A 30 Person Hypothetical Society

Let us set up the environment of the Hypothetical situation.

Geography

The world is surrounded by water. There is an island and the Island has the following,

1) Cave

2) Trees with fruits

3) 30 persons, 15 women and 15 men. Not all are alike.

4) Wild animals

5) The people have basic intelligence of weapons and identification of basic food.

6) Wild animals and domestic animals (but not yet domesticated)

7) Fresh water pond

8) You as "Creator" are in full control and are currently letting the system work by itself. You will intervene only when you think the system is itself at stake.

9) Humans are unaware of where they came from.

10) They have a language and can communicate.

11) They have all lived and experienced the basic needs and threats and instincts. And they will now unite in one system.

The system begins.

15 persons (all men) meet each other outside the cave. They are all carrying a spear each. They meet each other and form opinions about one another in their minds. They enter the cave and find shelter. It is raining outside and hence, they must stay inside. They ask each other about who they are and where did they come from. Nobody knows. (Technically they should fight over the cave and kill each other, for argument sake we will let them continue)

One of them is creative and he suggests that he saw a deer giving birth to a smaller deer and hence we are born from something.

Another is intelligent so he adds that it is likely we are born from each other.

The third is intelligent and far sighted. He knows survival is not going to be easy and this question is constantly repeated about who we are. He says or rather lies for the greater benefit of the community that we are all coming from the Sun/lamp. Because it is only the sun that protects us and allows us to see, feel the warmth and stay safe. He also claims to know this for sure and he has talked to the sun and the sun has some rules for us. People agree to his logic but cannot understand how we were born from the sun.

That is when they hear voices. These voices don’t scare them. They are not scary like those of the animals. Rather soothing and comforting. There are women in the cave.

They meet their other similar kind and start talking and exploring mentally. There is immediate attraction.

The society is confused now.

The women were happy and exploring their own world. They had their own theory about where they came from. They felt that it was land that was where they came from as one of them had noticed that the land gave food to them and the animals. These animals become food to others and then all the animals disappeared into the land eventually. They would kiss the land every day to show their respect.

The men were already singing songs when the sun came up. They praised the sun.

So the sun met the earth.

The immediate attraction to women was the new thing for the men. The same was for the women.

However, one man was the most attractive of all and one women the most attractive of all.

But by nature of humans- Everyone wanted the best female.

So the fight begins. The strongest one takes the best female. The political one convinces three other less intelligent men to follow his command as he is the one who is close to the sun and gave the knowledge of the sun. He convinces them that the strong bully man who has taken the best women and few others for himself cannot be allowed to survive and must be returned to the sun. So the three attack the Bully and take him down. Just as they are about to smash his head open-

YOU INTERVENE (in their minds) as you cannot let a killing spree begin-

Beware! It is I who created you. I am your Master. I don’t die like you do and neither am born from something like you. You shall not kill your own kind and neither hurt the other.

One of them is a good man. Who is only involved in doing things like bringing water, calming people down and does not lie and does not think about hurting anyone. So you think he is worthy of a gift.

You, Oh ! Righteous one. You shall be my slave who will monitor these people and set things right. If no one follows my command I will make them do it.

Tell them, that I know the liar who said that the Sun is where you came from. He only made a story to use you. You have all witnessed him using the three to kill the bully.

Each man shall have one woman only and not touch or even enjoy the speech of the other man’s woman. So shall be the same for the woman.
No one should lie even if it benefits them. And I will punish those who do the same.

Was there another way to control the society and system?
Yes, but that was some other theory with some other rules.

The society must have rules.

Our society has its own in the real world. We have learned with time and created the constitution. Is the constitution fair to everyone? No. Constitution is more like a tool to neutralize the strong and empower the weak. To reduce the able, and push the disabled. But it does help to stabilize the society. Every time the society changes, the rules of constitution change.

The society cannot sustain without boundaries form the very beginning. The food will be fought over. The land will be fought for. The water will be fought for. The women will be fought for. People will be deceived, leaders will rise, massacre will happen. A simple experiment or hypothetical situation seems like an impossible situation as soon as it starts to form (A more imaginary version can be studied in the amazing book titled Lord of the flies-William Golding). There is no way people will cooperate in a society with scarce resources or abundant resources. The people will have to be bound by rules. Rules that will exist through the nature itself- such as the rule that you must eat, you must drink, you must sleep, you must protect yourself etc. everything that happens to you is a laid out set of rules for the nature itself. The pain you feel after a cut is a rule for the human body, it must happen. The fish must not come out of the water, you must have food to survive, you must breathe to live; are nothing but rules and they are of pinnacle importance as deviation from them is possible, but the effects of the deviation are disastrous.

