[ Yompu Karlo ]
There are fundamental, seemingly irreconcilable contradictions that accompany mortals of our kind throughout life. Raised amid the shifting contours of both the local and global landscape, today’s young people in our state face ethical dilemmas on every front.
They inherit the intense drive for conventional success in a capitalist regime, where wealth accumulation, competition and domination are the ideals. Yet, they also carry an equally powerful sense of justice, moral awareness and ethical responsibility for the inequities in society, and for the exploitation of nature and both unpaid and underpaid labour.
The political culture of the state continues to deteriorate, marred by corruption, while those struggling to get their primary needs met find themselves compelled to prioritise their immediate survival over political idealism.
Tribal women experience a deep ambivalence on questions of property, gender and identity: a desire to preserve the sanctity, security and distinctiveness of a fragile indigenous culture vis-à-vis the majority population, yet a simultaneous resentment towards the explicit and implicit intra-community controls that curb their freedom to pursue inter-racial romantic choices within a tribal, patrilineal order.
Similarly, a niche group of native citizens find themselves empathising with the severe plight of statelessness, human-rights violations and insecurity faced by migrant communities, despite also feeling a compelling duty to safeguard their own security, limited resources and cultural identity. The tug of war between these antithetical forces is perpetual; one side often advances only at the expense of the other. This results in a profound sense of moral confusion and ideological disorientation among the youths, who must learn to navigate the political, social and cultural landscape of the state.
Many thinkers have expressed a similar pessimism in their attempt to unify contradicting values. Isaiah Berlin, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1990), famously wrote: “The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution, in which all good things coexist, seems to me to be not merely unattainable – that is a truism – but conceptually incoherent…. Some among the Great Goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.”
Yet, there have also been others who, since antiquity, have sought to understand and reconcile the deep dichotomies that structure both worldly crises and the human condition.
On a positive note, however, this dilemma confronted by the youths of our state may be hinting at a newer development: an intellectual and ethical awakening, and a heightened critical awareness of the erstwhile ‘taken-for-granted’ systems around them. These tensions are symptomatic of a fast-changing society. The unattainability of perfect unity does not exempt us from the responsibility of confronting these conflicts. The key is not to do away with contradictions altogether, but to manage them with wisdom, compromise, fairness and humility; to make sure that no value is maximised to the point that it overrides another.
Perhaps there is no final concrete solution; rather, we must learn the difficult art of ethical compromise and balance: keeping every value alive, even if none can be fully chosen. (The contributor is a doctoral fellow in the political science department of Rajiv Gandhi University, Rono Hills.)
