The War Within - Between Good and Evil, Bheemeswara Challa [books for 7th graders txt] 📗

a virtuous or dharmic life. But the conundrum is that
to lead such a life we have to ‘win’ the war within. It is a two-way process and
we have to work on both fronts at the same time. Internally we must learn how
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to enhance the role of the heart intelligence and externally by performing our
actions and activities in the spirit of what the Bhagavad Gita calls nishkama
karma, to do one’s actions without expectation of any reward. Expectation not
only causes disappointment, but also colors and corrupts the action and the
result. Freed from self-interest, our actions automatically become righteous. In
turn, they become suitable to serve as ‘feed’ for the forces of goodness. In short,
the doctrine of nishkama karma not only sanitizes our external life but also helps
us to ‘win’ the war within.
To sum up, to ‘win’ this war, we need to adopt the following nine-point
agenda: (1) recognize, at the level of our collective awareness, that there is a whole
world within; (2) recognize that the most consequential and the most important
of all wars is taking place in that world; (3) recognize that all our current problems
and hopes and dreams for our future hinge on how the war wages and its ebbs
and flows; (4) recognize that although invisible and inaccessible we must find a
way to intervene in this war and help the ‘good wolf ’; (5) recognize that the only
tangible way to do so is by changing our mindset and our behavior; (6) recognize
that for that we need the twin changes: consciousness-change and contextualchange;
(7) recognize that our comatose heart-intelligence has to be awakened
in our consciousness as part of such a change; (8) recognize that to bring about
the required change in our context of life, we have to follow the spirit of the
doctrine of nishkama karma in our daily life; (9) recognize that given the way
and extent the triad of the ‘three Ms’—morality, money and mortality—shadows
and dominates our lives, our particular attention has to be bestowed on these
subjects.

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Chapter 3
Money—Maya, Mara, and Moksha—All-in-One
Money, Homo economicus, and Homo consumens
Money’s precise moment of birth might be diffused and difficult to pinpoint, but its might is unmistakable. For, might itself is a problem in the human mind, not a perk, but it is many times multiplied by money. It is at once a master key and a magic wand, the ultimate illusion (maya), the ultimate temptation (mara) and the ultimate liberator (moksha). Money is at the center of the mindset that asks, ‘if everything has a price, does nothing have a value?’ The hold of money over our mind is formidable; nothing else comes even close. Other than malice, it is money that separates us from other animals. Mind with money is a man-eater; and without it is a toothless tiger. Recent research has shown that thinking about money undermines our sense of social connectedness. Obscene opulence adds social isolation to what is described as the psychological solipsism of power. Whether or not money can buy everything, the fact is, as Emerson said, it costs too much. Money sugarcoats everything, including murder; in fact, it has become a major incentive for killing. Money rides roughshod over sex, qualms, restraints, or relationships. Some experts are beginning to see a link between inequality and rates of homicide, and find that inequality predicts homicide rates “better than any other variable”1 and the perception that it can, makes money matter the most. Money too is at the heart of the crisis of morality. There is a general belief that all money tends to corrupt, and that absolute money corrupts absolutely. And that it has destroyed all vestige of civic virtue. And there is much truth in that. While money inherently is value-neutral, it is also true that it takes lot of effort to be moral in handling money at all levels and stages. It is very difficult not to be unfair, unjust and not deny someone else’s due, if not legally, ethically. And that has become far more extensive and invasive in modern times. The point of departure is this: the world has transited from a modus vivendi where most of humanity had no need of money at all, to a modus operandi in which
much of mankind struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money. This ‘transition’ has profoundly altered the role and place of money in human life.
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The moral perils of being rich were made clear in many scriptures. The Book of
James warns the rich: “The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your
fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears
of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence.
Money is now the median and measure of success, fame, and fortune. Whether
or not money can buy happiness—a subject on which many have said much—it
certainly has much to do with our acute anxiety, high levels of stress and the ratrace,
a metaphor for our modern life of Sisyphean struggle without satisfaction,
sometimes described as the ‘dog-eats-dog’ culture.2 And money is the fulcrum of
the ‘market economy’, which philosopher Michael Sandal says has turned into
‘market society’. The dynamics of this ‘society ‘are seriously distorted, resulting
in intolerable injustice. As a recent Oxfam report shows, in several countries,
wage inequality has increased and the share of labor compensation in GDP has
declined because profits have increased more rapidly than wages. While the
income share of the top 1% has grown substantially, many others have not shared
in the goodies of economic growth. And much of decision-making, personal to
businesses and national—is now economic and the result is money crowds out
motility in our everyday life. The use of money as the primary, often the only,
measure of success puts enormous pressure on even those who are not directly
involved to toe the party line, to echo the chorus.
