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

meaning is coming close to how we share
each others’ life, materially and spiritually. But the more basic question remains.
Money—Maya, Mara, and Moksha
325
Should we at all allow the make-or-break role money is playing in human life?
We can now ‘buy’ everything, including insurance for immortality, which, we
are told, is cheaper than normal insurance ($78 per month for a ‘cryonics term
life insurance’).45 We can obtain the rewards of morality by being altruistic
and donating money to noble causes. Perhaps even a passage to heaven. If
money is spent in a socially beneficial manner, can that be a substitute to care
and compassion, to what we consider as ‘good behavior’ and give us what in
Hinduism is called punya, the rewards of virtuous actions? On the other hand, if
money is used for wrong purposes or not properly shared, does it result in paapa,
the fruits of evil deeds? But is that right? Ideally no one should be enabled to have
more than what one needs, or left in a position to decide how to discretionally
dispose of the ‘surplus’, even if it is done philanthropically. But is that possible?
If society removes the allure of excess money, as wages, income, or as inheritance
and takes over the responsibility of providing a person’s living needs, will anyone
work at all to their potential? One reason communism never had a chance as an
egalitarian experiment was this insuperable impediment. Inevitably, we are left
with the only imperfect alternative: to focus not in the direction of crushing or
curbing the earning capacity of individuals, but in the direction of equitable
distribution and social stimulants for sharing, altruism, and philanthropy.
We have to bring into our economic thinking the moral dimension. To be
moral, money must move from the affluent to the middle class, from the middle
class to the lower class. One way could be to inject what was once known as
georgism (also known as geoism and geonomics) which is an ‘economic philosophy
holding that the economic value derived from natural resources and natural
opportunities should belong equally to all residents of a community, but that
people own the value they create’.46 That philosophy attracted great thinkers like
John Locke, Spinoza and Tolstoy. It relies ‘on principles of land rights and public
finance which attempt to integrate economic efficiency with social justice’.47 It
is based on the premise that many of the problems that beset society, such as
poverty, inequality, and economic booms and busts, could be attributed to the
private ownership of the necessary resource, land. It is in this light that in Progress
and Poverty48 Henry George argued “We must make land common property” and
he drew a distinction between common and collective property. Such ideas are
worth a serious look at a time when there is heightened alarm about economic
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
326
inequality, so starkly brought to light by the Oxfam report mentioned earlier:
the “world’s richest 1 percent control half of global wealth”. Those eight men
now own the same amount of wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the
poorest half of humanity. Such revelations might have sparked a revolt, if not
revolution, in our better, more moral times, but now we are too numbed even
to react.
And yet, we should not lose sight of our dream. The fulcrum of our
existence and life must be what Abu Ibn Tufayl’s solitary character Hayy ibn
Yaqzan challenged himself to do: ‘never allow himself to see any plant or animal
hurt, sick, encumbered, or in need without helping it if he could’.49 That is a
distant dream, but dream we must. Kant’s formula to ‘treat every [person] as a
spiritual means to thine own spiritual end and conversely’ could also be a useful
point of reference. Our idea of morality must not be contained by personal
virtue; it should include what is known as the ‘product’s level of virtue’.50 Much
of our moral sense revolves around attributes such as loyalty, fidelity, honesty,
and truthfulness. They are important but often verge on exclusivity. They become
monopolistic; if you love someone you can’t love anyone else. If you are loyal to
your country you are expected to hate another country. On the one hand, we say
that separateness has to be erased, that all of us are interlinked, that sharing is
important, and yet we want to possess, to monopolize everything and everyone.
And when we talk of society, it must include those who produce and market
goods and services and the vast apparatus of the State and Government. What
we face is not moral decline in the classical sense but a foundational crisis of
morality.
Killing Kids for Money
Spurred by his insatiable desire for money, man conceals within himself a sinister
‘mass murderer’, who does not directly kill with a knife or a bullet, but who
is capable of far greater damage to the human spirit and vitality. Such is this
murderer who deliberately, methodically, and single-mindedly pollutes, poisons,
and adulterates the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe; not
to make a living, but to make more money, to earn more profit. The reference,
obviously, is to the ever-increasing use of chemical agents in the foodstuffs we
consume. Fruits like mangoes are ripened with ammonia; vegetables are treated
Money—Maya, Mara, and Moksha
327
with carcinogenic pesticides; chicken and cattle are injected with overdoses of
antibiotics; fish is preserved with formaldehyde (the chemical used to embalm
corpses); spices are mixed with dung, sand, and saw dust… From fruits to
vegetables, from milk to sodas, from clarified butter to edible oils, from wheat
flour to pulses, from spices to sweets, even the medicines we take, chances are
that we are consuming products that are injurious to our health, in effect, slow
poison. Food that is supposed to give us nourishment has now become the source
of our enfeeblement and endangerment; so is the air we breathe and water we
drink. In some countries, what passes for milk, which school books describe as
complete food, contains high levels of urea, detergents, and cheap edible oil. For
the record, let it be said that no other species deliberately feeds its offspring food
that it knows is putrid. Only human beings would not hesitate to do anything for
profit, for money. The poison we put into everything we ingest is also consumed
by our children and grandchildren, which means that, for money, we don’t mind
maiming or murdering the ones we profess to love the most, and for whom we
will sacrifice anything, and for whose sake we earn that very money.