But ‘free will’ is uncontrolled and yet driven entirely upon rules that exist around us. If ‘free will’ is given into the hands of the people without any rules-

The bully will want everything for himself.

The leader will make his followers take down others and keep everything for himself.

The intelligent will invent his own useful methods to take down the other and keep everything for himself. (Let’s not forget technology- Hiroshima and Nagasaki are two words enough to justify the thought)

There will be good men who would only want the best for everyone. But they will not be allowed to perform as their ideas will make everyone equals. In reality-The leader is no equal, the handsome is no equal, the white is no equal the black is no equal the tall is no equal the fast is no equal…everything and everyone is different and unique. And all of them aspire to be the best, and to get the best. Men are greedy by nature only because of the element of free will.

A person can think as much as he likes, but the ONLY possible solution to a society is rules.

Rules will exist in one way or the other. There is no escaping that. The rules will also be hard for one type of person and easy for another. Imagine a rule in the society that the strong shall not kill or hurt. This is going to destroy the one who is strong and make the weak’s chances of survival better. The rule would soon need to be modified to- No one shall kill the other.

Because the physically weak may be intellectually strong he may not need to fight the other at all and yet cause destruction of his enemies.

There is no possible way that a system can survive without rules. Otherwise it will be just a system which never develops and is propelled by pure instincts. It will be a system that is more like the behavior of animals. We are not animals. We can improvise.

The question really is- who will set out the rules for us.

It has to be someone from outside the system. Someone, who cannot benefit or take any loss from creating the rules, someone, who is Just and understands us completely. You know the society cannot function without rules.

So what is a religion?

A set of rules, some clearly benefitting and some seemingly odd.

Imagine our hypothetical 1:1 society. Because of the ratio of one is to one of male to female we had to implement the rule that one shall have only one woman. That is just the beginning as the immediate retaliation of the people would be- who will have which one. So you could come up with an idea to stabilize your society- let a coin toss decide or let them decide for themselves (disastrous) or let the parents decide or let the chief or most loyal man decide etc. Immediately, millions of doubts will arise. Who is the most loyal, how do we decide the most loyal. What if the parents are wrong, what if the parents are being selfish what if the parents make a match that is fighting each other, who will toss the coin..etc..WHO WIL DECIDE!!

It is impossible to manage people like this. There has to be a deeper set of rules. The eventual result of all these rules will form a religion.

The question is this- Whether we like it or not we will always need to have and follow a set of rules. Some of them, we may never understand and yet we should know that they are just a set of rules for the benefit of every individual as a whole. Not for just a type of people or a kind of people or for the benefit of one over the other. It is benefit for all. And those who reject it are only trying to come up with rules that will benefit them.

Is this happening?

Yes.

The Americans want to be the only ones to have nuclear technology.

A few countries (countries were created due to greed, before it was just rules) are calling themselves the 5 powerful countries whose decisions decide the fate of the world.

All nations have a trade policy to benefit for themselves FDI is just one example. Employment has rules about the category of people who will be employed. Many countries demand their kind of men should have compulsory openings. India has caste wise jobs; gulf has their own country employment programme.

All inventions are patented. Africa has AIDS but only few countries have the control mechanisms which are sold at unbelievable prices for benefits. The whole pharmaceutical industry is a set of patents. No one is thinking about the benefit of the whole world because once we modify the rules they are always bound to be biased. The rules MUST be from outside the system.

And these set of rules must be from a JUST source and a Perfect source. Who will decide this perfect source?

Each individual who will decide it from his free will and then follow the rules all together as a whole without really challenging them because, challenging them happens because you need something that benefits you or you don’t seem to understand their benefit. Looking for the benefit is again a selfish cause.

In our 30 person society we said one man for one woman. That may not make sense to the strong person. For him it is easy to handle all 15. But that would leave 14 other men sad, and women sad and loot the society of emotional and physical needs.

In our society, after you intervened and fixed the situation. Everything was all right. But as the society will grow old new generation will think and wonder why I can’t have two apples, two lands, more cattle etc. The rules will have to be reminded to them. They will require proof for the rules because it will not be benefitting them individually and they will also consider their ancestral knowledge as out dated and only useful for the ancestors and modify their rules as per the benefit to themselves.

The fact is- we cannot escape rules and hence we cannot escape religion.

