The War Within - Between Good and Evil - Bheemeswara Challa (psychology books to read TXT) 📗

exaggerate ‘killing’ and underrate other forms of harm, hurt,
and injury. Non-lethal physical violence can last a lifetime. Subtler forms of
violence like exploitation, humiliation, abuse, neglect, indifference to injustice
can cause deeper and more sustained damage and hurt. Even imposing our will
on others, even if well-intended, is violence. By that test and standard, few, if
Musings on Mankind
123
any, have been non-violent. Even Gandhi, the apostle of ahimsa, was, in that
sense, ‘violent’ as he wanted his wife and children to do what he did or follow
what he said, whether or not they were convinced. ‘Self-righteousness’ is another
implicit form; it does violence to other’s views, beliefs, and sensitivities. Likewise,
intolerance and inequity are alternative forms of violence.
We are also privy to different forms of ‘collective violence’, social, political,
religious, and economic. All it means is that even with the best of intentions
and due diligence and care we cannot but impair the lives of other people, not
to speak of other creatures. Clearly our capacity to hurt others is immense.
Scriptures are themselves replete with violence. Acts of violence are sometimes
not only condoned, they are even celebrated. That is the noble premise behind
a Jain ritual—Samvastsari pratikraman (ritual for washing away sins). Jains seek
forgiveness from all the creatures whom they may have harmed knowingly or
unknowingly, by uttering the phrase Micchami dukkadam, which translates
as, “If I have caused you offence in any way, knowingly or unknowingly, in
thought, word or deed, then I seek your forgiveness”. Dag Hammarskjold wrote,
“Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who ‘forgives’ you—out of
love—takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness,
therefore, always entails a sacrifice”.
We must also touch upon another variable that has greatly deepened
and sharpened human suffering. It springs from the age-old clash between two
human impulses: cooperation and competition. In all life they coexist, and while
for much of our history we were able to maintain some kind of detente, during
the past few centuries our competitive drives have overwhelmed the cooperative
imperative. Competition, confrontation, and conflict have come to dominate
daily human life. Cooperation is necessary to achieve any objective beyond the
capability of an individual, but it needs to be backstopped by harnessing the
competitive energy. History has shown that a society based purely on cooperation
(the Marxist model) or competition (the laissez-faire model of capitalism) is
unsustainable. One might even say that we are ‘naturally’ more competitive than
cooperative; it drives every aspect of human life. That is why we need collective
restraints and that is necessary not only to contain human avarice but also to
restrain human hauteur exemplified by our onslaught on nature. Our unbridled
competitive impulses have also aggravated global suffering. Although we talk of
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
124
competition as the essence of the ‘free market’, in truth there is nothing ‘free’
or even ‘fair’ about markets, or anything ‘competitive’ about competition. We
all love oligarchy, monopolies, and domination; we brook no rival, not only in
matters of market or money, but even in matters of power, love, and sex. Our
instinct is to possess something or someone so completely and exclusively that
they cease to exist. We want to prevail in every situation and that necessarily
makes someone else suffer. In the current fierce competitive culture, there are
few winners and many losers, and many, often the majority, are discarded,
marginalized, impoverished and denuded of their due as human beings. That
‘suffering’, which affects our self-image, is more intense than ‘natural’ suffering.
That leads to anger, envy, hatred and violence. It is not only the body that suffers;
it is also the psyche. History has shown that the human mind cannot ‘humanely’
handle power over others. It is apt in the case of economic power, the capacity
to impose one’s will over others through economic means. The root of social
economic power is the idea of ‘private property’; the sense that one can possess,
own, monopolize a piece of property, of land. Bertrand Russell wrote, “It is
preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from
living freely and nobly” (Principles of Social Reconstruction, 1917). And Sigmund
Freud said, “By abolishing private property one takes away the human love of
aggression”. As someone reminded us, ‘even the tiniest piece of land is four
thousand miles deep, and that is quite a bit of ownership’.
Till recently, man was content with changing the inorganic environment;
now he is changing and enhancing himself. In a sense, the trend started with
the direct method: when the ape-ancestor first used a stone, he was modifying
his bodily structure by the inclusion of a foreign substance. A hallmark of
technology-driven culture is speed; we want to do everything, go everywhere,
attain everything in the swiftest possible way, in the shortest possible time.
But we also know that speed kills and shortens life. Yet, we are powerless. The
Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu wrote a long time ago that ‘to a mind that
is still, the whole universe surrenders’. Trotsky aptly summed up this aspect of
human nature: ‘As a general rule, man strives to avoid labor. Love for work is
not at all an inborn characteristic: it is created by economic pressure and social
education. One may even say that man is a fairly lazy animal. It is on this quality,
in reality, that is founded to a considerable extent all human progress; because
Musings on Mankind
125
if man did not strive to expend his energy economically, did not seek to receive
the largest possible quantity of products in return for a small quantity of energy,
there would have been no technical development or social culture. It would
appear, then, from this point of view that human laziness is a progressive force’.
We may not know what we want to do or where we want to go; only that it must
take as little effort and time as possible. Such is our obsession with speed that
we might actually be accelerating the speed of our extinction, far ahead of what
nature might have intended.
