What is relationship?
Relationship can be defined as a voluntary
cooperation between individuals who have mutual
needs and sometimes complimentary skill sets. Thus for a relationship to be
established there should be a need which can be satisfied to a greater extent
by cooperating with another individual who has needs of his own.
In today’s society, the relationships are
sometimes (often) formed through peer-pressure. Nonetheless, even such
relationships satisfy some of our needs.
So what could be our
needs?
The evolutionary objective of life is survival of oneself and then one's own
species. To achieve the first and basic objective, two things are required and these
requirements constitute the basic needs. These basic needs are food (and a continuous supply of that)
and security. To achieve the latter
objective, sexual needs also gets added to the basic needs.
So how did relationships
develop?
Sexual relationships should have been the
first kind of relationships but such relationships are more personal in nature
and not social.
The initial kind of social relationship must
have arisen due to the need for security combined with the natural diversities
in physical strength and in intellect of people. Thus this relationship would
be of protection. In a group everyone
is a protector for everyone else. As the group realised the other fields in
which they could cooperate, the initial relationship might have then developed,
so that everyone is a hunter/food-gatherer
for everyone else. Further this transformed into a relationship of sharing food. Since the norms of
'founders keepers' and 'first-come first preference' might not have lasted
long, there arose a necessity to divide/share food according to one's contribution.
This meant that the type and amount of contribution towards the collective
survival of the society would be judged. Since the one who judges the amount of contribution would obviously be the strongest or the most intelligent, and due to the fact that
man is inherently selfish, the
earlier mentioned diversities slowly became grounds for discrimination.
So what?
To judge the 'amount of contribution'; to
discriminate is essentially a power, rather
it is the power in any society, and
because power has an innate tendency to get concentrated, soon the ‘share’ of food became entitlements. This combined with development of agriculture and
settled life resulted in property rights. All this along with the advent of
money (which complements and supplements power and vice-versa) meant that in
such a society, where the survival of any individual is dependent on the infinite and complicated snare of relationships that he/she maintains with every
other member of the society, will always have, in all strata, two classes: the
rulers and the ruled; the exploiters and the exploited; the 'judge' and the
'judged'.
So what can be (could have
been) done? What is the solution?
I think we can find a solution if we could only
stick to the definition of relationship.
If we analyse the definition, it is quite
clear that relationship when existing between a few people can more efficiently
achieve its objectives while more number of relationships not only complicates
survival but also renders it meaningless since we don’t have a survival of our
own.
Hence I feel that the number of social
relationships and through that the dependence of a person, for survival, on others
should be kept at minimum.
Thus a more perfect society would be where there are relationships
only to the size of a family, and where such a ‘family’ is self-sufficient and doesn't need any reimbursements from the rest
of the society.
In such a situation, a family would be an
entire independent 'society' in itself.
Only in such a society can there be
comparative equality and justice.
