The wild within is male

We advocate openness in social interactions between people because man is not an island. Sociability, we say, is a driving need, along with food, drink, sex and security. We believe globalization shrinks the world into a village, and expect universal brotherhood to spread across borders. Yet when diverse people occupy the same space, rage responses tend to heighten. On the streets or in public gatherings, the offenders are largely male.

This dichotomy of thought and action among human populations may relate to resource availability. It may also be a consequence of social reorganizations, and in the pursuit of power, because whosoever corners the wealth, corners social advantage. If any organization is to succeed as such, it needs rules and penalties for rule-breakers, acknowledged and accepted by all the group members. The implementations of these rules require measures to install a leadership ready to make the hard choices, and to compel followers to acquiesce to the decisions made on their behalf. Else, the larger numbers perpetrate more chaos, increasing group vulnerability. To obtain power in the group and to maintain that power, force becomes the weapon of choice. The organization sanctions controlled aggression to police the detractors of its ideology, and to keep divisive influences at bay.

That sociability is instrumental in group security and the propagation of species is clear in the wild. Aggression on other groups is also a law of the jungle. On the anvil of the food chain, the weak are the first casualties. Humans, naturally so in comparison to other predators, thus have the least likelihood of survival especially against the group aggression of packs and herds. The physical disadvantage is overcome with the powers of the mind, the creation of tools and weapons. The early understanding of the strength in numbers, leads to the organized community living we like to call civilization. Hierarchy and the divisions of labour are created to harmonize social relations that continue in time, often held sacrosanct as traditions.

Needless to say, male domination is the operative tradition in most human cultures. Despite the apparently superior thought processes amongst their populations, the presence of others evokes feelings of competitiveness, frustration, expectations, and so on. Civilized populations have been especially preoccupied with male lineage through millennia. Extrapolating the might is right doctrine of the animal world, many presume to infringe on the rights of other individuals and groups. The history of cultures around the world records innumerable intrigues, assassination plots, battles and wars, wherein the lives of thousands have been sacrificed over genealogical claims.

We commonly assume that all other animals cannot think ahead as the humans do. Their responses are purely instinctive, we say - to attack when hungry or in defence of young. However, because the environment is constantly changing, each species must learn to adapt to change or face extinction. They too must evolve, and perhaps do so to adopt processes to moderate the social organization not unlike the human strategy. Experiments controlling space with other animals confirm that crowding increases irritability, and thence the rage.

Within several higher orders of the animal world, internecine male aggression powers survival not just against environmental adversity, but also of the particular lineage - yes, male. A pride of lions for instance, generally consists of one alpha male and several lionesses as one large family. Male cubs coming of age are ejected by their mothers to find their own destiny. Leadership depends on physical prowess, and the patriarch must continually prove his ability in combat with challengers. Should he be defeated, the victor takes control to form a new family. The lionesses must hide their existing male cubs to keep them alive, because to establish his authority, and while seeding his own family tree, the new leader sets about decimating future threats.

Male hormones like testosterone are implicated in this physiology of aggression. Fact is the male is genetically programmed to fight. The male group of hormones, the androgens, secrete from sex and adrenal glands. They are responsible for the visual splendour of the train of peacock tail feathers or the full-grown lion mane. These displays feed the universal myth of male domination, although they are merely the secondary sexual characteristics of the species. The preening and posturing of the male is needed to outshine other males to attract the females, or else the lineage ends. The failure to scare off the opposition creates stress, prompts fear and rage. Consequently, other hormones from the adrenal glands flood the system, causing the adrenaline rush of instant action.

