Ten sharks against a million mackerel… If each one eats 100 mackerel, that makes a thousand mackerel. This means your chance of becoming prey is only one in a thousand.
Is Feeling a Sense of Belonging to Society Good or Bad? That is the primary question… The answer is quite clear: if society is on the right path, then what you are doing is correct. This feeling leads you to a good place because the crowd you joined is heading in the right direction. However, the exact opposite would be a total catastrophe. Although whether society is on the right path is a major debate in itself, “feeling a sense of belonging to society” is good. Rest assured, if you view yourself as belonging to society, society views you as belonging to it as well. Otherwise, it could not have multiplied enough to form a “society.” Why does a human being view themselves as belonging to society? It is quite simple: because they find what they are seeking within society. What else would they be doing there? But remember, those who step where everyone else steps end up where everyone else ends up. If one’s mindset resembles that of a school of mackerel, it is understandable. One million mackerel against ten sharks… If each shark eats 100 mackerel, that makes one thousand mackerel. This means your probability of becoming prey is merely one in a thousand.
Thinking about it once more, it is completely logical. Feeling a sense of belonging to society is a very healthy and sound decision. Previously, in the article titled “Belonging and Being Accepted,” we shared the quotes of many great figures emphasizing togetherness. However, those were recommendations for people belonging to the common crowd. Bounded unity and togetherness are certainly far better than being completely scattered. And if you can be useful within that society, good for you. Yet again, a reminder: wherever everyone goes, that is where you go too. That is how this story ends. Being with society is quite fine, but try to spend a little time in solitude as well.
Arthur Schopenhauer: “A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”
Friedrich Nietzsche: “Those who belong to the herd fear solitude; for solitude is the only mirror in which man confronts his own truth.”
Rumi: “Unless you learn to be alone within the crowd, you can never taste the sweetness of being alone with God.”
There is no harm in nurturing a sense of belonging to society. Both psychological sciences and spirituality already support this. When the desire to belong to a community is examined closely, it becomes evident that self-interest lies beneath it. It is driven by either obtaining something, protecting oneself from undesirable outcomes, or the impulse to be useful and active. To the one who asks what self-interest exists in the intention to be useful, I say it is the interest of being secure from the fear of being useless—the interest of remaining distant from an unwanted state. A human being ought to experience a sense of belonging to society at the beginning anyway. They must. If a person is a mirror to another person, do they not need mirrors in which to see themselves? How else could one make progress on the path toward becoming “human”? What one must pay attention to is knowing right now that they are joining something they will abandon as they begin to progress on the path toward maturity. If one remains on a path to which they feel complete belonging until the very end, it is inevitable that they will suffer the exact same fate as the crowd.
I do not mean to explicitly claim that societies are on the wrong path. But can it really be said that they are on a good path? We can only comprehend the true state of a society by examining statistical data relative to its population—such as incarceration rates, crime statistics, poverty and homelessness figures, public support for armaments and war, as well as the types of accidents and deaths. All these metrics are publicly available information accessible to anyone. Regardless of the continent, religion, or culture, the foundational pillar of societies has now become their material and spiritual self-interests. It is an undeniable fact that any community centered around “me first” rather than “you first” is doomed to collapse according to every exoteric and esoteric worldview. It is merely a matter of time.
