Thought Process

This should probably have been a diary entry, but I think that it is better off as a confessional article, which has an intellectual introspection. Most of the people around me think that I view the society because of my political views. The truth is that my political views are a result of how I see the society.

There is a very good fable to describe the dilemma that everyone faces. Three blind men were told to hold three separate parts of the elephant and tell the shape of the animal. The person who was holding the trunk said that the elephant was tube-like in shape, the person who held the leg told that it was like a tree trunk and the last one who was holding the tail said that it was probably a reptile. The society is the elephant in this case and I am blindfolded. I will describe it according to the part that I have held.

Why am I blindfolded? My answer to that is, due to the distortions in the information and knowledge provided to me. There are incessant power struggles in any polity, and the interest groups try and incline all literature and intellectual writing towards their agenda. The lobbies are formed, and the thought is perpetuated in an organized way. So any book that I read today is a mere point of view. It is up to me how I analyze and judge the situation. This process of judgement is built over the years and a person’s upbringing has a substantial role to play. A few essentials that might culminate into a good paradigm of judgement according to me or the once that I used are:

• A liberal environment. The audacity to question any and everything with impunity. Society will always taboo questioning to maintain the status quo. But it is of utmost importance that we question and satisfy ourselves before complying with any idea.
• Rationality and reason should be used as tools to counter any doubts and questions that arise. A scientific temper is paramount to avoid the biases in your thought process.
• An aversion of hate in the thought process is important. Hating a point of view is an extreme manifestation of a bias, which has been nurtured through constant indoctrination. While biases, inevitably always exist in a thought process, we must try and fight to keep it restricted to the minimum. Example: A capitalist will hate a communist and vice versa. While everyone is entitled to their own view, why should your dislike for a certain ideology filter to individuals? We are fighting against ideas and not individuals.
• There is no place for cynicism or pessimism in the thought process. While certain phases will arise we must try and fight these, for we are inconsequential in history, but nonetheless, we make it. So action is imperative.
• The support should be lent to ideas and not to individuals, for I have realized that in history, causes are always greater than individuals. Causes make individuals great and not the other way around.

 

Why Socialism?

 

If you just analyze the socio-economic conditions of the world today, there is blatant injustice and disparity in the distribution of wealth in the society. I just ask everyone around me; is asking for equity in wealth distribution evil? Is hoping for a change against blatant, imperial injustice, the flashes of which we saw in the Iraq war evil? Moreover, India is a predominantly an agrarian society, where the peasants and workers form the majority of the population, and they are the ones living in utter destitution. Fidel Castro says “More than 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger; and 790 million of them live in the Third World.” He further comments “As I have said before, the ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness, poverty or hunger.” For a supposedly maniacal killer, he is talking quite sensibly. He has lived up to his promise of providing the best social infrastructure to his countrymen, whether it is health or education or even bio-technology for that matter. He accomplished these feats under massive sanctions and widespread slanderous propaganda by the western media. The western media talks of human rights, and the USA have since Fidel has taken over, waged at least three large-scale, unjust wars. I am not even mentioning their covert operations of assassinating popularly elected leaders in Latin America, like Salvador Allende of Chile to name one, which cause chaos in the political and economic life of those countries, making a mockery of the concept of democracy that they pontificate. You don’t even need to pick up a book to realize this fact.

 

I will write this article in two parts due to lack of time. Just to finish off the first part, I’d like to make it simple. Just think about this.

If we could shrink the earth’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following.

 

There would be:

57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south
8 would be Africans
52 would be female
48 would be male
70 would be non-white30 would be white
70 would be non-Christian30 would be Christian
89 would be heterosexual11 would be homosexual
6 people would possess 59% of the entire world’s wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
(ONE)1 would be near death;
(ONE)1 would be near birth;
(ONE)1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education;
(ONE)1 (yes, only 1) would own a computer.
When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.
And, therefore . . .
If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of this world.

 I shall put my perspective on why we need to take political stands and the urgent need to understand our history, in the next part, and will most probably merge the two articles .