“Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.”

These are the opening lines of epoch-making novel The Stranger by Albert Camus where the anomie of the protagonist is portrayed so meticulously. Antithetical to what is usually expected of a human living in the society, Meursault, the protagonist of the novel, exhibits a very stolid response and does not show any outward signs of remorse or grief at his mother’s funeral. Unapologetic Meursault is not even moved by a significant event like his parent’s death.

Consequently, society sees him as a ‘stranger’, an ‘outsider’, a monster to some extent, whose aberrant attitude is vexing and at the same time thought-provoking. Whether Meursault is a monster or not in the truest sense, that’s a food for another write-up.

But, it’s true that there are so many people in our society whose psyche is comparable to Meursault, at least in the sense that not a scintilla of emotion is left in those people. If not so, then how could people like Shahed and Sabrina even think of cashing in on a humanitarian crisis caused by the pandemic and dish out fake Covid-19 certificates? If not so, then how come bearded businessmen in a Muslim country stack up daily essentials and orchestrate artificial crisis to fish in troubled waters by jacking up the prices of those products? This is only possible when an individual or the society is suffering from lack of moral lines.

Our moral turpitude, further compounded by a tendency to transgress every written and unwritten social standard, have transmogrified our society into an institution defined by deregulation and amoral outlook. There is no sign of rectitude among most of us, except a few straight arrows who are still trying hard to stay true to the traditional set of ethics.

If it was not the case, then traders could have never thought of gouging commoners during the holy month of Ramadan, hospitals would never swindle patients in this country, public servants and politicians would never get influenced by megalomaniac behavior and their commitments to mass people would never wax and wane with their changing political fortunes, ordinary passers-by would never batter an innocuous lady to death in broad daylight, a mother or a father would never commit filicide, religious preachers would never sin by outraging the modesty of women or violating them and people from all walks of life would never derive silly fun from scopophilia. All these happenings reflect the zeitgeist of our anomie-stricken society and all these anomalies are happening under the very aegis of the society.

In short, as it transpires, we are skating on thin ice. So, what’s the way out of this nightmare? Given that our conscience has been debilitated by forbidden fantasies and social institutions are in a diabolical condition, we are really left with a Hobson’s choice.

We can, may be, turn to religion, not one as preached by our clerics because they themselves have been equally hypocritical, but to one that is virgin in its essence and not mutilated by anyone. Because no religion in the world inspires immorality and belligerence. We need to get our head around the true messages as conveyed in the religions and embrace those, no matter what your one is, if we really want to stop ourselves being called the descender of the demon horde.

(The writer is a graduate who likes to talk about society and its people.)