Hello again, to all my dear readers. Unfortunately or fortunately, I don't know, but I'm feeling somewhat philosophical today. And as such, I guess the occasion is right to share with you all a system of beliefs I've thought of in my leisure time.
Some of you may have heard of Selma Lageroff, the renowned Swedish authoress, whose central theme in her stories is that, the innate goodness in all human beings can be brought into being through compassion and love. In her story 'The Rattrap', she tells us the story of a simple peddler, a part-time thief and a rattrap seller otherwise. The person has a wretched life, but everything soon changes when he receives good treatment and compassion from Edla Willmasson, one of the main characters of the story, a personification of human goodness. In the story, what especially attracted my idea is the simple philosophy the rattrap seller thought of, while lost in his thoughts one day in loneliness.
He realised that the world around him is like a rattrap itself, which allures people to various baits which have been setup only to capture them, like rats are trapped with baits of cheese and pork. While his philosophy changes later, what is more important is that, even the simplest mind may develop a philosophy, to explain the mysterious ways in which the universe works.
And as one such lonely soul wandering around in the vast expanse of the cosmos, I am the proponent of a self-devised idea, that is, the laws of physics have their manifestations, analogically, in the social and psychological field too. I am a great fan of Rishi Bankimchandra Chattopadhaya, perhaps the most influential writer of Indian literature, of all times. He is the very person who gave Indians the concept of visualising the nation as a unified entity, the mother, the protector, the material manifestation of the divine. His name remains immortal, with the chanting of 'Vande Maataram' (Hail to the Motherland), which still echoes and resounds in every corner of this independent country. In one of his stories, titled 'Krishnakanter Will' (The will of Krishnakanta), Bankimchandra writes "The mind of man committed to sin is like a falling stone. The more it falls, the more it accelerates. Similarly, the mind is allured to more sins as it goes on sinning around, unless and until the consequences are met.", and thus, in his writing we find a simple co-relation, pseudo-mathematically, between the psychology of sins and Newton's second law of motion.
Similarly, if we further extend the belief, which I believe would be best to title 'Impact of physical laws in the social world', we can show ourselves many other examples. To exemplify, say a person believes in God very much. Now the same person is also one of the sort who accept every logical thing. So, if someone hits him hard with logic, say Epicurean paradox (without going into the complexity of Leibniz's Theodicies), and he accepts the fact logically (his mind does, irrespective of whether he accepts it or not), we'll see that gradually he goes on moving in another direction, turning into an agnostic maybe, or in the extreme case, into an atheist. Thus, Newton's second and third laws, in my vision, seem to manifest themselves again. First, the mind of the person can be considered to be like a body A moving in a direction with constant velocity. Now, when force (logic) is applied from a direction other than that of A's motion, there is change in momentum of A, an gradually A shifts its course, the degree of shift depending on how much force has been applied.
These are most basic laws of mechanics, which govern the very basic structures in the universe, in this vast and complex universe. Yet, we somehow (as it appears to my humble mind) see the connection between them. Thus, is psychology really nothing but a complex structure based on increasingly complex interactions between molecules and such? Perhaps the answer can only be presented to us by time. And till then, we have every liberty to develop our own versions or theories, because the more we think logically, the more we approach the fundamental truth, the eternal law that governs the structure of space and time.
And to end this brief article, let me quote the Vedantas, the ancient Indo-Aryan texts relating philosophy and philology,
"Asato Ma Sad Gamaya,
Tamasa Ma Jyotir Gamaya,
Mrityur Ma Amraritam Gamaya"
(Deliver us from unreal to real, from darkness to light, from death to immortality)
And as such, even if it's the case that we may never be able to understand and comprehend the complexity of the universe, like Calculus, we can always go ever nearer to it. :)
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