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Chapter title: Socialism and self-realization
14 April 1970 pm in Cross Maidan Archive
code:
7004145
ShortTitle:
SOCIAL02
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A friend has asked:
Question
WE WANT SELF-REALIZATION, AND WHAT YOU SAID LAST EVENING WAS
SOMETHING QUITE DIFFERENT. WHAT HAS IT TO DO WITH SELF- REALIZATION?
It has lots to do with it. It is not possible in today's Russia or China to seek and find what you say you are seeking. Let alone Mahavira, Buddha, Mohammed and Christ, even Karl Marx will not be allowed to be born in these communist countries. Man's search for self-realization needs a climate of freedom. And what you call socialism does not accept that man has a soul. Basically, socialism is a materialist way of life. One of its fundamental tenets says that man is nothing more than matter.
It is necessary to understand this, because the socialism that does not accept
man's soul will be dangerous. Because it will, according to its principles, do everything to suppress and wipe out man's soul if it is there.
The questioner wants to know what connection there is between self-realization and my criticism of socialism.
The connection is deep. In the history of man, socialism has emerged as the most formidable ideology in opposition to what you call self, soul or God. Never in the past had atheism succeeded anywhere in the world, nor had an atheist system, an atheist society or country, been established on this planet. Why? Because the atheists had mounted a direct attack on the existence of God and soul. And they lost the fight, they could not win. But communism has entered this battle from the back door. And for the first time in history the communists have created an atheistic society, an atheistic state.
Charvak and Epicurus could not win. Where all the atheists of the past had lost, Marx, Engels and Lenin won.
What is the secret? The secret is that communism brings atheism in from the back door. It does not oppose religion directly; its direct opposition is mounted against the rich, the capitalist. And then it says that to destroy the rich, it is necessary to destroy religion: the rich cannot be finished unless religion is finished first. Communism also argues that if the affluent has to be liquidated, it is essential to liquidate all the ideologies of the past that have given a foothold to the affluent class. Marx believed that every ideology is class-oriented.
Marxists say that if the rich man talks of religion, it is just because religion shields and protects him. And there is some truth in this matter -- a religion can be used as the rich man's shield. If a thief escapes from the clutches of the police by hiding himself in a temple, then for sure the temple has a hand in protecting him. But this does not mean that the temple is wrong. It is true that the rich have used religion as their shield, but this does not mean that religion is wrong. But the communists use it as a pretext to destroy religion.
Socialism also believes that man is only a by-product of matter . In its view there is no soul, no spirit, nothing beyond matter. It is because of this belief that Stalin could indulge in killing on such a massive scale. If man is only matter, then nothing dies if your throat is cut -- matter does not die. Mao, too, can indulge in killing with ease because man is only matter; there is no soul behind it. It is the
communists who, for the first time, succeeded in killing people without any qualms of conscience. That is just because man's soul has been denied. And constant effort is made to smother the possibilities, the opportunities, for its discovery and growth.
In this connection it is good that we understand a few things. Firstly, for its manifestation, the soul hidden inside a man needs the right opportunity and help. A seed has a tree hidden inside it, but the tree will not appear if you destroy the seed. Undoubtedly the tree is hidden, but to manifest itself it needs so many things -- propel soil, water, sunshine, manure. management. and a loving gardener to care for it. God is hidden in man like a flower is hidden in the seed. But God cannot be found by dissecting a man. Take him to a laboratory, place him on a table and dissect his body, but you will never find God.
I have heard Marx once said as a joke that he would accept God if he was caught in a test tube in a laboratory. And then he said, "But please, don't take your God to the laboratory even by mistake, because what kind of God will he be if he is caught in a test tube?"
No, God cannot be caught in a test tube, because a test tube is too small a thing. We cannot find him by dissecting man's body, but this does not mean that there is no God. If you open my skull and dissect my brain, will you find a thing like "thought" there? But thought is. Similarly you will not find a thing like love if a man's heart is opened and dissected. But love is, though there is nothing to prove it. It cannot be caught in a laboratory. It cannot be found even by dissecting a man's heart, which is its abode. Yet you know that love is. And even if all the scientific laboratories of the world tell you that there is no love. you will not accept their verdict. You will say, "I will not accept it because I myself have known love."
God is an experience, a nd it is beyond matter.
But denial of God is foundational to socialism. And once a society accepts this principle, it will close all avenues that lead to God. How will one sow the seed if he comes to believe that there is nothing like a tree hidden in it? It will be the greatest misfortune of man if it is accepted that there is no God. Then self- realization will be a thing of the past, it will become an impossibility. If people accept that there is no tree in a seed, then who will care to sow it, water it and care for it? The seed will rot and die.
The most dangerous tenet of socialism is its materialism. And remember that socialism will destroy everything -- climate, adventure, opportunity, and freedom
-- that is greatly needed for self-realization. At least the socialism that threatens to come right now will certainly do so. Because what is most essential for the socialism of the day is the destruction of human freedom. Without taking away man's freedom it cannot succeed.
And economic freedom -- freedom to pro-duce and own his production -- forms the largest pal t of man's freedom. Really economic freedom is man's basic freedom. And socialism cannot be established right now without depriving man of this freedom. Of course, if capitalism is allowed to grow fully then, and then alone, socialism with freedom will be possible. Then socialism will not need to destroy freedom.
But socialism with freedom calls for abundant wealth, as abundant as water and air. That is the first condition for the socialism that will come naturally, on its own. At the moment, no country in the world, not even America, fulfills the conditions of socialism with freedom. Maybe in fifty years' time America will reach that peak of affluence. But, if we insist, it is only through force that socialism can be imposed. And imposed socialism will mean the death of freedom. And in the absence of freedom the possibility of man's spiritual growth will be dim. Man's spirit needs the open sky of freedom to grow and bloom. And when man's economic freedom is gone, the next assault will be made on his freedom of thought. The partisans of socialism say that if they allow freedom of thought they will not succeed in creating a socialist system. So they cannot accept and ideology that goes against socialism.
It is interesting to note that there exists only one political party in Russia. Is it not amazing that elections are held with a single party in the field? That is why Stalin always won the elections with such a huge number of votes -- as no other person in the world had ever secured. Stalin always won with one hundred percent of the votes. And this fact was announced to the whole world with great fanfare, and great political capital was made out of it. And no one ever asked if he had a contestant in the field. He had no contestant, no rival. What does this mean?
It simply means that there is no freedom of thought in Russia. In the course of the last fifty years of socialism in Russia, very amazing things have happened in that country.
Even scientists are told by the government what to think and what not to think. They are told what scientific theories they have to formulate, and to formulate them according to the tenets of Marxism. If a scientific theory does not accord with Marxism, it is rejected and condemned. Consequently, in the last thirty years, principles of biology were current there that were not valid in any other part of the world. Scientists and research workers all over the world said they were wrong, but they were valid in Russia because Stalin decreed them so. Of course, they became invalid after the death of Stalin. Russian scientists had to say yes to the communist party, had to conform to it, because to stay alive, they were at the mercy of the party.
Before 1917, when the Bolshevik revolution came about, Russia produced some of the most intelligent men of the world -- names worth being written in letters of gold. But after 1917 Russia could not produce a single man of their stature. Not one man of the height of Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Lenin, Turgenev, Gogol, Dostoevsky! What is the matter?
It is true that communist Russia produced writers and thinkers who received awards from their government, but not even one among them can come near the grandeur and glory of those whom Russia produced in the days of her utter poverty anc1 degradation, in the worst days of the czars. Russia has yet to produce a thinker as intelligent and as creative as those of the pre-revolutionary times. Why?
It is because the basic requirement of spiritual growth is denied in communist Russia. I,et alone Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky, even Lenin is not possible in present-day Russia. If Lenin, his soul, wants to be born again, he will have to go to England or America; he cannot be born in Russia again .
In fact, people who know say that Lenin was poisoned, that he did not die a natural death.
The man who made the revolution and who wanted to turn Russia into a socialist country, was killed. The other man was Trotsky, who came next to Lenin as the architect of the revolution. He had to flee Russia for his life, had to run from one country to another to hide himself: He had left behind in Russia his pet dog -- whom the communists killed in spite -- ,and then they hunted Trotsky down in Mexico and killed him brutally At no time in its history has the human society seen killing on such a massive scale. But it was easy, because there is no soul,
only matter is. So people were killed like flies. It made no difference whether the communists killed their own men or killed rats. It was in accord with their philosophy.
Another logical conclusion that stems from the thinking has no soul is that man has no need of freedom. If socialism succeeds -- the socialism that we know -- it is bound to turn man into a machine. The process is already underway.
In this context I would like to repeat what I said yesterday: that man's bondage will end fully only when the machine will release man from the drudgery of labor. Man will really be free from poverty of every sort when automatic machines will do everything and man will no longer be required to work. One way to it lies through the full development of capitalism but if we are in a hurry to bring socialism right now, Then we have to take the other way, the opposite way, and this will turn men into machines. That is exactly what is happening in Russia and China at the moment. That is the other alternative: turn man into
,a machine. Then he need not think. A machine does not think. And since they believe that man is just body, their argument seems logical: he need not think: what he needs is food for his stomach, clothes for his body and ,a shade over his head. That is all he s.
Have you ever heard ,a socialist say that man needs a soul too. Socialism ends up with three demands of mall: bread, clothes and housing. Man needs nothing more. He need not think at all -- thinking will land him in unnecessary trouble. It is good that he be deprived of the bother; then he will live undisturbed. like an animal lives. He should have plenty to eat and drink, he should be properly clothed, he should have good housing, he should work and live happily. What use is thinking? It only brings worry and trouble of every sort. It even leads to rebellion. The socialist not only says so, he also works to this end --
he creates devices to eliminate thinking. And their best device is this: Before the child begins to think, indoctrinate him with socialist concepts and beliefs so that his mind is in shackles -- heavily conditioned.
