Man's Fate and God's Choice by Bhimeswara Challa (ereader for textbooks TXT) 📖

blend becomes behavior is hard to grasp. If we want to bask in the reflected glory of good men, we have to equally bear the burden of the acts of bad men. Some scholars like Roel Sterckx even suggest that human morality affects animal behavior, and that the cultivation of virtue in human society was a condition for the spontaneous and orderly working of the animal world, and that changes in human society would spontaneously induce

behavioral changes in the animal world.237 That means that human behavior and animal behavior are connected; perhaps the increased irritability and enhanced aggression in animals, like well-trained temple elephants suddenly turning into killers, could be a reflection of the depravity in the human world. This is an intriguing and potentially perilous line of thought.

The odds seem overwhelming. In the current state of the human condition, human fragilities appear to prevail over human strengths. We seem like straws in a storm, reeds in a stream,

 

 

 

 

236 Cited in: Jonathan Wallace. An Auschwitz Alphabet. What I Learned from Auschwitz. Accessed at: http://www.spectacle.org/695/essay.html

237 Roel Sterckx. The Animal and the Daemon in Early China. 2002. State University of New York Press. Albany, USA. p.162.

 

utterly powerless to control our senses yet powerful enough to play around with the stars. Scriptures, sayings, and teachings are like pebbles thrown into a swirling sea of senses and selfishness. Pettiness and nitpicking, negativity, vanity and spite continue to rule the waves.

 

Money, sex, and power

In any discourse or contemplation of the questions of good and evil, the triad of money, power, and sex invariably arise. They are the ways we affirm our anthropological and ontological affirmations as human beings. That is because man’s primary drive is to minimize physical pain and maximize pleasure, and money, power, and sex are the three channels through which he can exercise that drive. While each has a distinct character and is legitimate to human life — even with the scriptures acknowledging it — their combination changes the nature of the compound. Although each of these is dealt with separately in different contexts

— for example power in conjunction with passion and love — the thrust and the setting here is the melting pot of the triad. What has happened over the last century is the virtual ‘merger’ of the three forces, which has become a major complicating factor in our passage to the posthuman future. Even independently, almost nothing historical has happened, nor has any great man or civilization fallen, without any of these three factors playing a pivotal role. They leave a terrible trail of carnage: careers ended, families ripped apart, hearts broken, and human potential wasted.

Money, power, and sex have legitimate — and necessary — places in human life but each of them has been corrupted: money by greed, sex by lust, and power by monopoly.

Without some sort of medium like money, it will be impossible to harmonize and optimize collective skills, needs and resources. Without sex there can be no creation. And without power there can be no order. While it is a close call, money — rather our love of money — perhaps is the strongest attachment and affliction. It makes us immeasurably powerful. It is a sentiment well captured by Goethe’s character Mephistopheles in the play Faust: “If for six stallions, I can pay, Aren’t all their powers added to my store? I am a proper man and dash away, as if the legs I had were twenty-four!”. Before the advent of ‘money’, man’s ‘natural’ needs were taken care of naturally. After the advent of ‘money’, particularly paper money, man must have money to have access to things needed even for survival. And given the natures of mind and money, it did not stop there; it went all the way to making man a virtual vassal. Such is money’s mastery over the human mind that, should God wish to save us, nothing else will work unless He enables and empowers us to wriggle out of its clasp. Or else, we need a brand new consciousness. Everything is fair not only in love and war — but even more in the matter of making money. But making money can also be virtuous if it helps in the upliftment of others. As a medium of exchange it can be a leveler. In Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged (1957), one of the heroes, Francisco d’Anconia, giving an oration on the meaning of money, says: “The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.”

Money and morality are linked because nothing else makes us take so many moral risks for its possession, retention, and aggrandizement. Because, as Karl Marx puts it in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, “Money is the procurer between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person”.238 Money begets money; in that sense as Marx puts it, it ‘became pregnant’. The chief temptation of money lies in the fact that with it we can possess anything, and that ‘anything’

 

 

 

238 Karl Marx. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 : The Power of Money. Accessed at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/power.htm

