SACRED EVIL

Some weeks back, i came across one of the most popular book of all time known as THE FOUNTAINHEAD. The book was all about 'IDEALISM', 'CONVENTIONAL CAPITALISM',but more importantly according to my perception it was on 'SELF-SUBMISSION'. Weeks later I happened to come across one of the speeches of A SPIRITUAL LEADER, on EGOTISM. A thunderbolt of a conversion from the book struck into my head.... those words were from a character called "Ellsworth Toohey".... The words from the speech of the spiritual leader echoed the wishes and things that Mr. Toohey was trying to do. Mr. Toohey's words were somewhat like follows:


"You. The world. It’s only a matter of discovering the lever. If you learn how to rule one single man’s soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It’s the soul, not whips or swords or fire or guns. That’s why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. The soul must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it – and the man is yours. You won’t need a whip – he’ll bring it to you and ask to be whipped. Set him in reverse – and his own mechanism will do your work for you. Use him against himself. Want to know how it’s done? See if I ever lied to you. See if you haven’t heard all this for years, but didn’t want to hear, and the fault is yours, not mine.

There are many ways. Here’s one. Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity. That’s difficult. The worst among you gropes for an idol in his own twisted way. Kill integrity by internal corruption. Use it against himself. Direct it towards a goal destructive of all integrity. Preach selflessness. Tell man that altruism is the ideal. Not a single one has ever reached it and not a single one ever will. His every living instinct screams against it. But don’t you see what you accomplish ? Man realises that he’s incapable of what he’s accepted as the noblest virtue - and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness. Since the supreme ideal is beyond his grasp, he gives up eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of his personal value. He feels himself obliged to preach what he can’t practice. But one can’t be good halfway or honest approximately. To preserve one’s integrity is a hard battle. Why preserve that which one knows to be corrupt already? His soul gives up its self respect. You’ve got him. He’ll obey. He’ll be glad to obey – because he can’t trust himself, he feels uncertain, he feels unclean. That’s one way.

Here’s another. Kill man’s sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognise greatness or to achieve it. Great men can’t be ruled. We don’t want any great men. Don’t deny conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept – and you stop the impetus to effort in men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. Don’t set out to raze all shrines – you’ll frighten men, Enshrine mediocrity - and the shrines are razed.

Then there’s another way. Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It’s simple. Tell them to laugh at everything. Tell them that a sense of humour is an unlimited virtue. Don't let anything remain sacred in a man’s soul – and his soul won’t be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man. One doesn’t reverence with a giggle. He’ll obey and he’ll set no limits to obedience – anything goes – nothing is too serious.

Here’s another way. This is most important. Don't allow men to be happy. Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men. So kill their joy in living. Take away from them what they want. Make them think that the mere thought of a personal desire is evil. Bring them to a state where saying ‘I want’ is no longer a natural right, but a shameful admission. Altruism is of great help in this. Unhappy men will come to you. They’ll need you. They’ll come for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no vacuum. Empty man’s soul – and the space is yours to fill.

This is the oldest one of all. Look back at history. Look at any great system of ethics, from the Orient up. Didn’t they all preach the sacrifice of personal joy? Under all the complications of verbiage, haven’t they all had a single leitmotif: sacrifice, renunciation, self-denial ? Haven’t you been able to catch their theme song – ‘Give up, give up, give up, give up’ ? Look at the moral atmosphere of today. Everything enjoyable, from cigarettes to sex to ambition to the profit motive, is considered depraved or sinful. Just prove that a thing makes men happy and you’ve damned it. That’s how far we’ve come. We’ve tied happiness to guilt. And we’ve got mankind by the throat.

Throw your first born into a sacrificial furnace – lie on a bed of nails – go into the desert to mortify the flesh – don’t dance – don't go to the movies on Sunday – don't try to get rich – don’t smoke – don’t drink. It’s all the same line. The great line. Fools don’t think that taboos of this nature are just nonsense. Something left over, old-fashioned. But there’s always a purpose in nonsense. Don’t bother to examine a folly – ask yourself only what it accomplishes. Every system of ethics that preached sacrifice grew into a world power and ruled millions of men.

