The War Within - Between Good and Evil by Bheemeswara Challa (e book reader online .txt) 📕

about money, albeit tinged with an implicit warning, perhaps the most
euphoric description of money comes from the pen of Ayn Rand, who writes,
in her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, that money is ‘the barometer of a society’s
virtue’, ‘the creation of the best power within you and your passkey to trade your
effort for the effort of the best among men’. Ayn Rand says that ‘money rests on
the axiom that every man is the owner of the mind and his effort’, that ‘when
you accept money as payment for your effort, you do so only on the condition
that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others… your wallet
is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you, there are
men who will not default on that moral principle, which is the root of money’.
Further, according to her, ‘Money demands of the recognition that men must
work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their
loss—the recognition that they are not the beasts of burden, born to carry the
weight of your misery—that you must offer them values, not wounds—that the
common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of
goods. Money demands that you sell not your weakness for men’s stupidity, but
your talent for their reason…’. Rand says that ‘money is the product of virtue,
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but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices’. She adds “but
money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or keep it” and
proclaims that the proudest distinction of Americans is the coining of the phrase
‘to make money’, which she says ‘holds the essence of human morality’. Rand
is breathtaking and makes one breathless too. If all that she says is true, man, at
least an American, must have become an angel by now, and the Western world,
at least America, a land fit for gods. That it hasn’t happened nor is it likely to
should give us some food for thought.
That kind of ‘thought’ is articulated by those scholars and spiritualists
who have chronicled, what they call, the perils of money. The reality is that,
as the writer Louisa May Alcott put it, “money is the root of all evil, and yet
it is such a useful root that we cannot get on without it any more than we can
without potatoes”. John Stuart Mill once said that money is a machinery for
doing quickly and commodiously, what would be done, though less quickly and
commodiously, without it. Metals have been used as money throughout history.
They became useful when the various necessities of life could not be effectively
carried out, and, as a result, societies agreed to deploy in their dealings with
each other something that is innately useful and easily applicable. The value
of the metal was in the beginning measured by weight, but, over time, rulers
or sovereigns put stamps upon it to avoid the headache of weighing it, and to
make the value recognizable on sight. While money always played an important
role in human civilization—metallic money was in use over 2,000 years before
the birth of Christ—its power increased enormously with the advent of paper
money in the late 18th century and since then man has not been the same. It
fuelled the contemporary culture of consumption and a mindset of materialism.
The arrival of electronic money and what is called e-commerce in the late 20th
century unhinged money from the constraints of space and time. Money has
transformed human personality more than any other single factor. It became
the sole criterion for judging a person’s worth and success in life. The pervasive
influence—mostly negative—of money and materialism on human psychology
is well documented in a recent book called The High Price of Materialism by Tim
Kasser.34 Kasser offers a scientific explanation of how materialistic values affect
‘our everyday happiness’ but also makes the point that the effect is not only on
the psychological well-being of man but also on his physical health.
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Money, Body, and Brain
In today’s world, the underscoring belief is that nothing and no one is without a
price tag, in cash or kind; nothing we can summon is beyond barter for pleasure
and progress. The driving force is money. A growing number are turning to their
bodies to earn extra money, or to make both ends meet, not as a last resort but
as an easy option. Today’s utilitarian man argues: why must we exclude, as a
resource, the body that is the only thing we unquestionably own, and over which
no one else can lay a claim? If one can ‘morally’ and legally sell or mortgage our
brains to make a living, which is what much of what we call ‘work’ or doing a
‘job’ is, why can’t we sell or put to use our own body and its parts to make a
living? In the age of ‘marketing’ for money, specific parts are marketed for cash.
For instance, in Japan, one advertising agency paid young women for thighvertising—
wearing a temporary product tattoo on the bare skin between the hem
of a short-skirt and the top of a knee-sock. Then, an enterprising young man
in America launched Lease Your Body, to entice good-looking people to ‘lease’
space on their bodies to advertise and market commercial products. Of course,
there are innumerable other ways in which one could market his or her body
for a living—selling one’s hair, sperm or eggs, breast milk, bone marrow and
blood, renting a womb, modeling naked, etc. We generally consider that some
of these practices, particularly prostitution, to ‘make a living’ as signs of moral
degeneration, but we are soft and silent when it comes to selling one’s skills
and souls, talent and ingenuity for the sake of promoting armaments, alcohol,
cigarettes, and drugs. It means that the body is sacred and the brain is secular.
In fact, we can do more harm by lending or leasing our brain for the wrong
purposes than the body. Body vending primarily affects the individual whereas
brain misuse impacts on society itself. It is very difficult to inject morality into
this matrix. One could forcefully argue that there is nothing wrong, that the
individuals are only making use of whatever nature has endowed them with.
They are harming or hurting no one. If anyone ‘suffers’ it is only they, and society
cannot have double standards between brain and body. The critical ingredients
in whatever work we do are intent, sincerity, honesty, diligence and being useful
and helpful, not harmful.