Ask a child in Russia, "Is there God?" and he will say immediately, "No, there is no God." A friend of mine visited Russia in 1936. He visited a school and put this question to the children, "Is there God?" Do you know how the children answered him? They said,
"We wonder how a man of your ripe age can ask such a question. Before 1917 there was a God he is now no more. He is not; he was." Children are being taught that there is no God, no soul, no religion, no higher values of life There is only one value in man's life --
if he has plenty of food, clothes and housing, he is satisfied.
A curious sort of caste system has come into being in Russia, as there is in India. There are now two castes there: one, that of the rulers or the managers, and the other of the ruled or the managed. Classes in Russia have not been abolished, they are still there, but they have changed their forms. Here in India, as we say, there are those who exploit and there are others who are exploited. Similarly in Russia there are those who manage and there are others who are managed. Russia is still a class society, not a classless society. A number of people are the managers and the rest of the people are the managed. And the division is clear- cut. In fact, it is wrong to describe them as classes, they are really castes.
There is a difference between class and caste. The class is fluid -- it is easy for one to move from one class to another; and the caste is rigid, fixed -- it is not fluid, resilient. For example, the shudras of India are a caste. Howsoever a shudra tries, he cannot become a brahmin. Whatever he does, he cannot be admitted into the caste of the brahmins. The brahmins are a caste, not a class. And the frontiers of a caste are well-defined, rigidly fixed.
A new caste system is being set up in Russia, as it once happened in India. It has two castes: one of the managers and the other of the managed -- the rulers and the ruled. A member of the managed caste cannot enter the caste of the managers. It is so difficult, there is no way. The manager will not allow him, because he has his own interests, vested interests. Please do not commit the mistake of thinking that Stalin had only as much rights and privileges as the poor worker of Russia has today. And don't think that there is equality in Russia, or for that matter, in China. Mao and his attendants don't have equal rights and privileges.
Equality is just not possible today. Until the time there is an overabundance of wealth, so much wealth that it loses meaning, the classes will remain. Classes will not disappear, they will only change their forms. If ever a classless society comes into being, it will be in a society where wealth will be as plentiful as water and air. As long as wealth is scarce and has value and meaning, as it has
till now, a classless society will remain a dream. The people who will control power and property will become a new class per se.
In my vision, however, class is better than caste. Because caste is rigid, fixed, it has no fluidity. Class is better because it has mobility: a poor man can become rich and a rich man can become poor. The poor and the rich are classes, not castes, and the Russian system is giving rise to castes. There, things are becoming rigid and immobile. And the chasm between the establishment and the rest of the people is so great that it seems impossible to move from one to the other.
But it seems necessary that we examine together the fundamental assumptions of socialism. A friend has asked, DON'T YOU ACCEPT THE BASIC CONCEIT OF
SOCIALISM THAT ALL MEN ARE EQUAL?
Let us consider it. First, all men are not equal and all men cannot be equal. It is not a question of the right of equality. The fact is that all men are not equal and they cannot be.
But I say that there should be equal opportunity of development for all. What does it mean?
It means that every person should have equal opportunity to be unequal. I repeat: Every person should have equal opportunity to be unequal. Everybody has the right to be what he wants to be, and this right to be himself should be equally available to all. And the right to create wealth is one such right. The right to acquire knowledge is another.
Everybody in the world cannot become Einstein, nor can they become Buddha or Mahavira. Rarely is a man born with the genius of Einstein. Similarly, I say, everybody cannot become Ford. But, strangely enough, we do not accept that the capacity to produce wealth is as much inborn as the capacity to produce poetry, mathematics, philosophy and religion. The capacity to produce wealth also comes with birth. A Ford is not made, he is born. Some people are born with the talent to produce wealth and many others are not born with this talent. This is a fact, not a theory. And if we thwart and suppress people born with the talent to produce wealth, if we prevent them from producing wealth, then the world will be the poorer for it; it will never be prosperous. It is like saying that all people
should produce poetry equally, that there is no need for Kalidas or Shakespeare to be at the top, that we cannot tolerate it. We will create a society of classless poetry in which everybody will compose poetry equally In that case it will be a grotesque rhyming of verse; it can never be poetry. Then Kalidas and Shakespeare will not be born. Certainly, everyone can put a few rhymed verses together, but that will not produce Shakespeare or Kalidas. Shakespeare and Kalidas were not rhymsters. Poetry is something very different and rare. Any one of us can daub color on a poster or a canvas, but that will not make of him a Picasso or a Van Gogh. Van Gogh and Picasso are born geniuses.
The fact that socialism does not accept that every person is born different -- he is just like himself and not like everyone else -- is very dangerous. The truth is that every man is unique, peerless and incomparable. It is impossible to find another person matching him in every way. No two persons, not even twins, are alike, the same -- let alone all mankind. It has never happened. And that is why every person has a soul, a higher self.
The soul means the potentiality to be different. Machines can be equal, the same; a hundred thousand Fiat cars coming from the assembly line can be the same, but not two persons. The Fiat car has no soul, it is just a machine. Machines can be equal; only machines can be equal. And if attempts are made to force all men to be equal, it will be possible only by pulling man down to the level of animals. At any level higher than that of the animal, men will remain unequal. So turn man into a machine and he will have equality.
And men will be increasingly unequal as they rise higher and higher spiritually. And they will be increasingly equal as they descend lower and lower. We are all approximately equal at the level of sleep. We are very nearly equal at the level of our hunger and other needs. Everybody needs food, clothes, houses and sex. In these matters we are all equal, even more equal than animals. But as we ascend to the higher levels, which a Buddha, a Kalidas, a Picasso, an Einstein, a Bertrand Russel reach, inequality grows in the same measure. Because as the soul soars high, it is left alone, it is more and more alone. Then a man like Mahavira or Buddha is alone, solitary, rare -- the rarest. Then for millions of years we will not see another like him.
But the crowd, burning with jealousy, can say, "We will not allow it to happen any more; we will make all people equal." And once this madness for equality gets hold of us -- and it is doing so all over the world -- then we will destroy the
glory and the greatness, the grandeur and the splendor that man is heir to. Of course, we will then achieve the leveling of men, the equality of men. Everyone will have food and clothes and jobs and sex. Eat, drink and be merry! -- only on this level of life can equality be achieved. But at what price?
Equality is not possible; it is not even desirable. But equality of opportunity is a must.
Socialism mounts its first and frontal attack on equality of opportunity. Producers of wealth are its first target; they are sorted out and finished first. Its next target is the thinker -- one who is unequal, superior in thinking. The socialist says that we are out to equalize all, so we cannot allow inequality of thought. Now it is so surprising that in the last fifty years there has been no great debate in Russia -- not even one. Fifty years is a long time. The truth is that there is not one idea in man's life over which a debate, a controversy cannot be raised. Every idea is seen from the particular angle of the thinker, and it is not necessary that another person should agree with it. Even the loftiest of thoughts have been opposed, and opposed without fail.
Great debates on ideas, clashes of ideas, ideological upheavals happen in the same measure as man's intelligence grows. But in the last fifty years Russia has not witnessed any great debate, any upsurge of thought, any explosion of ideas, or a cultural revolution that might have stirred the psyche of the country to its roots. Let alone a tidal wave, not even a ripple could rise in these fifty years in the psychic sea of Russia. Why?
If you ask the socialists why, they will simply say, "Because we are engaged in building a socialist society, we cannot allow debates, discussions and oppositions; we cannot tolerate any revolt and rebellion." They also say "Right now we don't have any space for free thinking, we cannot afford it. So we will suppress freedom of thought for the present, but we will certainly allow it when everything is okay."
But then it will be too late. It will be impossible for Russia to think again, and to think boldly, after thinking has been gagged for fifty years. Suppose a man's feet have been in shackles for fifty years and then the man is released one fine morning and told, "Now you are free, so run and climb the mountain." Do you think he can climb the mountain? It will be impossible for him even to walk a few steps inside his own courtyard. Man's mind begins to wither and die if it is
enslaved for a length of time.
To the friend who wants to know what connection there is between my talk about socialism and self-realization, I would say that the greatest danger facing man and his quest for the soul is that the politician all over the world is, by and by, out to concentrate all power -- political and economic -- in the hands of the state, and thereby, he is going to capture and control man's mind and soul. So it is imperative that we think it over, debate it, and raise our voices against it.
When the socialists attack freedom they do it with cunning and tact. Their tactics are appealing. They say they want equality and therefore curbs on freedom become necessary. With freedom, they argue, they cannot achieve equality. Socialists don't talk of freedom, they lay all their emphasis on equality. Equality, for them, comes first; without equality freedom is a myth. And as long as inequality remains, freedom will remain a dream. So equality has to be had first, they argue, even if freedom has to be destroyed for its sake.
Now we have to make our choice. We have to decide clearly which has the highest value, equality or freedom. We have to settle our preference. And all of mankind has to decide, and to decide soon: What is more valued, freedom or equality?
Remember, if freedom lives, it makes it possible for equality to happen in the future. But if we sacrifice freedom for equality, then there is no possibility for regaining freedom in the future. Because once we lose freedom, it will be extremely difficult to regain it.
And this matter called equality is very unscientific and anti-psychological. Men are not equal. And so, if we impose equality on man with force, it will only destroy him. Man should have full opportunity to be unequal and different; he should be free to differ, to dissent, to deny, to rebel. Then only will he grow and blossom and bear fruit.
Socialism today, is the loudest voice against man's spirit, soul, against God and religion.
Another friend has asked: Question
SOCIALISM WANTS TO DO GOOD TO THE POOR. ARE YOU AGAINST THE
GOOD OF THE POOR?
Me -- against the good of the poor! In fact, no one should go against the good of the poor.
But remember, this talk of serving the poor has been going on for thousands of years --
and innumerable servants of the poor have come and gone -- but up to now they have not done a thing for the poor. But they have done lots for themselves in the name of the poor.
And the poor have remained where they always were. The servants of the poor have nothing to do with the poor, but the poor become their camp followers, because they are told that everything is being done for their sake. And the poor follow them, and even go to the gallows at their behest.
But the people who become martyrs for socialism are not the same as those who grab power in the name of socialism. They are altogether different people. The poor suffer and die for socialism, but those who come to power are not poor. They are a new class of the rich, a new bourgeoisie.
