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Chapter XX Part I
The Drive towards Economic Centralisation
The State and the Society
One of the most important prerequisites for
the ideal functioning of any human grouping like the society is
that it should be organized around certain norms, follow a set
of guidelines to maintain an optimal cohesion and prevent
disruption and develop in obedience to law and logic that is in
consonance with its own collective psyche. However the
development of law and logic can only be possible when the human
mind has reached a certain sophistication of intellect, after
having overgrown its rustic moorings and subconscious
influences. A certain degree of intellectual development is
needed for the human mind to be able to enact laws (legislative
functions) and a certain degree of collective will has to
consolidate to execute the laws (judicial functions). The
transition from the human animal to the self-conscious being
needs a growth in individual as well as collective
consciousness.
‘Logically, one would suppose that the
conscious and organized determination of its own rules of life
should be the first business of a society from which all others
should derive and on which they should be dependent and
therefore it should naturally be the earliest to develop. But
life develops in obedience to its own law and the pressure of
forces and not according to the law and the logic of the
self-conscious mind; its first course is determined by the
subconscient and is only secondarily and derivatively
self-conscious. The development of human society has been no
exception to the rule; for man, though in the essence of his
nature a mental being, has practically started with a largely
mechanical mentality as the conscious living being, Nature’s
human animal, and only afterwards can he be the self-conscious
living being, the self-perfecting Manu. That is the course the
individual has had to follow; the group-man follows in the wake
of the individual and is always far behind the highest
individual development. Therefore, the development of the
society as an organism consciously and entirely legislating
for its own needs, which should be by the logic of reason the
first necessary step, is actually in the logic of life the last
and culminative step. It enables the society at last to perfect
consciously by means of the State the whole organization of its
life, military, political, administrative, economic, social,
cultural’ (The Ideal of Human Unity, pg 445-446).
One of the main hurdles between the State and the society is
that the State possesses the monopoly of legislation,
particularly the legal use of violence. Sri Aurobindo explains
that if a society is able to perfect itself by consciously
legislating its own needs and priorities which in turn acts as a
pivot for uniformity of its political, military and
administrative functions, then the way is paved for the State
and the society to be progressively synonymous. ‘That is the
importance of democracy; that is the importance also of
socialism. They are the sign that the society is getting ready
to be an entirely self-conscious and therefore a freely and
consciously self-regulating organism’ (However nearly three
decades after writing this in 1917, Sri Aurobindo commented in a
footnote: ‘Fascism, National Socialism have cut out the “freely”
in this formula and set about the task of creating the organized
self-regulating consciousness by a violent regimentation’)
(Ibid, pg 446). Even as of now, a perfect State synonymous with
a perfectly self-conscious society is yet to be a reality while
‘modern democracy and modern socialism are only a first crude
are bungling attempt at that consummation, an inefficient hint,
and not a freely intelligent realisation’ (Ibid). A
progressively ideal State can only emerge from a progressively
evolving mind-set of a society manifesting through the
individual and collective consciousness of the society. The
anarchists even dream of a Stateless society which is an
extension of the yet Utopian concept of a freely developing
society that does not need any coercion or imposition of the
State. A coercive State would never tolerate a freely growing
society that respects individual variations and build harmony in
the bosom of a variegated diversity. No wonder, the ISIS, who
have been carrying on the most horrendous genocide to establish
the Islamic State at the cost of the freely evolving organic
society, have declared, albeit in a retrograde vein, and that
too in the second decade of the twenty-first century (so much
for human progress!) that ‘All faiths who back democracy must
die’ (The Times of India, 22nd December,2014).
Date of Update:
31-Dec-14
- By Dr. Soumitra Basu
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