A colony of the mentally ill

In his poem, I Dream A World, American poet Langston Hughes writes: “I dream a world where man, No other man will scorn; Where love will bless the earth, And peace its paths adorn; I dream a world where all, Will know sweet freedom’s way; Where greed no longer saps the soul, Nor avarice blights our day; A world I dream where black or white, Whatever race you be; Will share the bounties of the earth, And every man is free; Where wretchedness will hang its head, And joy, like a pearl; Attends the needs of all mankind, Of such I dream, my world!”

American novelist Alice Walker says: “Because whatever has happed to humanity, whatever is currently happening to humanity, it is happening to all of us. No matter how hidden the cruelty, no matter how far off the screams of pain and terror, we live in one world.”

The Little Match Girl is a literary fairytale by Danish poet and author Hans Christian Andersen. The story, about a dying child’s dreams and hope, was first published in 1845. This story has a great satire on upper class society. It says that the snow is falling. All the people wear long coat and long shoes. They all enjoy themselves lovely season but on the other side a little girl has no shoes on her pretty small feet. Nobody sees towards her little cold body. Her body turns blue by coldness. The people roast the duck and makes Christmas tree. The little girl is seeing a dinner table from the window. She wants to eat something. Her condition becomes very bad because of hunger and cold. Her hands feel blood-frozen. She tries to fire herself but in vain. Everybody passes by without noticing her, and she feels helpless.

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations is a rich and lively novel, centring on the life of Pip, an orphan. Young Pip is powerless to stand against injustice, or to realise his own dreams. As he grows up, he realises that grand schemes and dreams are never what they seem to be. He says, “I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion and morality, and against the arguments of my best friends.” The First lesson of his life is injustice, which he learns as a child. He says, “In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.”

The roots of social injustice can be traced back through history. From slavery and colonization to segregation and apartheid, societies have been impacted by deeply entrenched inequalities and systemic oppression. The idea of social justice received more attention after John Rawls, an American political philosopher, published A Theory of Justice in 1971. Its guiding principle was that people have “an equal right to the most extensive system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.”

Rawal’s ideas and theories of social justice have remained pertinent in economics and politics. Before him, the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, those of medieval age Augustine and Aquinas, modern era ones Hobbes and Hume, and of more recent modern times Kant and Mill have highlighted the theories of social justice in detail. And after centuries, the world has come to the conclusion that the worst form of sin is social injustice. A society which is suffering from the painful punishment of injustice, poverty and ignorance cannot have a dream of healthy life. States can be rebuilt if they disintegrate, but societies cannot. The fate of a society can well be known by how it is treating its people. And the worst of the societies are those that inflict mental torment on their citizens.

Isn’t it true to say that our sick society has made millions of people mentally ill? Obviously, a sick society can only give birth to sick people. Therefore, our society has become a huge colony of sick people, where everyone feels danger from the other.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 17^th, 2024.

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