Even Unreasonable Things Have Their Reasons
A Strange Kind of Rationality
Yesterday, I was half-watching a world history lecture on YouTube when the topic turned to the Hindu social hierarchy.
Honestly, from a Japanese perspective, it is hard to believe that a person’s occupation or social position could be decided at birth. Any system that encourages discrimination is unacceptable, and I think that is a basic assumption in modern society.
But the lecturer said something interesting.
“Discrimination is wrong. That is the premise. But if a system survived for thousands of years, there must have been some rational reason behind it.”
Hearing that made me notice my own habit of judging the past and other cultures only through today’s values.
Stability Inside an Unfair System
According to the lecturer, hereditary occupations can also be seen from another angle: you never have to worry about finding work. Your path is decided from the moment you are born, so you do not have to keep agonizing over your future.
You do not have to fear unemployment. You do not have to keep asking what you should do with your life. If you can accept the system, it offers an extremely stable life.
Modern people have gained freedom. But as the price of that freedom, we now carry endless questions such as, “Who am I?” and “How should I live?”
That was the point.
Of course, I have no intention of justifying unfairness or injustice. Still, for people at the time, accepting that unfairness may have been connected to social stability and a guarantee of daily life.
Tradition and Change
As I was thinking about this, I remembered some Indian engineers I used to work with.
They sometimes approached problems in ways that felt very different from how Japanese people tend to think. I have heard that today’s Indian IT industry is a new kind of profession that cannot be fully explained by the traditional caste framework. Precisely because of that, it has become a place where people with talent can aim higher, and many people from groups that have historically faced discrimination are gathering there with tremendous energy.
In a society where tradition and change exist at the same time, watching people try to build new tracks with their own ability is genuinely impressive.
The Same Lesson in Engineering
In the end, it is easy to stop thinking at “discrimination is wrong.”
But if we really want to understand something, we have to ask why such a system emerged and what role it played.
This is not only about history.
The same thing happens when engineers look at legacy code. At first glance, an implementation may look completely incomprehensible. But if you dig deeper, you often start to see the constraints and circumstances that existed at the time.
Unreasonable things have their own unreasonable reasons.
Just thinking that way makes the world feel a little wider.
That said, after thinking all these serious thoughts, I spent five minutes today just trying to decide what to eat for lunch.
Freedom is surprisingly troublesome.