THE Swiss-born French Philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau said in his seminal work Social Contract, ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are.’ It is a truism today but interestingly, the chains are tricky to be identified as fetters barring humans from enjoying life in freedom. The invisible links of the fetters do not cut into their ankles or necks physically like those furiously reluctant shackled black slaves carried on ships as human cargo by the American settlers in the yester years.
They, rather, appear as conformity with routine while some others say that it is just going by the clock to achieve life’s goals. And what are the goals? To sum up, they are learning how to be happy cushioned by the amassed wealth, ensuring its protection and enjoying it. So, schools welcome the toddlers, so do academies and universities the youngsters. They get well-versed and well-trained in property acquisition, investing in the process, the management of the vaults (read banks), the art of how to squeeze out the maximum of the individuals that work for them and, eventually, the discipline fondly called strategic human resource management.
Sometimes, the most brilliant ones become adept in creating a dream world at the expense of the ignorance-ridden, semi- or unfed multitudes who believe every round and whizzing objects in the infinite universe to be wheat-floured bread to be consumed. Thus, high-nosed NASA scientists and tech-tycoons like Elon Musk and other organisations and luminaries’ celestial projects get fuelled day in day out while hungry, skeletal human children in Yemen, Gaza, Botswana, Sierra Leone, Syria and many other parts of the world queuing for some porridge get ever longer.
It is a maze, indeed — the goal of life thing! Once people become or assume that they are the masters of this maze, they become the chained men and women or the clock-bound ones, devoid of the down-to earth wisdom, to stop at times for a while and look around while making ahead in life’s journey. Conversely, they vehemently oppose the idea of wasting human work hours and productivity in the name of leisure, ‘the chief patron of idleness’ in their words.
What troubled Rousseau the most is the idea of owning personal property by people drifting from the pre-societal state of humans understanding that the earth belonged to no one inclusively and, hence, they had to leave it as unspoilt as they commonly inherited. He curiously observed how members of the pre-societal stage lived together in groups in nature during the hunting and gathering phase of pre-historic economy. In its advanced stage, some became envious of others to discover extra food staff hoarded around the group leader. Some others were envied for their physical attributes, women they possessed, ferocity of strength, etc. This envy ignited their minds to become competitors to the rivals, in strength and possession. That is the genesis of private property and individualism that dominate the planet till date.
The more one aspires to go up the ladder of individual attainment, the more the fetters get tightened round the neck. It begins early, indeed. A toddler of four or five gets up from bed at 6:00am every day, dozes off to school in mother’s arms for the luckier one of course, or for the privileged one, at the back seat of the car assisted by the caregivers at home, while the careerist parent or, in some cases, both the parents are after preparations for the workplaces of whatsoever — offices, business houses and production plants. This manoeuvrings though heterogeneous at the surface in terms of age, sex and social classes are all the same underneath and directed towards the same goal — personal attainment and gratification.
In nature, on the other hand, inferior to humans, of course, living species do not hoard anything for future, not even for tomorrow. They just seize the day. They graze or fly or swim or entrap in nature to feed them for the day, leaving the provenance-giving nature unaffected by their greed. This is indicative of the fact that some humans at their primitive stage, unwittingly garlanded by greed being allured by position, power and leadership over the group, lived together.
The image of nature here is not meant to call people back to nature as some pantheists like the English poet William Wordsworth put it. But modern humans could have at least opted for a produce-use-reuse-recycle way of life, rather than going headlong for a produce-use and waste cycle of economy which might have resulted in a less tiresome life, a recluse from swirling competition to always innovate, market and deliver the most uncommon, the most unearthly to the ever-changing capitalistic consumerism.
People now live alone in crowds. They prefer sweating, running on the tread mills, ordering pizza from Foodpanda, cosily sitting for hours and chatting online to spending some meaningful moments with family and friends. Clock-bound race of everyday makes them stressful which is more exacerbated by whizzing speed of daily engagements and relevant correspondences via social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram, X and so on. Ancient bards of this region depicted the unsettled, ever-running mind of a human being as a mad-for-race horse which the bard wondered to what direction it would be following to carry one on its back. It is true of today’s men and women. They are at the track of competition for life’s attainment: wealth and fame. It seems that they have utterly forgotten the Tolstoy’s story of the poor peasant Pakhom who had breathed his last bleeding profusely of exhaustion just on the piece of land that was needed for his grave although he had aspired to own a vast territory of land since the sense of ownership of a private property bugged him.
In the parlance of the rat race of life, terms like ‘in time’, ‘on time’, within the given time frame’, ‘stipulated time and date’, ‘meeting the deadlines’, ‘on or before such and such time and date’, ‘time constraints’, ‘time-bound action plan’ and so on are most commonly practised vocabulary denoting how entangled people are within schedules of their ever competitive life. Even this hectic, routinised life spanning from the childhood to maturity and beyond does not guarantee acquiring basic necessity like owning a two-room apartment — to get married and live a conjugal life — having a child to call it a home in some advanced countries such as China, Japan and Korea, resulting a sharp rise of unmarried, young population and steep decline in population growth.
Human mind travels speedier than light, reaching hundreds of light years in a nano second. It accelerates speed being fuelled by greed and ambition. But the massive body lags behind, suffers from inertia and that is why people are increasingly becoming restless every day because of the duality of mind and body conditions. Similar to the law of physics, the inexhaustible nature of mind that finds its abode inside the feeblest human body forcibly makes even the weakest one always on the move. This jeopardises people’s personal life — the own self, family and the likes. As a result, the do not talk in sentences and, rather, grumbles some terms which are mostly inaudible and nonsensical or, at best, carry equivocal explanations that often tarnish his individual and social identity, eventually turning things more complicated. They do not have time to touch things. They, rather, just grab them. They do not enjoy beauty but aspire to buy it in cash simply because enjoying it takes more time than picking it off the shelf. Ultimately, as days roll on, they become stuffed people, a hollow and devoid of any rationality.
It is this changed people that Rousseau called slaves to others while the people thought themselves to be their master. Does ‘others’ here mean the allurement of life’s goals that every one of us deliberately targets to run after from our cradle to the grave?
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Md Mukhlesur Rahman Akand is a joint secretary to the expatriates’ welfare and overseas employment ministry.