The explosive testosterone-adrenaline combo fuels violence. Sometimes, the destructive results appear purposeless. The frenzy of rogue elephants, for example, demolishes, maims or kills everything in their path. This masti phenomenon appears to affect young adult males the most. Studies in the African wilds reveal that, male calves orphaned perchance or by human interventions, tend to become anti-social in later years. Separated from their herd early in life, they are forced to fend for themselves in the wild. Essentially, the orphans have been deprived during the formative stages of growing up, of crucial social learning within the herd, and hence their insecurity and lacks of socializing spill over. The senseless violence reflected amongst the human youth around the world may perhaps stem from similar underlying deprivations.

The organization itself is like a living organism; it needs a brain to reason, decision-make and direct. The group’s leadership is this brain that strategizes its activities and deliberates on ways to sustain its longevity. To preserve the harmony between individuals and groups, the community leadership has the heavy duty to delineate the boundaries, and socialize the total organization into them; to reclaim, not destroy, even the socially disruptive. 

An effective process of taming rogue elephants has been the company of trained bigger, older bulls. These more experienced elephants withstand their aggressive onslaughts, and also help bring down their seemingly uncontrollable rages. Perhaps human organizations need to offer their rudderless youth similar opportunities to control the instinctive, unthinking behaviours born of abondonment, fear and rage. Appropriate mentoring in sociability may actually bring the aggressive male out of the lonely wild within, and integrate him into mainstream society.

Under the cover of lies

I heard the other day that a young man of my acquaintance fibs. He is now adult and working with a multinational concern in his campus-recruited first job. Educated at a reputed institution, he is the former frat boy who survived gruelling initiation rites to learn the ropes of organized living. The family is immigrant, which makes the achievements more impressive. Yet, He lies, says his father, matter-of-factly. I question a person's deceiving where he need not and even fabricating rationales to compound the lies - more from curiosity about the motivation behind the pastime, than from a moral high ground.

The saying is: You can fool all people some of the time, you can fool some people all the time, but you cannot fool all people all the time. But these old adages are hardly a deterrent! Lies have become an accepted form of social communication. Its practice is active across all of humanity, and knows no social barriers, age, education and gender. Although the purpose behind the action may vary in each case, do it enough times and lying becomes an end in itself.

For little children, their little untruths are a defence against a world where everybody towers over them. The motivation is fear, of being punished or deprived of rewards, mainly in physiological terms. They may give in easily to the joy of scribbling on walls or table tops, but the spirit is unwilling to take on adverse adult responses. Denial – even with the tell-tale crayon dust under the finger-nails, shows up their powerlessness. The same may be said for the poverty-stricken, the illiterate, the very elderly, and women that have no control over their lives. The lies are their survival technique before intimidating authority. The young man I mention is hardly in the same boat; he is of age, his destiny is in his own hands. Perhaps he has just not been weaned off the childish habit of fibbing.

It may also be that deception is the game he is now hooked on playing. In the age of information, new generations grow more accustomed to shades of grey than to the moralistic black and white of yesteryears. In the childhood of our time, the emphasis at home and in school is on honour, sacrifice and other virtues of righteous living – extensions of social collectivism in part, in part catechism. The story books we love to read transport us to the fantasy world of magical creatures, and each carries a lesson to learn. In school, to pass the class, we have to pass the moral science test. Right and wrong becomes clearly demarcated in the mind. Indeed, pithy proverbs pop out of long term memory at inopportune moments, to create doubt, dilemma, discomfort and the omnipresent burden of guilt. The moral science subject is now obsolete in schools, perhaps to reduce pressures on impressionable minds. The social learning at home too is in abeyance because families have shrunk, and both parents are employed. The books that fascinate the earlier generation have lost their allure. The young are left alone to role-play in the virtual reality that appears at the touch of a button. Fact is they know more about video game plots than they do about human values.