In fact, the man who comes to power gets rich immediately. There is really no difference between man and man. Today he is a partisan of the poor, but tomorrow when he is in power he will have his own vested interests. Now he will want to stay in power, and to do so he will systematically destroy the very ladder with which he reached the top. Who knows? -- by the same ladder others may come to the top and displace him.
The poor have never been served; they have never been helped. Yes, in the name of the poor there have been plenty of movements, plenty of revolutions, and plenty of bloodshed. But they did the poor no good. It is time that we become alert about this whole business. Be alert and aware when somebody tells you that he wants to serve the poor -- for sure, he is a dangerous man. He, too, is going to use the poor as a ladder. And the poor people are foolish; otherwise they would not have been poor. They are poor because of their foolishness. So they will accept him as their new messiah. This is how they get their messiahs again and
again, messiahs U ho exploit them, enslave them, torture them.
Hitler rose to power through "doing good for the poor". Mussolini came to power for "the good of the poor". So did Stalin and Mao. Everybody in the world seems to be busy doing good for the poor, and no good ever happens to them. The poor have remained as poor as ever. Why is it so?
There is a single reason why wealth is less and the number of people very large. As it is, you cannot do a thing for the good of the poor. Put whosoever in the seat of power, and nothing will happen. The real problem is that wealth is much less than the number of people on the earth. We need more wealth, much more. We need to have more wealth than the number of people. We need to have more wealth than the needs of the people.
And the next problem is: How to produce this wealth?
The irony is that the poor people are in opposition to those who can produce more wealth.
The poor are fighting their own benefactors. And this has been an ancient habit with mankind, and it is amazing. Galileo was killed, and yet the whole world today benefits by his discovery. We crucified Jesus, and yet the teachings of Jesus are instrumental in humanizing the world. We poisoned Socrates, and yet Socrates' sayings will continue to guide mankind's spiritual evolution for eternity.
Man is really a strange creature. He can never know who is really working for his good.
His difficulty is that those who shout and scream, professing their concern for the people, come to the forefront, while the real benefactors are doing their work silently, unobtrusively. And we are influenced by propaganda. But I say that the real do-gooders are very different. A scientist doing research in his laboratory is one, but not a politician busy politicking, quibbling and intriguing in Delhi. The politician can do no good, though he is always before the eyes of the people. And the poor man will never know that his child is alive today because some Pasteur found a vaccine in a laboratory. He will never know who saved him when he was stricken with T.B. He will never know the ones who are working strenuously to prolong his life and to find a remedy for cancer and other deadly diseases. The poor man is not grateful to the person who found electricity. But he
knows the politician because he holds a flag in his hand and shouts. In fact, there are a few people who enjoy shouting and make it their business.
I have heard... A boy stood on a pavement and began shouting in a hoarse voice to sell his newspapers. A man became curious and asked him, "What profit do you make? I see you every day, straining your vocal chords so much." The boy said, "I make no profit at all. I buy these papers from the vendor on the opposite side of the street at the rate of ten paise each and sell them for the same price." The man said, "You seem to be crazy! You shout so much for nothing?" The boy said, "No, I am not crazy," which made the man fire another question at him. He asked, "Then for what?" And the boy said, "For the sake of shouting. I enjoy shouting." Then the curious man left, saying, "You will make a good politician."
Who are the people really working for the good of man? They do it very silently; they are not even known. They die for you, but you don't know them. Do you know who the scientist was who died tasting a deadly poison on his own tongue so that you are saved from it? Do you know the names of those who died working on disease-bearing germs so that you remain alive and healthy? You don't know the scientists who are developing automation so that man is saved from the drudgery of labor. But you know the politician who shouts from the rooftops that he is working for your good.
The politicians have done no good. The revolutionaries have done no good. And all revolutions have failed. Not only revolutions that we know have failed to do good, they have definitely done immense harm to the society of homo sapiens. They have obstructed the growth of man; they have impeded the natural flow of life at many points.
Now we need a different revolution -- altogether different from the past revolutions. We need a revolution that will make us forget all other revolutions. We need a revolution that will tell the do-gooders, "For God's sake, leave us to ourselves. Enough is enough. You failed to do us any good for five thousand years; we don't need you anymore. Be quiet!"
The good of the poor depends upon the production of wealth, more wealth. It depends upon the production of such instruments as can increase production a thousand times. The well-being of the poor demands that class conflict be eradicated from the world.
But socialism, every variety of it, thrives on class conflict. Class conflict is the oxygen on which socialists all over the world live. Inciting the poor against the rich, slowing down and stopping production in factories, strikes and bunds and marches have become their stock-in-trade. And the poor are blissfully unaware that through all these strikes and marches they are only adding to their poverty, multiplying their miseries, because they are instrumental in hampering production, in reducing production all around. Is this what you call "the good of the poor"?
If you really want your "good", then forget the politicians and put all your energies into the imperative task of increasing production and adding to the wealth of the society.
Forget the politicians and work hard. Don't impede production by setting one class against another. Class conflict has to go. It is time classes come closer to each other and work unitedly for massive production.
But the politician will lose his business if he promotes friendly relations and understanding among the classes. The political leader lives by inciting conflicts and strife between different groups and classes. Without them he will cease to be. And as long as the leader is alive on this earth, wars will go on. Say good- bye to all your politicians and wars will say goodbye to you. They are the architects of conflict and strife and war. And they depend on them for their very existence.
Hitler has said in his autobiography that if you intend to be a great leader, then you need a great war. And if there is no real war, then a cold war will do. But war is a must, so that people are kept in fear. Because when they are in fear they need a leader to cling to. But when they are free of fear, when they have no worries, then they don't need the politician.
So keep war alive, create new conflicts and wars, and the masses will flock to you and ask you to lead them.
In the twenty years after Indian independence, the politicians prevented the industrialization of India by inciting class conflicts all over. This is the greatest crime they have committed; they have stabbed the country in the back. But the poor will never know that it was especially a stab in their backs.
Another friend has asked,
Question
WHAT YOU SAY GOES IN SUPPORT OF THE CAPITALISTS. WON'T YOU SAY
SOMETHING AGAINST THEM?
Of course, I am going to say a lot against them. And I will have to say it because the capitalists have also played a basic role in creating class conflicts. In fact, the man who becomes wealthy soon begins to think that he belongs to a different world -- different from the rest of the society. This is utterly wrong; no man becomes great by amassing wealth. By amassing wealth no one gets to the top of the world. If a man paints a picture, he does not get to the top of the world. A sculptor does not think that he is great, but a rich man thinks himself to be high and mighty. And as long as a rich man goes on feeding his ego with riches, he will arouse the jealousy of the poor; this is inevitable. I said yesterday that the jealousy of the poor is being aroused and inflamed.
Fifty percent of the responsibility for the poor man's jealousy belongs to poverty; another fifty percent belongs to the ego of the poor man's rich neighbor. The rich man will have to give up his arrogance.
Production of wealth should be his joy. But if he inflates his ego with wealth and thinks himself to be superior to others, to be a demigod, then it is inevitable that the masses around him will do everything to pull him down.
Really, wealth should not become a means to gratify the ego. On the contrary, the more wealth a man has, the more humble and egoless he should be. He should be egoless because he has gone through the abundance of wealth and found that nothing is gained by gaining wealth. Buddha and Mahavira were sons of the rich, but they renounced riches and walked away. Why?
Once Buddha was camping in a village that belonged to some other state than his father's.
The ruler of that state came to see him, and he said, "I have come to remonstrate with you. Are you crazy? Why did you give up your palace, your riches, and the grandeur and glory associated with them? This is crazy! I beseech you to give up this craziness. You marry my daughter, and become heir to my state; my daughter is my only child. Give up the monk's robe and manage the affairs of my
kingdom." Buddha said, "The kingdom that I left behind is larger than yours. Now don't tempt me." Then the king asked, "What is it that made you leave your kingdom?" and
Buddha answered, "I realized that I had everything and yet there was an emptiness inside me which wealth could not fill."
My vision is that it is difficult for a poor man to drop his ego because he does not know that even after having riches one has nothing. But the rich man's ego should go. He alone is truly rich who has come to realize that he has everything -
- riches and mansions, cars and everything that riches bring -- yet there is something inside him which is utterly empty. If you fill that emptiness with wealth, you become egoistic, arrogant. And if you see that emptiness with clarity, against the background of riches, then egolessness arises.
If the rich man gives up his ego, it will be easier for the poor to shed his jealousy. But if the rich remain abundantly egoistic and arrogant, then the poor are left with nothing but Jealousy and bitterness to nurse.
The arrogance of the rich provides an opportunity to the politician to fan the jealousy of the poor. And when the politician does so, the rich man becomes more arrogant in defense. He seeks to defend his ego, what he calls his prestige, in various ways. But these ways are dangerous; they only add fuel to the fire.
No, if the country has to be rich, it is urgent that class conflict be reduced and eliminated.
And this is the responsibility of the rich -- much more than that of the poor, because the poor man's jealousy is very natural while it is unnatural on the part of the rich to be egoistic. While the poor man's jealousy is real, the ego of the rich is irrational and unreal.
I remember a small story. There is a hospital inside a jail with a hundred beds where sick prisoners are kept for treatment. Like the prisoners, their beds are also numbered. The number one bed is allotted to the prisoner who is a little hefty and enjoys the favor of the jail authorities. The second bed goes to one with less influence with the authorities. The prisoner on bed number one hundred thinks himself to be a nobody, a nonentity.
The man on bed number one is chained to his cot like the others, but he has an
air of arrogance about him, the arrogance of being somebody. His bed is close to the window.
Rising from his bed every morning he looks out and says, "What a beautiful morning!"
And all the other prisoners feel humbled before him. They think him to be the most fortunate man and feel jealous of him. And the prisoner in bed number one goes on talking. Sometimes he praises the grandeur of the full moon in the sky, at other times he describes the beauty and smell of the various flowers.
