Reason is too much to hope for: this world is after all populated by filthy, hairy, primates.
These nauseating creatures like to label things and themselves. They like to classify, compare, give names to things, and distinguish them from others. Their categories always come in pairs of mutual opposites. One such dichotomy is between the liberal and the conservative. The former likes to leave everything to the individual's judgement, and assumes that as long as it doesn't directly harm someone, anything goes, emphasis of course on the "directly". These misguided fools live in abject denial and find themselves trapped in an amoral universe of confusion and conflict - what the Vedic philosophers would have called "bhrama". The other type believes that things are for a reason, though it is not for us to question why, not because we are filthy dumb primates but because we are little children possibly designed by some abstract benevolent force, who has also designed the rules by the way. So there should be no reason to change anything, rules, customs, and traditions - since they are preordained for our own good, and because change is uncomfortable. These fools would stick with the basest of customs as part of 'tradition' and curb individual rebellions with punitive action. The illusion that the system was designed perfectly and following some pre-ordained rules will solve all problems: "Bhrama" here too.
What then are we to make of this civilization of filthy primates, whose members are torn between one of two, equally unappetizing extremes? In fact as the existentialists would say, there is not much sense to look forward to in the first place. Yet the primate tendency to order, organize and structure things in the mind, which later led to agriculture and city life, must have its own merits, one of which being that this is one of the few redeeming things about the primates. That this desire to instill order, to plan ahead, to infuse structure, is often frustrated by ambient circumstances, makes it quite a pathetic desire. Evolution and mate selection clearly do not favor the desire for "order", while material success in a modern economy relies almost squarely on the later. Certain traits possibly unfavorable to evolution, such as the tendency to over-analyze and look for order amidst an otherwise chaotic turn of affairs, are however assets in a modern society. This "social evolution", so to speak, gives us some hope for the future that the crude, instinctive, beast would be replaced by a more sapient, rational human.
This will perhaps lead to a better understanding of things, will rescue them from the morass of "bhrama", and things might seem more meaningful then.
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