Imagine this, you are living in a time where slavery is very common, let’s say sometime between 15th to 17th century. You see that a lot of people believe that slaves are a different “species” of sorts and they deserve the treatment they are getting. You see that a lot of people treat slaves inhumanely. What do you think your reaction will be? Will you believe that there is nothing wrong with slavery? Will you believe that slaves are so dumb that they themselves can’t find any other job and so they deserve to be slaves and their masters are actually helping them by doing that?

Let’s consider another scenario. This time you are born in 1st century AD in Rome. All your neighbours are going to visit the colloseum to watch the gladiator fights that used to happen at that time. For anyone who doesn’t know, Roman colloseum used to host fights between warriors (called gladiators) or between a warrior and wild animals. These fights were deadly, often involving torture and killing of one of the contestants. This was a very famous means of entertainment for the common people of Rome at that time. Imagine you are in the colloseum watching one of these gruesome fights and people are cheering loudly “Kill him! Smash his head!!”. What do you think your reaction will be? Do you think you would be cheering with the crowd? Do you think you would engage in such a sadistic activity?

One last scenario. The time is 1600s-1700s when women are considered inferior to men. They are not allowed to study anything beyond elementary education. The purpose of their life is to serve their husband. The Sati practice was prevelant around that time in India as well. Do you think you would practice, preach and defend it like the people of the time did?

You might be tempted to say no to all the questions above. You might be tempted to say that you will revolt against the injustice the slaves/gladiators/women were facing. But I beg to differ (for most people). You see, almost everything that we consider moral or immoral is given to us by our society. Not just morality, all our desires and preferences come to us from the society. Almost everything you can think about is implanted by the social conditioning we have got. It is not even an exaggeration to say that group conformism is biologically built into us. This is because the survival of our hunter gatherer ancestors depended on staying in groups. It was not possible for a single human to survive alone for a long time. Agreeing with the group was not a choice, it was a matter of survival. This is what leads us to instinctively internalize the morals of our society. I am of the opinion that if the same level of inequality prevailed today against women, most of us, including women, would think that women are indeed inferior to men. Even extremely smart people of that time used to think like that. Thanks to a few extremely courageous people, who started the feminism movement, we are now aware of how many attrocities were committed on women in the past. The same applies to the slaves, the gladiators, the black people in west and the backward castes in India.

Based on this, there is no guarantee that the morals of the society today are perfect. The main takeaway for us in this is that internalization of these morals can lead to bad judgements and a lot of inequality and suffering for a few sections of the society. So we should be very careful when we are internalizing the societal beliefs. It is important to distinguish between what the society thinks is correct or moral and what we actually, individually think about the issue.

There are three type of people in our society -

  1. The people who have completely internalized the societal beliefs and anyone who acts according to the beliefs is a “good person” and anyone who acts against it is a “bad person”. These are most of the people, including us in many cases.
  2. The people who have not internalized the societal beliefs and revolt against it. These people are extremely brave and often have tragic endings. There are countless examples of this in history. These people usually have just one goal in life, fight for equality in the society. These are the people who bring actual change to the society.
  3. The people who have not internalized the societal beliefs but behave according to the society externally. These are the people who are aware that there are flaws in the society, but that’s how it works. It is an iterative process of improvement. But acting against the society can be very detrimental to themselves. This is why they choose to behave according to the society and keep their thoughts to themselves.

This is not just related to historical issues that are fixed now and current issues that will be fixed in the future. Even if we just consider the present time, humans are divided into multiple societies and sub-societies and each human is a part of multiple kinds of sub-societies. For example, I am part of a Jain society, which is my religion and my family and relatives are a part of it. But my friends, my colleagues etc. are a different society. We could internalize the beliefs of any of these societies. We could also internalize the beliefs that are polar opposite to the current society because we don’t like the way it is currently working. For example, being an absolute hater of religion and faith means that you have created your own religion that is exactly opposite of the current religion. If we internalize beliefs of one society, we could end up ridiculing people in another society with different beliefs. With the countless conflicts that have happened in history, we can say that disagreements and conflicts between different societies is a recipe for disaster. The internalization of beliefs of one society and hate against another has led to so much violence and bloodshed in the past and it is also happening right now.

So to conclude, here are the takeaways from this discussion -

  1. We should not ridicule people who internalize social beliefs (for example, superstitious people), because we are one of them, if you are forced to change their beliefs, explaining, reasoning and educating them might be the best possible way forward.
  2. We should not ridicule people who revolt against social beliefs, because we might have internalized the social belief and it might be actually unfair.
  3. If we can’t become the type 2 person, we should at least try to become the type 3 person (refer above paragraph).