Reality, Stupidity, Hypocrisy And Humanity by Santosh Jha (read any book txt) 📕

A person needs collective spaces for growth, evolving and validation of ‘I’ or self and this itself stands out as most powerful causality of most of his or her 3Cs – Conflicts, Chaos and Confusion. An individual shall keep struggling for his or her liberty and freedom to have his or her own way of shaping reality for his or her life-living and as there shall always be many times more people already, vying fiercely to have their own respective liberties to prevail, struggling to install their own or even antagonistic realities. This causality of struggle and battle for liberties instigate the animalistic tribal instincts in humans and in turn unleash huge loads of stress and conflicts. This is perfect causality for impossibility of sanity.

It is only natural and amply clear that personal sanity can be attained only when an individual comes out of this causality – this dualistic contextuality and relativism between individual and society. Does this mean that a person shall have to abandon all his liberties in favor of society? No, certainly not. All he or she has to do is to accept the holism, understand and accept this dualism and suitably condition his consciousness towards this contextual reality. As a person sees and understands this causality between him or her and the collective spaces, he or she shall not fall in the trap of reactionary and instinctive anger and frustration. Rather, he or she shall grow more receptive, skillful and objectively accustomed to the inbuilt conflict. He or she shall become more compassionate towards ‘others’ and that alone has the potential to install lasting sanity.

This is what we have to do for personal sanity. We have two ways out of this trap of duality –

First step is to ‘unlearn’ this insistence of seeking expression of liberty in calamitously competitive collective spaces and instead, learn the artistry of expression and communication of ‘I’ or self in personal and other non-competitive space.

Secondly and more importantly, allow the intelligence of holism to paint one’s consciousness and this shall ensure that an individual’s expression of liberty in collective spaces is more compassionate and less passionate. There is no need to curtail or abandon any of one’s liberty and freedom. All we have to do is to change the cognition and do it with a compassionate consciousness, understanding and accepting that the collective spaces are too heavily crowded and liberties are constricted for expression. This cognitive change of acceptance of individual liberty with more compassion and lessened passion shall lead to larger sanity prospect.

It has to be admitted here that this all may seem easy at theoretical level but hugely tough to practice. It is primarily because an adult has had this populist and prolonged mind-training to be ‘passionate’ about his identities, liberties, belief-systems, life goals, etc. and be ‘intuitively crafty’ in facing competition head on and maneuver his or her way out of the crowd to shine alone as a pole star. This is basic and bare hypocrisy that humans relish and then expect sanity, system and order in the society! How?

It is because an individual needs the collective spaces for his or her very growth and journey to adulthood. It is in society and culture that he or she finds meaning and validity of his or her liberty. A child cannot reach to happy and poised adulthood if society as a whole is not compassionate about his or her individual liberties. However, when an individual grows to adulthood, he or she passionately manipulates this very society and culture to seek individualistic and personal attainments and expression of his or her ‘I’ or self. If the adult is not paying back to society in the same compassion-coin, it is biggest stupidity-hypocrisy and definitive road to insanity.

In passion driven milieus, the situation has gone worse. It is this passionate individualism that has created this contemporary calamitous reality of ‘5 Percent’ having income and wealth more than that of the rest of ‘95 Percent’. The compassion-deficit society and cultures have become so competitive and individualistically so rigid and dogmatic about passionate individual goals and attainments of life that a growing up child is not getting the desirable compassion from the collective space at the first instance. This itself infuses conflict and competitiveness in an adult. It is only natural that this compassion-deficit adult shall not be innately inclined to pay any amount of compassion back into the system of collective spaces. This shall augment and embolden the cyclicality of causality of more brutal and passion-driven competitiveness and conflict in human world as well as in individuals. This is perfect recipe for hypocrisies and insanity. This we have to come out of, if we wish to extend any reasonable chance to personal sanity in contemporary world.

The first step of course is to understand this causality of conflict between individual and society and other collective spaces and design small but compassionate steps to stay away from this passion-driven reactionary and hypocritical causality. Secondly, an individual has to look for a probable pattern of interaction with collective spaces, which allows less competitive field of operation to personal liberty. Thirdly, an individual also has to make suitable enterprise to seek utility and value in such self-expressions which are more internal and personal, not requiring validation from collective spaces. It may seem tough but only because we see and accept things from our current and contemporary mind training and cognition. There are enough such spaces and many young people are already into it. All it may take is compassionate acceptance of alternative cognition of utilities, value and worth of other non-conventional and non-conformist parts of Reality, which constitute the holism of worldview.

