Issue Essay 4
"The stability of a society depends on how it responds to the extremes of human behaviour."
A society is loosely defined as a gathering of people sharing common property and values. These values extend not only to physical assets like real estate, but also encompass intellectual issues such as cultural values, language, patriotic feelings, and even common beliefs in religion, etc. A society is considered "stable" when such a system matures into a self-confident community that is confident about its own security. Such a society inherently can manage all unexpected variations in community behaviour due to its stability.
The topic is thus considered extremely valid - extremes of human behaviour in society, and aberrant behaviour, are what define a stable society. It is the ability of a society to manage this extreme behaviour within its own framework, that defines it.
A clarification is pertinent here. "Extremes" of human behaviour refer to the natural tendency of all human beings to exhibit what is commonly known as "antisocial tendencies", sometime during their existence. This kind of behaviour is not necessarily restricted to a fringe minority, but is rather a tendency prevalent among all individual constituents of a societal structure.
A society where these tendencies are noted and expected, can consider itself stable. Instability in a society is caused precisely due to its inability to handle extreme behaviour among its denizens, especially on a large scale.
On the other hand, stable societies anticipate such behaviour, and provide safeguards to control it. These safeguards are now more commonly called "laws" in civilized societies today. These are the lines of control that are drawn by the society itself, delineating the boundaries beyond which its members will be contributing to the instability of a society. A society knows that it is defined by its response to extreme behaviour; it therefore defines such behaviour and clearly demarcates it, so that it will easily identify aberrance and be able to manage it well.
Such "safeguards" are best tested in situations where the "mass hysteria" factor comes to the fore. Mass hysteria occurs when, due to unknown, insignificant or irrelevant reasons, the previously mentioned extreme tendencies become rampant in society. An example of such a situation is the recent looting that occured in Baghdad after the American and British coalition troops conquered the city during the second Gulf War. Iraqi society could consider itself very fickle, mainly because even though it knew that a change of government was looming, it could not prepare itself to handle it sufficiently well. What occured was that "extreme behaviour" came to the fore - the citizens of Baghdad began looting their own neighbours' belongings. Baghdad's society was thus defined by its inability to handle this - this extreme behaviour defined its society's stability, or extreme lack thereof; thus reiterating the given topic.
Of course, while it is true that a society defines its stability based on the extreme tendencies of its members, it is not the *only* reason to define its stability. A community's self-confidence is also measured on other logically relevant factors, such as its economic confidence, and availability of food, water and shelter. These factors do not dispute the topic at hand, but help in focussing its relevance. What this means is that there are two distinct ways of defining the stability of a society - one is the practicality of such a decision - factors such as money, food. Another is what the topic states - its social behaviour patterns. Both contribute wholly to the definition of a society.
A society's maturity is thus very germanely judged by its extreme behaviours. In an stable society, extreme behaviour is expected and suppressed. On the other hand, an unstable society is marked by its exteme nature. It is thus the extent of visibility of extreme behaviour that is a very direct and linear indicator of the stability of a society.