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The urban Indian youth today enjoys much more liberty in personal choices and life decisions as compared to older generations. The talks of individual independence have been injected into the bloodline of these folks. But the mainstream narrative is actually busy dismantling social order under the cover of "free choice".
A Freedom That Doesn't Exist
Free choice is a chimera. The greater we look for free choice, the more we get wound up with influences which shape us. Our choices are guided by our experiences in life.
Our choices are influenced by many externalities. Some from our inner circle, some from far away voices. Free thinkers have portrayed our family and culture as tyrants that limit us. As a reaction, people are increasingly seeking freedom from their inner circle. Disregarding the voices from the close circle who cared for us, our life stands on shaky ground.
In such a phase of dire need of support, a person is forced to listen to the voices from far away. He goes to the internet to find his kind of echo chamber and get validation. He works not to serve someone close, but to follow the voices of the big conspiracy. Voices from fake godmen and spiritual gurus spreading ill propaganda and influencers propagating unrealistic lifestyles become so important for a person that he is willing to compromise on his family for that. When one fails to please the family, he seeks validation by trying to please the distant voices.
The bitter truth is that free choice doesn't exist. Those who think they are exercising free choice by not paying heed to their inner circle are the ones enslaved by faraway voices.
How Social Order Gravitates Us Towards Equilibrium
In the course of our lives, we are often held in place because of our culture, traditions, conventional morality and our inner circle (i.e. family). Social structure teaches us to regard these influences and feel a sense of achievement in upholding them. It keeps a check on the chaotic side of our personality. This in turn brings in necessary social order.
Take the case of extramarital affairs. They were traditionally looked down upon. That forced responsible spouses to make the best out of their families, which was a great boost in ensuring the proper upbringing of the next generation. Social morality forces people to not cheat.
Contrast that setup with the present-day situation where in pursuit of personal liberty, western societies have disturbed the social order, leading to very high cases of infidelity and divorces. Nobody is denying that marriages need effort to succeed. But people aren't willing to put in that effort because no-responsibility affairs are free.
"Free thinkers" hail the right over one's body and don't see infidelity as a social wrong. Rather, they have started questioning the utility of marriages, not realizing that the growing number of failed marriages today can be partly attributed to the narrative they spread. They are reeling under the problems they birthed.
A child growing up in such a household is highly likely to suffer childhood trauma and it will manifest later on in his life, creating issues in his personal relationships. The way we disturb social order today will cause disasters for the next generation.
Modern ideas of individual freedom have gone to great lengths to disregard influences that ensure social order. Instead, modern narratives create a public perception that we're being chained by our culture or family. These narratives have horrible misrepresentations of what culture endows us with.
Why Social Order Is Important
We live in a society. There are structures and systems in place which try to ensure stability. These structures may not serve everyone equally, because they are meant to serve the society as a whole.
It is social order that restricts deviant behaviour and provides space for everyone to grow. Societal restrictions contain chaos.
The reason why you can walk down a road without the fear of getting shot is a gift of social structures that discourage the act of such shooting. Those having the privilege of growing up with parents who weren't separated should be thankful to social structures which promote respect for marriage and discourage infidelity.
Come to think of it - different people have anger in different measures. If there were no stopcock upon how their anger manifests, society would collapse faster than we can imagine.
As an example, school shootings in the US are often attributed to the anger brewing up inside the shooter. This anger ended up manifesting in a way that caused destruction. Instead, had these people been restricted by strict social order and taught to manifest their disagreement by finding tangible solutions to the issues they see - their deviant nature could have been very beneficial to society.
Why Order Also Needs To Be Disturbed
Social order tends to restrict, to inhibit entropy. The way socially deviant behaviour needs to be checked, social order must also be kept in check.
Societies with extremely high levels of order fail to adapt to changes and even have elements of tyranny. That is the tipping point where order leads to oppression.
Many great ideas have come from deviant people. They questioned social structures to the point where they paid a huge price for that. Galileo was prosecuted for supporting heliocentrism. The Church wanted to retain their power over the population. In pursuit of exercising power, they restricted scientific growth.
