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

earth belong
to us all, and the earth itself to nobody’”.83 But Rousseau goes on to add, “But
there is great probability that things had then already come to such a pitch, that
they could no longer continue as they were; for the idea of property depends on
many prior ideas, which could only be acquired successively, and cannot have
been formed all at once in the human mind”. Kingdoms, empires, and nation
states, the rich and the poor, are all defined, and constrained, by ownership. It is
through this kind of ownership that most people make much money because, as
they say, land appreciates, which means if you hoard it, its value only increases
over time. The urge to own is insatiable and insidious. John Steinbeck says “If
a man owns a little property, that property is him, it’s part of him, and it’s like
him…. The property is the man, stronger than he is. And he is small, not big.
Only his possessions are big—and he’s the servant of his property”.84 We own,
and ceaselessly want to own, everything: land, house, goods, gadgets, and people.
Actually, you can only buy and sell the rights to use; you can’t actually own. But
the idea of servitude, fidelity, loyalty, love, and even employment comes from
ownership. People owe you their time, skills, attention, and exclusivity. When
these are shared with someone else we say we were ‘betrayed’. And that leads to
possessiveness, jealousy and, as in love, to bloody revenge. The words ‘my’ and
‘mine’ imply we own something. All our life is spent ‘owning’ and ‘being owned’.
In reality, we don’t ‘own’ anything that we cannot part with; that thing owns
‘us’. And in truth, we don’t even ‘own’ ourselves; we owe so much to so many
people that very little is left to ourselves. But perhaps in death alone we finally
own something, some property—at least in the traditions in which the dead are
buried—a tiny piece of barren earth, which is all ours, whose price ironically
appreciates over time, but is of no use to us, the dead.
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
350
And the question of property is inseparable from money; they are
interchangeable. Without money there can be no property, and without property
money is useless. Money lets us own and possess property and property multiplies
money. Money lets us own not only physical property like land, buildings, and
goods but even people. French anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
described property as theft, because no one can own anything without depriving
something, even a person, from someone who needs it more. Our passion for
property, for ownership, and for possession, which are linked, has now taken a
new dimension with our craze for the machine. It is the new status symbol—
what machine we own, whether or not we need it or even know how to harness
it. We are zealous, if not jealous, about our gadgets, appliances and mechanical
add-ons. We are almost, if not actually, ‘in love’ with them and in love everything
is fair or foul. And, as in love, it is fair not only to keep what we have, but to get
what another has, if we take a fancy for it.
Money, Good Life, and Goodness of Life
No act happens in its own exalted solitude; more than one person is invariably
involved or affected in everything that occurs and the fallout, too, is a blend of
the good and the bad. The problem comes when we want, in every situation,
the good for ourselves, and the bad for others. Although we do not still know
what kind of a life is a ‘well-lived’ life, and what is a ‘wasted’ life, the mantra in
modern society is ‘good life’ and ‘growth’, with idioms like ‘standard of life’ and
‘quality time’ thrown in between. And money is central to them all. The fact is, as
Anthon St. Maarten put it, modern society has generally ‘lost the plot’. The place
where we ‘lost it’ is not in the marketplace of materialism, as many commonly
believe; it is within the confines of our own consciousness, when it came under
the undue influence of our own mind. While we will perhaps never get any
conclusive answers to all that we ask or seek to know, the time has come to do
some soul-searching on questions such as what is the true value and purpose of
money? what is affordability? how do we judge the moral worth of our work?—
and, what is a life ‘well spent’ or a life that is ‘wasted’?
To be ‘alive’ is distinct from ‘goodness of life’, which again is different
from ‘good life’. This differentiation is what distinguishes the human from other
Money—Maya, Mara, and Moksha
351
animals. To be alive on earth, one needs very few things from nature, and in
that condition, entails more giving than taking. Except man, other creatures
instinctively lead that kind of life. That is how nature maintains its own overall
equilibrium, and stays ‘alive’. Why nature or God gave a ‘different’ treatment to
man and endowed him with the faculty of willful choice we do not know. Has
it overestimated or underestimated man? How does it intend to make amends
to its ‘mistake’? One theory is that in the ‘original’ man, all his endowments,
faculties, powers, and abilities were working in harmony with each other and
his ‘way of life’ was not very different from the rest. Somewhere, that ‘harmony’
was sundered and then man wanted more than ‘to be alive’, and ‘money’ came in
handy. We came to believe that ‘what we cannot be, our money can get for us’.
And that ‘money’ can offset whatever nature has denied us. It has come to mean
more than what it can actually do, its value more than its worth. John Stuart
Mill wrote, “Its worth is solely that of the things which it will buy… Yet the
love of money is not only one of the strongest moving forces of human life, but
money is, in many cases, desired in and for itself ”.85 Psychologically speaking, it
has been described as “our projection onto coins, bills, bank accounts, and other
financial instruments of our beliefs, hopes, and fears about how those things
will affect who we are, what will happen to us and how we will be treated by
others or by ourselves…”.86 Put differently, “because money is the solution to
poverty, it can make us believe that we are impoverished only by lack of money.
