Rafed English
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THE ACTUAL HUMAN PROBLEM

The world problem that occupies peoples' minds now, affecting the heart of their present existence, is the social-problem which can be summarized by giving the most frank answer to this question:

What is the system that befits humanity, the one whereby humanity achieves a happy social life?

Naturally, this problem occupies a prominent and dangerous position. In its complexity and diver- sity of suggested resolutions it poses as a source of danger to humanity itself, for system is included in the calculation of the human life, affecting the core of its social entity.

This problem is deeply rooted in the distant epochs of the history of the human existence. Man faced it ever since it had sprung up in his social life. The human social entity sprung up from several in- dividuals tied to each other by common bonds and ties. These bonds, naturally, need general directions and organization. Indeed, it is upon the extent of the harmony between this system and the existing human reality and its benefit that both social stability and happiness depend.

This social problem has pushed humanity, in its intellectual and political arenas, to wage a long battle and engage in a struggle full of different sorts of combat, and by different codes of the human mind, aiming at erecting and engineering the social structure, trying to sketch its plans and lay down its pillars. It was a tiring struggle, crowded with miseries and iniquity, full of laughters and tears, one wherein happiness was espoused to misery. All this occurred because of all the different colours of abnormality and deviation that characterized those social systems. Except for glimpses shone during moments of the history of this planet, the social existence of man would have lived in continu- ous misery and dived in tumultuous waves ...

We do not want to display, now, the rounds of the human struggle in the social field, for we do not want, by making such type of research here, to nar rate the history of suffering humanity, showing the different spheres through which it revolved since time immemorial; instead, we want to partake in humanity's present living circumstances and in the rounds it reached, so that we may know the desti- nation that a round is expected to reach, and the natural shore towards which a ship should make its way and embark at, so that it reaches peace and goodness, coming back to a stable life of justice and happiness after a long struggle and tiring en- deavour, after journeying long in different places and directions.

In fact, contemporary man's awareness of today's social problem is stronger than any past epoch of ancient history. Today, he is more con scious of his relationship to the problem and to its complexity, for modern man has come to realize the fact that the problem is of his own making, and that the social order is not imposed on him from above, the way natural phenomena operate, for these phenomena govern man's relationship to na- ture. Man now stands contrary to ancient man who often used to look at the social order as though it were an order of nature, facing it without choice or power. While he could not develop the law of earth gravitation, by the same token, he could not change his social relations. Naturally, when man starts to believe that those relations are but one aspect of behaviour while man himself chooses without losing his own will within their sphere, the social problem then starts to reflect in him - in man that lives it intellectually - a revolutionary bitterness, instead of the bitterness of yielding!

Modern man, on the other hand, started to be contemporary to a tremendous change in man's con- trol over nature, a change that has never been pre ceded. This growing control, terrifying and gigantic, increases the complexity of the social problem and doubles its dangers, for it opens to mankind new and great avenues of utilization; and it doubles the significance of the social order upon which depends the distribution of each individual's share of those tremendous outcomes that nature today bestows on man with generosity.

Man, after all, inherited from his predecessors, along ages, a broader experience, more inclusive and deep, that resulted from the social experiences which ancient man had had, and in their light he studies the social problem.

Adopted from the book: "Contemporary Man and The Social Problem" by: "Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir Al-Sadr"