by Jishi Santos

Created on: May 04, 2009

YOU CANT HELP ANYONE ELSE UNLESS YOU HELP YOURSELF.

Individuals have a greater obligation to themselves. Firstly, so that they can be efficient in the jigsaw of societies workings. It may be hard to comprehend such a notion but it is as true as the saying, "better to clean up your own backyard first," before you take on anything else. There are two points of view here and one which has appeared as a dilemma in my mind in the past. Firstly, there are a lot of community minded people around who will try to work for the good of society. This is fine if the work is of a positive nature and altruistic but if that same society becomes ego centric and over runs the individual then it is not good. Extreme examples of this have been the various dictatorships we have seen around the world and the classic example is World War 2. Here societies were coerced into brainwashing, ethnic cleansing and the idea of the creation of a master race.

You have the right to be a loner or an individual and have nothing to do with society, and some of the rules and norms with which you don't agree, in your quest for total freedom. Sometimes life really opens up when you take that chance and think of self before society. The boundaries are no longer there and the sunset is clearer on the open plain than through society's city smog where people are living together for security. Society, by the way, means, a social mode of life or any social community or an association of persons, but listen to this; the upper classes or people of fashion! So maybe this is what happened in England with all the landed gentry and the lords and ladies and knights of the realm. Maybe this sort of society, which would have bred an arrogance of sorts, was the forerunner of England's heartless conquests of other lands. Look at Blood river crushing of the Zulus in South Africa and the wholesale shooting of aborigines in Australia and the partition of India with its loss of one million lives. Fighting for king and country made this society ruthless in its hunt for new land and products such as tea and opium. Any individual who did not get involved in such would have seen the immorality of the group government decision reflecting the upper class of society in those days.

So there is this danger of committing one's self to the majority and then finding there is no way out to regain your self. Once certain societies get hold of power they don't want to relinquish it and will overrun individuals to hold on to it even at

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