To Be or Not to Be, That Is the Question
The human race has always been in a continuous state of social evolution. There is no other living creature on the planet known to be constantly developing new norms that governs its interactions within its species and outside it; there is perhaps no other species on this planet which has the ability to reach a saturation point with regard to norms and behavior patterns and then replace them with radically different ones! While it is astonishing to see how man has been able to discover and patrol an entire solar system of planets using the same basic logic which he used to explain why an apple falls onto the ground an does not remain still in air, the more astonishing achievement of man has been to come up with the concept of morality. Using morality as the basis, men have been able to first impose a death penalty for crimes they consider to be non-forgivable, and then later many of those men have opposed the very concept of a society-sanctioned killing even if it is in answer to the severest of crimes. It is astonishing how man not only evolved to develop a strong sense of morality but also used it to propagate opinions which sometimes are two different extremes. It is as if man has developed a single psychological train which allows two people to travel in opposite directions, in the same split of time.
Morality once required that a samurai take his own life in the name of honor; in certain social groups it still requires people to execute those who are found to be homosexuals. And yet morality requires that other societies protect homosexuals by legislation, and that they even make an attempt to stop an act of suicide using legal mechanisms! One cannot deny the fact that every person’s morality is at least in a slightest way different from others around them, but one also has to acknowledge the fact that most personal morals are only derived from social groups and the values that govern those groups. Morality is relative- at both the level of the individual and the level of the society. But more importantly, morality is a very powerful apparatus.
The point in time where we stand now, we have evolved to a point where morality, though highly variable, has become the basis of our decision making process. In some cases, we are now beginning to see that morality can even veto necessity on occasions. Today our subconscious is dominated with the question of “to be, or not to be?” We mostly just consider if we should do something and immediately fully indulge in it even if we are practically incapable of performing that act. The best place to observe this phenomenon is to look inside national parliaments where governments assume a duty to unilaterally fight lengthy wars in the name of international security, even though