Divine (in)justice?

Have you ever wondered why, despite unparalleled cognitive capabilities, humans lingered in a near-total primordial state of nature for most of their existence? And why, in their roughly 300,000 years on Earth, did Homo sapiens only recently learn to challenge their fixated existence - with The Epic of Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia (circa 2100–1200 BCE) and Greek contributions (circa 600 BCE)?

Though the mind in Locke's tabula rasa state might have held open multiple possibilities - or as philosophers put it, "worlds within and beyond" - the absence of inherent agency or blueprint made humans prone to selective fixation. An unformed cognition rendered them susceptible to becoming locked in dictated fates. While intuition may have helped them stay on course, it often lacked the capacity to lead towards a truly fulfilling life. Notwithstanding the existential anxiety that marked their long existence, the absence of inherent agency largely explains their impressionability.

One might then wonder how a few managed to outwit or overpower the many. The answer, though debatable, partially lies in their outmanoeuvring within a Hobbesian state of nature. Those few who escaped the common fate - through intuition, experience, divine injunctions and trial and error - often used their unrefined agency in a brutish manner to satisfy their ruling desires.

To prevent people from examining life and contesting authority, leaders inculcated unquestionable answers and unanswerable questions wrapped in psychic phenomena. This manifested in the divine right to rule where princes protected the clergy's interests and the clergy sanctified the rulers' power. However brutal the regime and miserable the subjects, it was all framed as divine justice. This way, divine truth became personified in the prince as a divine project; the truth of power became divine truth; the kleptocracy of the prince-clergy alliance was presented as ordained fate.

Had most of those who escaped the Hobbesian trap and gained agency used it for humanity's collective salvation from the beginning, civilisations would have advanced far beyond. It was primarily the Greek philosophers around 600 BCE who first challenged the sanctified authority through a rational lens. Socrates, for instance, professed critical inquiry over passive acceptance. Though the theory later weakened in the West, it is far from extinct. Today, it is increasingly institutionalised and weaponised to sanctify the vested interests of the powerful, with clear manifestations across the world.

There are societies where pre-Socratic darkness operates even today – albeit with differences. Besides the traditional prince-clergy duo, the Qazi acts more as a courtier, the clergy is more cunning, and the intelligentsia is more parasitic toward the people. Such societies have drifted toward a modern form of "divine right rule", where the gains of the powerful are sanctified and the public's suffering is portrayed as a divine scheme. The Qazi legitimises and the clergy divinely justifies the very systematic and direct oppression of people. There are other quarters – like media-persons, feudal and tribal warlords, bureaucrats and the capitalist and corporate elite – which enforce and sustain the system at the grassroots level.

All those who could do something instead choose to become beneficiaries of the system. All of this - dressed up as democracy or national interest - drags societies back towards a pre-Socratic darkness, fostering a mass culture of compliance. As a result, most people find themselves at the mercy of empowered brutes, facing pressing issues at every level created by those in power, all waiting to consume them.

Amidst all this, the Socratic challenges to the system today come from a growing public awakening and the handful individuals who, despite hardships and all allure of perks, refuse to be in cahoots with the powerful – and, perhaps, more importantly from public distrust earned and the weight of follies accumulated over decades by those drunk in power.