You as Creator will have to intervene in every aspect of the society and tell them what is best for them. Otherwise, people will invent you and upon you they will invent rules. A butterfly is born pre-programmed to travel thousands of miles, birds are preprogrammed to duck when a predator appears in the sky and raise their heads when their parents appear for food, a baby deer runs at the sight of an animal that could harm it and sucks without being told the milk it needs for its thirst, birds of different generation manage to migrate to same places as their previous generations have even while they haven’t seen it before, a human baby cries for the food it badly needs and yet a grown up person doesn’t cry the moment they are hungry, humans try to follow something or the other in their lives because they are also built with the thirst to realize that there is something that they are looking for and it goes on forever. Nature has been preprogrammed. (By nature itself? That is a different chapter in the coming soon zone…)

What this very simple food for thought is trying to say is-

1. We need a set of rules from outside the system. Call it religion or call it the way of life or call it anything that you want. But that is necessary. If it doesn’t exist it will still be created anyway and that would be unfair unless it is from outside the system and from a source that does not benefit or lose from the rules and is Just. We see it in the world clearly millions die because of hunger yearly and one example is clear enough to tell us that our rules are selfish.



2. Mankind cannot escape rules.



3. A set of rules is religion and hence mankind cannot escape religion. Either they will accept it or reject it, a group of persons rejecting it are only forming their own rules or rather religion.

Hence, it is only natural to have a religion in once life.

If you say you are an atheist. You just have your own definition of rules. That is all.

A very detailed approach to the subject can be taken describing the conflicts and resolution on every single issue that would arise in a hypothetical society. However, the purpose was only to understand the simple idea that there is no way that one can escape rules and regulations in a society and hence it is impossible to escape religion. One can only be a part of a different school of thought but cannot escape the thought itself.

(The sole purpose of this article is to understand religion and NOT in any form compare anything or anyone with God)

We must re-learn to think !

Our thoughts have been constricted like constricting the horse with blinkers.

Our capacity to imagine is slowly changing into a limited capacity of following the Normal. Children are forced into thinking like the system. There is no problem with that, however, it is slowly killing imagination and taking down CREATIVITY with it.

We MUST think.

We MUST Reason.

We Must Conclude.

Think again.

Re-Reason.

Re-Conclude/Improvise.

Here, I would like to share a simple view of a simple arrangement from two different angles.

This will help us decide a location upon which we can create a space for THINKING.

Let us think about ‘thinking’

    “I think. Therefore, I am.”- Rene Descartes.

For many who have read this or heard this before, fail to see the beauty that Rene has captured in these words. For, he has completely simplified a question that has been left unanswered or unproven for many years. I understand that it sounds easy to some and vague to many, and its meaning is not as simple as you may think. You will have to go deeper to realise the gravity of his idea and it can be better understood if it is seen from another angle. Once you have done that, doubts and questions would start jumping in your head, i.e. if you are blessed with something that many think they lack in themselves- i.e. Common Sense.

So what is this other side?

“I don’t think, therefore I am not”..... What???

Firstly, it is impossible to think, that you don’t think. Because you are thinking anyway. So did I just make a fool out of myself? No, actually it is meant to be applied as a broader idea.
So what is this broader Idea?

Imagine a pen. Now a pen cannot think (which is only an assumption, it cannot be proved). So, it does not exist. But that is not the topic of my discussion as yet. How the pen does not exist is something for you to explore, I am only going to navigate your common sense into thinking more deeply about trivial things.

There is a methodology that we are going to use slightly in order to understand the ideas and thoughts more clearly. These are very essential.

1. The language used here will be made as easy as possible.

2. We will adopt a ‘systematic doubt approach’ strategy to arrive at our conclusions.

Systematic doubt approach is about cancelling all factors which put you in doubt, such that you are left with the best option.
Now, systematic doubt approach is not that easy to understand. But I will give you an example that would allow you to hang on it for a while.

Thomas Edison invented the Light bulb after trying two thousand times. When he was asked how he found out or when did he discover the idea that he could make a bulb ‘light’, he said
“I have found 1999 ways not to make a light bulb.”
(Story arranged to fit the situation. It is not exactly as it happened)

Now, Thomas was sticking to his idea and he found out all ways that would be unsuccessful in creating a light bulb and the result was his final idea which eventually worked. So if you try proving that the pen is not on the table you might eventually arrive at the decision that the pen is on the table, because it can’t be proved otherwise. However, here we don’t just talk about doubting in such simple scenarios alone. It is necessary that we doubt everything; our own self, our perception, our presence and even if anything else really existed.

