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

difference lies in a mix of ‘more’ and ‘less’. In earlier days people
led simpler lives, with limited wants and with more of a moral mindset. That
made people generally ‘more’ hesitant to appease the monkey’ in, or on, them.
And then their reach was limited to the local store and they were ‘less’ subject
to temptations like seductive ads on TV. And those who had ‘more’ money
did not feel the need to buy ‘more’ things. Earlier, wealth was finite, primarily
spread and exchanged, and having it in excess was considered sinful. Generosity
and charity were associated with wealth earned through righteous means and
through swadharma, doing one’s own dharma. People were generally open about
their wealth and worth but they did not flaunt it. Now people are more open
about their sex lives than about their wealth. The hypnotic effect of money and
wealth was foretold in the scriptures in the context of describing the effects of the
Kali Yuga, the most immoral of all ages. They describe the effect and attraction
of money in these terms: “Men will devote themselves to earning money; the
richest will hold power. Wealth alone will be considered the sign of a man’s good
birth, proper behavior and fine qualities. Property alone will confer rank; wealth
will be the only source of devotion.
The fundamental transformation came when the mind married money, as
it were; when money was turned into a major fault line in human life—the divisive
line between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. It came into being, as Aristotle noted,
when the various necessities of human life could not be easily carried about and
people agreed to employ in their dealings something that was intrinsically useful
and easily applicable to the activities of life, like iron or silver. The value of the
metal was first measured by weight and later, to avoid the trouble of weighing and
to make its value obvious at sight, kings and governments devised coin money.
It has come a long way since. Its primary purpose of exchange was sidelined
and money became a symbol of social status and a major means for separation,
discrimination, and exploitation. But unlike in a barter economy where savings
and investment were very difficult, modern money—paper currency and the
bank note—opened the doors to economic growth. By itself, paper money has
no value; it rests on trust and it offers fluidity, flexibility and, for the creative
mind, opportunities for speculation, savings and investment. Of all the things
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in the world, it became the most sought after possession: to obtain, protect and
keep money, people go to extraordinary lengths. They plan and scheme and use
every subterfuge; they steal and kill for it; they expend more time, energy, and
effort for its sake than for any other purpose. Much of a person’s life consists of
no more than earning, saving, and spending money; and the remainder of his life
is spent caring, tending, and preserving the possessions purchased. No sacrifice,
no relationship or human bond is spared when it comes to making money. Alan
Greenspan, a former chairman of the American Federal Reserve Board quotes
a friend as saying ‘I understand the history of money. When I get some, it is
soon history’. With it, man is a monarch; without it, subhuman. With money
in abundance, man can overcome ‘natural’ or inherited limitations; but without
it, one can scarcely obtain what is needed to be wholly human. Ironically, man
cannot do with or without money. Just as man has evolved, so has the character
and color of money. Moderation and the middle path have given way to gluttony
and greed. There are those who have come to believe that striving for inner
balance and tranquility will erode their competitive ability, who see a dichotomy
between being wise and worldly-wise.
Epiphany of Modern Man—Money
Somerset Maugham famously said, “Money is like a sixth sense without which
you cannot make a complete use of the other five”. Voltaire put it differently
when he said that when it is a question of money, everybody is of the same
religion. Thomas Jefferson said that money, not morality is the principle of
commercial nations.
Cicero said that endless money forms the sinews of war. Indeed violence,
warfare and wealth are intimately connected. Men are violent for money and
money makes violence possible. Money is both the tool and purpose of violence.
Money is a principal factor in most of suicides and homicides, not only among
the poor and poorer regions of the world but also in affluent societies, Glyn
Davies in his A History of Money from Ancient Times to the Present Day writes
that ‘ever since the invention of coins, monetary and military history have been
interconnected to a degree that is both depressing and surprising.’ He even
paraphrases Clausewitz’s famous dictum and refers to war as the continuation
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of monetary policy by other means, quoting 18th-century William Davenant:
“Nowadays that prince who can best find money to pay his army is surest of
success”. Davies concludes that the military ratchet was the most important
single influence in raising prices and reducing the value of money in the past
1,000 years, and for most of that time, debasement was the most common, but
not the only way, of strengthening the ‘sinews of war’. Whether it is making love
or war, some mavericks say that “we are evolving unto a society with much in
common with that of insects: ants, termites, hornets, etc. Something analogous
to social behavior makes us swarm in towns and cities like ants in their dark
colonies”. The instinct that compels us to behave like that, the theory continues,
is money, which is “to us what genes are to ants”, and which “will govern human
evolution in the future more than DNA”. Selfish economics rather than selfish
genes govern human evolution; in the richer nations, “we are no longer evolving
according to the principles of natural selection”, and “we have swapped our lifegiving
queen for cash”, and the root of all evil. The human race has greedily sold
its soul to the Devil. There is little doubt that money, much like technology, has
had a transformational effect on the human condition. By empowering man to
acquire convenience, comfort and gadgets for every need, money, together with
technology, has made man a ‘soft species’ and eroded considerably the strength
and resilience of the human organism. And technology is also raising moneymade
moral issues. For example, who should a driverless car choose to kill in
order to save its passengers: a money-less man in rags or an executive in a business
suit? How should we program for such an eventuality?