So money becomes a kind of greedy symbol for anything and everything we
might want”.87 Pope Francis, in one of his addresses, noted that many of the
problems the world is facing are rooted “in our relationship with money, and
our acceptance of its power over us and our society… The worship of the golden
calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the
dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane
goal”.88 Human cognitive and creative capacities then crafted a ‘civilized life’,
which also meant ‘living well’ with material conveniences and comforts. With
technology making inroads into our daily life ‘consumerism’ came into being.
The cocktail of ‘culture’, ‘civilization’, and ‘consumerism’ is what we call ‘good
life’. In the process, man changed from a ‘net-taker’ to a polluter and predator,
and increasingly, from a consumer to “consumer goods which can be used and
thrown away”.89 To get the inputs needed to make earth fit for ‘civilized human
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
352
life’—or ‘good life’—man has turned his greedy gaze and the tool of technology
on earth and nature, even if it meant wrecking the very ecosystem, biodiversity,
and environment that sustains life on earth.
The concept of what is ‘good life’ has changed over time. Initially it was
the same or close to what we now call ‘goodness of life’. It was in this line of
thought that Socrates said, “not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued”. The
problem is that our ‘values’ are our valuables. Confucius said, “Consideration
for others is the basic of a good life, a good society”. Instead of consideration,
we have callousness. Down the line in our own time when Bertrand Russell
wrote that a “good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge”. Love,
today, is bereft of two of its essential attribute, selflessness and sacrifice. And
the knowledge we pursue is for power and privilege and to be successful. But
for most humans, ‘good life’ has come to mean lots of leisure, luxury and lust,
what Thomas Merton calls devoting ourselves to the ‘cult of pleasure’.90 It is not
pleasure per se that is pernicious. The question is, whose pleasure? If it is directed
at others it can cleanse our soul. Gandhi said, “To give pleasure to a single heart
by a single deed is better than thousand heads bowing in prayer”. Giving pleasure
gives us pleasure but too often, as, Aldous Huxley said,91 it is a way to exercise our
power and to feel good about it. The four words ‘money cannot buy happiness’
is a cliché and conventional wisdom but, true to our times, even that is under
attack. Richer people in any country are happier than the poorer people. Clearly,
happiness levels are in positive correlation with the amount of wealth a person
accumulates, and, contrary to popular belief, happiness does not level off when
the assets reach a certain threshold. We equate ‘happiness’ with ‘quality of life’.
What remains hazy is the true nature of happiness and how one can measure. One
can also say that ‘smarter spending’ can give us happiness.92 Whatever ‘smarter’ is
intended to be in this context, it is true that if altruistically used or spent, money
does give happiness. If we can make others happy, the happiness we can and will
obtain is immeasurable. One does not have to be a billionaire or Bill Gates; even
the poorest can spend or share their money and give happiness to someone else.
Happy or otherwise, everyone, rich or poor, wants to make more money,
save more money and also spend more money, the interplay of which economists
call growth, and the inability to juggle with it is what makes us miserable. The
bottom line is that after millenniums of his love affair with money, man is now
Money—Maya, Mara, and Moksha
353
even more confused if it is inherently ‘mean’ or simply ‘means’, good or bad,
hurdle or help, in his timeless struggle to make himself a better, more responsible
and responsive being. Can we say, as Laurence Olivier said towards the end of
his life, “nothing is beneath me if it pays well”, or should we be more concerned
about ‘how’ than about ‘how much’? Do we continue to debate Protagoras’
famous statement ‘man is the measure of all things’ (Anthropos metron panton, in
Greek), or should we conclude that man is simply one, albeit more cunning and
predatory, of many mammals on earth? For long, wise men have wondered what
the true test of manhood is, what constitutes a heroic life, what is worth dying
for, and what we can give up ‘just to live’.
The New Gilded Age and the Emergence of the ‘One-Percent’
In the days of yore, most gloomy forecasts for man’s future came from religious
texts, soothsayers, crystal gazers, and occultists. Modern man came to dismiss
such end-of-the-world scenarios as mere mumbo jumbo. However, if science
had for a long time predicted and promised ‘happy days ahead’—that the human
would live as long as he wished, and would be equal to a virtual ‘god’—it, too, is
now finding itself nodding its head in consonance with the Doomsday Brigade.
Some scientists warn that modern civilization is heading for collapse within a
matter of decades due to growing economic instability and the pressure exerted
on the planet by industries’ unsustainable appetite for resources. People of the
world are waking up to the rude realization that a select few extremely wealthy
fellow-humans are enslaving the rest of us and even endangering the planet.
Economic inequality is increasingly seen as a red flag, symbolized by the global
gross distortion of capital, wealth, and income, and the rise of a new plutocracy
dominated by the super-rich, or the ‘One-Percent’, which some are calling the
dawn, not of the Golden Age, but of the ‘New Gilded Age’. So glaring is the
disparity that, for instance, in USA, the top 1% own 40% of the financial assets,
and the top 10% own upwards of 85%. Moreover, while extreme inequality
is fuelling climate change, the richest 1% of the world’s population produces
175 times as much carbon dioxide per person as the bottom 10%, and the
richest 10% produce fully half of all carbon emissions.93 Money matters in
everything, even in disproportionately being exposed to climate change