So let me stimulate your senses by combining your knowledge and thoughts to think about THINKING.

My first approach is to give you an idea about how a person can look at things from different angles and not just by assuming the data that is installed in our heads. Our thinking process is usually limited to comparing what we perceive with existing data in our head and producing a logic that we understand.

For example, when we look at something that looks like a pen, our senses combine the data about what we are looking at. This data is passed on to our brain and we realise that this is a pen. We then confirm it by feeling it and writing with it. But if it doesn’t write, our thoughts quickly start calculating all the possibilities that this pen could be. You may say that it is a laser pen (used for pointing out things from a distance) or you may assume it to be a gun, or a gadget of some kind if it was found on 007’s table or batman’s breast pocket (batman doesn’t have a breast pocket, Bruce has the pocket). So our thinking is dependent on what our senses are conveying and then comparing the data with our existing recorded data. This means that everything that we actually understand is because we have something against it or about it already in our mind. But this idea is way too deep and requires much more understanding or research or thinking then that which you would have with a few pages of explanation.

Coming back to 'stimulating the common sense'.

Question1. Imagine a situation where we all are in a room. I am facing you as a speaker to the audience and I point out at a corner where a table is placed with a flower pot on it, and then I ask you- There is a table and on the table is a flower pot. Now, prove that the flower pot is on the table.

Start thinking. Don’t read the answers below until you have already exercised your mind into thinking as far as possible. Try to use the doubt approach.


Done?

Now, if I had been in this situation my answers would be these. Different people would have different answers to it. It is good if you have arrived at a logical conclusion with a proof.

So as the audience, I would answer with: -

Answer 1-You just said that there is a table with a flower pot on it. Hence, Proved.
Now, the above answer is smart and witty. It can get you applause. But take a look at the second answer.
Answer 2- There is no flower pot on the table. We are all trying to prove something that is not ON the table, and when the whole picture is seen, it is a different story. So the truth is that there is no pot on the table.

This is the kind of an answer that needs a proof.
So, how am I going to prove something that was crazy enough to be questioned in the first place? Simple, I am going to combine my knowledge and use my common sense to do it. Excited? So am I.

Proof –

If you look at the question, it is very incomplete in many senses. It does not bind you in any form to think further than required. The pot is on the table because we consider that anything is above (as in on top of) another, with respect to the ground or gravity. So in reality, the pot is on the table when you put your reference point as gravity or the ground or even the table.

Did anyone tell you in the question to assume the reference point to be the ground or gravity or the table? Then why are you still roaming in those ideas, step out.

I am going to prove something even crazier now. I am going to prove that the pot is not on the table but the table is on the pot. How? Read on. 

Imagine if you are looking at the pot on the table from space. You are so further away that you can see the whole spherical planet at a time and with high-tech stuff the table and the pot on the planet. You are not seeing any other obstacles for now. The imagination is expected to be something like this (look at Figure 1).

Figure 1

If you look fig 1 you will see that the table is on the earth and on it is the pot. The real question is this, what is the earth on?

Lost? The earth is not on anything as there is nothing here to relate the earth to. There is no point of reference at all. The table is on the earth and the pot on it because the earth is the selected reference point in this case. This is sufficient to prove my idea but I will go further to make it even more clear and amusing.
Now we are going to look at the whole idea again, but upside down.

Now look at Figure 2,

Figure 2

   Since, there is an absence of reference point we can change to this view. Now the complex part begins. On earth it may seem exactly like before. The pot is on the table. However, if our reference is north and south of the planet as per geographical or astronomical data we will see that when the table is placed on the south the whole situation changes. As you can see from the diagram, the table is on the pot and on the table is our planet earth.
Since, there are no real or physical reference points as North or South but only conventional, we can say that at any point it can be said that the table is on the pot and the earth on the table.

Hence, Proved.

This was just an example. This should be your approach towards thinking. If this article of mine has given you a feeling that you must explore life in a similar manner and if it has made you think about something in a different but logical way and if it has ignited in you any form of interest, then I have succeeded in inviting you to explore the world of lateral thinking.

You can now proceed to the next threads. Comments are welcome.

There are other levels of thought which we could have explored and discussed. we could have moved on to argue whether we ourselves exist or not before we question the pot and the table.

But the purpose of the article is only to show an option and create this ray of escape into the world of Imagination and Creativity. Great number of inventions and discoveries were a result of creativity followed by examination and experimentation.

IRSHAN AHMAD