By and by the number one bed becomes the most coveted bed of the hospital, the object of ninety-nine prisoners' desires and dreams. The fellow prisoners tell the occupant of the number one bed, "You are the most fortunate one among us; you must have earned it in your previous lives," but in their heart of hearts they pray for his death. And whenever he has a heart attack -- occupants of bed number one often suffer from heart troubles -- it sends a wave of joy among his fellow prisoners and they begin to look forward to the time when he will die. But he survives, because people like him die with difficulty. And when he is a little better, he begins again his hymns of praise to the splendor of the world beyond the window.
At long last the prisoner in bed number one dies.
His death sends a wave of joy among the ninety-nine prisoners, each of whom aspires for his bed. A contest starts -- as it happens in Delhi after the death of the "number one" man.
A mad race is on. They flatter the officials of the jail to win their favor. They even bribe them. And ultimately the prisoner offering the largest bribe wins the race. The winner is overjoyed and soon occupies the coveted bed. And the first thing he does after occupying it is to inspect his state and surroundings. This is what one does after becoming the president of the country. As the new occupant looks out the window, all his joys vanish into thin air. He is utterly disappointed to see that there is nothing except the massive outer wall of the prison. There is no sky, no sunrise, no flowers, no song of the birds --
nothing of those joys that his predecessor had gleefully talked about for years. And now he is in great difficulty -- how to say that there is nothing? And do you know what he said to his fellow prisoners?
He said, "Hey guys, how fortunate I am! The sun is rising, the flowers are blooming and the birds are singing." And again the rest of the prisoners say outwardly, "How fortunate you are," and secretly pray for his death as well.
I have also heard that this hospital has been there for hundreds of years, and for hundreds of years the same drama is being played again and again. And up to now no prisoner in bed number one has gathered enough courage to say the truth.
The man getting to the top of the ladder of wealth should gather courage to say that though he has amassed wealth, he has not found his soul, he has not known the truth, he has not experienced love. In fact, he should realize the utter poverty of his being and say it. Then he will cease to be the pillar of ego that he is -- and, with the cessation of ego, he will also cease to inflame the jealousy of the poor. If class conflict has to be removed, the rich man will have to drop his arrogance and come down from his imaginary height.
Man does not become great because of wealth. A clerk in an office is not small because he is a clerk. To be really human is altogether different. It comes with the richness of being, which has nothing to do with outer richness. And the man who has no respect for this inner richness harms the society in many ways. The rich man should know that wealth does not make for inner richness. He should also know that God resides within the poor too. He has not to look down upon the poor man as if he is an animal. Only then we will extinguish the fire of class conflict. And this fire can be extinguished. And the country can engage itself in creativity, in the production of wealth, only if class conflict disappears.
A friend has asked, Question
HOW IS IT THAT INDIA COULD NOT PRODUCE WEALTH?
There are reasons for it. And I would like to go into a few of them. The first reason is that we, as a people, are anti-wealth. It must have been a most unfortunate moment in our long past when we decided to go against wealth. For thousands of years we have respected poverty, even deified it. And we also respect the poor. Perhaps the reason was that we were very poor, and because of our envy of the rich we began to respect the poor.
If I am a beggar and there is no way whatsoever to be a king, then as a last measure, my mind may say that I am happy being a beggar, that I would never, like to be a king. This would be the last device of the poor man's ego.
India has remained poor for thousands of years. Our poverty has been so long that it became necessary to find a way to gratify our ego even in the midst of poverty. And we found it at last: we gave poverty many good names. We said, "It is simplicity, non-acquisitiveness, renunciation," and the rest of it. And if some wealthy person embraced poverty voluntarily, we bowed down to him, we touched his feet. All the twenty-four teerthankaras of Jainism were sons of kings. Why could not a poor man's son be accepted as a teerthankara?
There is a reason for it. The poor man has nothing to renounce, and we measure a man's greatness by what he renounces. Really, wealth is our measure, whether one amasses it or renounces it. Mahavira is great because he renounced a huge amount of wealth. Buddha is great because he renounced his riches. No one would have cared to take note of him if he had been born in a poor family. We would have asked, "How much gold, how many palaces, elephants and horses did you renounce?" And he would have said, "None, because I had nothing." How could one be a teerthankara if he had no wealth? To be a teerthankara, one needs to be a millionaire. We measure everything with money. Poor people measure everything with money. We measure one's wealth by the amount of wealth one has; we measure renunciation by the amount of wealth one gives up.
Once I visited Jaipur. A man came to me and said, "There is a great sannyasin here; you must see him. He is an extraordinary sannyasin." I asked, "How did you find out that he is a great sannyasin?" And he answered, "The king of Jaipur himself touches his feet." I told the man, "You respect the king of Jaipur, and not the sannyasin. What would you say if the king refused to touch his feet?"
On another occasion I happened to be the guest of a sannyasin. In the course of our talks, every now and then he said that he had renounced wealth worth hundreds of thousands of rupees. Once I asked him, "Can you tell me about the time when you renounced so much wealth?" And he said, "Almost thirty years ago." Then I said, "Your renunciation did not click, because you remember it even after the lapse of thirty years. You are still enjoying the wealth. Once your ego thrived on its possession, now it thrives on its renunciation.
But in each case wealth remains the basis."
A poor man's measure is wealth.
But it was most unfortunate that we accepted poverty and thought that it was a blessing.
We said that contentment was of the highest. And that is why we failed to produce wealth, and we remained poor.
Now in order to produce wealth we have to stop respecting poverty. We have to stop calling the poor by the name of daidranarain, saying the poor are God. We have had enough of this nonsense. The poor are not God, and poverty is not a virtue. Poverty is a great disease, a curse, a scourge. It is like a plague, and it has to be destroyed, and wealth has to be respected. We will produce wealth only if we respect it.
We create what we desire, intensely desire to create. We created poverty because we accepted it. If somebody asked Gandhi why he traveled in a third-class compartment, he used to say, "Because there is no fourth class on the railway trains." If there had been a fourth class Gandhi would have traveled in that class saying, "I travel in the fourth because there is no fifth class on the train." Now Gandhi would not he contented until he traveled in the train of hell itself. We say that Gandhi was a mahatma, a great soul, a saint, because he accepted the third class.
Because we all, being poor, travel in the third, we think of Gandhi as the real mahatma.
Really, we are sick of traveling third class; we would travel by first class if w e could afford it . But that is not possible, so we have to lend respectability to the third class by honoring one who travels by it. Third class is now sought. It is turned into an object of our respect; it is made important -- and it gratifies our ego.
This false and senseless gratification of ego has ruined this country. It is time for it to go.
We need wealth. Wealth is not everything, but it is certainly something. Self- realization is not possible through wealth, but it is also true that without wealth self-realization is more difficult to attain. There is at least one great value in wealth: it helps us to forget our bodies, bodily needs. Bread serves one great
purpose: we are freed from our bodily concerns. In hunger it is difficult to forget the body. If I have a headache, I cannot forget my head, but with the headache gone I forget it completely. If I have a thorn in my foot, my whole mind enters and lives around the paining foot. With the thorn taken out, the mind leaves the foot, it becomes free, carefree. Where there is a want, there is a sore. It hurts and haunts us. The poor man lives in his body, he lives on the level of the body; he cannot think beyond it. The rich man has an advantage: he can forget his body.
That is why I feel that the whole world should be made prosperous and rich, so that every person can rise above his body. And the day we forget the body, we begin to take care of our soul. When the needs of the body are fulfilled, then the question arises: What next?
What to seek next? The search for religion and God arises after all the physical needs of man have been satisfied. It is the last luxury. When you have all the good things of this world, the ultimate journey begins.
So now we have to change all our old choices; they were illusory, ill-conceived and wrong.
There is yet another important matter to consider. Our acceptance of poverty has one other reason: We believe that a man is poor because of his past sins, the sins of his past lives. This was also a device of consolation. We said that the rich were rich because they had earned merits in past lives, and the poor were poor because of their past sins. This fatalist thinking again provided us with consolation. And it made poverty and misery bearable. But it also made it impossible to end poverty.
Poverty is not the result of any mistakes that we made in our past lives, it is the result of the mistakes made in the present life itself. If what we do in this life fails to produce wealth, then poverty is inevitable.
And secondly, poverty is not only the result of our individual ways of life, it is also the cumulative effect of our group or collective life and its inner organization.
If we understand two things -- fallacies of past karmas and individual ways of life -- then we can get rid of our age-old poverty.
As long as we believed that the lifespan of a man was determined by fate, we
could not increase our longevity. But the same lifespan increased considerably when our belief in fate declined. There was a strange custom in Tibet. When a child was born, he was dipped in ice-cold water and then taken out. This ritual was repeated several times, as a result of which seven out of ten children died only three survived. The people of Tibet believed that of the ten, seven died because they were destined to die, and three lived because they were destined to live. And they thought that this ritual was just a way of testing the fate of the children. This custom continued for centuries, and as a result, millions of children lost their lives.
It is wrong to conclude from the history of the Tibetan custom that if these millions of children had been spared this ordeal they would yet have died because they were destined to die. It simply shows that their resistance was low. But resistance could have been improved. But the Tibetans opted for killing them.
Our lifespan increased when we realized that longevity was not determined by fate. We now live much longer.
In the same way, we believed that diseases were caused by principles of karma, and so we did not do anything to fight or eradicate disease. However, when we dropped this belief, the situation changed radically. Now any number of diseases have disappeared, and a time will come when they will disappear altogether.
We are poor because we have decided to be so, and poverty can end only when we reject it with all our heart and mind. And if the whole country so decides and says goodbye to poverty, there will be no difficulty whatsoever. But the will to end poverty should come first -- the ending will follow inevitably.
Now the poor man is taught new stupidities, new superstitions in place of the old ones.
He is being ceaselessly harangued that he is poor because he is exploited by the rich, and that in order to liquidate poverty the exploiter has to be liquidated first. This is an utterly senseless argument. Liquidation of the so-called exploiter will never end poverty.
Another friend has asked, Question
YOU ARE WRONG IN SAYING THAT THE POOR MAN IS NOT EXPLOITED.
WHY IS HE PAID BY THE EMPLOYER ONLY TWO RUPEES FOR WORK WORTH TEN?
