Money is troubling me, as I am not so desirous
about money. Motivational leaders and management gurus say one is not bound to
achieve what they are not desirous about. Life is all about ‘Get, Set, Go’ or ‘aim
and shoot’. The modern world is all about materialistic instinct and hence
building a castle on air is impossible and impractical, every dream need to be
grounded on a materialistic goal, and goals divided into short term and long
term.
In November 2018, I got introduced to the books,
“How
will Capitalism End?” (2014) by Wolfgang Streeck (which I am still
reading) and “A Guide for the Perplexed” (1977) by E. F. Schumacher. Both
books are by German economists, but the second one was philosophical. I have
some extracts from E. F. Schumacher:
[…] virtually
all my ancestors, until a quite recent generation, had been rather pathetic
illusionists who conducted their lives on the basis of irrational beliefs and
absurd superstitions. [...] Throughout history, enormous amounts of hard-earned
wealth were squandered to the honour and glory of imaginary deities - not only
by my European forebears, but by all peoples, in all parts of the world, at all
times. Everywhere thousands of seemingly healthy men and women subjected
themselves to utterly meaningless restrictions, like voluntary fasting;
tormented themselves by celibacy; wasted their time on pilgrimages, fantastic
rituals, repetitive prayers, and so forth; turning their backs on reality - and
some actually still do it even in this enlightened age! - all for nothing, all
out of ignorance and stupidity; none of it to be taken seriously today, except
of course as museum pieces. […]
Knowledge of the past was considered interesting and occasionally
thrilling but of no particular value for learning to cope with the problems of
the present.
From Wolfgang Streeck, I would like to quote
the following:
Steady growth,
sound money and a modicum of social equity, spreading some of the benefits of
capitalism to those without capital, were long considered prerequisites for a
capitalist political economy to command the legitimacy it needs. [...] There is
mounting evidence that increasing inequality may be one of the causes of
declining growth, as inequality both impedes improvements in productivity and
weakens demand. Low growth, in turn, reinforces inequality by intensifying
distributional conflict, making concessions to the poor more costly for the
rich, and making the rich insist more than before on strict observance of the ‘Matthew
principle’ governing free markets: ‘For unto every one that hath shall be
given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken
even that which he hath.’
Former US President Obama’s Chief Economic
Adviser, Larry Summers, on a “surprise” speech (a surprise speech because Larry
Summers was considered to be the friend of Wall Street) at Brookings
Institution on March 13, 2009 said:
“An abundance
of greed and an absence of fear on Wall Street led some to make purchases—not
based on the real value of assets, but on the faith that there would be another
who would pay more for those assets. At the same time, the government turned a
blind eye to these practices and their potential consequences for the economy
as a whole. This is how a bubble is born. And in these moments, greed begets
greed. The bubble grows. . . . In the past few years, we’ve seen too much
greed.”
Yet another quote from E. F Schumacher in his
book Small
Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered:
Ever-bigger
machines, entailing ever-bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting
ever-greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they
are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and
technology towards the organic, the gentle, the nonviolent, the elegant and
beautiful.
All the quotes seem to be irrelevant and quite
unconnected with what I try to convey through this article. I would like to
summarise the above in four statements:
- Knowledge is not absolute; with knowledge evolving every moment, the knowledge preserved from the past may be irrelevant or becomes obsolete in the future.
- Knowledge invented money; and the money created inequality and therefore the rich grow richer and poor falls into poverty.
- Money accumulates wealth; wealth breeds greed.
- Knowledge and money together proposes development and progress; development is directly proportional to depletion of natural resources which could never be replenished with the human invented economic system.
When the Financial and Banking industry
controlled the economy, newer products were invented to hound on the
consumers. Henry David Thoreau or Ralph
Waldo Emerson would never have imagined water as a future commodity as we find
it today. Consumers have greed in purchasing more than their neighbours and
when they run out of purchasing power they take up consumer credit and “supplement
consumerist incentives with legal obligations to work, entered into as debtors
and enforced by lenders”
(quoted by Wolfgang Streeck from, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural
History of Consumer Credit, by Lendol Calder). Now, workers become
bonded labours or slaves to the bank to repay the credit offered by the banks.
Whether a new order of political economy arises
to resolve the systemic disorders of the capitalistic countries or the
maddening consumerism is not my worry. But, I have always wondered (Socrates
said, 'Wonder is the feeling of a
philosopher, and philosophy begins with wonder.') the raise and growth of
human race in this world in the past 40,000 years.
The raise of the Homo sapiens or as matter of
fact the evolution of life in this earth is accidental and there is no fixed
plan or a definite goal or any act of faith or freewill or any intelligent
design in this evolution. It is humans, the only living species, in this world
has the capability to bring his imagination and thoughts affect the course of
natural evolution. The civilization, the cultures, the faiths, the social
beliefs and the languages are collective changes of thoughts shaped through
individual imagination; imagination is the source of knowledge. The progress in
scientific sophistications and the structural changes effected to the world are
individual imagination. When we look back at the history, every theory (Big
Bang Theory, Atomic and Molecular Theories, Medicines, Computers, Space
Travels, Artificial Intelligence, Gene Therapy, etc.) developed will have
inspiration from another person’s imagination. Sooner, when Higgs Particles (or
Higgs Bosons, if one would love to have an Indian name tag to it) comes into
the control of science, even teleportation would be possible. Yet the only
physical quantity that couldn’t get affected (or brought into the control) by
human imagination is the time, the continuum.
Thirty years back, nobody would have ever
imagined on the social connectivity made by the today’s digital revolution, and
the current generation is craze about moving in a faster pace, creating their
own solutions of the jigsaw puzzle and get easily bored and uninterested. Whatsoever
happens to individuals, there are intellects who always keeps on imagining and
inventing newer wheels to keep the world moving further. With technological
ease, our lives are more complicated; with technological transparency, we
invent more methods to hide; development in individual life is not helping
overall progress of humanity, it is only leading to greater inequality. More the
number of social connectivity less is the intimacy between individuals.
Human race lived for long as groups or
communities, with economic development they drew distinct lines of class and
further fragmented into families; technological development is further dividing
families into individuals. Early people wondered at the regularity of the
Universe, good natured people philosophically explored the laws of governance
and further implored the secrets of atoms and elementary particles. Development,
though visualised holistic it exists only as individualistic and atomic.
Development sounds paradoxical and enigmatic!
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