The Conflict Within

By Rami Abdo Social conditioning is a funny thing. It is defined as the process of training individuals within a society to accept the norms, customs, morals and ideologies of that society so that they may be seamlessly integrated into its functioning structural framework. In basic terms, it is what society teaches us to be right or wrong. This code of conduct is based on the specific culture, history, and environment of that social order, formulated to sustain and protect itself and control its members, thereupon making it a set of principles that is extremely subjective and prejudiced. More importantly, this conditioning is usually in direct contrast with our own instinctual judgement that is based on our own experiences and views that we mould during our lifetime; our gut feeling so to speak. This is where conflict arises within us, creating the confusion that spearheads a lot of our insecurities, complexes, and other guilt-ridden emotions that tear us apart from the inside out. On the one hand, we have been raised to believe that certain things are clearly right and wrong, a picture of black and white that allows no flexibility in between; we are rewarded for behaving righteously and punished for wrongful acts, the rules are quite explicit. On the other hand, our gut feeling usually tells us otherwise, sometimes the exact opposite. We have to process this second set of pure and untainted laws that we have created for ourselves and decide which one means more to us. Which one makes more sense? Which one should we follow? Sometimes the intrinsic and extrinsic line up, although never under the same rules. We know for example that killing another human being is wrong, mostly because the law says its wrong. Intrinsically however, we also know that the thought of killing someone leaves us with a sickening feeling in our stomach, so there is a correlation there. But even this example is not so black and white. If someone threatens to kill you or your family, would it be wrong for you to murder that person to defend yourself and the ones you love? Thousands of people are dying every day, crushed under the iron boots of soldiers who justify their bloodied hands with the war-torn flags of their countries, the same countries that say it is wrong to kill. Where does this justification to kill come from? How does its authoritative voice drown out the voice of reason inside us that tells us not to take anothers life? It is the same voice that teaches us the code of conduct that we must follow if we are to be accepted in its society. We are so used to following its orders that we take everything it says for granted to be true, even if our internal processing tells us otherwise. My point being that both of these sets of principles, internal and external, are constantly changing, adapting and evolving based on our times and our circumstances. They do not follow a logical pattern, nor are they getting better or worse. We consider ourselves to be more civilized compared to our more savage ancestors, but if those same ancestors looked through a keyhole of time into our moder n world, our culture would be just as alien to them as we found their culture alien to us. We cannot be set in our ways any more. We cannot accept that what we have been taught since childhood will be true forever, just as much as we cannot hold on to a certain belief inside of us because we are used to it, even though our body is pulling us in the opposing direction.

So how are we to know which set of principles to trust in at any given moment, since we cannot trust in neither social conditioning nor our own personal conditioning? If we strip away all the conditioning, all the brainwashing, all the norms that we are expected to follow as individuals and as a group and realize to what extent we have been herded by societys iron grip and our own personal history, we begin to question everything about ourselves: What we believe in, what we fight for, what we value in our lives... But most of all, we come to realize that there is no right and wrong. There is no fixed set of rules that we must follow on how we must act, how we must behave, or how we must conduct ourselves, whether these rules come from within or without. There is only that...thing...which feels good; that clean unspoiled sensation within us that we must inadvertently follow at a given moment, because every inch of our body tells us to, and to ignore it would be pure folly. It takes us down a path that we have no choice but to follow, even though we know it will be opposed by those who condemn it and by our own doubts. We surrender to it because we must, because to ignore it would mean to deny our very freedom, our very existence at that moment to choose our own fates.