I ask this friend what will happen if this poor man refuses to work for two rupees? And then let him try to sell his ten rupees worth of labor for ten, not less. Where will he get this amount? Maybe he will fail to earn even two paise if he refuses to work for two rupees. And how did you determine the worth of his labor to be ten? Do you know how wages, the price of labor are determined?
Marx preached a strange theory that the worker is paid much less than the real value of his labor. But the question is that if the worker refuses to work for two rupees, is he going to be employed elsewhere for more? It is true that search for wages higher than the current ones should be undertaken. So also for higher production. But if we think in terms of the exploited and the exploiter, we will only create a wall of enmity between the poor and the rich, and the country will suffer. It will never attain prosperity if the institution of production is turned into an institution of conflict, strife and enmity.
So, it has to be an institution of friendship and cooperation. The worker and employer have to work with understanding and in cooperation. The worker should know that it is not a question of exploitation, it is a question of increasing production and productivity.
And the employer should know that it is not merely a matter of earning profits, but a question of investing them in further production. And if this twin understanding happens, the country will attain affluence unfailingly.
But if what the socialists say is accepted, the country will go to the wall, because after twenty years we will be poorer than we are today. Socialists give no thought to the matter of production, their sole concern is distribution of wealth. And this thing appeals to the poor -- that he will share the wealth of the rich for nothing. He is poor because he lacks the will to work, to create, to produce. So what more could he desire if wealth comes free of charge? And he joins the chorus: "Stop all work and march! We demand distribution of wealth!"
If this mad wish takes a firm hold on the country's poor, it means that India has
finally decided to remain poor forever. Then riddance from poverty would be simply impossible.
And now the last thing... There remain a number of questions to be answered; I will answer them tomorrow. A friend wants to know if I am paid by the capitalists for supporting them.
No payment so far, but if there is a suggestion please bring it to me. It is strange, the whole pattern of our thinking is such. When I speak in favor of socialism I receive letters saying that I am Mao's agent and paid by China. And when I criticize socialism they say I am in the pay of America and I am an agent of American capital.
Is it a crime to think? Do only agents think, and no one else? I wonder if the questioner himself is connected with some agency. If not why this question?
We cannot imagine that one can think independently. We say one must be an agent. This means that man does not have a soul of his own and he cannot think on his own.
Another friend says that as I sometimes speak in support of socialism and again against it, I create confusion.
In reality our problem is different. We treat socialism and capitalism as contradictory to each other. This is a very wrong assessment Socialism is nothing more than the developed stage of capitalism; they are not opposite. So, when I speak in support of socialism, I speak about the end, the goal. And when I support capitalism, I speak about the means, the process. There is no contradiction whatsoever. But because we are in the habit of thinking in terms of enmity, we cannot think in any other manner. We have been trained to think in terms of conflict, not cooperation. The political leader knows only the language of conflict.
But I am not a leader. To me it seems that socialism is the end, and capitalism the means.
And that is why I am in favor of socialism and I am not opposed to capitalism. This has to be understood very clearly.
Any number of friends have written to me that I say things that are very
inconsistent, that sometimes I say one thing and at other times its very opposite. This charge is again wrong.
You were young yesterday, and today you are an old man. If someone tells you that you are very inconsistent -- once you were a child, then young and now you are old -- what would you say to him? You will say that it is not inconsistent, it is growth. Childhood leads to youth, and youth in its turn leads to old age. In the same way capitalism will lead to socialism, socialism to communism and communism to anarchism. The day communism will have been established rightly, there will be no need of the state. But these are the gradual processes of social growth; they are not contradictory at all.
I am not inconsistent. Whatever I say is relevant, and that is why I say it. In my view, socialism will not come through those who talk of it -- the demagogues. There is every possibility that they will impede it, prevent it. They may succeed in subverting and sabotaging the system of capital formation, and consequently prevent the advent of socialism in India. But nobody can think that Tatas and Birlas are going to bring socialism here. I say to you, Tatas and Birlas are doing exactly that. I mean to say that if the wealth that they are engaged in producing becomes massive and abundant, then it is bound to culminate in socialism, and in no other way. It is inevitable. And then socialism will be a very natural consequence of capitalism.
But Karl Marx thought in terms of thesis and antithesis. He thought in terms of conflict and struggle and the revolution of the proletariat. And his followers are conditioned by his teachings. Marx had no concept of evolution. This is the basic weakness of his philosophy. But evolution is the fundamental law of life and its basic function. And revolution becomes necessary only when the evolutionary process is blocked. Revolution should not step in where evolution itself has not happened. As I said yesterday, it would be wrong if a childbirth is forced much before the child has completed nine months in the mother's womb. It would be dangerous. The child will die; even the mother may die. And if the child survives, it would be as good as dead.
It is also possible that childbirth does not take place even after completion of the pregnancy, and a Caesarian section becomes unavoidable. In the same way, if the evolutionary process is impeded, revolution will become necessary. Revolution will be needed to remove the impediment. If America does not become socialist after fifty years, a revolution can be needed there. But it was not necessary for
Russia and China, and it is not needed in India yet. It is unfortunate that revolutions are taking place where they were not needed at all.
Lenin had predicted that the road of communism to London lies through Moscow, Peking and Calcutta. It was a dangerous prophecy which seems to be coming true. Already there is a paved road from Moscow to Peking, and footpaths between Peking and Calcutta have become visible. Nobody can say that Lenin's prediction will really come true. But in case it comes true, it will be most unfortunate for Asia and the world. There is yet time to remove the footpaths because they are in their rudimentary stage. But how can it be done in the absence of a definite vision and goal?
The irony is that while socialism has a movement and a philosophy, capitalism has none.
Capitalism has no philosophy of its own. That is why it cannot take a bold stand. it is always on the defensive. And if it does not change its posture, its stance, it is going to die.
Its being on the defensive means that it accepts defeat. A person or a system, if it wants to win, must not be on the defensive. But capitalism is committing the same mistake.
Capitalism says, "It does not matter if Calcutta is lost, we will take care of Bombay." And if tomorrow Bombay is lost, they will take care of Delhi. This is the certain way of retreat and ultimate defeat.
So, this will not do. When a movement is based on jealousy, hatred and violence, it gathers much fire and goes on spreading like wildfire. A great force of thought. ideology and philosophy is needed to counteract and defeat it. And I say, it is possible to build that force. As I see it. capitalism is dying for want of argument, for want of philosophy. It is not able to argue its case, and it is afraid of appearing in court because it cannot produce evidence in its favor. A single party is present in the court and getting away with a default judgment.
Capitalism must present its case, Its philosophy. It should announce in clear terms that we are part of socialism. part of its development. Socialism is not the first, but the last stage of capitalism. And when capitalism presents its case well, we will drive away communism not only from Calcutta and Peking, but from Moscow itself. That is not so difficult.
There is great unrest in Russia at the moment. It is seething with discontent, stress and strain. Its youth are in foment, but they are not in a position to rebel. They don't have the wherewithal, the necessary ideology. That ideology, that rebellion. has to reach Russia too. America also suffers from the same deficiency
-- it does not have an aggressive ideology. America is also on the defensive, and that is why it is in difficulty. But I think socialism will not reach London via Moscow, Peking and Calcutta. If socialism has to spread in the world, its headquarters will be Washington. Socialism via Washington.
There can be no other way.
And if socialism goes all over the world via Washington, it will be natural, healthy and happy.
If you have any questions, please give them in writing and we will discuss them together.
I am grateful to you for having listened to me with such love and attention. I salute the God residing in each of you. Please accept my salutations.
Beware of Socialism Chapter #3
Chapter title: No going back to the past 15 April 1970 pm in Cross Maidan Archive
code: 7004155
ShortTitle: SOCIAL03
Audio: No
Video: No
A friend has a question, and there are a few more questions to the same effect. The friend has asked, HOW IS IT THAT YOU SUPPORT CAPITALISM WHICH IS BASED ON
SELFISHNESS?
A few things have to be understood in this connection. Firstly, down the ages we have been taught many wrong things, and among them, one is that it is wrong to live for oneself. In fact, man is born to live for himself, but he is taught to live for others, and not for himself. The father should live for his son, and the son, in his turn, should live for his son. This means that neither the father nor the son can really live. They say, "Live for the society, live for the nation, live for humanity, live for God, live for salvation, but please, never commit the mistake of living for yourself."
This thing has been so incessantly preached that it has sunk deep into our consciousness, and we really believe that it is a sin to live for oneself. But the truth is that if a person has to live, he can only live for himself, and for no one else. And if living for others happens, it is just the consequence of living very deeply for oneself; it iS Just Its fragrance.
No one in the world can live for the other; it is just impossible. A mother does not live for her son; she lives for the joy of being a mother. And if she dies for her son, it is really her own joy. The son is an excuse. If you see a man drowning and you jump into the river to save him, you might say to others that you risked your life to save another man's life, but it would be a wrong statement on your part. The truth is that you could not bear to see the man dying, which was your own pain. And to rid yourself of this pain you jumped into the river and saved him. You had nothing to do with the other really. Would you have saved him if you had not suffered pain? There were many others on the bank of the river too; they felt no pain and they did not do a thing. Whenever a man saves another man from drowning, he really does so to save himself from pain, because he cannot bear to see him dying. Deep down he is saving himself from pain and sorrow.
A man serves the poor because he cannot hear to .see them suffer. So, he is wrong if he says that he serves the poor. The poverty of another man hecomes his own sorrow and he does something to alleviate it. He just cannot live with
this sorrow, and so he serves the poor. Till now no man has lived for another man; each man lives for himself.
But you can live for yourself in two ways. You can live in a way that harms others; you can live by injuring and killing others. And you can live in a way that helps others to live and grow too. But the talk of altruism, of the service of others, is dangerous. When we ask someone to live for others, we really ask him to live a life that is unnatural and unhealthy.
I have heard that a father was once teaching his son the purpose of life. Many times teachings like this have proven to be dangerous. He said to his son, "God has made you for the service of others." The son, if he was like the sons of olden times, would have taken to serving others as asked by his father -- but he belonged to the new age, and he said, "I take it that God made me for the service of others, but why do you think he made the others? Just to be served by me? Then God has been unjust to me. And if he made me to serve others and made the others to serve me, then God seems to be very confused.
