By: Dr. Adnan Buzan

A human being is not an entity isolated from his surroundings. Rather, he is a product of the environment in which he grows up and a reflection of the values he receives, the circumstances he experiences, and the relationships that contribute to shaping his consciousness from childhood.

When oppression prevails, people learn fear.
When lying becomes a means of survival, people learn deception.
When opportunism is rewarded, honesty becomes a form of naivety.
When truth is humiliated and the oppressor is rewarded, a generation grows up losing its faith in justice.
And when hatred becomes a culture, the other becomes an enemy before being seen as a human being.

Therefore, many of the behaviors we describe as “individual distortion” are not always produced by the individual alone. They may instead be reflections of a diseased environment, a society that has lost its moral and ethical balance, and a troubled social system that has contributed to shaping the individual’s consciousness and behavior.

“A distorted environment produces a distorted consciousness; a distorted consciousness produces distorted behavior; and distorted behavior, when it becomes a collective phenomenon, reproduces the distorted society all over again.”

Thus, the cycle begins:

“A corrupt environment → a troubled society → a distorted consciousness → distorted behavior → the reproduction of the same environment.”

For this reason, it is not enough to blame the individual alone, nor is it reasonable to demand that a person remain virtuous within a system that rewards corruption and punishes integrity. Reforming the human being begins, to a great extent, with reforming the environment in which that person is shaped, the values that govern society, and the institutions that define the meaning of justice, dignity, and responsibility.

A human being does not develop in a vacuum, nor is their personality formed independently of the world in which they live. They are influenced by what they see, what they hear, what they learn, what they are rewarded for, and what they are punished for. If the social environment imprints corruption upon consciousness, turns injustice into something ordinary, lying into a means of survival, and opportunism into a path to success, then it does not easily produce individuals capable of breaking these rules. Rather, it may produce individuals who reproduce them, until, over time, they become part of what is considered “normal” and “ordinary” in the life of society.

Nevertheless, the human being is not merely an automatic product of their environment, nor an absolute prisoner of the circumstances in which they were raised. To varying degrees, they remain capable of rejection, resistance, and rebuilding themselves. Therefore, understanding human behavior requires bringing together “individual responsibility and the influence of the environment,” rather than eliminating one in favor of the other.

“Society shapes the human being just as the human being shapes society; the environment shapes the individual just as the individual is capable of changing the environment.”

From this perspective, reforming society does not begin merely by condemning individuals who have gone astray. It also begins by asking about the conditions that contributed to producing such deviation, the values that allowed it to spread, and the institutions that failed to confront it—or contributed, directly or indirectly, to entrenching it.

It is unjust to demand integrity from a person within a system that rewards corruption, honesty within an environment that punishes truth, or justice within a system that makes injustice more profitable than fairness.

“If you want to change a person, do not look only at their behavior; first look at the world in which they grew up, the values they learned, the circumstances that shaped their consciousness, and the social system that taught them how to see themselves and others.”

For reforming the human being cannot be separated from reforming the environment in which they are formed, nor from reforming the society that reshapes their consciousness and behavior every day.

“A distorted environment may distort human consciousness, and a distorted society may reproduce that distortion in its individuals. When distortion becomes a social norm, reforming the individual alone becomes incapable of bringing about genuine change.”

“Therefore, it is not enough to change the human being; we must also change the world that teaches them how to become that human being.”