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| The story of man |
The world is a great place, great in every imaginable sense and the story of man has been a heroic one, but this story has been blotched with occasional dark periods. What are these dark periods? What caused these dark periods when men suffered and became victims of the intellectual brigade of their times and before? Can we avoid this and if so, how? What exactly is going on in the world? One must ask these vital questions so that one may learn right lessons from them and prevent unwanted suffering and disillusionment.
We humans are making tremendous progress in science and technology, real visible unparalleled progress but our cultural and philosophical state remains not only stunted, but also is getting worsened, our morality is being corrupted, our truthfulness being depleted, our reason being slowly destroyed. What is causing this? Those who propagate false ideas have waged a war on the mind and have made innocent people their victims and it is not happening by default but happening deliberately at the behest of a handful and they are assaulting the mind with wrong ideas. It is happening in religion, art, schools, colleges, politics, economics, culture etc. This article is an attempt at revealing the true state of what exactly is happening, why it is happening and how to correct it.
For centuries, preachers have been preaching potato philosophy to the mindless multitudes, like cunning parasites they are, seeking to devour not the blood in the veins but seeking to kill the thinking mind. None is safe from their assault, not even those who think themselves to be outside the multitude. They are right now also carrying out this assault on your mind so be prepared and arm yourself, not with guns and ammunition but with ‘reason’ if you are to survive like a man and beat them in their own great evil game.
‘The greatest injury one can inflict on an individual is not by hurting him physically but by making the individual believe in wrong ideas.’ An individual’s thinking and philosophy affects his entire life and if this gets infiltrated with wrong ideas then it will impact each and everything adversely. This is exactly what is going on in the world today, our intellectuals, teachers, leaders, gurus etc. have been doing a dastardly job, they have conned and conned and conned the people for so very long and in so many various ways that now that the ‘wrong’ has become the new ‘right.’ Truth is being deliberately suppressed ever so more and as a result, today, falsehood, treachery and myopia are having a bull run, but the bull run cannot just go on forever hence eventually at some point in time a peak will definitely be reached. I don’t know exactly when it will happen but I do know is that when the truth has played out its course and the toxic energy of wrong ideas built over the decades and centuries starts to explode, then the people will truly start to awaken to the truth and there will be a revolution, a transforming and liberating revolution! We are moving towards it for sure and such is the state of the world I see and foresee.
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| Mr. Karl Marx |
The intellectuals of any time always set the standards for any culture and prevalent thinking in the society because they come out with the dominant ideas and these ideas slowly seep down the hierarchy into the multitude and are absorbed and assimilated by them. When such intellectuals propound faulty ideas then imagine what would happen, the entire base all the way down the hierarchy gets affected severely.
For example, let us look at Karl Marx, a man of formidable intellect and the most influential socialist who lived more than a century ago. He was a philosopher, economic theorist and sociologist who constructed the socio-political theory called Marxism. He wrote ’The communist Manifesto’ and ‘Das Kapital’, two most influential books in which his socialist ideas were expressed. His ideas have been widely adopted even if they have always led to disastrous results. The greatest experiment of Marxist socialism was demonstrated before in Russia via the formation of USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) by overthrowing the czarist and aristocratic rule and establishing a socialist state. The USSR however eventually broke up with drastic repercussions because Marxist ideas about economy just did not work. Marxist ideas are fundamentally flawed and that is the reason why they never work and always lead to strife, unhappiness and oppression.
Today Marxist ideology mainly ‘socialism’ is everywhere and causing damage all around. The idea gained foothold because on the surface it seems to be very benevolent and harmless hence is readily accepted. Only a deeper analysis of the idea and its nature and historical impact can make one aware beyond any doubt of how evil the ideology really is. Socialism is opposed to capitalism. In socialism, the private ownership of means of production is disallowed unlike that in capitalism where private property ownership is the key essential. Socialism advocates that production of goods and services have to be done to fulfill the needs of the people and not for any personal profit. The idea seems nice and right on the surface, but in reality it always fails to provide for all what it proposes and more than that causes extreme dissension among the people. A socialist system tries to cheat and control the free market forces by controlling every aspect of the economy and this never works and never will because nobody in the entire world is or can be smarter than the free markets. An inevitable outcome of socialism is called communism which is even worse, it is so worse that I intend to devote an entire article about it. Communism attempts to equalize forcefully all different kinds of people having different abilities into one classless social setup i.e. the beggar and the drunkard are supposed to get the same privileges as the man who works earnestly and hard to earn his living. How much more contradictory can it get! However I will deal with this in another article, as for now, I will go as far as to say that this single man called Marx has caused so much damage with his ideas in the world and on such a massive scale that the ravages of Hitler and Mao seem like a mild walk in the park.
