Stages of Societal Growth

For a society to establish and grow it has to go through the following stages

1. Ideology
2. Geography
3. Political System
4. Justice System and
5. Economic System

The Ideology brings the people together. It is the message that links people into a chain. Their emotions and intellect become affiliated and their faith and trust on their fellow human being is established. Once the ideology is accepted and adopted, the group then needs physical space where they can live together. Immigrants moving to a new land or country in droves is a classic example of Ideology and Geography being interlinked. Once the geography is secured, next come the power structure needed for governance of that geography and people. This is the political system required to formulate a power structure and creation of succession plans within the power corridors. Democracy, theocracy, monarchy are all forms of the political system.

It can be debated whether a system of justice comes before a system of politics. The argument is that if the politicians are corrupt, they will never let the system of justice prevail. In an existing society this is probably true but if we look at the evolution of society from the very begining, someone in power has to form the code of conduct. So rules of conduct with fellow citizens and with the state machinery are defined and an enforcement mechanism is built around it. Therefore political system and its commitment and endorsement of the justice system is necessary. This provides the basic platform for survival and now the economics can take over.

The reason for this background is to analyze Pakistan along these stages. These stages have to be followed in this exact same order for a society to prosper. In subsequent blogs, I will cover this one by one with respect to Pakistan as a society.