For example, we all know how in the last 60-70 years, there has been a mad rush of people towards urban spaces from rural landscapes. In popular perception, good life has come to be solely associated with urban and metropolis living. There is a decisive movement of people towards cities and it has created such complexities and competitiveness in urban life-living, which is becoming seed content of most chaos and conflicts in average life-living. It is such a tragedy that average person does not understand that even while in popular perception it may seem that the world lives in town and cities, the reality is that the entire urban landscape is only less than one percent of the total global land. The trouble is that this less than one percent urban land accommodates over 54 percent of global population.

On the other hand, rural lands with different farming and non-farming potentials occupy around 40 percent of global land but homes only less than 50 percent of global population. Then, there are forest lands that occupy 30 percent of global land but even small tribal population in forested regions are being fast removed. The scary detail, which is so apparent yet neglected by most of us is that things were not in such a mess only a century back. Humanity was primarily a rural living reality with urbanized living less than 10 percent. In the second half of 20th century, humanity created its own trouble by clustering most economic activities and facilities in handful of urban centers. That was probably not enough of a stupidity so, humanity ensured that rural areas got gradually neglected and dilapidated so that urban life-living could get cheap labor force.

The contemporary human life-living is in such disaster that globally, especially in developing world of China and India, thousands of villages have been completely deserted and even developed countries like most European nations have villages where little sustainable activities are taking place. In only last 50 years, humanity has destroyed completely the cradle of its own civilization by making rural landscape unviable and unsustainable. This in turn is impacting the sanity and system of urban spaces, which have emerged as the only spaces where life-living could be sustained. It is easily imaginable as what is the state of life-living in most urban spaces when the reality remains that over 50 percent of global population live in less than one percent of global land. And, the remaining half of the global population not in urban space is trapped in a landscape, which has become unsustainable.

It is not that global think tanks and intellectuals are not pointing out to these huge anomalies in contemporary civilized life-living but the fact remains that majority of people do not see and accept this insanity as they have this populist mindsets and cognition to blindly and madly follow what looks like the ‘smart’ thing, everyone is doing! There is some thinking at political levels in some developed countries to correct this huge anomaly but it is doubtful whether any meaningful step shall ever be taken. However, good news is that some aware and conscious young men and women have understood this modern trap and working their way out to sustainable life-living in rural landscapes. This is a pointer to the fact that only personal sanity and individualistic enterprise is the possibility in contemporary state of insanity.

Another big trap situation and huge anomaly, which is major causality of contemporary human insanity and hypocrisy is in global economic and financial systems. Like the urban-rural hypocrisy, the economic and financial ecosystems are living wildly and madly with stark stupidities, despite warning emanating from the ecosystems itself as well as from experts, who see the root of trouble.

Post Second World War, the shaken up humanity desperately sought a global order, which worked out a political and economic model for the world to avoid any such calamitous probability like the two world wars. The human and other costs of the two world wars were so colossal that humanity, especially the intellectuals and leaderships of the world sat together to work out global system of sanity in the years to come. Liberalism, open trade, free market economy, anti-imperialism, disarmament and international dialogues were accepted as the singular and common creed for all nations of the world to follow. In next few years, things were also started in the right note. However, it is common knowledge how everything lost its fizz and national identity, national interest and supremacy politics once again led humanity to the same old and oft-trodden road to major conflicts, wars and armament.

Not only politics failed, the global economic sanity was also shattered with politics deciding to disrespect all sanity principles of peace and order. The post world wars resolve of free trade, cooperation and sharing of resource and expertise were thrown to the winds. The powerful and disastrous element of nationalism, identities and narrow-wallism of domestic growth superseded the compassionate and idealistic imagery of global wellness and altruistic sustainable growth for all humanity, across nation-state boundaries.

So, manufacturing boom and technological upsurge in countries created trade war conflicts. Global trade redesigned the old fashioned imperialism and global finances worked overtime like national armies to churn the world into domination triggered international relationship. Strategic interests and geopolitics were redesigned to remodel and de-contextualize human slavery and human deprivation into novel terminologies of international monetary mechanism and finances. Disarmament was gradually and conveniently forgotten and rather, diplomatic artistries were honed up to ensure perpetual strife-zones across globe to keep afloat the lucrative money-minting arms bazaar.

And where humanity has reached! Latest world inequality report tells it all as how humanity has failed big time in ensuring wellness for all. The model of polity and economy has miserably failed in ensuring equitable growth and distribution of incomes and wealth. Contemporary reality of a handful of billionaires pocketing massive majority of wealth and incomes, leaving over 90 percent of human population struggling for a descent life-living is the perfect picture of human insanity in the post world war era. It is definitively hugely contrary to the dream and aspiration of humanity in middle of 20th century of a world