The very fact that our desires often transgress the bounds of biology or
balance of life on earth, and that our social life goes beyond the demands of sheer
survival, requires a medium to harmonize and optimize the diverse capacities
of human society and makes synergy socially possible. That was the origin of
what we call ‘money’, initially designed as a medium of exchange of products,
services, and talents, facilitating human interfacing, an input into the making
of an orderly, if not an egalitarian, society. The transformation of money from
what it was intended into what it has become—our all-consuming passion—
is perhaps the single most destabilizing development in human history; it has
created not only a ‘new class’, but even a new breed of men. Money is more
than the coin, paper or plastic to acquire goods and services. Money is linked to
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complex emotions, feelings and behaviors. It has a huge influence on what we
call ‘quality of life’ and on the pursuit of the three Cs and Ps that consume much
of human life—comfort, convenience, and control; pleasure, profit, and power.
Mind and Money
The mind invented money but, in turn, is enslaved by its own invention. The
mind views and relates to the entire world of life through the prism, and prison,
of money. Money is broadly defined as ‘any marketable good or token trusted
by a society to be used as a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a unit
of account’. In A History of Money, Davies defines it as anything that is widely
used for making payments and accounting for debts and credits. Money has
been called many things by many wise and ‘otherwise’ men: like muck, not
good unless spread (Francis Bacon); like manure, which spreads around does
a lot of good, but piled up in one place, stinks like hell (Clint Murchison Jr);
the most important thing in life (Bernard Shaw); equally important to those
who have it and who don’t (Galbraith); one of the great inventions of mankind
(Alan Greenspan); and a myriad more. Since prehistoric times all sorts of things
have been used as money and Davies lists some of these: amber, beads, cowries,
drums, eggs, feathers, gongs, hoes, ivory, jade, kettles, leather, mats, nails,
oxen, pigs, quartz, rice, salt, thimbles, umiacs, vodka, wampums, yarns, and
zappozats (decorated axes). Davies says that money did not have a single origin
but developed independently in many different parts of the world.
Today, scholars say that money’s origin had little to do with trading, as
popularly believed, but arose in a social setting, possibly as a method of punishment.
Barter was probably the earliest form of human exchange when humans were
essentially hunter-gatherers, fishermen, and farmers. Stone Age man, according
to anthropological evidence, used precious metals as money. Silver was first used
as coins in Lydia (Iron-Age kingdom) or Turkey in 3 BCE. In Babylonia, a form
of rudimentary banking was prevalent. In 118 BCE, banknotes in the form of
leather money appeared in China and in 800 CE, printed paper currency also
appeared. According to Marco Polo, the Mongols adopted the bank note as ‘legal
tender’, i.e., it was a capital offense to refuse them as payment. Only in the 17th
century, did coinage become standardized and certified. Paper money, first in
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fiduciary form (which promises to pay specified amounts in gold and silver), and
later in its own right (where the paper did not promise payment in some other
form), became the mainstay of money in the late 18th and early 19th century. An
obsession is essentially a consuming desire, a compulsive craving; so compulsive
that it becomes the center of one’s existence to the utter exclusion of all the rest;
it transports the obsessed to a different state of consciousness and to a different
moral mindset. While it could hamper and hinder regular life, through our
obsessions, we are often seeking redemption or relaxation. As the Buddha said,
if desire itself is the supreme disease, then obsession can eat our very vitals and
its cessation is itself nirvana, ‘the stopping of becoming’. Some scholars interpret
nirvana as “letting go of clinging, hatred, and ignorance, and the full acceptance
of imperfection, impermanence, and interconnectedness”. Some scholars say
that Buddhism tells us what nirvana delivers us from—suffering, dukha—but
not what it delivers us into. A Buddhist master and scholar, Nagarjuna, even
says that a desire for nirvana, as enlightenment, is itself an obstacle to nirvana.
He also makes a distinction between ‘longing’, which he says we could have, and
‘desire’, which he asks us to eschew. Longing, it is said, is about ‘here and now’;
and desire is a future state, what Jiddu Krishnamurti called ‘future psychological
time’.6 In that state of obsessive desire we are no longer balanced; we do not
calculate profit or loss; we just do it because that is the only thing that matters.
Without the obsessed object or person, the whole world seems empty; and with
it, we do not need the world. Although most often viewed negatively, ‘burning
obsession’ is the driving force behind much of human creativity. In some,
obsession can turn into depression; but that very obsession-driven depression
can trigger great creativity.
The description of love in the Bible is the opposite of ‘obsessive love’. It says
that “Love never gives up. Love cares for others more than for self. Love doesn’t
want what it doesn’t have. Love doesn’t strut, doesn’t have a swelled head, doesn’t
force itself on others, it isn’t always “me first,” doesn’t fly off the handle, doesn’t
keep score of the sins of others, doesn’t revel when others grovel…”7 Sometimes
we hate someone we wish to love but cannot love; sometimes we do not even
know what the driving force behind our obsessions is. It is possible that there is
no single source or trigger but we cannot insulate such people from the world
around them, a world that sustains their life. The world now worships ‘success’
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and scoffs at ‘failure’; in fact, as David Brooks says, we fear ‘failure’ more than we
desire ‘success’. Our deepest desire, the desire to love and be loved, is