Mockery of awards?

Throughout history, humankind has interacted with each other to fulfil their needs and ensure survival. However, the question of regulating interactions for their predictability and optimal productivity has remained a central concern at all times.

That is, the predictability and stability of interactions demanded the channeling of individual and collective actions. This led to the evolution of social control mechanisms, which aim to ensure conformity to agreed-upon social norms. In its truest sense, social control refers to managing social affairs for collective benefit in accordance with codified norms.

While laws, enforcement mechanisms, justice systems, and penology are central to social control, rewards (positive sanctions) also play a crucial role in encouraging social conformity. Societies that reward altruism, integ[1]rity, honesty, truth, and conformism to exalted norms ultimately turn them[1]selves into a paradise of peace and prosperity.

However, ours is among the few where exalted acts are punished and sycophancy and flattery are rewarded. Rarely does a deserving, altruistic, or self-made scientist, artist, academic, IT expert, or medic receive rewards.

In our society, earning an award is easier than earning sustainable livelihoods. In the former, one simply trades or pretends to trade one’s soul, conscience, Constitution, moralities, norms, public trust, hopes, improvised intellect, or tainted pen. In the latter, one has to sell one’s labour, sweat, and efforts in a competitive market. This makes the former the most sought-after and well-trodden path for most of us in our society. Trading souls, norms and values remains one of the most lucrative bargains in our part of the world.

As a win-win game with little risk, it not only benefits the sellers of souls but also the buyers — the status quo. The latter, in return for the invaluable contributions, rightly reciprocates the former with awards as a gesture of goodwill.

Most medals are awarded to those who have either done undue favours to stakeholders at the utter detriment of the laws of the land and public interests or have promised to safeguard the latter’s stake when in danger. This is evident from the fact that the proverbial “puppets” of the elitist status quo stand as the most rewarded breed in our country.

Moreover, the frequent instances of crowning and garlanding the notoriously prominent people of the country need no description. Therefore, one shouldn’t be surprised at all if bandits in the riverine area of Kashmore get rewarded in the future for outdoing state writ in the district. The occasional rewards and medals aren’t the only instances; people get rewarded in the form of postings, promotions, plots, and much more.

Most institutions are manned by individuals who earned their positions through undue favours for the elitist. Since they contribute to and complement the system in various ways, they are deemed worthy of rewards.

Don’t they? Democracy derailment, institutional decay, accelerating brain drain, rising unemployment, skyrocketing inflation, and social chaos are the outcomes of most rewards. And who is the ultimate beneficiary of this?

The givers and takers of rewards. They continue to reward each other so that their interests are not only guarded but also served at the expense of the public. The elite capture and subsequent practices of rewarding the corrupt, pliant, and puppets rarely serve the real objectives of rewarding people for collective public benefits.

Instead, such rewards encourage deviations that benefit the status quo. These practices diminished the worth of the rewards so much that they are rarely sought by the deserving ones or taken seriously by them.

Perhaps the meaning of awards has been so tarnished that a true altruist would reject being honoured rather than accept it. With a few exceptions, the rewards themselves might feel suffocated in the chests and strangled around the necks of most recipients. If merit were the sole criterion for receiving awards, our society could have become a paradise for its people. Instead, it’s a safe haven for parasitic elites.