 

becomes part of us, like another brain or body, hand or leg. Even that ‘I am’ could be that which one can acquire with money. Most people, given a choice between money and ‘the rest’, will choose money; in any case, with money, the ‘rest’ is easy picking. The problems we face with money, dramatically brought home by the current global financial crisis, are rooted in the nature of money itself, being constitutents of its very design — and they will continue and intensify and implode until money itself and its place in our lives is transformed. That is because money makes money, it bears and seeks interest, and in fact is created in its own absence. Today, one does not have to have money, to have the money or the things we need money for. Everything ‘human’ is monetized, and there is virtually no ‘capital’ in circulation of any other kind — cultural, natural, social, or spiritual. Millenniums of money creation have left us with nothing else to show or sell. Every innate human skill and natural ability has been taken away from us and mortgaged to money. Every human relationship is now a virtual hostage to money. We depend on money for everything we need to live. Everything, even an individual’s worth and value, is a matter of money. It is synonymous with happiness, joy, self-esteem, success — even survival. Money — or the lack of it — is a major trigger for suicides: the list goes all the way from debt-ridden farmers to school girls denied pocket-money. Indeed, life itself has become indistinguishable from money. Although some idealists dream of human society without any manner of money or property, somewhat on the lines of the Marxist maxim ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’, such a paradigm of human life has never existed and possibly never will; the mix of thoughts and emotions, needs and wants, passions and feelings did not evolve with that end in view. As the Irish social revolutionary William O’Brien once quipped, “when we truly discover love, capitalism will not be possible and Marxism will not

be necessary.”239 We have gone a step further — or deeper. We have debased love. We made sure Marxism was stillborn, and we know now that the much-trumpeted triumph of capitalism over socialism has not made the human condition any better. If any, it has widened the chasm between ‘good life’ and the ‘goodness of life’. Two of the driving forces in the human mind are avarice and lust for power. Gluttony in what we eat and consume and the desire to dominate others frame our daily life. Much of the time and energy of life is swallowed by the wants of the economic man and the perennial consumer. The stranglehold of ‘more’ and ‘money’ on the human mind shows no signs of slackening.

With money as his mascot, man has stopped living in the ‘living world’, in harmony with other earthly inhabitants and with Nature; he feels he needs them no more. He has created a ‘Nature’ of his own and made it his link to his fellow humans. The English author Somerset Maugham, in his much acclaimed work Of Human Bondage (1915), wrote that

“money is like a sixth sense — and you can’t make use of the other five without it”240. It has become so pervasive and intrusive in human society that there is nothing that even the best of men — be it a saint, or a monk or a sadhu (ascetic) — can do without its touch or shadow.

More often than not, most of these men have been deeply scarred by its contact. If power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, as the American diplomat Henry Kissinger famously quipped, abundant wealth is the ultimate orgasm, an irresistible titillation. Those who do not have ‘enough money’ are branded as losers. The really rich automatically climb to the top of the social ladder, the powers-that-be hobnob with them; being seen in their company is a

 

 

 

239 Cited in : Gaiam Life: Stream of Consciousness. Accessed at: http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/will- obrien/59940

240 Somerset Maugham. ThinkExist.com. Money Quotes. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotations/money

 

statement of having arrived. As long as two millenniums ago, the Chinese Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu said: “To have enough is good luck, to have more than enough is harmful. This is true of all things, but especially of money.”241 ‘More money’ is not just one of the many ‘mores’ in life; this ‘more’ causes mayhem, almost alters the very model of thinking, and also plays heavily on how we view people who have money or those who do not have it. With

other ‘passions’ like food, sex, or power, a phase can come when we cannot ‘take it’ — or even enjoy it — anymore. When something in us says ‘enough’. But we can never say that about money. Money was meant as a means, but it is now the end; the substitute has become the actual good. Since everyone cannot make everything, money was expected to help produce and exchange things we need for life — food, shelter, and the trappings of civilization. Today, it produces and exchanges itself and grows independently. Is the power of money but a reflection of the power of evil, or is it simply man’s inherent inability to resist anything that gives immediate pleasure? Pleasure, in all its temporal dimensions as remembrance, experienced and anticipated, is a salient part of our mental life; it has a bearing on our spiritual quest. The Katha Upanishad says that human beings have to constantly make a choice between things that give permanent joy or immediate pleasure, and the tragedy is that we humans tend to invariably choose the path of immediate pleasure. There are many who think that what gives pleasure is what is ‘good’, and what gives pain is what is ‘bad’.

And money is the main means for all pleasures that can be obtained through satiating the senses. For, despite the frowning of the scriptures and the disapproval of saints, its grip over the human mind has never waned; if any, it has only become tighter. The Bible says that one cannot serve God and Mammon at the same time, but that is precisely what man has been trying to do, and has done, one must grudgingly concede, somewhat successfully. What matters is that we need money, we cannot do without it; it is simply a matter of social, even physical, survival. There is a prayer in the Bible that says: “...give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only