Acharya Prashant: Deepanshu (Questioner) says, “If everyone drops their ego, there would be no civilization and everybody would be roaming naked in the Jungle.”
We have to understand what is ego and what civilization? What is it that is meant by civilization? Civilization refers to a particular order in living. A particular system in living, an orderliness. That is the meaning of civilization. Is it clear what is civilization? Civilization refers to an orderliness in living. An orderliness, that it is not random, it is orderly.
Order can arise from two distinct sources. Order can arise either out of fear, as you see in our society. That, if people are civilized then most of them behave in a civilized way because of fear of punishment, right? Order can arise from there.
And when there is fear, there is ego. Because you are afraid of somebody else, that’s what ego is. Somebody else is dominating your mind. So, we have seen order only of one kind, civilization only of one kind which is the civilization arising from fear. That, if I behave in an uncivilized way then I will be jailed or I lose my respectability.
Hence, Deepanshu is justified in thinking that the very basis of civilization is fear. No, Deepanshu. The civilization that we see, this is based on fear but it is not necessary that civilization or order is must necessarily be based on fear.
Orderliness, civilization can come from another source, what source is that? That source is that of your intelligence. For example, we have this room and there are air molecules in this room; the molecules are not very tightly packed as well, we know the packing ratio. For every unit of the molecule, that a molecule volume, that a molecule occupies, there are many times of volume that is free space, still what are these molecules doing all the time? They are colliding with each other and there is no order. This is what you call ‘Brownian motion’, random motion.