Instead of this complex arrangement he could have laid a very simple rule: 'Let each live for himself.'"
And remember, when somebody serves others he always does so with a motive. Service is a bait with which he dominates others. Really, he begins with service and ends with lordship. Beware of one who professes to serve you. He is certainly going to ask the price. He will say, "I served you; I sacrificed everything for you." A mother who tells her child that she sacrificed everything for him is going to cripple the child, even ruin him.
And a father who says so to his son will possess and dominate him all his life. It is just natural. It is natural that he will ask for the price of his services.
But I say that a mother is not a mother who tells her child that she suffered and sacrificed for him. She may have been a nurse, but not a mother. Really, she has not known what motherhood is. Caring for the child is the joy of motherhood; it is its own reward. It has nothing to do with the child. If she had no child, she would have shed tears for the rest of her life; she would have thought her life to be a waste.
It is in the very nature of man, in his innate nature, to live for himself. But this simple and clean truth could not be accepted -- we condemned it; we called it
selfishness. But selfishness is natural and therefore right; it is not unnatural. It is unnatural only if I live at the cost of others, if I injure others for my sake. So a society should not be so organized that we ask everyone to live for the society, to sacrifice for the society. It should be such as allows every member to live for his sake, and the law or the state should intervene only when one hurts the interests of others.
But the so-called socialist or communist ideology believes that the individual has to be sacrificed at the altar of the collective, the society. For them, society is the end, and the individual has to live for the society. Whenever such goals are set, the individual is disarmed, he becomes helpless. He says, "What can I do? The society is so big that I have to submit to it, to sacrifice for it." So much bloodshed and killing in human history were the results of this thinking. Someone is dying for Islam, and someone else is killing for Islam. They say, "If you die for Islam, your heaven is guaranteed. Don't live for yourself, live for Islam." Someone else says that you have to live for Hinduism, and not for yourself. You have to live for the temple, for the idol in the temple -- you have to die for the sake of the idols. Again, someone says that you have to live for the sake of India, or for the sake of Pakistan or China, or for the sake of socialism.
But no one says that everybody should live for himself, which is so natural and simple.
We let go of natural and simple truths; we forget them altogether. The truth is that every man can live only for himself. And if we force him to do otherwise, he will turn into a hypocrite. That is why people who take to the service of others, necessarily, unavoidably become hypocrites. Because while they live for themselves, they have to show that they are living for others. Thus they live a double life; they are one thing inwardly, and quite another outwardly. That is inevitable
The politician claims that he is dying for the nation, when in reality he is dying for his chair, for his position. The chair has become synonymous with the nation. If his chair is lost he would not care a bit for the nation; he would let it go to hell. Similarly the priest proclaims that he is dying for God and religion, when in reality he is dying for his position in the church; he is dying for his ego.
But we are not prepared to accept this simple truth. And that is why hypocrisy enters our life and corrodes it. And because of hypocrisy and its thousand and
one tentacles, life moves onto wrong tracks and becomes hellish.
I say to you that to be selfish is to be healthy. There is nothing sinful about it. In my vision, men like Mahavira, Buddha and Christ are the most selfish men on this earth.
Why? -- because they live purely for themselves, seeking their self, their soul, their bliss, their freedom, their God. And, curiously enough, they happen to be the most altruistic people who walked this planet. The reason is that when a man discovers himself and finds his enlightenment and bliss, he immediately begins to share it with others. He is now on a new journey -- a journey of sharing his joy, his benediction. What else can he do? When clouds are full they rain; when bliss is full it overflows, it shares itself with others.
And this too, is selfishness.
The same is true with misery. When a man is full of misery, he shares it by hurting others. These are the martyr-like people abounding all over in the form of parents, teachers, politicians, saints, gurus and mahatmas. They are trying to live for others, and they are very dangerous people. In the first place, they themselves fail to grow and bloom; they remain stunted and they are increasingly miserable. And the more miserable they are, the more they serve you. And then they ask for their return, for the price of their services. So by way of serving you they dominate you, they strangle you. That is the price you pay for their services.
The people who served this country until 1947 are now out collecting their rewards. They have been in jails and now they are asking for the presidency of the country as their price.
Nobody tells them that it was their pleasure that they courted imprisonment and that they enjoyed it. Nobody had promised the presidency in return for going to jail. They fought for the country's freedom; it was their own choosing. Nobody had forced them to do it.
But now they are trying to dominate us, to rule over us forever. They say that we have to honor them for their services, that we have to pay them back.
Every servant demands his price. And nobody knows when a servant will turn into a boss. The servant is already preparing to be a boss; service is only a means
to this end.
He alone truly serves others who is supremely selfish. And to be so selfish means that he is seeking his own highest good, his own benediction. And the day he attains it, its fragrance, its joy begins irresistibly to reach others. He is fulfilled, he is overflowing with bliss, and he cannot but share it. But then this man knows that whatever he is doing is again for his own joy. He does not even expect a "thank you" in return.
Buddha visited a village. The people of the village said, "We are grateful to you for coming to us and sharing your wisdom with us. It is your compassion that you traveled such a long distance for our sake." Buddha said, "Please don't say so. In fact, I am grateful to you for kindly coming to listen to me. I am fulfilled, I am overflowing with bliss, and I want to share it with you. If you had not come, I would have gone calling you from house to house. I am like a cloud in search of parched land where it can rain; I am like a river in search of the sea to pour itself into; I am like the flower in full bloom scattering its fragrance in all directions. I am thankful to you for having come to me so I can give of myself to you."
Those who know, know well that service of others is also an act of deep, profound selfishness. Service is the joy of the servant himself, and this joy can be possible only if we accept selfishness, not condemn it.
The capitalist system is the most natural system where nobody is called upon to sacrifice himself for another. Everybody lives for himself, in search of life. And through this search he will certainly live for others too, because nobody can live alone and by himself.
To live means living in relationship. Life is relationship. If all of us seek our happiness and bliss, if a thousand persons sitting here find their happiness, then we are going to have happiness a thousandfold. And we will have to share it; it will go on spreading.
There is no other way. On the other hand, if each of us lives for others, if each is made to sacrifice himself for others, then all of us will be left with nothing but piles of misery; there will be not one iota of happiness to share.
To the friend who says that the world is in a mess on account of selfishness, I would like to say that he is mistaken to think so. It is not because of selfishness
but because of the unnatural and unscientific teaching of altruism, of service to others, that the world is in a mess. It is enough if you find your own happiness, which is natural and easy. If you do this much in one lifetime -- between birth and death, you find your own bliss -- the world will be grateful to you. Because the man who finds his happiness ceases to hurt others, to cause unhappiness to others. Why?
The man who knows that he wants to be happy also knows that it is impossible to be happy by hurting others. The man who knows that if he hurts others he will lose his own happiness, also knows that if he makes others happy his own happiness will multiply.
This is the simple arithmetic of life. And the day a man sees the truth of it, a revolution happens in his life: he is transformed.
But the religions of the world teach renunciation. They ask you to renounce, to sacrifice, and not to be selfish. The Sanskrit word for selfishness is swartha and it is beautiful.
Swartha means "that which is meaningful for the self". Swa means the self, the soul, and artha means meaning.
How is it necessary that what is in my interests should go against your interests? If you go deeper and deeper you will find that what is good for you cannot go against the good of others. Because deep down, at the level of being, we are all united and one. It is impossible that what is good for me should be basically bad for you. And the contrary is also true -- what is harmful for you would be the same for me.
I had been to a mountain which had an echo point. Whatever sound one makes there, the whole mountain echoes it. One of the friends with me knew how to imitate the sounds of different animals. He barked like a dog and soon the mountain was resounding with the bark of a dog. And it seemed that a thousand dogs were barking, and that they were all over the place. I said to the friend, "Do you see it? You produced the sound of a single dog, and it was magnified into that of a thousand dogs -- as if we are surrounded by dogs and only dogs. On account of your own small dog's voice you are now surrounded by the uproar of a thousand dogs. How beautiful it would be if you now speak in the voice of a cuckoo."
The friend knew how, and he called like a cuckoo. And now the mountain was filled with the sweet melody of a thousand cuckoos, resounding beautifully all over the place.
This incident made the friend silent and pensive, and he retired to a secluded place. He came back to me after a while and said. "It seems to me that you had devised a message for me through this incident." Agreeing with him, I asked. "Can you tell me what the message was?"
He then said. "It appears that this mountain with an echo point is symbolic of man's life.
What we say or do here returns to us a thousandfold. If we bark like a dog we will be surrounded by a thousand barking dogs. If we hurt others the hurt will return to us multiplied by a thousand. If we treat the world with anger, hate and violence, the same hate and violence will come back to us, magnified greatly. The old dictum is true that if we sow the seeds of the thorn, we will have to reap a whole harvest of thorns alone. In the same way, if we share our love and bliss with others it will return to us a thousandfold. Life is really an echo point."
That is why I say that I am not against selfishness. If you can find your swartha -
- the meaning of your self -- you will do so much good to the world, good you cannot do in any other way.
For this very reason I am not opposed to the system of capitalism -- which is based on selfishness. Rather. I support it fully. It is this selfish system which will gradually develop into a socialist system. My vision is that if everybody pursues his self interests, we will, sooner or later, come to realize that we unnecessarily come in the way of the interests of others, and then we will cease to do so. If all of you can multiply your selfishness -- your self interest, your happiness -- a thousand times, then humanity is destined to achieve socialism. It will come, not through the conflict of self-interests. but through cooperation of self-interests.
Another friend has asked, CAPITALISM IS FULL OF CORRUPTION AND BLACK
MARKETING. WHAT HAVE YOU TO SAY ABOUT IT?
Capitalism is not the cause of black markets and corruption. Scarcity of capital is the cause. When there is a shortage of wealth we cannot prevent corruption.