Furthermore, blatant lies have become the weapon of manipulation in today’s world. Lawyers, for instance are said to be liars by profession, scarcely concerned any more with justice. They weave webs of words to twist and turn perceptions of events, projecting as the absolute truth the perspectives of their own clients. In similar vein, the search for political power in any organization requires mastering the art of persuasion whereby a molehill may be made to assume the proportions of a mountain, and vice versa. The point is to bring down opponents wresting from them the reins of power. In corporate industry, the Madoffs, the Lehmans and the Lawsons of the world use their genius with numbers and technology with the same cynical disregard for human values to defraud their victims and even their own organizations of currency notes in the millions. They call it hustling, spinning elaborate cons to dupe the unsuspecting. There is no remorse in scamming the elderly and the financially weak out of their trust and their life savings.

Cynicism permeates the interactions of groups with other groups. There is take rather than give in this predatorial world that transposes going for the jugular from the wild into the organizational process. To use subterfuge to get close to the prey and to then move in swiftly for the kill is an act that plays out regularly in everyday life. People learn to be less disturbed by lies, which in fact interweave into their social masks. These hide their true natures or conceal their vulnerability. The motivation is again fear, but in psychological terms, because nobody wants to lose. To be the winner, the game must be played and played well. The humans tend to forget that their minds have evolved beyond that of the other animals; that they actually need to adapt to the world of other people, rather than to orders on the food chain.

The heroes the young emulate are in virtual reality, sometimes perceived as more real than real life may be. The ploy set up for immediate rewards can turn into the long term habit they wear like a second skin. They may begin to live the lie, believe in the illusion, and be caught up, unable to escape, in the traps they build for others. Like addicts, they seek the next score, the next adrenaline rush, and the next win in the games of their own making. Lies may become the compulsion that pushes people to deny their true self. Peel that cover of lies away and there might be a frightened child within, afraid to grow up, making believe his maturity. 

Image of a homeland

Within three decades of India’s independence, the brain drain raises a furore, as demographic migration to the West becomes a popular trend amongst the educated. In enlightened self-interest, the future generations of India’s freedom fighters willingly choose to break tradition and swear new allegiances. They actively ignore perceptions in the mother country of being mercenary, traitors to the nationalistic ideals of their forefathers. The assumption may be that people choosing to emigrate base their decisions on felt affinity with their destination regions. However, the emotional reactivity that tends to surface later suggests that the choice may have been economic opportunism.

A century or two earlier, while India was a colony, it was routine to forcibly shunt workers to other lands as cheap manual labour. The colonizers then decide to harness the Indian intellect as well, to increase profitability. The “Baboo culture” is thus born - that is, educated Indians, the Baboos, inducted to maintain the system, become the backbone of bureaucratic functioning. Education in India is structured along Western lines, replacing the indigenous universities of its more ancient civilization. Missionary schools spring up all around the country dispensing knowledge and conversions to Christianity. University colleges for higher studies open doors to Western sciences in the presidencies of the north, south, east and west. Obviously, the medium of study is also mainly English.

About the first quarter of the twentieth century, things begin to change politically. Satyagrahis (freedom fighters) burn symbols of Western affluence, clothes, etc., on the streets as demands to end colonial rule gain momentum. Eventually, independence is achieved. But the price of freedom, people realize, is empty coffers. Almost overnight, the erstwhile rich colony is stripped of its wealth. The Partition that carves Pakistan out of undivided India displaces thousands on the grounds of religion. Hindu families in Pakistan and Muslims in the new India are evicted from their respective homelands and pushed across the new borders.  The thousands upon thousands that are forcibly unsettled, that lose their homes, their lands, their families and their very identity in the political machinations, feel that they go from frying pan into fire. Ironically, they preferred to forge bonds with their erstwhile masters, and rage at one another. The traumatic wounds of this separation continue to bleed to this day between neighbours in the sub-continent.

At independence, there are about six hundred kingdoms and princely states in India. It is a momentuous task to bring them under the banner of a secular, democratic republic. Obviously, no consensus can be reached on elevating any one regional tongue over others as the national language, and there are twenty-two of them officially, along with thousands of dialects. English, the once foreign tongue, is the common medium of communication around the country, indianizing according to the grammar and speech patterns of each state. The bureaucratic system also survives social and political turmoil. Even today, the country’s civil administration is sustained by the “baboodom” of yore. It functions as before with paper files and manual entries, is loath to adapt to the modernity of electronic communications, and its incumbents often occupy the same spaces and look very much like their predecessors of that bygone era.