After all, it is with the body that athletes and sportsmen earn money and
glory by being ‘auctioned’ to represent or play for the highest bidder in games
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such as cricket. Then again, if selling sex is the culprit, what about marrying
for money? Many sell their body, and arguably their soul and autonomy, in an
institution like marriage. It is also said that ‘prostitution’ is not simply selling
sex; it includes any action that compromises one’s beliefs and values to obtain
another thing, whether money, security, or even a promotion. The other view can
be that all religions prohibit the use of sex for a living. This view holds that the
sex organ is not like any other organ, that sexual intimacy is of a different genre
than any other human interfacing, that commercial sex is often exploitative
and that, as it is associated with procreation, it is sacred. For long, experts have
debated why the human race is so aggressive, bloodthirsty and kill-happy. Is the
‘villain’ the gene, our hormones, or the environment? Why do we destroy that
which gives us shelter and which keeps us alive, the earth? Why do we starve
ourselves and build weapons that kill us all many times over? Are we diabolic, or
demented or deranged? Contrary to what one might infer from today’s horrific
cruelty, massacres, and mayhem, the idea that humans are peaceable by nature
and corrupted by modern institution, has always found a voice in authors and
intellectuals. Take, for a small example, José Ortega Gasset (‘War is not an instinct
but an invention’), Stephen Jay Gould (‘Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive
species’), and Ashley Montagu (‘Biological studies lend support to the ethic of
universal brotherhood’). There are some scientists who say that, in the ultimate
test of altruism, “we are better at putting ourselves in other’s shoes than we used
to be” and that we are actually more evil in the cause of antiquated morality (e.g.,
religious morality) than from “amoral predation and conquest”.35
The principal reason why we cannot agree if we are ‘morally’ better or
worse-off is that we cannot agree on what human well-being is or ought to be,
and if there is anything we can all embrace as an all-weather ‘moral truth’. And it
all depends on what we bring under the rubric of ‘violence’. Although there is a
decline in the number of armed conflicts and resultant casualties in this century,
it should not lead us to obscure the bigger picture. We must remember that
‘violence’ is a multi-headed monster and manifests in multiple ways. The time
has come to broaden its ambit beyond the ‘intentional use of physical force or
power, threatened or actual’; it must extend to mental, psychological, social, and
moral dimensions. We might not go as far as the Jain scripture that says that “all
sins like falsehood, theft, attachment and immorality are forms of violence which
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destroy the purity of the soul”. But we must include several other forms of violence
besides the physical, and also acts of omission, indifference, intolerance, and
injustice. For example, violence by the word is far more insidious and degrading
of dignity than violence by hand. Hurting, humiliating and wounding other’s
sensibilities and sensitivities, taking undue advantage of others’ vulnerabilities
and helplessness, deliberately slighting, a cutting word and obscene opulence in
the midst of acute poverty are also forms of violence, more lasting than physical
harm. From this perspective the world today is more violent than ever before.
Indeed modern life is unlivable without some sort of ‘violence’. Thomas Merton
wrote half a century ago that the “rush and pressure of modern life are a form,
perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence”. That innate violence, in
the past five decades, has turned into ‘infectious’ violence. Today, to be violent
is the use of any kind of force intended to control or exert power over another
person to make him act in a manner contrary to his volition, and to hurt,
intimidate, inhibit or dominate another person. It may take various forms: an
action, spoken words, written words, humiliation, etc. The modern world is also
seething with ‘collective’ forms of violence like genocide, ethnic cleansing and
race riots. We have crafted a society that values, even worships, both work and
entertainment, and people use technology to switch off one form of ‘being busy’
and switch on the other. This is a form of violence. It causes violence first of all
to the human persona and psyche, because we cannot either know or become our
true selves if we don’t have periodic periods of reflection free from distraction.
Second, ‘being busy’ in both work and entertainment serves primarily material
purposes at the cost of moral and spiritual underpinnings. Our obsession with
corrosive consumerism is a form of violence; so is our relentless onslaught on
the earth’s ecosystem. But we do not think, even the best among us, that we are
violent; it is insidious. We are all ‘violent’ in one form or the other but perhaps
the most violent of all is the very instrument—the State—which is meant to offer
security and safety to those who are victims of the more powerful and exploitative
among us. A monopoly over the legal use of violence is deemed a sine qua non
of the modern State. Violence and state power are inextricably intertwined, with
the state operating simultaneously as a limiting and restraining force and as a
perpetrator of systemic use of violence and force. To put it differently, a state
inflicts violence against another state and other organized groups (warfare), it
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can direct violence against its citizens (State violence) as a way to exercise control
and political power, or it can wield its monopoly of the legitimate use of force to
constrain or contain the use of violence within society in the name and guise of
maintaining public order.
Whether or not we are ‘natural-born-noble savages’, as Rousseau
described, we cannot ignore the unmistakable truth that the factors that
inseminate and impregnate violence—avarice, anger, animosity, selfrighteousness,
possessiveness, intolerance—are ‘natural’ to our psyche. We must
first acknowledge