Where the population is large and wealth scarce, people find ways and means to own wealth; they care little for the right ways and means. If you want to do away with corruption, then stop worrying about corruption, because corruption is a byproduct. We have nothing to do with it. But all the politicians, all the saints, are busy fighting corruption. They say, "We are determined to end corruption." But the real problem is different -- it is lack of wealth.
Corruption is the natural consequence of poverty. If there are a thousand persons here and there is food enough only for ten, do you think there will be no attempts at procuring food through stealing?
Dr. Frankel has written a small book of his memoirs. Dr. Frankel was a psychologist who was thrown into one of Hitler's concentration camps. Mind you, Hitler was a socialist. Dr.
Frankel says in his memoirs that it was in that prison camp that he came to see the real face of man. The prisoners were given only one meal in twenty-four hours, and that too was very meager. They were almost being starved. Dr. Frankel says that he saw people known as great poets, writers, physicians and engineers, stealing pieces of bread from the bags of their fellow prisoners during the nighttime. Among them were men highly respected for their character and moral values, men who held high offices like that of the mayor of a city, and they were seen begging for a cigarette on bended knees -- and unashamedly. And none of them thought that he was doing anything wrong.
Writing about himself, the famous psychologist says that the bread he was given was so little that it never satiated his hunger; he was always in a state a semi- starvation. So he broke the bread into a number of small pieces to be eaten at small intervals of time so they would last for twenty-four hours. And he found that day in and day out he only thought of bread and nothing else. He forgot all about God and soul, consciousness and unconsciousness, analysis and psychology, and the rest of it -- which had been the most significant things of his life. In Hitler's concentration camp he realized that bread was everything and nothing else mattered. Frankel also admits that he was not sure that if given the opportunity he would not have stolen another's bread.
Bribery, corruption and black marketing only prove the fact that there are too many people and too little goods. We refuse to understand this simple fact. Corruption is not a disease, it is just a symptom of a disease which is deep-
rooted. When a man has a fever, it is said that he is "down with fever". Fever itself is taken for the disease. But in reality fever is a symptom, an indication of some deep disorder in the physiology of the man who is running a temperature. Similarly, corruption is a symptom of a social disease --
poverty. But the politician and the priest believe that corruption can be ended without caring for production and population control. They say that God is sending more and more men to this earth. If God is responsible for our increasing population, then he is the most corrupting factor today, because corruption grows with the growing population. We have to restrict, even to stop this ever-flowing gift of God. We have to tell him, "Enough is enough; we don't need more men. And if you send more, then give to each one of them ten acres of land and a factory to work with."
People are not immoral, as the priests and politicians would have us believe. It is the situation that is immoral. No man is immoral. Really, man is neither moral nor immoral, but the situation is immoral. And a person can be moral in an immoral situation if he strives hard, but then his whole life will be wasted in the very effort. He will not be able to do anything else. He will somehow save himself from being immoral. He will, with tremendous effort, suppress the temptation to steal; that is all he will achieve. So it is a question of changing the situation, because really the situation is immoral. No amount of anti-corruption campaigns are going to succeed if the situation is not changed. But if production grows and wealth is plentiful, corruption will go by itself. Nobody will steal if there is an abundance of wealth in the society.
Another friend has asked, Question
BUDDHA, MAHAVIRA, KRISHNA AND RAMA -- THEY ALL TALKED OF
RENUNCIATION, BUT YOU SAY THAT WEALTH HAS TO BE INCREASED.
WHY THIS CONTRADICTION?
It is true that I ask you to produce more wealth. It is now difficult to ascertain exactly what Buddha, Rama and Krishna had said But if they said that wealth need not be produced, then they were wrong.
Talk of renunciation on the part of those who have no wealth is ridiculous. What would they renounce? Buddha could talk of renunciation because he was born in an affluent family. Buddha could afford to leave Yashodhara, his wife, behind, and move to the forest to live the life of an ascetic, because he knew that Yashodhara had a palace and every other means of security that one needs. But if a Buddha of the present times leaves his Yashodara a for twelve years, then at the end of twelve years he will find Yashodhara in some brothel and not in her home. Buddha could leave his son. Rahul, behind. because on his return he would find him in his own home. But it a present-day Buddha leaves his son and goes to the forest, the son will be found either in some orphanage or begging on the streets of Bombay. It would even be difficult to locate him. Buddha had abundant wealth, and men like him can very well talk of sacrifice because they have plenty to sacrifice.
But the irony is that people who had nothing chose to follow those who had plenty. All the wise men of this country came from affluent families, while the rest of the people lived in poverty and misery. I wonder how the people accepted their teaching and agreed to follow them. But there is a logic behind it, a reason for it. The poor derived some pleasure, some satisfaction from their acceptance of the Buddhas. They now said to themselves, "What is there in wealth? Buddha had so much and he is begging in the streets. We are already Buddhas; we are already beggars." The mind of India, that had suffered so much poverty, felt consoled and gratified. We were pleased to see Buddha and Mahavira begging. He bowed down to them not because of them, but because of the consolation we derived from them. We thought that we were blessed in our misery.
But remember, it is one thing to live in a palace and then leave it and beg, and quite another never to have lived in a palace and be a beggar on the streets. Buddha was not an ordinary beggar; even as a beggar he moved with the dignity and grace of a lord. Even emperors looked small before him, because he had renounced that which they were dying for. He was the emperor of emperors, because empires had become meaningless for him.
On the other hand there are those who have never known riches and whose whole being craves riches, but they don't have the will and energy and intelligence necessary to attain it. And then they say the grapes are sour. Buddha and Mahavira provide them with an alibi, an excuse. This is how they console themselves.
India has long been in that state of self: deception, and because of it she is in a mess. And this is her main difficulty, her real problem. We have to understand clearly that Buddha and Mahavira and men like them had renounced affluence, and not poverty. They had not known poverty and misery. Buddha's father had assembled around him all the beautiful women that were then available in Bihar. He had known women through and through.
And so it is understandable that he transcended sex.
But there are people who have not known a woman in their lives, not even touched one, and they are trying to become Buddhas. They are constantly dreaming about women.
There is a release from sex after you have experienced it thoroughly. But one who practices celibacy by keeping away from women will get mole entangled in sex than a married man gets. Really, the married man wants to run away from women; the husband is constantly trying to escape from his wife, to get rid of her. But the unmarried man cannot know the torments of the married. And if he decides to practice celibacy he is bound to be in trouble. great trouble.
To use contentment as an escape from poverty is one thing, and to give up riches with wisdom is quite another. It was unfortunate that India accepted the leadership of those who had really known riches and then renounced it. That is the basic reason why this country could not be prosperous, why it has remained poor for centuries. We took to a philosophy -- a philosophy of poverty -- and became its prisoners. And, curiously enough. we seem to enjoy it. It is like enjoying an itch!
We have had enough of this nonsense. It is time we said a complete goodbye to it. The mind of the country has to understand very clearly that we have to have wealth. Wealth is a must, because we can go beyond it only after we have it; otherwise it is tremendously difficult.
I don't say that there cannot be any exceptions to this rule, but exceptions only prove the rule. Somebody wrote to me that a particular saint was poor and yet he went beyond . H e may have been an exception. It is just possible, but he is not the rule. Rules cannot be made on the basis of a few exceptions. If there is malaria in a certain village and one of the villagers escapes infection without taking anti-malaria vaccine, does it prove that anti-malarial vaccination is
useless? Maybe he escaped just because malaria germs were negligible in his case. But he cannot be the rule. And the whole village will die if he is made the rule; and if the whole village dies, he cannot live. It is also possible that this man survived because all others had been vacillated; their immunity helped him.
Never should an exception be made the basis of a rule. But this is precisely the mistake India has been making. We make rules of exceptions; we do not make rules on the basis of the ordinary people -- the uncommon, the extraordinary, the rare become our basis.
And we try to regiment the common men and women according to them. But to make the uncommon an ideal for the common is like destroying the latter, and this is what has happened up to now.
If Mahavira becomes the ideal because he is naked, and all the people are asked to follow him, there is bound to be trouble. Mahavira had used clothes, he had lived in rich clothes, he had enjoyed clothes. Now those clothes have a definite the joys that nudity brings to Mahavira. Now if you tell a man who was born naked, who did not have clothes, that there is great joy in being nude, he will just laugh. He will say, Mahavira was a god, a teerthankara, an extraordinary man. He might have enjoyed being naked, but as far as I am concerned I enjoy clothes tremendously." Now see the difference. Mahavira enjoyed nudity because of clothes; this man enjoys clothes because of nudity. There is no great difference in the state of their minds. Their logic is the same: happiness comes from the unknown, the unfamiliar. The forbidden fruit tempts. And the known, the familiar, repels, is useless. For Mahavira, clothes, being familiar had become useless; for this man, nakedness had no use for the same reason.
We have to get rid of teachings that support poverty. These teachings create a non-dynamic society, a static society. It is because of them that the Indian society is so stagnant and dead. It has lost all dynamism of life.
If we have to create a dynamic society, a live society, we will have to lay its foundation on discontent, not on contentment. We always ask why we are poor. We are poor for the simple reason that we are contented with poverty. And as long as we are content, we will remain poor. Wealth will have to be created, and it can be created only by those who are discontented with poverty. There is no other way but discontent. Wealth has to be produced; it does not rain from the skies. It is a human product, and a discontented mind.
a searching mind, an adventurous mind is its first requirement.
But all our teachings applaud contentment. And it is these teachings that make for a static and dead society. And we have to get rid of them.
A friend has asked, Question
YESTERDAY YOU TALKED ABOUT GANDHI AND CRITICIZED HIM. BUT
GANDHI ALWAYS WANTED THE COUNTRY TO BE PROSPEROUS, HAPPY
AND ITS PEOPLE TO BE GOOD. WHAT DO YOU SAY?
Certainly he wanted all this. But remember, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Just desiring is not enough. I may very much want your cancer to go, but if I give you plain water for medication, your cancer will not disappear. It is not going to be cured by good intentions alone. I fervently desire you to be free of your T. B., and I tie a talisman on your arm -- your T.B. will remain. To cure it the science of tuberculosis will need to be understood.
Gandhi always wanted this country to be prosperous and happy and its people to be good.
