Topic IV : Social Communities

Like topics II and III, this topic was also initially posted in my previous blog with the name "what's world?". I have had this idea about viewing a world as communities exactly 2 years back. I first wrote it in a notes and then entered it in the blog and now re-editing it again and making it more perfect:P. The theory goes like this....

A child starts understanding the world when he starts listening to his mother’s words, even when he doesn’t speak. The child notes each and every action of his parents and tries to copy and learn. Parents play a very major role in developing a kid to a complete man. Starting from telling him how to perform certain action to how to think or how to solve a day-to-day problem. Parents and kid together, here, form a smaller set of actions or operations, which affect the child’s mind(or behavior) a lot in the beginning. Later, when the child grows up, hey may be subjected to the interaction with the world through any means. So, parents introduce some beliefs, some knowledge and some truths (which they believe in) in to the child's mind, which together constitute the personality of the child. And when the kid starts speaking and walking, he is allowed to play with some kids of his age. His activeness in the activities performed by kids in absence of parents may also change his personality a lot. In other words, every experience he gains, by interacting with others, helps him in understanding the world better and better or helps him clarify his doubts or helps him satisfy his quest for knowledge.

So, the child forms a community here with his parents or family and similarly with the group of children with whom he was playing. Every person in his life is prone to be socially active through playing some role in different communities which are dependent on personal interests, dreams, goals, tastes, principles etc. So, now we can draw a conclusion saying that, when a person looks at the world from his point of view, the ‘world consists of many or sometimes infinite smaller or larger communities’. Communities may not be restricted to human communities. A person can form communities with his lover alone, or with his pets, or with a non-living object, or with himself. For example, Tom Hanks forms a community with Wilson, his pet football toy, in the movie Cast Away.

Now that a person is active in many communities, his role and how well he is active in his role or how effective he is active in inter personal operations like discussions, sharing interests, etc. of the respective communities will change his personality. Operations like working for dreams or goals, finding a better girl friend, having a social status as in buying a car or computer, being successful all the time, etc. make the society participate in the dog race. For example, for a company, the aspect profit making or retaining the market value or share is also some kind of social status or an operation. My Idea here is about the effect of the company's operations on a particular employee. And as we see because a person is active in many communities, the operations performed between the different communities also has an effect on personality. Even if the person is not active a community, the inter community operations still can effect due the trend and drive towards certain social goals of the society.

Rawls quotes a similar finding as “everybody shares an invisible contract with others when he is a part of some society or community so as to live a nominal life and to make sure that others also to live the nominal life. But, the fact here is that the absolute liberty is not assured to anyone, but at the same time a minimal liberty is assured. Though the context of Rawls is related to the philosophy of development, my point here is that, because the developmental issues are social they cause social effects like changing the people's mentalities toward viewing at things etc. For example untouchability divides all the people in a village into two different communities. The operations performed between these two communities affect their minds in two different ways; one, making the untouchables feel morally insignificant and limiting their scope of understanding of the world, or restricting themselves towards paying attention to social and economic development due to the slavery they did, or to have pessimistic attitude towards education, etc; two, in making the upper castes feel that they are extremely superior to the poor untouchables, or in making them treat untouchables as least category of human and so on.

This explains the inter-disciplinary nature of life. So the world is a group of infinite smaller communities, which may be common with one another in many cases. And these communities together constitute the visible reality of the world and so do set the minds of the world. The applications will be posted in the next topic :P.

Sree..!!!