Of course, you must dress them up. You must tell people they’ll achieve a superior kind of happiness by giving up everything that makes them happy. You don't have to be too clear about it. Use big vague words. ‘Universal Harmony’ – ‘Eternal Spirit’ – ‘Divine Purpose’ – ‘Nirvana’ - ‘Paradise’ – ‘Racial Supremacy’ – ‘the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.’ Internal corruption, that’s the oldest one of all. The farce has been going on for centuries and men still fall for it.

Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice – run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if you ever hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it’s your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself – that will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and you’ll scream your empty heads off, howling that he’s a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries.

But here you might have noticed something, ‘It stands to reason’. Do you see? Men have a weapon against you. Reason. So you must be very sure to take it away from them. Cut the props from under it. But be careful. Don’t deny outright. Never deny anything outright, you give your hand away. Don’t say reason is evil – though some have gone that far and with astonishing success. Just say that reason is limited. That there’s something above it. What ? You don’t have to be too clear about it either. The field’s inexhaustible. ‘Instinct’ – ‘Feeling’ – ‘Revelation’ – ‘Divine Intuition’ – ‘Dialectic Materialism’. If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you that your doctrine doesn’t make sense – you’re ready for him. You tell him there’s something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He must believe. Suspend reason and you play it deuces wild. Anything goes in any manner you wish whenever you need it. You’ve got him. Can you rule a thinking man ? We don’t want any thinking men."

At that very moment i realized what the men ruling so called "soul" experimented throughout the centuries... MEN NEEDED THEM, ONLY BECAUSE MANKIND WAS UNABLE TO USE THEIR BRAINS...Right from Abraham to Moses... Hsuan-Tsang to The Fourteenth Dalai Lama..... C. S. Lewis to Oscar Romeo... Mohandas Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr... Each one of them miscalculated their intellect and have failed to create an ideal world. And as far as i reckon all of them have failed to a SUCCESSOR that out-comes their shadow... in Today's world " souls cannot be ruled, like play-boyish acts,and setting an ashram for it... neither by Hippocratic speeches on egotism.. nor by hypothetical preachings on the secret of life....IT HAS TO BE DONE TERESA'S WAY..."

Common Man's Budget

Since last few days, I devoted my time a bit in analyzing the union budget 2010-11 and I came across some interesting facts, during my random and time killing analysis. Some point that struck me during my analysis are:-

(1) Fiscal deficit pegged at 5.5% for 2010-11.

(2) Elevation of the tax slab.

(3) Complete fiasco of indirect-tax.

(4) Immature approach for the infra-development.

(5) Removal of the stimulus, and planned recovery of the stimulus.

Considering the aspect of reduced fiscal deficit, finally improvement in that portion, the Indian economy would be at less debts than the previous years. An improvement of the economy can be considered through such plans. The fruitful utilization of the GDP can be expected this year.

Through tax slabs elevation, the common Indian salaried class citizens are expected to save around Rs. 600 billions in gross. A sign of relief is evident in there TDS. Yet much improvement was expected by the common Indian.

Now taking the Indian Infrastructure into the scenario, the FM wasn't bold enough to take the privatization approach. The FM should have privatized the infra development projects, and rather concentrated such capital into the other sectors such as import and exports, healthcare, aviation, power and telecom. Proper dilution and optimized distribution of the funding should have been done to infrastructure and the other sectors. Such distribution of funds guarantees better returns and improve over all development. Apart from that it has now become the requirement of the common public.

In the issue of the indirect taxes, the Govt. should have shown more matured approach by removing all the major indirect taxes and then levying inform of a common VAT. All the other strings from the corporate sector should be removed and much simpler and a non-complicated VAT should be centralized. The more number of excise free zones should be developed and supported at the economically critical regions.

The Govt. has made a bold and correct decision by declaring timely and gradual removal of the stimulus given to the Indian economy. This wise step should be appreciated taking present market scenario into consideration. It is good to know that the FM realized soon enough and did not follow the path of Dubai, Portugal or Greece.

In a nutshell the Common Man's budget, according to me, seems to be a desperate capitalistic approach, with some democratic fears. I would always say that the budget 2010-11 was an optimistic along with some pinch of expected inflation.