IN RESPONSE TO SHARMISTHA CHATTERJEE'S (
Sharmistha Chatterjee) COMMENT ON MY POST ... 1
Sugata Bose : Ramakrishna renounced money and must we, his devotees, pursue it by all means? Subsistence is one and surplus quite another.
Sharmistha Chatterjee : If we are the earning householders, then we are the ones who can render a lending hand to an honest organisation to move forward for a greater cau
se. Hence we may pursue money morally and without duping others.
Sugata Bose : But the very economic system is exploitative and corruption necessarily entails even in the very participation in it by way of earning one's bread if one is at the upper end of the economic fold, for all such subsistence is at the cost of inflicted human hardship elsewhere in this brutal world of disproportionate man-made inequalities.
The act of charity is aimed at healing a wound after senselessly inflicting it on a healthy person. Why inflict it at all? Why create the unequal society where humans, no less human than you are, need your charity to survive? Why create artificial differences of a gargantuan kind through the pursuit of greed and gain and then attempt a superficial make-believe act of so-called sameness by way of redressing things gone hopelessly wrong? Why work at the surface while allowing the malefic sources to keep on breeding the virus that infects society? Call you humans gods and goddesses and dare charity to them?
Just ponder where society stands today and has stood ever despite the tallest claims to civilisation and culture that it so eloquently articulates. A few prosper to enjoy life at the cost of billions that suffer to provide for that enjoyment. System after system has been tried on earth in every country to assuage human misery, theory after theory has been churned out, yet, billions suffer even today in a manner that makes civilisation a mockery and human life a hellish experience save for the fleeting moments of love and tenderness even the poor and the dispossessed feel in their hours of youthful health and vigour, in the very sunshine of the blossoming springtime of their youth.
The third vice, greed, of the human personality seems to hold humanity in its octopus grip and refuses to relent even as the ego divides and separates brothers of the same family into disparate units warring for domination over each other. This senseless separation is fraught with ignorance of the higher realities of life and is the root cause of all human misery beyond what Nature causes to the physical self on account of its placement within its inimical ambit.
Philosophers come and philosophers go and new theories are manufactured, laws discovered and methods devised to counter the corrosive conditions of human inequality but the situation hardly improves for this is a world of multitudinous variables that are seemingly impossible to control in a population mass so very ignorant of the essential principles of life and living. Perhaps, in a smaller sample of the human population experiments may be conducted to see as to how inequalities may be reduced effectively to conduce to higher human welfare but the situation seems impossible on the global level as of now with nations in a predatory mood ever surveying the landscape in their bid to prey over weaker nations but with resources available for loot.
Marx offered his material solutions of sorts but they have led to terrible dictatorships of individuals with devilish intents who have mercilessly slaughtered millions in the name of manufacturing an egalitarian society free of exploitation.
In the past military might of monarchs has ruled and now rules the capital which slowly but surely drains the blood of society and careers it upward till two sharply divided classes develop that are in coarse conflict with each other. In the meantime millions die unnoticed for this modern holocaust of the Industrial Revolution is not so apparent as Hitler's was but kills no less mercilessly, nonetheless. It is the silent crushing power of capital that is at the base of the world's major conflicts and is the mother of all the wars that have decimated populations over the last few centuries.
Colonialism the world over by the European powers was the handiwork of this menace of capitalism that sought raw materials from resource-rich militarily weaker nations and led to the enslavement of these nations to fuel the factories of these predatory western powers. Two World Wars have been fought to resolve differences and the system of classical colonialism has been broken down but the masked face of deceit wears a fresher garb in neocolonialism as military technology tyrannises over the weak and reduces nations to rubble in the twinkling of an eye. The situation seems hopelessly sterile in terms of future possibilities of a solution as tribalism reigns supreme even today in the form of technologically advanced nationalism which, despite two world cataclysms, seems a thriving prospect in impending human doom. The ego pervades it all, this self-defeating, self-breeding, self-annihilating mode in primeval ignorance of one's eternal spiritual verities.
Civilisation has been built on the frozen blood of the billions who have died for its birth and all those who vaunt of human attainments in the past need only to take cognisance of the astronomical cost in terms of human blood that it has entailed. Nonetheless, civilisation has progressed from its barbarous savage state in the forests and in caves to its modern mansions from where aristocrats and, now, business tycoons dictate terms to the rest of humanity as if they are the lords and masters of this planet by lineage and the legatees of all its resources thereof.
Now here lies the problem and the solution seems nowhere. Communism has been tried as a systemic antidote to capitalism but has itself turned pernicious by allowing invariably the dictatorship of a coterie or, at its worst, an individual which has ruined human hopes of a redemption and brought about catastrophic decimation of populations in the name of revolution.
So, where lies the solution? Perhaps, there is not any. The world may be, to phrase it as Swami Vivekananda did, a tottering building where a repair done at one end opens up a crack at another. The very solution seems to be the cause of a future problem. It is an eternal adjustment of cards in a dream, so to say, where the very vagary of the phenomenon leads to a continuous disorder and disparity seems a generic proposition. Such is Maya in Vedanta terms and it is here that the battle lies in fighting inequality.
Is it possible? Why not? If it is possible to battle it out on one's individual front, it ought to be possible to do so on the collective front as well. After all, everywhere am I, all beings are myself in a myriad guise and the essence in all is the same Self that oversees things, is the witness of phenomena and is the ultimate field of the resolution of karma and the dispenser of its fruits. This is a lofty principle which must be worked out today to overcome the delusion of the divisive self in our bid to battle inequality. Social justice will then be when large numbers of people the world over realise the futility of selfish living and the efficacy of unselfish existence in a world that will pass in a frothy flicker of physical decay and death.
But the system has to change and is that possible? Let us ponder over the reality as it is and the imperatives as they are before in further deliberations we seek solutions if there be any.
Response written to Sharmistha Chatterjee's comment by Sugata Bose
End of Part 1
To be continued ...