 

The traditional joint family structure that society is built upon disintegrates, post independence. The extended branches of family are now often separated by the new borders. Each splintered segment is compelled to find their own financial stability. The outlook towards women also has to change. For economic reasons, their education links to employment for the first time. Learning from European and Anglo-Indian teachers becomes a matter of course for boys and girls born in the new democracy. In the early days, knowledge dissembled is swallowed unquestioningly. What comes out of the Book is gospel truth – including for instance, nursery tales picturizing the white mother as thinner, prettier and smarter than any other, black, red or yellow!

No surprise then that the children learn to identify more with blonde hair, blue eyes, and the English language than they can with their own shattered roots. The image of the “homeland” also blurs. In the 1970s and ’80s, skilled young adults being westward bound are perhaps the logical conclusion to the childhood aspirations.

Moreover, the leaders of the new India struggle to run the fledgling democracy. The country joins the ranks of penurious developing nations. The people that had sought to become their own masters find they have to seek aid just to get by. Clearly, it will take decades for India to be at par with the leading nations. Getting out to richer pastures makes most economic sense. Besides, the architects of the new democracy failed to include compulsory service to the nation in the constitutional duties for its citizens and hence, the governments watch helplessly as new crops of graduates fly away to bring fame and fortune to their overseas employers. The brain drain leaves a vacuous workforce in the nation that, thinking future, nurtures the cream of its youth through years of subsidized education. The countries that grew fat on the gullibility of Asia and Africa are able to call the shots in the reconstruction of the nations they previously ravaged. They are now the lands of plenty beckoning India’s new intelligentsia.

 

Traditional values in India base on strong family relationships across generations. The family buffers its members against adversity, providing the social security and support the state cannot. Children live with their parents and care for them in old age. These are the just rewards for the many sacrifices they make to raise them to adulthood. But in the new reality, the elderly left behind in India find themselves unable to cope with living alone or in the care of hired help. Bereft of the traditional extended family environment they have grown to expect, their emotional suffering is acute.

The immigrant communities soon find out that their relinquished citizenship does not guarantee integration into the new society in the West. People brought up on collectivistic values gradually realize that multiculturalism in the West is a patchwork of demographic fractions maintaining minimal social interrelationships outside of work. While socializing in distinctly dissimilar cultures is difficult in itself, the immigrants from the Asian sub-continent and Africa also carry the colonized stigma. Consequently, each social group becomes inward-looking, fearing the decimation of their unique cultural identity. Realizing perhaps a little late that money is not everything, their focus shifts to forging strong intra-group bonds. They form a Little India, a Chinatown and so on, to preserve culture through the associations, norms, customs and rituals experienced in childhood. These become the heritage to keep alive in their adopted homelands thousands of miles away from their origins.

First-generation immigrants probably carry a suppressed sense of guilt that they abandon their familial duties for riches. Indeed, they are more strident in their attempts to recreate the way things were back home. They demand obedience and respect from their offspring in the mould of the traditional culture. They dream of establishing continuity with the past they renounced a few decades ago, including the segregation of gender. But often, they are unaware that the homeland itself has evolved beyond that point, while they cling to some obsolete image of it. Children reared in the West are caught between cultures. On the one hand, they imbibe the liberalness of the here-and-now environment they live in. On the other, they are bombarded with parental projections of there-and-then traditions that scarcely match their present experience of life. In a new cycle of change, this dichotomous image of a homeland may seem alien and meaningless to the rebellious young. The older generations thereby perceive their liberal leanings as mercenary, traitors to the cultural ideals of their forefathers...