When duty is a societal construct, why can’t we just follow our heart’s calling without caring for society’s opinion?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Isn’t duty a societal construct? If Arjuna chooses to follow his heart and not care for social society’s expectation from him, how would it make a difference? Can’t he stay equipoised? Answer, there are different social contexts and different perspectives. When society has certain expectations from us, that’s not always a bad thing. We are social creatures.
And we learn a lot about behavior by socialization. At every moment, what all we could do, there are hundreds of options available. And how we act is shaped by how people react to how we act.
So, maintaining our sanity among the hundreds of options that we have at each moment is almost an overwhelming task for our minds. So, there are people around us, and if some people disapprove of what we are doing, then we check ourselves. How will children learn when their parents disapprove of certain things? Then maybe small children don’t do that.
If they go toward a fire and their mother frowns or yells or chastises, then they don’t do that. And this principle goes on throughout our life. And societal expectations are a time-tested and reliable way of maintaining our sanity amid the almost infinity of options that we have for doing things.
Now, this can become negative, counterproductive, when society’s expectations start becoming throttling. They prevent us from doing what is our heart’s calling. Now, sometimes society’s expectations may stop us from doing our heart’s calling, but more often than not, they stop us from doing our mind’s propositioning.
Our mind often propositions us to do crazy things, and we need to avoid those. So, society helps us regulate that. When we live, it’s like we are living on a tall tree, and if we cut the branch under us, we may not even know how high we are and how low we will fall, how badly we will fall if we don’t do something properly, if we just flout society’s conventions.
This is not to say that we have to be like programmed machines doing whatever society tells us, but we shouldn’t be apathetic, thinking that these are the stiflings. These are not stiflings, but these can be protecting, they can be focus-inducing also. So, at one level, we do see as social structures are collapsing, as people are not so much governed by their social expectations.
At one level, there is room for greater individual creativity, but at another level, we also see that there is greater mental distress, because without any social structure to guide our actions, people’s minds can overwhelm them. Of course, the increase of mental health problems is a complex phenomenon with many causes, and I don’t want to give bad explanations over here, but it is true that the greater the structure in our life, the lesser is the rupture that the mind can cause in our life. If we have nothing to do for a whole day, the mind may propose, let’s watch some movies, let’s surf on the internet, and we might waste our time for a whole day, 15-16 hours, but if we have something to do after an hour, then that structure in our life prevents us from getting carried away by that urge or impulse of the mind.
So, structure does matter, and of course, we need maturity to know when a structure is protecting sanity and harmony, and when a structure starts stifling creativity and individuality. So, society’s expectations should protect us from the mind’s superficial promptings, or mind’s calling, if you want to say, but they should not stop us from our heart’s calling. Now, in this case, Arjuna was concerned about the right course of action, and Krishna is giving various levels of explanation in the Bhagavad Gita, and when we are trying to persuade someone, it’s normal that we try to present things from various perspectives, and whichever perspective works, that’s the best.
So, it’s like approaching an issue from multiple angles, because each person has a particular kind of mentality, so one particular angle might be what appeals to them the most, and that’s how they move on. So, in the case of Arjuna, he was just not sure what the course of action was, and Krishna was guiding him through various perspectives. So, one of the perspectives was to consider public perception.
Now, later on, there are other verses where Krishna says that if you are going to live spiritually, you have to go against the mainstream of society, what is considered night by all living beings is day for the self-realized, and the ways of thinking and seeing and acting are different for materialists and spiritualists. So, Krishna definitely doesn’t endorse blind adherence to societal norms, but he doesn’t even recommend blind rejection of societal norms. He recommends a purposefully, a spiritually purposeful mode of living, and while recommending that spiritually purposeful mode of living, Krishna gives one level of arguments that are centered on public perception.