While it's true that Galileo might have never been able to even think of heliocentrism had he followed the order of that time, it's also true that it was social order which restricted him from exercising his intelligent mind for evil purposes.
This post is in no support of prosecuting scientists. Instead, it's meant to be accepted that chaos and order are mutually perpetuating. Societies go through phases of "high order - low deviance" and "low order - high deviance".
These phases keep both order and chaos in check. If allowed to grow unchecked, either of them is akin to tyranny. The presence of counteracting forces never allows either of them to spread extreme control. This is very similar to the Chinese philosophy of Yin and Yang. It describes opposite but interconnected, mutually perpetuating forces.
These Forces Aren't Meant To Be Played With
A small fraction of the population will naturally be deviant. Even in societies where the figure of power exercises extreme control, they can't stop deviant behaviour.
Some people are negatively deviant, i.e. causing destructive chaos, eg. via crimes. Such disturbance in society doesn't serve any good purpose.
Others will be positively deviant, i.e. causing creative destruction, eg. via inventions that allow dismantling of a certain older social setup. Eg. many rural areas have a culture of using firewood as fuel. Replacing them with LPG stoves is eco-friendly and at the same time shields women from regular exposure to harmful smoke. By dismantling an older structure or way of life, such changes give a net positive result.
However, what we must ensure is that the fraction of deviant people isn't artificially pushed up.
Nature has its own course. If an agenda to convert socially ordered people into deviant beings catches steam, there shall emerge a section of people who will feel disconnected from their self. They will find a gap between what their mind believes in and what the propaganda wants them to believe. This section of population is highly vulnerable and negatively dangerous to society. These are people who want to follow order but have been taught to be deviant instead.
This crisis has already started. From lots of people feeling "disconnected", to the rapid rise of artificial coping mechanisms - everything points towards the fact that society is filled with mentally weak actors.
As seen throughout history, no extreme force has a chance to survive. High deviance will be wiped away under its own problems. Eg. cooking is shown as a burden, a lower job and so-called modern lifestyle seems to disregard cooking. Those who follow this thought will suffer the result of their own choices. Those following the older order of cooking will live a healthier life compared to those who gave up cooking and are externally dependent for food. This will cause a natural selection for healthier individuals. So while it seems like home cooking is on the decline, it will eventually become a trend again.
Internet Serves Only Negativity; Reality Is Much Brighter Than That
The internet is a huge echo chamber. There's too much hollow noise emanating from people who are frustrated in their lives. Either because of their inability to succeed or because of their weak-mindedness causing them to not deal with failures, they have taken over the internet to vent their frustration with life. They're prompting others to revolt against social structures. There's an unchecked rise of fake relationship "experts" who take more interest in spreading pessimism about relationships and culture. People who tag themselves as intellectuals are being misled by fatuous godmen pulling out ill interpretations of the sacred texts. It's horribly funny how even for spreading negativity about traditional wisdom, these imbeciles have to rely on religious texts.
They do all this under the garb of promoting free thought.
Those busy maintaining order aren't to be found on the internet tweeting ten times a day about their frustrations. They're engaged in activities which forge stronger social bonds and strengthen personal relationships.
The internet has thus become an easily accessible place for the deviants to spread their ideas. This leads to a twofold problem. Firstly, the deviant forces are not being channelled towards bringing positive change. Second, they are artificially trying to increase the level of social disorder by spreading deviant ideas. Negativity bias also makes us observe negative content more closely, while we pass away positive content as "mundane".
The deviant should instead exercise their free choice to challenge flaws in social structures and put forth better solutions to existing problems. Mobilizing an army of frustrated individuals is only going to increase unrest.
Be Cautious With 'Free Choice'
The chimera of free choice turns the masses into amplifiers of propaganda and narratives. Without really understanding the far reaching effects of the way they're being influenced, they take pride in in being deviant. Without any idea about how their choices will pan out in their life, they turn to promoting others to also follow the same path. Proponents of individuality and freedom are wound up with the idea of free choice and its no wonder that even those people have no acknowledgement for the fact that they are not really free individuals. Ironically, they are highly influenced by voices from faraway.