There were many incidents in the past of our movement that, putting it mildly, were far from ideal. People who would put their trust in spiritual authorities would end up being deceived. Up to this day, that’s a great scar that many of us are still struggling to surpass.
Why Krsna did not intervene and make our society perfect from day one?
In parenting, we quickly learn that we can’t do everything for our children; frequently we just need to allow them to commit mistakes and learn from them the hard way. My personal understanding of it is that if Krsna would mystically intervene every time something wrong was about to happen, perhaps we as a society would not learn the lessons we are supposed to learn. Probably we would not mature in the way we are supposed to do.
When there is a war, always many innocent persons suffer. The man in charge, the one who started it, is surely responsible, and he will have to pay for his acts, be here or in hell. However, there are always people who could have intervened and done something but chose to be negligent. To a smaller degree, they are also responsible. Finally, there are other people who were not directly affected by the situation and thus chose to ignore what was happening. Although on a much smaller scale, they also share part of the responsibility. Without their voluntary or involuntary cooperation, things could not have happened the way they did.
Similarly, when we speak about problems our movement faced in the past, we are forced to confront the uncomfortable truth that we also share a certain parcel of responsibility for the events that happened around us. Maybe we could have done something to prevent some of these situations but chose to not do it, maybe we deep inside knew that someone was doing something wrong, but chose to not act on it because it was not our business, maybe we supported some leader who abused his position, or maybe we chose to observe something from afar instead of getting involved.
Reflecting on what went wrong and whatever role we played in it is part of the process we must go through to understand what happened, learn from it, and prevent the same thing from happening again. Conversely, when we exempt ourselves from all responsibility, we may not learn anything and as a result, the same mistakes may be repeated over and over.
Constructing a perfect society demands us to become mature as individuals. Leaders have an important role, and they also have a great parcel of responsibility when things go wrong, but without maturity from the individuals, society will remain flawed, regardless of how perfect or imperfect the leaders may be. Indeed, if most members are flawed, they will tend to elect or support flawed leaders, exacerbating the problems.
We can see that the qualification of the leaders is important, but the general qualification of the society is what produces qualified leaders and creates the conditions for them to make the necessary changes in the first place. These two things can thus only go hand in hand. It’s very difficult to improve society without first improving ourselves as individuals, and problems are, in my humble understanding, one of the tools Krsna uses to foment that.