Whose job is it to see such things don’t happen? The ‘rulers’, of course.
But power is what motivates them to do nothing about it. The general public are
helpless as they have no alternatives to eating and drinking whatever is made
available in the marketplace. They are too much in love with the good life;
and while on other issues of far less import they organize, agitate, and manage
to change the perpetrating system, in this case they are apathetic, refusing to
believe and to decisively and collectively act. And while they are prepared to
pay exorbitant prices for luxuries and fine goods, in the case of food and water
they want affordable prices, forcing the producer to choose adulteration over
authenticity, poison over purity. So, everyone has a stake in this: the producers
profit and consumers enjoy lower prices. Everyone makes a ‘ritual’ protest but is
not prepared to fight or make any sacrifice; we are all both villains and victims. It
is like death: everyone thinks that they are somehow untouched and only others
will get affected. Yet another example of willful blindness of the consequences;
and blind faith in their personal invulnerability. These synthetic chemicals
contribute to subtle and gradual dysfunction in the human body. They not only
cause slow and more painful death to far more people than rampage killers, they
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
328
also jeopardize their vitality because an enfeebled generation cannot but beget
more enfeebled, and endanger the next generation. Adulteration, like adultery, is
time-tested, is a very old practice for profit. But it used to be relatively innocuous,
like mixing water with milk, adding lower grade oil with more expensive oil, and
so on. Today, however, harmful chemicals are mixed with foodstuffs as a way to
spend less and to earn more. Then, it was cheating; now, it is mass murder or
‘generational genocide’. Synthetic chemicals, or what Randall Fitzgerald (The
Hundred-Year Lie)51 calls ‘chemical synergies’, that is, the combinations of these
chemicals stored in our bodies, are major sources of mass murder or mutilation.
Modern man lives and dies in a cocoon of chemicals; almost everywhere he lives
and everything he inhales and intakes is laced with such synergies, which are
now embedded into the mainstream of the food chain and are integral to and
inseparable from leading what we have come to call ‘civilized life’.
While chemicals are inherent in nature and are indispensable to life (water
is a chemical, and so is oxygen), synthetic chemicals have different effects and
are potentially toxic and carcinogenic. Prolonged and sustained exposure and
ingestion of toxic chemicals can not only affect our health and potentially ‘disrupt
healthy neurological development in unintended ways’52 but through chemical
inheritance could be injurious to the health of humans yet to be born. Just as
the exposure three generations before reprograms the brain so it responds in a
different way to a life challenge, as suggested by recent research at the University
of Texas at Austin, so too would be our addictive appetite for the toxic chemical
soup. And environmental contamination might well leave a ‘chemical signature’
on our genes and influence the DNA and genetic make up of our descendants
three generations later. Another study shows that “the old ideas that genes are
‘set in stone’ or that they alone determine development have been disproven”.53
The same study also pointed out that the epigenetic changes that occur in the
fetus during pregnancy could be passed on to later generations, affecting the
health and welfare of children, grandchildren, and their descendants. We are also
told that “evidence is emerging that the environment triggers and even alters
DNA to serve purposes that transcend the individual”.54 It means that what we
eat, drink, or breathe or the chemicals that get absorbed through our skin can
impact the brain and binaural development of our great, great-grandchildren.
While swearing by science, why do we ignore such scientific evidence and dire
Money—Maya, Mara, and Moksha
329
warnings about the toxic threat that exists within and around us; continuing
with our obsession with chemicals, not only making ourselves vulnerable to
diseases like cancer and mental illness but also putting on the block the lives
and sanity of generations to come? There seems to be an acknowledgment that
without chemicals our entire way of life will collapse, and since we cannot even
contemplate that, we will accept and accommodate, and pay any price, much
of which will be charged to the account of unborn humans. We might have
the right to choose cancer over chemicals, but do we have the moral right to
condemn future generations? To condemn them to being a ‘mutant species’?
Our unrelenting onslaught on nature in the name of growth, progress,
and development is not only an ecological issue but also a moral matter. We treat
nature, more specifically Mother Earth, as at once a doorman, to be at our beck and
call, and as a dustbin, to dispose of the waste of our civilization. Whether man is
a noble savage—intrinsically peaceful but corrupted by culture—or a controlled
brute, whether he is a being made in the direct image of God or a microcosm
of the cosmos, the fact is that man is no longer what nature made him to be or
intended him to be. What the recklessness of human behavior underscores is
that the composite of the human prototype, as it matured or mutated over time,
is such that no man can be trusted enough to be left to the mercy of his own
mind or to the dialectic of his volitional choice-making. Cooperation is not the
natural mode of man’s mind. Not even competition. Indeed, the mantra of man
is ‘control’. Much of our life, it is this power we pursue. The power of power is
irresistible, even for the gods. The lure of arrogance is intoxicating. We all exercise
some power over something or someone all the time. Power is a fact of life but
how it impacts on our behavior is not beyond our power. Lord Acton famously
said “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are
almost always bad men”. They are more likely to become bad because the blend
of absolute power and a brilliant mind is a heady mix. Even the most ordinary