Ayn Rand said, ‘A mixed economy is a society in the process of slow death.’ India is a mixed economy! A mixed economy is a combination of state ownership and control of business and privately owned enterprise. This therefore represents a big contradiction as opposed ideas cannot coexist and sustain. The idea of regulating and controlling an economy has always proved to be disastrous and still we cling to it and think it is right only because on the surface it looks right, this is the tragedy of our time that most of us are easily convinced by just the surface appearance. They never dig deeper to find the truth and readily accept whatever is thrown at them.
Einstein, one of my heroes said this about socialism, "I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate (the) grave evils (of capitalism), namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow-men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society."
Einstein was and still is my hero, because I admire him for his scientific achievements greatly, but I think his socio-political ideas expressed above are absolutely wrong. I find them to be so fallacious that I fail for words to communicate in this short article the true extent of the inherent evil in this statement of his and I doubt if he himself understood fully the scope and implications of what he was saying. If the great Einstein could fall for such an ideology then what to talk of the common man and of our intellectual political leaders whom we supposedly trust so much. That is why one must question everything and dig deeper to arrive at the truth in any matter so that we can escape unscathed from the assault of wrong ideas.
Another example to note is our present system of education. The education imparted today has an overall effect of killing the passion in the individual and subduing his capacity to think critically in an objective way. The education is aimed at breeding helplessness and lethargy within the student and taming his mind in a way so that he becomes a slave to the system. What is the purpose of education? This aspect when is not clearly defined gets ignored. When it is ignored, the masses start to perceive that having a degree and passing through this education system is all that matters in life. What everyone is doing must be right and therefore unquestionable. Moreover today the education is so much overpriced and advertised as if the end of the world is near if one has not passed through the education system and acquired appropriate degrees, it is of secondary concern that if one has learnt anything of value or not.
What I want to stress here is that the education system is fundamentally flawed and incomplete. It is flawed fundamentally because, the actual purpose of education i.e. to develop the thinking capacity of an individual is not realized but what happens is that the individual is conditioned and brainwashed to fit the system and become the bearer of wrong ideas and pass them along to the next generation just as his parents did.
The education system is incomplete because ‘philosophy’ is not included along with other subjects of study. This is the greatest drawback in education today and the impact of which is everywhere to see. The moral and cultural bankruptcy in the society today is a direct result of this. Religion, which is a crude and primitive form of philosophy, is taken for granted and deemed sufficiently complete for showing us the way to living a proper life and nothing better is thought possible or required. Hence, the idea of inclusion of proper philosophy is thought to be unnecessary for an education. The students are innocent and naive and their parents and teachers are a product of the same system and hence no worthwhile change takes place and the status quo remains as such.
Last, but not least the example of art is a very important one and hence it has to be discussed here. Literature, music, painting, sculpture etc. are all examples of art, they are different art forms but fundamentally, they serve the same purpose. Art reflects the true state of the society at any given time and even more. Today most of the artists come from the same educational establishment and are a product of the same kind of educational curriculum, and belong to similar intellectual and ideological stream of thought, which was, sown in their minds by the intellectuals whom they followed and looked up for ideological support.
Most of the art, which is being done today, is mostly lifeless and looks like drudgery. There does not seem to be clarity of thought but instead there is a hodgepodge of half-baked ideologies connected and loosely integrated together to guide the intellect of the artists in making art. The artists are confused and disillusioned and are unable to pinpoint what is wrong exactly. What is wrong is that fallacious ideas abound here in this field, and which, are usually considered and taken to be correct without even subjecting them to critical enquiry and there are not many to show the right way ahead.
The picture I have painted above certainly seems to be disconsolate and actually it is but I do not want to imply that the scenario is completely dark and no bright spots are possibly there. In fact, there are many bright spots where right ideas bloom and prosper and worthwhile progress is taking place. Science and technology are some of the bright spots because here there are clear provable ideas to deal with and no messing around with logic and reason is possible because everything is there supported with undeniable proof. People think that it is impossible to bring such clarity in field of philosophy, economics, education, art and other areas of life. But I think with certainty that it is possible and it can be accomplished by having an attitude to challenge different ideas, theories and beliefs via reason and logic, we have to find back our reason and make it the absolute standard in dealing with ideas and everything else. Only then can we be truly liberated and achieve the clarity of mind, a great life and a great future.
The world has suffered more from wrong ideas than from anything else. It is these wrong ideas we have to recognize and reject. It does not matter which field the ideas belong to or which great personality supports such ideas or how many numbers of people believe in these ideas. What matters is that people must not show support for any idea nor adopt any idea blindly without properly understanding it first. People must not hesitate to question the validity of ideas and the only way to do this is by using reason as an instrument of critical inquiry. This is the way to wither the assault of wrong ideas on the mind.
Thank You.
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