The War Within - Between Good and Evil by Bheemeswara Challa (e reader for manga .TXT) 📖

this insight. PD Ouspensky once wrote that “so long as a man
is not horrified at himself he knows nothing about himself ”. It may be that
in today’s world, a popular form of entertainment is no longer, like in 16thcentury
France, cat-burning, in which cats were hoisted in a sling and slowly
lowered into a fire, while people watched and cheered; but we still use dogs
for target practice. Slavery as a labor-saving device might be illegal but we still
have bonded labor. Most people see not much difference between entertainment
and enlightenment, sensory satisfaction and salvation. Rape is still a lascivious
part of the spoils of war; but it also is more intrusive and pervasive, touching
almost every human relationship—we now have things like date-rape; maritalrape;
child-rape; revenge-rape, gang-rape and incest-rape. And unlike in the past
when the casualties of war were confined largely to the battlefield, what we see
now, euphemistically called collateral damage, is the murder of civilians far away
from the actual arena of fighting, accounting for more killings and mutilations
than that of the actual combatants. Killing has always been integral to the
human psyche. It has always been viewed as the ultimate punishment, deterrent,
or manner of settling scores. Since Cain went nuts and killed Abel, there have
always been those humans who, for one reason or another, forcibly and violently
ended others’ lives. The Roman Emperor Tiberius enjoyed throwing victims off
a cliff on the Mediterranean island of Capri. Gilles de Rais, a French knight and
ally of Joan of Arc during the Middle Ages, went crazy and ended up murdering
hundreds of children. Just a few decades later Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration
for Dracula, was killing people in Transylvania in numberless horrifying ways.
History is replete with mass murderers from Genghis Khan to Mao Zedong to
Pol Pot. And every war is mass murder. In every society, there are individuals
who feel an urge inside them to kill not only those they have a grudge against,
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but total strangers. What does it all mean? What has happened is that there has
been a seismic shift in the psychology of killing in the mind of man. Virtually
our entire civilization is built on killing and death—for fun, for pleasure, or
profit, and even (supposedly), “for God!” It is no longer the ultimate deterrent
or act of cruelty, or punishment. More and more people are associating killing,
the self or others, as an easy way to accomplish their life goals, to eliminate what
they fear, or as a facile ‘problem solver’. And technology makes it easier; ‘distant
killing’ allows you to stay in comfort somewhere and take lives far away. Are such
people less or more guilty than one who fears for his life, real or illusory, and kills
a neighbor? We should also refocus our priorities of culpability and criminality
and bring to the forefront what are called social or ‘white collar’ crimes. Our
love affair with the miracle of the marketplace, and the resultant gross economic
injustice, is ‘killing by emaciation’ and deprives and devastates more people than
killing the old-fashioned way. Companies that advertise products known to be
slow killers are silent killers. There are those who adulterate food, air, and even
medicines for profit and de facto kill, cripple or endanger the health of more
people than mass murderers, but such people are often envied for their riches and
lifestyles. It may be time to revisit and rethink ‘direct’ killing.
It is noteworthy that, in Hindu mythology, God and his avatars never
hesitated to kill the ‘evil’ person, not only as a punishment for his evil deeds
but also on the premise that his continued ‘existence’ was not in the interest of
the world. One could even argue that if death is no ‘big deal’ as the scriptures
tell us—it is but another rite of passage of life—then why should killing, which
is another form of dying, be held so heinous? Even now, many societies allow
euthanasia, which is killing with consent. Today, killing is taking more mundane
but macabre forms, not very different from lying, cheating, and robbing. The
everyday happenings we read in our newspapers are hard to square up with
the premise that human violence is on the wane. It is of little comfort that the
occurrence of such horrible things was foretold in this age, the Kali Yuga, in the
epic Mahabharata: “In the dark age (of Kali), morality mixed with three parts of
sin liveth by the side of men”. We have now rampage murders or spree killings:
a lone man, normal and nondescript, for no apparent reason, suddenly starts
killing total strangers or his own family members. Such killings have always been
a part of our horrific history, cutting across continents, race, religion, ethnicity,
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and economic and social status. While that is true, it would be a grievous folly
not to recognize their contemporary civilizational implications. For the new
breed of mass murderers, killing is just another way to assert their self-identity,
to vent their rage or grievance or redress an injury, perceived or real. In 1999,
two high school teenagers went on a killing spree at their school in Colorado,
USA. One of them, Eric Harris, apparently wrote in his notebook, “Humans
are as dispensable as fungus in a petri dish… I have a goal to destroy as much
as possible… I want to burn the world… no one should survive”. It is easy to
dismiss such people as psychopaths, psychotics or sociopaths or simply as sadistic
human freaks. But they too are children of our time and temper, germinated and
incubated in the same melting pot of human culture.
The ‘Good’ That Money Can Do
In essence, and in its effect, money is power, the most powerful and potentially
polluting of all. If the power of money cannot be wished away, what do we do?