We might soon, if we are to believe the prophecies of some futurologists,
‘sleep-walk’ into a future that blurs the boundaries between living and nonliving
beings, and our bodies and the rest of the world. It is being said that
‘our technological progress has by and large replaced evolution as the dominant,
future-shaping force’ and that we, humans, have ‘become optimized, in the
sense that we now control the future’. Some researchers peering far, far into
future say that ‘as genetic engineering becomes the norm, man will take control
of the human form away from natural evolution and adapt biology to suit his
needs’. This includes, apparently, an ever-expanding forehead to accommodate
his growing brains, implanted communication devices, and eyes so large people
will resemble tarsiers. Some others say the human by then might well resemble
‘cyborgs (or robots) imbued with machine mind’. Many are worried if humanity
can survive this century. In fact, some scientists say, “the ability to really muck
about in the human genome is only decades or centuries, not millenniums,
away”.15 A millennium can take its time; century is what counts. Disturbing
as this is, the more practical question is what should we, as individuals whose
lives have a ripple-effect, do to mend our own ‘behavior’, to find peace within
and harmony outside? Whatever man might look like far in the future is not
the matter; how he behaves is the rub. There has always been a chasm between
our sacred thought and secular behavior, and between scientific solutions and
ordinary lives. With the suffocating sweep of materialism on the one hand, and
the growing zeal of rabid religiosity on the other, the two chasms have widened
but the lines between the two have got blurred. In this logjam, through this
impasse, how do we break through, get a grip on our rudderless lives, our windlike
minds and our wolfish behavior?
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
126
Packaged Pleasures
To get that ‘grip’ we need to get a grip on our mind. Our mind is elusive but our
brain is tangible. The human brain, we must remember, evolved over almost 90%
of human evolution, to adapt to the life lived by humans of that time, whom we
derisively describe as ‘hunter-gatherers’. In fact, the ‘modern man’ is no different.
The men of that age hunted and gathered for survival and subsistence, for food.
We do the same… the quarry being pleasure, profit, and power. Man has always
craved for pleasure and shunned pain. What is new is the change in the character
of modern-day pleasure. It has become what Gary Cross and Robert Procter
described as a “revolution—as significant as anything that has tossed the world
over the past two hundred years”: packaged pleasure.16 Modern technology has
tectonically impacted upon human consumption and sensory exposure and
experience. We not only ceaselessly crave for pleasurable experiences but also want
them to be immediate and without any time-lag between event and experience,
sensation and satiation. We want to grab and gorge on sight, ‘often to the point
of grotesque excess’. What is new, as Cross and Proctor point out, is that while
pleasure was born in paucity and is sustained by relative scarcity, that context has
fundamentally changed. The ‘modern consumer culture’, or ‘packaged pleasure
revolution’, reinforced by the gale of globalization, has upset the ‘ancient balance
between desire and scarcity’. It has led to an unbridled onslaught on finite natural
resources, which is like the ‘earth eating itself to death’. Our gluttony for goods
and services is also leading to a breakdown of traditional moral norms and to
greater tolerance of tyranny and oppression.
We have a hunter’s instinct to ruthlessly prevail, to subdue and control
other people, many times sans any self-gain. The one difference is that despite
being ‘hunter-gatherers’, those humans were more in balance than the modern
ones. The parts of the brain that were responsible for ‘negative’ emotions were
largely in a state of symmetry in relation with the parts in the brain that were
the focus for ‘positive’ emotions. In the hunter-gatherer era, ‘negative’ emotions,
which were centered inside and around the amygdala in the brain, were activated
by perilous situations of real physical danger, such as when a tiger chased the
human. The ‘positives’—bonding, affection, empathy, and sharing—were also
present in those times, but the ‘negatives’ were more needed and therefore
were stronger. Today, those same neurological mechanisms are still ensconced
Musings on Mankind
127
in our brains, but our circumstances have changed unrecognizably. One of the
consequences of the growing hold of the negative forces, or in the words of Adam
Smith, ‘unsocial passions’ like greed, jealousy, malice, hatred, intolerance, lust
for wealth, sex and power—the false gods—is that we have muted, in the words
of Martin Luther King Jr., the ‘inaudible language of the heart’. The upshot is
that our stress responses are ill-adapted to the modern living context; the same
reactions that a hunter-gatherer had to the threat-perception of a lurking predator
are now triggered when somebody cuts in front of you on the highway, as well
as in many other examples in the daily life of today’s chaotic, complex society.
It is these unconscious processes, what are described as ‘thinking below the level
of awareness’, that propel us to think, speak, and act in multiple ways. What we
don’t know is what exactly goes on deep down there—‘inside’—that makes us
think in a certain way, say a particular word or behave in some way. All animals
are as autonomous and interconnected as we are, although we label ourselves as
the only ‘social animal’ and ‘rational being’. One of man’s great failings is that
he has never found a way to realize, recognize, and organize himself as a member
of an interdependent and interconnected collective community, where the wellbeing
of other members need not be at the cost of his own. We have never been
very good, Marx notwithstanding, at deep social thought—how to participate,
share and optimize social ‘capital’. On the other hand, despite our breathtaking
contemporary connectivity—even boasting platforms like Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn—we are assiduously eroding that very capital. Social media is powerful
but double-edged. It can shatter social barriers but also strengthen sectarianism.
It can foster brotherhood of kindred spirits but it also enables us to hide our true
personality, cheat others and project a false image. The irony, and tragedy, is that
no man who ever lived before had the means to bring about human synergy,
the whole becoming more than the sum of the parts. And no one before us has
wasted that opportunity more than we have.
That being said, it is easy to point the finger at technology and digital
devices, but this is another ruse of our mind: to throw a red herring, a
diversionary tactic. The problem is ‘within’, not within any appliance. What
lures so many to suicide is not the