Why does one want to dominate the other? || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)
Question: Why do people dominate, in any sense, money, strength?
Speaker: The reason is simple- survival, physical survival. You look at animals. If you want to understand the human mind, look at animals because that is where we are coming from. In the group of animals, who survives?
Listener 1: The strongest, the fittest one.
Speaker: The strongest one, the one who can dominate. In a group of males, who gets the female? The one who can win and kill everybody else.That is what happens in the animals. Kill the others, dominate them, injure them and then you have the access to the female. That is why it is always called the survival of the fittest, the Darwinian selection, and all that. Because of this the off-spring that is born, is born out of the strongest male. So the species gets strengthened and strengthened.
So physically we are conditioned to be violent, dominating. All that is there in your physiology. But we can go beyond that, at least after the age of twelve, we can go beyond that. A child cannot be excepted to go beyond that, but we can. We must, if we are to be human. We must go beyond this conditioning.
Listener 2: Why does the society have values?
Speaker: Why does the society exist?
Listener 2: Because man is a social.
Speaker: Who told you that?
Listener 2: My teacher in the third grade.
Speaker: Are you still in the third grade? Are you?
Listener 2: No! I heard it from others.
Speaker: Why must you hear? You hear only the words said by the others. Why can’t you know ourselves?Are we really animals? Neither social nor animals. We are individual human beings. Now why does the society exists?
Listener 3: Why?
Speaker: You tell me, you are living in it. You are asking that why does the society exists? Isn’t it one of the most basic questions you must ask. Why must the society exist?
Listener 4: Because we feel unsafe. Even animals live in groups.
Speaker: So, society exists because of fear. Animals too live in groups because they want to defend themselves against the predators.
Listener 5: So that they can help each other.
Speaker: Yes, so that they can help each other survive. So that they can survive, and fight back the aggressor. So the foundation of society is fear.
Listener 5: Yes, fear.
Speaker: When you are fearful, what did you do? When you are in fear, what do you do?
Listener 6: Fight and attack.
Speaker: Some kind of violence always takes place. Yes?
Listeners(everyone): Yes.
Speaker: When you are in fear, you want everybody to toe your line. You do not want creative intelligence. You want to move along a single line, the line of safety. You do not want deviant behaviors. The society does not like individuals because the individual is not afraid, the society is always afraid. The individual is never afraid. It is obvious that the society does not like the individuals. What is the reason that the society keeps on punishing the individual?
Society rewards those who toe its line. They are given all rewards, medals, decorations. Those who are really individuals, are punished by the society because the individual is not afraid, he walks on his own path, he creates his own path. Society says, ‘No! Move along only this path, the other path is dangerous’.
Excerpted from a ‘Shabd-Yog’ session. Edited for clarity.