Should we use all our energy, attention and activism to curb and contain its role
and influence, or can we turn it around and use it as an instrument for doing
good, to help others in dire need, to use it as a social leveler ? Whether we like
it or not, we have to acknowledge money’s magnetic hold on the human mind
and yet strive to see how to salvage some time and synergy for our spiritual
growth. We do not have to choose whether it is the ‘root of evil’ or ‘necessary
evil’, divine gift or devil’s ploy—it may be all or none. We don’t have to agree
with the assertion that “until and unless you discover that money is the root of
all good, you will ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the
tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men”.36
One of the more important questions is: in a world controlled by money, how
can we make or earn it dharmically, and spend and spread it bearing in mind that
much of what we come to have is more than our moral right? To make money
moral, it must flow in the right direction; it must be shared and spread. Is the
Robin Hood way, the moral way? That is, the redistribution of wealth, what most
governments are supposed to do under the cover of legality.
Money is now the measure, motive, metaphor, and means of everything
we do, desire and dream of in life. It is also a measure of self-worth and selfMoney—
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respect. As an ABBA lyric intones, ‘Money, money, money; always sunny in a rich
man’s world’.37 In the poor man’s world, its lack is marked by the three deadly
‘D’s: desperation, deprivation, and death. In fact, there is no such thing as ‘rich
man’ or ‘poor man’; every one is both richer and poorer than someone else. But
that doesn’t change the fact that our fascination with wealth knows no bounds,
with some even being addicted to wealth. Some have confessed that earning
bulging bonuses running into millions of dollars causes something similar to
an alcohol or drug addiction, prompting rage and an uncontrollable desire for
more, risking to destroy themselves and their companies rather than be satisfied
with the millions or billions they already have. Money does indeed make the
world go round but most of us want the best of both; we don’t want to be rich
and be the subject of envy, derision and disdain but, as Pablo Picasso quipped,
we want to ‘live as a poor man with lots of money’. Although it is impossible
to define the rich, and although we want to have what the rich have, we don’t
want to be ‘different from you and me’, which is how Scott Fitzgerald famously
described the very rich.38 As for living like the very poor, we would rather die. We
would rather be a Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who said, “No, not rich. I am a poor
man with money, which is not the same thing”. What he implies is that he wants
to have his cake and eat it too; exercise power without responsibility. Money has
many functions, purposes and attractions. But it is most irresistible as power, in
its essence and in its effect.
Money and the mind are made for each other; together they are playing
havoc on human life. Money and commerce have become the analogies through
which all our human experiences are mediated. In a 2010 survey in the USA,
some 77% of the youngest people polled said they are more concerned about
outliving their money in retirement than about death itself.39 The make-or-break
importance we attach to money was foreseen. In the Hindu scripture Srimad
Bhagavatam, it is written that ‘a person will be judged unholy if he does not have
money, and hypocrisy will be accepted as virtue’. Whether or not it is the love, or
lack, of money that is at the root of evil, the reality is that we don’t own money
anymore; money owns us. Money is the bedrock of materialism; the backbone
of capitalism; indeed, the essential to any economic ‘ism’. It is the measure of
meaningfulness, of well-being, of good feeling; of health and happiness; but not
necessarily of goodness or of a virtuous life. Socrates said, “I tell you that virtue
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is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good
of man, public as well as private”. Money has, left to its own genius, had a
baneful influence on morality. Possessing, earning, amassing, even spending it,
is so overpowering that anything that comes in its way is brushed aside. A study
revealed that “as a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion
and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and
their ideology of self-interest increases…”, and that wealthier individuals are
more likely to moralize greed and self-interest as favorable, less likely to be prosocial,
and more likely to cheat and break laws if it behooves them”.40 The findings
of the study also revealed that ‘People who make less are more generous… on
the larger scale’; ‘rich people are more likely to ignore pedestrians’; and ‘poverty
impedes cognitive function’.41 Another study indicates that ‘more money makes
people act less human or, at least less humane’.42 As one writer put it, ‘Money
can weaken even the firmest ethical backbone. Money sows the seeds of mistrust.
It ends friendships. Experiments have found that it encourages us to lie and
cheat’.43 ‘The simple idea of money changes the way we think—weakening every
other social bond’.44 As Marx remarked, “money, then, appears as the enemy of
man and social bonds that pretend to self-subsistence”.
Everything in this life is a mixed bag; so is money. Its total identification
with modern life, its all-embracing scope, and the depth of its penetration
has made the power of money transformational. While its immense potential
to make man do horrible things has long been known, what is emerging is its
transformational potential to do good. Given how irreplaceable it has become,
money can make, if righteously earned and judiciously channeled, a decisive
difference between life and death, between destitution and dignity. It could be a
fairly accurate moral barometer of, in Ayn Rand’s words, ‘society’s virtue’. This is
not a novel idea. A distinction on how money was earned and the purposes for
which it was utilized was a part of ancient Greek thought. Aristotle, for example,
distinguished between the making of money to satisfy real needs (which he
considered to be a virtuous activity) and the accumulation of money for its own
sake (which he considered to be a deleterious activity). If the essence of man is
morality, the purpose of mortality is to give meaning to life and increasingly,
for good or bad, that ‘meaning’ of