Money is the one thing having which nothing else is needed and not
having which everything else is valueless and vain. There is almost nothing man
does these days without the shadow of money looming over. Its hold on man
now is vice-like and vicious. For reasons still unclear, money seems to draw
out of us some of our worst traits like greed, envy, jealousy, and malice. Some
say money corrupts; others, that it is man who corrupts money. Some argue
that money is only “a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods
produced and men able to produce them, and therefore it is neither virtue nor
evil”. Some say that it is the instrument of the strong to exploit the weak; others
say that it offers a chance to become strong by virtue of intellectual exercise and
effort. Some say it exacerbates inequality and unfairness; others, that it gives
inherent value and worth. Essentially, it is money that separates the so-called
‘one-percent’—the ultra-rich—and the rest. It is money that could keep you
healthier and live longer, even become immortal. Money is power in its barest
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sense. The British historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle ‘described its power in
the following words: “Whoso has sixpence is sovereign (to the length of sixpence)
over all men; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to
mount guard over him,—to the length of sixpence”.3 But what is indisputable
is that money’s essential character has changed from exchange to enrichment,
from a means to obtain the basic needs of life, to itself becoming an end. And,
perhaps above all, it has turned man essentially into a consumer, which has bred
a culture of instant gratification and one-upmanship. There is lot of money to
be made on ‘body-upgradation’, the latest fashion-statement. We are being sold
on the need to upgrade all parts of ourselves, all at once, including parts that we
did not previously know needed upgrading. According to one estimate, the socalled
self-improvement industry rakes in ten billion dollars a year. Money is the
most pressing moral issue now. If we can handle money well, and do not allow it
to mess with our mind, much of the rancor, friction, and violence in the world
will become manageable. Everyone thinks that to make or earn money to feed a
family, for example, nothing is bad or immoral, even cold-blooded murder. For
instance, according to police in New Delhi, India, anybody can be a contract
killer, including a mother of seven, a science graduate, and a property dealer. How
desperate they are and for how little they are willing to do such a terrible deed is
indicated by the fact that the money in question, for the ‘killing contract’ was a
mere Rs.49,000 (less than $1,000). For some others, hired-killing is a moral short
cut to get rich, a snapshot of collapsing social norms and value of life. In other
words, both the need and lure of money can trigger a mercenary and murderous
response in us; if we can get it right with money, everything else will fall into
place. With the rise of Homo economicus as the primary human persona, the
emblem and analogue of human values, everything else, even health, has taken
a back seat. Recently, the Director General of the World Health Organization
warned the world that putting economic interests over public health is leading
the world towards three gradual health disasters: climate change, the failure of
more and more antibiotic drugs, and the increase in so-called lifestyle diseases
caused by poor diet and exercise. And with the advent of industrial production as
the primary way to multiply money, the utility of every man, woman, and child
to society, became how much he or she spent as a consumer, what economists call
‘potential purchasing power’. Economics, materialism, and money have become
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synonymous. We value our material life more than our moral life. As a result,
today’s politics, which is a means to acquire power, is dominated by economics.
In ‘democratic societies’, the political power obtained through periodic elections
is often financed by rich donors who want their pound of say in what the elected
do later. Even the so-called charitable organizations, in some affluent societies,
are supported by what is called “dark money”—unlimited donations obtained by
nonprofit organizations and spent on influencing elections, without disclosing
the identity of the donors.
And much of the way we entertain and amuse ourselves, and almost all of
sport, is about big, if not dark money. From Homo economicus, we have turned
into what Erich Fromm called Homo consumens—a total consumer in a paradise
conceived as an infinite warehouse, “where everyone can buy something new
every day, buy everything he wants and even a little more than the one next door
to him but transfigures us into an empty cipher—anxious, passive, profoundly
discontented and bored”.4 That gnawing feeling of deep ‘discontent’ is spreading
to all human inventions and institutions that have been painstakingly built up
and which hold humanity together—family, community, marriage, markets,
traditions, state, religion, etc., foundationally altering our social and moral life.
Whether it is Homo economicus or Homo consumens, the bedrock of the identity
is money. What we give value to is how much money we earn regardless of how
much we are left with to do things that give us comfort, convenience and control
over other people. As the Chinese statesman Deng Xiaoping famously said “It
doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice”. We don’t care
who the ruler is, what system of governance it is, or what ‘ism’ it follows. All that
we want is to have plenty of money in our bulging pockets to get all the material
goodies we see on the screen and on the shopping malls. It increasingly appears
that ethical behavior and efficient markets are rarely compatible, a point implicit
in what Adam Smith said in The Wealth of Nations (1776): “It is not from the
benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,
but from their regard to their own interest”. With all the euphoria surrounding
‘free markets’, which really is an oxymoron, there is a growing sense as articulated
by thinkers like Harvard’s Michael Sandel that markets alone cannot define a
just society, that there are moral limits to markets. The fact is that markets “do
not just produce what we really want, they also produce what we want according
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to our monkey-on-the-shoulder tastes”.5 Well, we know what a monkey does
whether it is on the back or the shoulder, or in the mind!
The