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

or participate
in socially harmful activities. In any case, its very pervasive indispensability—
no one can live without any money—offers an opening. If morally earned and
properly channeled, it can make a life-or-death difference; it can lift the poor
from the margins of deprivation and destitution to a life of decency and dignity.
Through money, at this time in history, one could do more good to more people
than through most other means. In other words we now have a window of an
opportunity to transform money from summum malum (the greatest evil) to
summum bonum (the greatest good). If we can succeed in this effort, the world
will be transformed from what Thomas Hobbes called “bellum omnium contra
omnes, the state of ‘war against all’, of ‘every man against every man’, which is the
condition of current society, into a happier and harmonious place.
The source and the use of money demands the highest judgmental skills. It
has come to be unjust and exploitative because of the way we ‘make it’ and mobilize
it and marshal it. In the process, our negative passions come into play, like greed,
avarice, and malice. These have dominated our mind-driven consciousness and,
unless we change the composite of our consciousness, money cannot become
a force for good. The result is a human society aptly described by Ayn Rand:
“When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when
you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who
produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in
goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than
by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against
you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a selfsacrifice—
you may know that your society is doomed”.25 But if we can somehow
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bring to bear on our personality our ‘positive’ passions like compassion, sharing,
sensitivity and justness, then money too can become a creative power. We must
also bear a central fact. It is that throughout our lives we do myriad things as
members of society, and, despite our best efforts, we can never be sure that what
we receive is proportionate to our effort and inputs, that our share is just and
that we are not living on someone else’s labor, and that our rewards are not illgotten.
Many theories have been put forth by social scientists on how to ensure
fairness in distributing gains from social cooperation but none of them have
proved beyond leaks and misapplication. The simplest way is to constantly and
consciously make every effort in every context and situation to give more than
what we get, to always be on the lookout for even the most trivial opportunities
to help and heal and not let go any such openings, regardless of who the
recipient, or the occasion, might be. And the simple fact is that there is no other
way; nothing else works to give us a sense worthiness and fulfillment—and to
solve every problem the world faces—than giving, caring, empathy, compassion,
going beyond ourselves and our family, crossing out of our comfort zone to serve
others. Let God, not you, be the judge whether they deserve or not. Thank God
that He has given you the mind and means to give. That is His gift. The good
thing about giving is that you do not need to have anything; you have yourself
and that is more ‘givable’ than anything else. To love you need to give, but to
give, you do not need even love. We simply need to have a heart.
The Great Moral Issue of Our Age—Money Management
The medium of money and the act of ‘making profit’ sanitize any ill effects of
what goes on in an office or shop floor or boardroom. If we want to raise the
bar of morality in human society we must not exclude any place from moral
responsibility. Adding insult to injury, so to speak, the fact also is that most people
do not like, let alone enjoy, what they do to make money. In other words, they get
no joy in this world and are accountable in the afterworld. We must also address
what has come to be known as the ‘doctrine of lesser evil’, that sometimes we
have to deliberately choose an alternative that violates our own moral sensitivity
and do things against the grain, as the only other choice would be to condone
or allow something more horrible to happen. For example, suppose the state has
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in its custody a suspect who has information about a horrific act, and does not
reveal it despite cajoling and persuasion. Would the state be morally justified in
torturing him? While it is true that often choices are between different grays, not
between white and black or good and evil, we must not forget that the ‘lesser evil’
is also evil and that we are morally culpable. It also underscores the truism that
there are no absolutes in nature, not even in morality. Each case has to be judged
on its own merit. We must constantly reconcile contradictions between concrete
contemporary conditions and absolute, non-historical, universal values. That can
only be done by an ‘active subjective judgment’; by means of a ‘monologue in
our mind’ and a ‘conversation in our consciousness’. All morality comes down to
that. That is why the key to everything is consciousness.
We want to live our lives without inconvenience, without discomfort and
without any pain, and we want good health and a good life. And, we have come
to believe that to have these, we need plenty of money. And for that no price is
too high, no sacrifice too sacred and no sacrilege too profane. Andrew Carnegie,
the American philanthropist and once dubbed one of the richest men in history,
said that the proper management of wealth was a great moral issue of our age,
that nothing debases more than the worship of money and that “a man who
dies rich dies disgraced”. For many—too many people—money is a measure of
their identity and self-worth; it makes them feel powerful, on top of the world,
and conversely, its absence or limitation makes them feel impoverished, if not
existentially impotent. Nothing else matters more; nothing else gives us more
thrill and satisfaction, when one has it, and nothing causes more despair, when
one does not have it. Nothing else is ever enough, and nothing else casts a more
somber shadow over human life. Money can buy or get anything, so we say,
but there are exceptions too. Mata Hari, the famous female spy and seductress
during the First World War said that she would prefer to be the mistress of a poor
officer than of a rich banker! Was she then less money-minded and more moral?!
