It’s been years; we are happily ruining ourselves by staying on the same track, as it takes effort and a small sacrifice of happiness to change our path. Society is a common ground of tolerance that people share, irrespective of their beliefs; its origins are far older than our thoughts. We learn about it through our philosophers; as Karl Marx said, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it.” To cope with sanity, we must first learn insanity, but people prefer stereotypes and our inventions, and, as many have declared, there are two parts of the brain upon which we act: conscious and unconscious. Most of the time, we prefer to work with the unconscious part. Most of the time, we are in auto mode, as if our routines have paralysed us.
In the modern era, constitutions govern the states and keep them away from the state of the jungle. Oftentimes, we are governed by our fears. First of all, we need to overcome our fears to stop the dog’s chasing. G.H. Mead, a great philosopher, said that the self is nothing without the mind and vice versa, so we need to insert our own interpretation into our own mind. Many countries, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom, are known to lack written constitutions. To overcome the obstacles of our own, as people say, “Man is the maker of his own destiny.” Plato was also a believer in imagination; he said it provides us moulds, and as Terence McKenna said, “Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.” Laws and constitutions are the ultimate guarantors of stability and peace in the modern era.
We craft ourselves unconsciously into a conscious version of society. Like the way there is the “labelling theory” of Howard Becker and Erving Goffman, it gives the idea that deviance and conformity do not result from what a person does but from how others respond to those actions. It is a process through which the reaction of others spoils normal identity. Everything is bound to change, as Hercules has said, “We can’t step in the same river twice.” The United States, Norway, and the Netherlands are believed to have the oldest constitutions, while the Norwegian charter is believed to be the second oldest, having witnessed 316 amendments since the beginning. On the other hand, the Japanese constitution has never been amended until now, and the Chinese constitution has been amended only 5 times. Pakistan went through approximately 27 constitutional amendments.
Amendments are indeed part of life, and change is a necessary element for living beings, although the USA and Pakistani constitutions are believed to be the most rigid because of their complex amendment processes. Both require the majority approval for a USA constitutional amendment: two-thirds of Congress or three-quarters of the states are required for the world’s most difficult constitution to amend, and for Pakistan, a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Parliament after mandatory readings is required for a constitutional amendment. This trait is an antidote for an ambiguous mindset and politicians who like to go to any limit to hide their trace of crime, yet there should be an amendment of not amending the constitution whenever the person in power feels unsafe, because stable countries like Japan and China haven’t gone through many constitutional amendments.
Sometimes consistency is key to stability and success, unless and until there’s a major alteration to be addressed by amending the constitution. “Doubt is the origin of truth.” It’s a famous saying of the great philosopher Socrates. He was the founder of the dialectic method, also known as the elenctic method. It’s a form of argumentative dialogue between individuals based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas. This theory of his is still applied to many teaching and learning institutes, but obviously, it’s rarely encouraged. Socrates said that “an unexamined life is not worth living.”