Why is there so Much Wrong in Our Society?

Graham Peebles

As old certainties crumble and systems crystallize, social divisions grow and extremes harden, a friend asks: “Why is there so much wrong in our society?” It’s a good question. He was referring specifically to Britain where we both live, but, although the specific problems may vary, the question could be applied to any country, and by extension, to world society.

Politicians, lost in a fog of their own ambition and blinded by ideologies, argue and deceive; they have no answers to the pressing issues or my friend’s question and, addicted to the privilege, status and motorcades, are concerned only with gaining and retaining office. Corporations and undemocratic institutions exert increasing political power and sociological influence; religion, essential to some, is irrelevant to many, ‘the church’ east and west groans under the weight of its inhibiting doctrine, fails to provide guidance and succor, and ‘the people’ – most of whom live under a blanket of economic insecurity – feel increasingly anxious, angry and depressed.

We had been discussing the justice system and specifically prisons, retribution and the total absence of rehabilitation in the UK system, when my friend posed his rhetorical question. The areas of chaos and dysfunction are many and varied, from environmental carnage to armed conflict, slavery, economic injustice and homelessness. All, however, flow from the same polluted source, us – mankind; motive, often short-term ideologically rooted, conditions and corrupts action and the construction of socio-economic forms.

Society is not an abstraction, it is a reflection of the consciousness of the people who live within it, the seed of ‘what is wrong in our society’ lies within this consciousness, not simply in the forms and systems themselves. There will never be peace in the world, for example, until we ourselves are free of conflict: that we constitute society and that societal problems flow from us is clearly true, but, as with most things in life, the issue is more complex and nuanced.

Firstly, the relationship between the forces of society and the individual is a symbiotic one, and this is well known to those that most powerfully control the systems under which we all live; secondly, the vast majority of people have little or no influence over the mechanics of society. Depending on the nature of the society in which we live, we are all to a greater or lesser degree, structural victims, with little or no voice and even less influence – something that in recent years in particular, millions have been marching to change. Billions of people throughout the world, the overwhelming majority, feel themselves to be subjects within a Giant Game of Aggrandizement and Profit played by governments and powerful organizations, including the media in its many strands.

These interconnected and interdependent groups, which are of course made up of men and women, design and shape the way society functions, and do all they can to manipulate how the masses think and act. The ideology of choice for those functioning within the corporate political sphere is founded on and promotes the dogma of greed and profit. Selfishness, ambition, competition, nationalism all are found within its tenets and are promoted as natural human tendencies that are beneficial for an individual and so should be developed. Such ‘qualities’ they claim, bring success, usually understood as material comfort, career achievement or social position, and with success, the story goes, comes happiness. Within the Corrupt Construct happiness, which is rightly recognized as something that everyone longs for, has been replaced by pleasure, which is sought after day and night. Likewise, desire and the satiation of desire, itself an impossibility – this too is well known by the architects – has been substituted for love, which has been assimilated, commodified and neatly packaged.

The tendency towards greed and selfishness, hate and violence, no doubt exist within the human being, the negative lies within us all, so does the good. The Good is our inherent nature, hidden within the detritus of conditioning and fear. The negative, aggravated, rises, and, within the Corrupt Construct it is relentlessly prodded and stirred up. Desire is demanded, facilitating its bedmate fear, which manifests as anxiety/stress, to which an antidote is offered by the deeply concerned, eternally grateful, trillion dollar pharmaceutical companies, recreational drugs/alcohol and the world of entertainment. Common sense, restraint and The Wisdom of The Wise is trivialized, discarded; conflict and suffering, within and without goes on. Discontent leading to the pursuit of pleasure is the aim, desire, agitated, the means.

The two most pervasive and effective tools employed to condition the minds of all are education and the media. Conditioning into competition and nationalism, pleasure and individualism – not individuality, which is dangerous to the status quo and is therefore actively discouraged; conformity is insisted upon and forms a cornerstone of education and the stereotypes churned out by the media.

This is a transitional time, a time of collapse and expansion, of disintegration and rebuilding; underlying the present tensions and discord is the energy of change and the emergence of the new.

A battle is taking place, between those forces in the world that are wedded to the old ways, and a dynamic, global movement for social justice, environmental action, peace and freedom. Sapped of energy, the existing forms and modes of living are in a state of decay; propelled solely by the impetus of the past they persist in form only, hollow carcasses without vitality. Growing numbers of people around the world know this to be true, and while some react with fear and look for certainty behind a flag or ideology, the majority call for a fundamental shift, for justice and the inculcation of systems that allow unifying harmonious ways of living to evolve. As always, resistance is fierce, but change and the spirit of the time cannot be held at bay indefinitely.