After all, she was just doing a job, a refrain that is a constant in modern life. All
our life is consumed by whatever it takes to get a job, to keep a job, not to lose
a job, to change a job. And we cover many moral omissions and transgressions
by saying ‘I am just doing my job’. The principal reason to do a job is to make
money. A job lets us make money, which, in turn, lets us make a living, often at
the expense of making a life. We work, we study, and we live with money ‘as the
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object’. Philosopher Alan Watts used to ask his students, “What would you like
to do if money were no object”, and “How would you really enjoy spending your
life”. The answers were to be poet, writer, painter, and so on. The tragedy is that
most people spend their life engaged in a professional activity that is not their
passion. And there is nothing more limiting and mentally more destructive than
doing things one does not like. But the greater question is that if money is no
longer an object, would we really spend the day in the sun with a pen or a brush
or a shovel? More likely, we would be sitting in front of a screen! Even if we do
not have to ‘make’ or earn money, money must still be spent, whatever we come
to have in any way. How we use, spend, share or spread money still remains as a
moral matter. What we need to do is to change the mindset.
A big chunk of contemporary human effort is to do what the ancient
Indian sage Yagnavalkya (in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad) told his wife
Maitreyi cannot be done: to buy immortality with money. Scott Fitzgerald
famously said,—‘Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you
and me…’ They are different not only because they have more money, which
enables them to live differently and live in ‘refinement, utmost refinement, total
refinement’ as Siddhartha Gautama described his life before his awakening, they
even think differently of death! They are different from the rest but they are also
different from each other in the way they see, gain, and use their wealth. Although
money has a corrosive effect on human consciousness, money can also make a
difference between a life of dignity and a life of indignity and degradation. Being
very poor can rob a person of what it takes to be human. And the very rich can
lift the very poor from that subhuman state. Not doing so can be as sinful as slow
murder. That is why all religions extol charity. Charity is not meant only for the
rich; it is sharing, and sharing can be done by everyone, even the poor because
there is always someone else richer and poorer than us. No one can become rich
only through solitary effort or that they are the most deserving of them all. For
the very process entails unequal and disproportionate effort. In that sense it is a
reasonable assumption to go by that no one is ‘rich’ because he has righteously
earned it and charity is not giving but giving back; it is paying back in money
what we borrowed in kind, as sweat and skill, time and energy of other people.
There have always been economic gaps, and some have had more money
than others, and men have always desired to live in the lap of luxury. Today, the gap
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between the rich and the poor is becoming wider and sharper than perhaps ever
before, which could become a major source of social tension. Human experience
over millenniums has shown that human ingenuity is far better at creating wealth
than sharing and distributing it. In 2011, The Economist magazine, usually an
ardent advocate of economic growth as the panacea for the ills of humankind,
identified this issue as a primary trigger for global instability. In its special report,
it noted that there are more high-net-worth-individuals and millionaires than
Australians in the world. About 1,000 billionaires happen to control one third
of global assets; the richest 1% of adults control 43% of the world’s assets; the
wealthiest 10% have 83%, and the bottom 50% have only 2%. Those at the
bottom, particularly those at the ‘bottom of the bottom’, the absolute poor, the
marginalized, the downtrodden, the oppressed, are those who lead lives that deny
them the full biological human potential, and yet it is they who allow the rest
to lead ‘human’ lives. The leisure class and the mainstream mass and the middle
class, depend on the marginalized, for the goods and services that backstop
their luxury, leisure, entertainment, even to live in their opulent homes. The
growing gap between the leisure class and the working class has widened social
divisions. It has given rise to those, particularly in the rural areas, who are called
left-wing-extremists, who argue that those at the top are rank exploiters and
cruel predators and that only through violence would it be possible to endow,
enable and empower those at the bottom and restore a better economic balance
in human society. Their aim is to overthrow the tyranny of plutocracy and install
the reign of the proletariat. Because of the widening gap, on the one hand, and
because the poor are now able to actually see through the mass media how the
rich lead their lives at their expense, their creed is increasingly finding favor with
the rest of the ‘bottom’ in many countries. If money continues to play the same
deterministic role in human affairs, and the new class of the nouveau riche, which
includes national and transnational corporations, continues to control the levers
of economic and political power, there can be little doubt the economic divide of
the world could become a source