In the Society: From Economics to Politics

Social Order and Cooperation

Any sound mind and aware conscience would approve of the necessity of order and discipline in individual and social life. Societies that lack an original culture, but follow order and discipline in various economic, political, legal and cultural aspects, enjoy more luxury and progress than societies that do not have order and discipline, even though they may have an original culture and economic, political, legal and cultural laws and principles. 

The problems that arise in the absence of social order and discipline are:

a)No individual or group will know where they stand socially.

b)Everyone would seek their own benefit, considering others as both the means and the end.

c)Nobody would pay any attention to what is to the society's benefit.

d)People would not be content with their legal rights.

e)In such societies, human conscience heads for doom. 

The Principles of Social Order and Cooperation

Religious, moral, political, and legal basics are the most important motives for social participation. Pioneer culture has put a great deal of emphasis upon people's social harmony and participation. The reasons we find for this in the Koran are:

1-Verses in the Koran that invite people to socially cooperate and create the proper grounds for social life, like (The Table, 5:2).

2-Verses that condemn disharmony and lack of unity, and emphasize the importance of collaboration and cooperation, like (The House of Imran, 3:103). 

3-There are also many hadith on the necessity and effect of social participation.

 

يدالله مع الجماعة

"God's hand is with the public unity."

4-Other hadith show the importance of the community.

من اصبح و لم يهتم بامور المسلمين فليس بمسلم

"He who wakes up in the morning without caring about the lives of other Muslims is not a Muslim."

Moral ethics are another basic factor in social harmony and participation. Moral ethics makes people observe social law and order for the sake of human values rather than force. If these two points are taken into consideration, moral virtues will be regarded as pillars of social harmony:

1-Knowledge of how great man is, and how valuable it is to help solve people's problems.

2-The will and determination to do proper deeds that the conscience also approves of.

If people's cooperation and participation does not aim to make social benefits come true, eliminate factors disturbing social life which is based upon religion and divine conscience, it will not be different from the cooperation seen in ants and bees. Without making effort toward cooperation and physically and mentally endeavoring to adjust a social life based upon religion and divine conscience, it will not be considered valuable, even if it does produce outstanding results in providing advantages and benefits for the society; bees and ants also cooperate and work hard together, but that arises out of their specifically compulsory animal instinct, and has no value.

Power and Right

Right: Generally all necessary or useful realities that have innate or clear poles are called right. The realities about the world outside and the essential rules governing it are part of rights. So are all values useful to man, like justice, freedom, development, the sense of responsibility and social laws. Anything that causes corruption or destruction, on the other hand, is the opposite of righteousness. Each right has two poles:

1-The obvious, clear pole: Realities that are necessary and useful to man. They really exist, regardless of how man makes contact with them, like the realities and facts about the universe. The obvious, clear pole includes all the laws and properness man needs for an intelligible life.

2-The innate pole: By "innate" here we mean man's existence against inhuman realities; in other words, we are referring to the human side of righteousness. This pole must always accompany the former one. 

Studying the verses in the Koran can guide us to these conclusions on righteousness:

●The foundation of the universe is right. Righteousness depends upon God's will, which no one can ever destroy. If man, in a balanced, sound state of mind, understands the meaning of righteousness, he will have respect for it. 

●Rights are stable and sustainable; evil and wrong, however, fade away like foam on water.

●Righteousness is the cornerstone of the universe, and using it calls for human effort; man must reach evolution based upon righteous principles. By means of intelligence and reason, conscience, prophets and men of wisdom, God shows us what the right is.

●Tendency toward righteousness and acting thus requires upbringing and education. Righteousness cannot be provided to people automatically; human beings should consciously, voluntarily aim to follow righteousness as their evolutionary goal. 

●Man should not rush for achieving righteousness. They should not imagine that the right is at all times achievable. 

●Man must realize that any kind of effort aiming to uphold and bring about righteousness is a part of the right, and the greater the effort made is, the more man makes progress in the direction of righteousness. 

●Man needs to make serious effort if he is to reach righteousness and perform actions based on what is right; he must realize that the right-based realities of the universe do not obey we human beings' lusts and desires. Righteousness, the factor that promotes human evolution, needs action and effort on man's behalf.

●God's will tends toward the wrong and evil being destroyed and the right prevailing successfully. The lust-infatuated cannot defeat righteousness.

Power: Power is the factor causing motion and change in various forms. Power is one of the realities of the universe which influences man and the universe both, for power is the natural changer and acting factor effecting man and the universe in various forms. Thus, power is an example of righteousness. 

Now the question comes up: power or righteousness – which is the dominant conqueror? There are two theories in response:

1-Some people believe that righteousness will always succeed, and the powerful will never be able to defeat it. They believe that man's intelligible life has appropriate and valuable elements that are righteous. Responsibility, freedom and moderating selfishness are real, and they are right.

2-Some others believe that power is the winner; righteousness, they believe, is a mental ideal that cannot withstand power. History also provides many cases in which power overcomes righteousness.

Righteousness never confronts power at all. Power is itself one of the rights that motivate the universe and mankind. The question whether power will overcome or righteousness is a trivial, illogical one. Righteousness shows how false, improper and worthless the wrong is rather than conflict with power which is right itself. When man gains power, he can change it into a constructive factor or abuse it and use it destructively. Men's deviation from righteousness makes power – a factor necessary for development and construction – be misused.

Power is the unconscious reality that is – from the aspect that it is the basic cause for all changes and movements – an example of righteousness; thus, it neither wins nor loses, for when power unconsciously destroys the resistance of a creature, it does not feel joy by hearing the creature fall and break. It does not regard this as a victory. It is man, however, who abuses power; man even treats his own mere existence as a plaything, too.

The most lethal factor endangering power is the feeling of absolute, independent power. Accompanied with imagination and induction, this feeling prevents power from gaining a logical, accurate calculation, and eventually brings about the powerful person's demise. Absolute power leads to inflatedness and rebelling against realities. This is why it is the feeling of absolute power and all its imaginations that the Koran condemns, not power itself. (The Blood-Clot, 96:6)

The power-greedy, who lust for controlling people's lives, had better realize that they are in fact drinking a cup of poison. Those who become playthings in the hands of the powerful and oppress the weak are no different, either. Losing one's right to live at the hands of the powerful has been, however, one of the most painful phenomena history has witnessed. The powerful have always tended to create such a corrupt state of minds in those they have crushed that these poor downtrodden souls regard them as saviors. 

In fact, those people who surrender to the powerful have downtrodden their own character; no power can defeat man unless he himself breaks his own character first. The human character is a forbidden zone into which only God and man himself can find a way into; no one else is able to enter it. 

As we have already mentioned, righteousness is far superior to success or failure. Power is a reality that may fall in the hands of righteousness or selfish people. Now let us see what will happen in either case:

 

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