It used to be a never-ending war of words between my friend’s young daughter and her grandmother, with the old lady trying to pass on her ideas of socio-cultural value-based living and the girl hating to be conditioned to follow the rules of the previous generation and believing in rewiring the social mores of her community.
Conditioned upbringing that influences one’s mindset and thought process to operate in a guided pattern is generally not welcomed. Great thinkers and enlightened personalities have always stressed the need to break free of conditioned upbringing that tries to instil archaic and defunct values of the previous generations. Current and upcoming generations are being motivated to develop a discriminative intellect to look at the world through a wider lens, through perspectives based on independent, conscious and rational thinking.
We, however, tend to miss the fact that at the most fundamental level, our rules of life are constructed on a set of moral and ethical indices. Life on earth is innocuously designed to follow certain common values of humaneness, behaviour, etiquette and integrated responses that conform to a conditioned pattern. This basic conditioning is the result of millions of years of striving to achieve a semblance of peace and harmony. This conditioned pattern is the criteria to strike a rapport with fellow beings and live in an integrated environment.
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While this can be called universal conditioning, lying unobtrusively at the substratum of survival, which no one can transgress, violate or transcend without destroying themselves in the process, then the question arises as to how and where are we supposed to transcend and break free of a conditioned pattern of living?
A great thinker said, “There should neither be a compulsion to break the rules of the past nor a compulsion to follow them.”
So it is to be decided by the individual and it is her prerogative; each one has to decide on the level, degree and extent of conditioned pattern of living that will suit a peaceful, organised life within the precincts of socio-cultural norms, and take care not to compromise on individualistic beliefs, ideals and principles.
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