Social evil and Mass media

Here’s my take on the concept of social evil and the role of mass media in general. Calling ourselves Human Beings as differentiated from animals is but an eyewash of astronomic proportions. We are nothing but animals – wild and Darwinian. Our upbringing and our education tempers and tames our animal instincts to a certain extent but left to ourselves we would eat each other up… which is nothing but our base instincts coming to the fore in all its darwininian ‘survival of the fittest’ glory and hence is not always a bad thing. So evil as we define it is nothing but our animal nature coming through our so called polished exterior. To cut a long argument short we are all ‘evil’.

Interestingly and  importantly social evil when seen through the prism of time and location varies dramatically. So the biggest evil of the modern history – Hitler would have been treated like Alexander the great had he been born in another time period and Ghengiz Khan would not look so great as he is made out to be in our history books.

Coming to the topic at hand, Amir Khan and his initiative, someone should have advised him that mass media has never had the slightest impact on human base social behaviour anywhere in the world, let alone India. Evil is ingrained in our very existence. No radio programme, movie, art has changed anything. Nothing will change with this show either. The role of mass media is very different and changing behaviour or making an intellectual discussion is not the role of mass media. Mass media, art, music can at best be a mirror in the face of society and hope that people will get the message, which needless to mention rarely happens.

So does that mean that there is no way to change human behaviour and make it less animal like? The answer is yes through education and education alone. But the truth is that the two socio-political  formats that exist in the world will never let this happen.  Socialism controls education and actually denies education so that the mass never thinks for itself. Capitalism is worse and creates barriers in the route of education of the masses by putting a price tag which only a few can afford. This brings us back to the fact that evil can never be curbed and certainly not through a TV programme.