Holier-than-thou

Humankind is like the crown of all creatures on Earth. Courtesy their unmatched cognitive potential, humans can pragmatically understand their surroundings through sensual perception, observations, reflection and orientation. Notwithstanding intellectual supremacy, humans aren’t infallible. They are susceptible to err in life. Luckily though, the wrongs they commit are not incorrigible. They could be ratified and refined in their best possible shape. However, this demands an amenable and critical appraisal of one’s thoughts and actions. Flexibility in cognition and action guarantees a progressively inclusive societal outlook.

However, being self-righteously stuck to what one does is worse than being wrong. As euphoric authentication of one’s thoughts and actions, self-righteousness keeps societies frozen in time. The biggest problem with the self-righteousness is that it trusts itself, its desires, its whims and perceptions, and never looks at its errors. Since self-righteousness develops reluctance in recognising wrongs and ratifying them, it cannot bode well in the race to the survival of the fittest. Acknowledged wrongdoing and ill-advised thoughts could be corrected, but self-righteously carried actions ultimately end in individual and societal backwardness.

Unfortunately, a large segment of our society suffers from sanctimonious tendencies. Owing to this superiority complex, each individual and faction brags to be more right than others. Each religio-political, ethnic group and individual is in the rat race to prove themselves more virtuous and sagacious than all others. Everyone wants to look and be called good: hardly a few act on the same.

One might rightly wonder if every individual or group is righteous and pious as claimed, why is everything in our country going wrong? It should imply that each of us suffers from a falsified notion of relative superiority. We have been looking to rightness with the wrong lens.

The false sense of infallibility takes its toll on the fate and future of our society, failing us in many ways.

First, it results in societal backwardness. Since a flexible approach is necessary for synchronising emerging internal and external realities, sanctimonious societies get stuck in time and ultimately pay the heavy prices in the long run. Second, it adds to intellectual and ideological stagnancy by discouraging innovative research and alternative views of looking at things. Third, it fosters fear, fatalism and fallacies. Blind acceptance of things chains societies in the yokes of carefully crafted narratives of destiny and threat of retribution. Fourth, self-righteousness wedges societies with factionalist, sectarian and ethnic frictions and extremist tendencies. Fifth, it promotes totalitarian and populist dispositions through the exploitation of people’s self-righteous beliefs. Sixth, the self-righteous individuals are intolerant and overly confident about their moralities. They try to indiscriminately impose their self-righteous assumptions on others and hence defy social inclusiveness. Last but not least, the narrowing space for dissent is yet another way it afflicts society. Since each one claims to be true, most individuals and groups detest dissenting accounts of the things.

Expecting adventures from a society where no one is ready to even revisit one’s views, let alone reject them altogether, is an immaterial percept. However, there’s a dire need to reform our perceptions of righteousness and superiority. We need to dare acknowledge our wrongdoings and ratify them rather than keeping them under the carpet of our fabricated notions. The unleashing global transformations demand a dynamic individual and collective attitude and approach in life. We as a society need to recognise that our sanctimonious sense fails us in keeping up with the fluid realities of contemporary times. Only a pragmatic switch towards righteousness could help us in seizing the accelerating dynamics of the world today.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 18^th, 2022.

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