Society cant be easily defined, because there is more to it, a group of people related to each other through persistent relations such as social status, roles and social networks, Or a large social grouping that shares the same geographical territory and is subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations.
There is more truth to this truth. Societies should mean more than a group of people related to each other through persistent relations such a social status, roles and etc neither can a society be simply a social grouping that shares the same geographical territory and is subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations.
What is a society?
I remember scenes from stories, told to me by my mum, about how in the olden days , the kids and all the youth in a village used to gather around a fire and listen to stories of an old man in the village. The old man in the village would probably be the wisest person in the village and his stories did many things apart from the listening pleasure of the audience .
The stories inspired and cautioned the youth to learn , to learn from the characters of the story, to learn from their flaws and strengths , that they may become better persons.
I also recall in bigger villages , the oldest woman in a family sect , will sit down especially with her grandchildren and tell them many stories. A hundred fables , would have been heard by a child before he turned fifteen. The older man in the family taught his sons how to farm,haunt and once a while meetings were held , where he told his sons about his conquests and failures and what they should do otherwise.
A lot of societies have existed before , I can talk of the Arthenians, the Egyptans, the Romans but I wish to talk about one , one that serves as a true example of what a society should be .
History has it that it was Lycurgus that reformed Sparta to the great nation it became.
Lycurgus was said to be a man who could lay down the supreme power easily out of respect for justice, so it was easy for Lycurgus to rule the Spartans in his capacity as the guardian of Charilaus. However, the young king's mother, and her relatives, envied and hated Lycurgus. Among other slanders, they accused Lycurgus of plotting the death of Charilaus.
Lycurgus finally decided that the only way that he might avoid blame in case something should happen to the child would be to go travelling until Charilaus had grown up and fathered a son to secure the succession. Therefore, Lycurgus gave up all of his authority and went to the island of Crete.
In Crete, Lycurgus met Thales the poet. Thales made his living as a musician at banquets, but in reality Thales was a teacher of civilization. Eventually, Lycurgus persuaded Thales to go to Sparta with his songs to prepare the people for the new way of life that he intended to introduce later.
Lycurgus had carefully studied the forms of government in Crete, and had picked out what might be useful for Sparta. He also travelled to Ionia, to study the difference between the pleasure-loving Ionians and the sober Cretans, as doctors study the difference between the sick and the healthy. Apparently he took this comparison to the Spartans, training one puppy in a disciplined manner and leaving the other to eat and play at will. The Spartans were taken by the discipline of Crete and liberties of Ionians at the same time.
In Ionia, Lycurgus discovered the works of Homer. Lycurgus compiled the scattered fragments of Homer and made sure that the lessons of statecraft and morality in Homer's epics became widely known. The Egyptians claim that Lycurgus visited them too, and that it was from the Egyptians that he got the idea of separating the military from the menial workers, thus refining Spartan society.
After Lycurgus had been absent for a while, the Spartans wrote and begged Lycurgus to come back. As they admitted, only Lycurgus was really a king in their heart, although others wore a crown and claimed the title. He had the true foundation of sovereignty: a nature born to rule, and a talent for inspiring obedience. Even the Spartan kings wanted Lycurgus to return because they saw him as one who could protect them from the people.
Lycurgus had already decided that some fundamental changes would have to be made in Sparta. When he returned, he did not merely tinker with the laws, but instead followed the example of the wisest ephors to implement incremental change.
Lycurgus created the finest society that existed in the world by then, in his return he asked that the walls of Sparta be brought down, and enacted a law that trained all the strong 7 year old boys for 22 years in warfare , making them the fiercest warriors in the world and the very standing walls of Sparta.
Lycurgus was a man, one who was able to find the secret to a functioning society, in his search , he had come to understand that a society will only function properly if it had a purpose( a dream) and if each member of the society had a status and a role in the unit.
Peter F Drucker mentions that no society can function as a society unless it gives the individual member social status and function and unless the decisive social power is legitimate power.
He continues on to say “ That the former establishes the basic frame of social life:the purpose and meaning of society. The latter shapes the space within the frame:It makes society concrete and creates ts institutions .
Read the history of the reformed Sparta Lycurgus institutionalized and you will realize, the whole society knew what it is it wanted to achieve. Women were taught to read,write and count and taught the art of war. Women were made to engage in athletics just so to birth strong men who could fit into the army.
Women were told to blindly criticize the men in order to make them train harder.
In Sparta was a unit, a group people who had come to believe in a dream that was supreme to all their dreams, and every member worked towards it.
Today we live in society that has no purpose, no vision, no dream, we actually don’t live in a society, because every individual seeks after his own ,and forgets about the purpose of whole, because maybe there is no purpose of the whole at all.
It seems the society is out of control, as if its become this enormous snowball descending from a hill, that keeps growing and running but has no intended direction.
In Peter F Drucker’s book of a functioning society, he mentions that :
Social status and function of the individual is the equation of the relationship between the group and the individual member. It symbolizes the integration of the individual with the group and that of the group with the individual. It expresses the individual purpose in terms of the society and the social purpose in terms of the individual.
For the individual there is no society unless he has social status and function.
Society is only meaningful if its purpose,its aims, it ideas and ideals make sense in terms of the individuals purposes, aims, ideas and ideals.
Somehow we’ve forgotten that the only way to make things work is to work as a unit, fostering each other towards the greater good, the good of the whole.
To make this country a better place, and to bring up men, bred to achieve great things, a functioning society needs to be created
Our society is growing everyday, at such enormous pace, It seems its kind of difficult to get it in a direction, with every individual living for himself and with different purposes.
The society is not functioning because somehow the basic unit of the society is not functioning.
The problems runs way up the top to way down, and yet still the most fundamental part of the society is the key to slowly turning things around.
What is the basic unit, the family, society is not functioning because the family is not functioning.
What dream, what purpose, what ideas, what ideals, what aims does the family instill?
What is the basic believe of a family, when a family sits at the dining table what do they talk about ?
I showed keen interest as I listened to one icon, being interviewed on the Oprah Winfrey show, when he said :at the time he was young, anytime his family sat at the table, each person was asked to talk about his day, what went right and what went wrong.... interesting I said.
Does your family ever hold meetings, to talk about your needs, your dreams and how to accomplish it?.
If a family has dream, and each member finds function in the achievement of this dream it will breed men purposed to achieve great things.
This means in essence that the family’s dream will shape the dreams of the members for the achievement of the greater goal.
In essence if we are to have a functioning society then the society must know where its going, it must have a dream.
Its like putting the whole country in a bus , someone in the drivers seat, and then an announced destination.
A destination that in a broader view conforms with the desire of every passenger or whats more a destination that engulfs each passengers destination.
Assuming every passenger wants to visit a state in the USA, then our destination should be the USA as when we get there every passenger gets to visit his or her state.
The road will be long, so every passenger will have a work to do. every passenger will have to do something , to get the bus there safely.
Every individual will have a role to play in order to get the bus to the destination ,if we are riding in a bus , we ask ourselves what we need to get the bus to its destination.
We might need scientists, engineers, cleaners, and all kinds of people to get there, but what we will really need are teachers and students, leaders and followers. Where one is willing to commit to the learnings and interpretations of the other, and the other is willing to inspire one with his learnings and interpretations, not so they become like him, but in order that they will be able to find themselves.
I had paused this writing for a while and I took a walk and asked myself what a society should be.....
I thought to myself, a society should be a place where each person worked towards that magnificent dream, where the main function of every individual is achieving growth, and as that did what was necessary to help the achievement of the good of all.
A society should be a place where every individual is nurtured by the other, where status is set on the effort put into achieving the great dream.
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