Transcending from being selective to collective
By Awais Ali Khan
In fact diversity is a blessing, when people from eclectic backgrounds live peacefully and work in concordance. It’s when masses improvise in a streamlined-collective-dimension and participatory-social acceptance. Human beings are interdependent, despite of discrete levels of self; autonomy, reliance and prioritization. It conveys applicability of a basic phenomenon, signifying spirit and need of collectivism and joint ventures, for sustainability of initiatives aimed at wellbeing of masses at large.
State has the principal role of abridging gaps, and leveling the community statures by policy directives and action oriented initiatives embodying spirit of justice, equality and fair play. Another parental role of state is to manage and maintain social and communal equilibrium in society, by taking in to consideration the concerns of majority masses, and taking mitigatory efforts. It has to act as mother, who maintains equality for all of its children, and at the same time uplifts the child, who is possibly most weak in her progeny. The beauty of mother’s love lies in its way of dealing that, weakest of her child gets support, and other children don’t feel deprived as well.
Governments’ role in running state machinery should be patterned with the aforementioned notion, that all communities and groups get treatment based on ‘equality of their intrinsic capacity’. The ones, who ought to be empowered more, are to be prioritized though, but with such mature conviction that’s acceptable. It can be made more rational by participatory approval of masses, so that the possibility of generating alienation and legitimizing grounds of being partial, are reduced.
Civil society entities somehow can follow, same egalitarian approach of state, replicating principles of proportionate-communal-equilibrium. The visualization of their policy directives should be reflected, in action plans of these non-governmental entities .These efforts ensure prevalence of justice and acceptable redistribution of resources attributes and services .If government isn’t able to do it alone, civil society can be utilized and taken help from, to materialize the goal of proportionate and distributive justice. The public-private partnership initiatives, instead of being tagged as selective in nature should be termed as holistically beneficial, but for achieving that useful and sustainable participatory approaches are to be adopted.
In a utopian approach, where efforts of state are likely to be deemed less selective, even then civil society and private entities can try serving as good examples .There on, the perspectives of civil society and private entities, on moral and rational grounds should be ‘collective in nature’ .Efforts of civil society can be significant guidance, for setting a positive trend in this for other public institutes, policies and directives ,if proportionately participatory and collective approach is adopted. The civil society ‘sections’ working for selectively oriented perspectives can’t be fruitful in long run for ‘whole’ of society. It has a long-term accumulative effects of giving outputs under skewed trends, which can create a sense of alienation and agitation for the rest of the entities, and instigate people, feeling being dejected of their due rights.
‘Structural functionalism’ principal says society works as a body. All parts, needed to be catered in their demands and requirements, so that ‘collective equilibrium’ is maintained. Other way, imagine if only selective parts of body get nurtured and trained, ignoring rest of body. This skewed pattern of development will disturb naturally acceptable equilibrium, and result will be nothing less than a disaster in longer run.
The mitigation for that can be achieved by re-orienting perspectives ,from selective to collective, regional to societal, skewed to neutral and ‘divergent to centralized’ .This will ensure provision of proportionately acceptable justice and redistribution, by participatory consent and social acceptance of majority of masses.
Awais Ali Khan is a youth activist and a student of UET, Lahore. He can be reached at : awais890@yahoo.com.