But the ways he advocated were ways that lead to poverty and degradation. If Gandhi succeeds. India will be doomed to live in poverty forever. If what he said is accepted fully by this country, 250 million people out of its 500 millions will have to be ready to die and to die soon. And if the whole world accepts him, two billion out of its three and a half billion will have to perish right now. Gandhi's thoughts alone can kill more people than all the murderers of history -- Genghis, Hitler Stalin and Mao put together. Why?
Because what Gandhi says -- I mean his thinking -- is antediluvian; it belongs to the pre-industrial age, the feudal age. He is essentially a revivalist. The instruments of production that he advocates, like the spinning wheel and the spindle, belong to medieval times and are not at all useful and adequate for the huge human population of today. With such primitive tools of production we
cannot keep alive so large a population; they will simply starve and die. Please don't accept his teachings and implement them; otherwise the future history will say that Gandhi was the greatest killer the world has ever known, because he killed the largest number of men ever.
We need a mode of production that can maintain the huge population that we have now.
The mode of production that Gandhi advocated might have been adequate for the age of Rama the ancient age, when the population of the world was very small. The slow-going spinning wheel could do. But now very speedy tools of production are needed. because there are so many mouths to be fed. so many bodies to be clothed, so many men and women to be kept alive. Gandhian methods cannot keep them alive. If you accept and follow Gandhiism, poverty will become permanent; we can never remove it.
The questioner has further said that I criticize a person like Gandhi, who practiced what he professed. and that there was such unity in his word and deed.
There cannot be a greater lie than this. There was such a wide chasm between Gandhi's professions and his practice as can hardly be found in any other man's life. It has had no parallel. What I say may surprise you, but it iS true.
Gandhi always opposed the railways, and he spent the major part of his life on the railways, traveling all over India. He opposed the railways throughout his life and he traveled by railways throughout his life. He opposed allopathy, the modern medicine, all his life, and he said that chanting the name of Rama was the best medicine. But whenever, when seriously sick, he came near death, he always took to allopathy -- which saved his life. Neither the name of Rama nor naturopathy could save him -- though he used them until the disease became very serious. When everything else failed, he always took shelter in allopathy and survived. It is strange that all his life he opposed this system and it saved him throughout his life. Gandhi opposed the modern system of post and telegraph, and he made maximum use of them. He was one of those who wrote the largest number of letters to be carried by the postal system.
Here is a man who is fighting the railways system -- always sitting in a railway carriage. I am the only person who can compare with Gandhi as a user of the railways, and that only if I continue, at the present rate, to travel for the rest of
my life. And remember, he was an enemy of the railways; he said that railways w ere a sin and they should disappear from the world. He opposed every modern instrument and yet made the fullest use of them. And you say that there was unity in his professions and his practice. How is this unity?
I say there was no unity between Gandhi's word and action. What he said he would not translate into action. If you look at his whole life vou will find that it was very different from his philosophy. But our difficulty is that when we accept someone as a mahatma, a great soul, we close our eyes, we become blind to him.
I saw Gandhi only once and I never felt like seeing him again. I was quite young then, just in my teens. His train was passing through my town and lots of people went to have a glimpse of him at the railway station. So did I. As I was leaving my home, my mother put three rupees into my pocket for small expenses, because the railway station was a good three miles away.
When I arrived, I found the railway platform terribly crowded and it was not possible for a boy like me to have a glimpse of him from there. So I went to the other side of the train where there was no platform. When Gandhi's train arrived I entered his compartment through the window. Gandhi did not notice me; his eyes fell first on the three silver coins showing from the breast pocket of my muslin shirt. He asked what it was, and I hurriedly took the money out, saying that I should donate it to the fund for the welfare of the untouchables. And before I could say yes or no, he dropped the money into the box meant for the fund. And the way I am, I said with perfect ease, "It is okay. You did well that you put the money in the box." And I really felt happy about it, thinking that I had done well not to have spent it already. But then, as my intuition dictated, I picked up the donation box with the money, and said to Gandhi, "Now I'll take the box with me, and I'll use this money in scholarship grants for the poor students of my school." Really, I had no intention to take away the box, which I picked up just to know how Gandhi would react to it. He said, "No, no, don't take the box. It is meant for a great work. This fund is meant for the untouchables. Leave it." To this I said, "Sir, you are not ready to part with this box with the same ease with which I gave you three RUPEES. " He then handed me an orange which I refused to take, saying, "I am not going to take this orange. For three rupees it is too costly. Better keep it with you." Then I looked into his eyes and said to myself, "The man I came to see is not there."
I came out of the train and stood on the side. The train moved and Gandhi was
still watching me and not the crowd. He seemed puzzled about what had happened.
Back home my mother asked me if I saw mahatmaji. I said, "Mahatmaji did not turn up."
Mother was now puzzled, and she asked, "What do you mean? Everyone says that he passed through the town." I then said, "The man who passed through the town was Mr.
Mohandas Karanchand Gandhi. He appeared to me to be a seasoned tradesman and not a mahatma, not a great soul."
This incident took place in my early days. Ever since I have tried hard to understand Gandhi, and the more I tried the more my first impression of him was confirmed and strengthened. But our difficulty is that once we believe something, we refuse to think and examine it. I do not say that you agree with me, but I do say please don't have fossil-like opinions about men and things, because it harms the thinking process of the country; it may even prove fatal.
Now everyone thinks that whatever Gandhi said is bound to benefit the country, because he was a mahatma, a saint. But it is not necessary that, being a saint, one only does good to the community.
I visited Rajkot recently. In the open area where I was going to address a meeting, I saw a number of bulls and cows. They were all very sick and skinny, almost dying. Inquiring, I learned that there was a scarcity of water as a result of a drought in the villages around Rajkot, and these animals had been collected from there so they might be saved from dying. I then asked what efforts were being made to save them. The man who was explaining things told me a strange story.
A saint came to Rajkot and fed the emaciated cows with quality sweets that people usually have for feasts, and the same day forty of them died. But the newspapers carried the saint's photograph saying, "What a saint! -- who feeds animals with quality sweets meant for human beings!" It seems that to be a saint it is necessary to part with intelligence altogether. He gives sweets to animals that badly needed water and fodder to save them. It would have been better if they were butchered instead -- they would have died peacefully. But the saint was applauded for being a kindly saint and a devotee of cows.
India's poverty will never go, it will abide, if the remedy that Gandhi suggests is applied.
To end poverty, technology is needed, and Gandhi was the greatest enemy of technology.
He said that technology was the invention of Satan. But, in fact, it is technology that is going to end poverty and bring prosperity to this earth. And it is again technology which iS going to take us to the moon and Mars when this earth will be overpopulated. In fifty years from now this planet of ours will cease to be a tit place for us to live.
I do not know how, with Gandhi's spinning wheel, millions and billions of men can be fed and clothed and housed. And I do not know how, with his spinning wheel, man will reach the moon and other planets and settle there.
Fortunately, however, there is no such danger, because even those who shout "Victory to Gandhi!" do not believe in his teachings, do not follow him. So there is no possibility of any danger. But if his ideas find wide acceptance the danger will be there. And then his ideas will turn back the hands of the clock by two thousand years; we will be back in the medieval times. What he calls his rama- rajya, the legendary kingdom of Rama, is nothing but another name for an extremely backward social system. Rama-rajya was much too backward in contrast to the present times. But Gandhi always aspired for rama-rajya Another friend has said that what I am saying is exactly what the ancient Hindu culture stood for; it is the real socialism that the Hindu culture advocated. But I fail to understand what he means. He also says that socialism had already happened in India.
Socialism did not happen anywhere in the world in the past. And as far as India is concerned there was no possibility whatsoever of its happening here. And the sooner you get rid of what you call your ancient culture the better. A disease does not become good just because it is your disease. And nothing becomes respectable just because it is old and ancient. But the difficulty is that we begin to like even our shackles if they have been on our feet for thousands of years. I don't understand what you are talking about. When did we have socialism in India?
Another friend has said that as all that is good was already there in India in the
past, so we should go back to the past.
There was nothing good in the past to which we should go back. In the first place we would not have left it behind us if it was good. No one ever leaves the good behind. And if one leaves it behind, he does so in the search for the better. But we have been laboring under great illusions. We believe that the India of the past was a golden bird. It was never so. Of course, it was a golden bird for a few, and it remains so even today; but it was never a golden bird for all.
We believe that houses in ancient India were without lock and key. People were so good and honest that padlocks were not needed at all. But I don't think this could be true. And if it was true, then the reasons for it were different from those we infer. Buddha had been exhorting people not to steal; Mahavira had been exhorting people not to steal. If people were so good and honest that they did not have to lock up their houses, then who were they whom Buddha and Mahavira asked not to steal? If people were really good and honest then Buddha and Mahavira were crazy.
Theft was always there, but if padlocks were really not seen anywhere, then it only means that they had nothing in their houses that was worth stealing. There could be no other reason. Or maybe. they did not possess the mind that subsequently invented locks. But the absence of locks does not prove that people were honest.
All the scriptures preached non-stealing. Buddha talked against stealing and dishonesty day in and day out. Socrates said the same things in Greece two thousand, five hundred years ago. He said that youngsters had gone astray. they did not listen to their parents, that teachers were not respected, that people had turned dishonest and corrupt. There is a six-thousand-year-old book in China. If you read its preface you will think that you are going through the editorial of this morning's newspaper. It says that people are dishonest, that they have become materialists, that there has been great moral decline, that corruption is rampant, and that anarchy has set in and that doomsday is at hand. And this six-thousand- year-old book also says that the people who lived before were good and honest.
That the people in the past were good is nothing more than a myth, a fantasy. The truth is that we have forgotten the people of the past, and a handful of them whom we still remember are at the root of the trouble. We remember Mahavira, hut we do not remember the people of his times. Then we think that people of
his times must have been good people. But if the people of his times were really good, we would not have cared to remember Mahavira at all. Mahavira is yet alive in our memory because of the people of his day.
The schoolmaster writes on a blackboard with a piece of white chalk. If he wrote on a white board -- and he can -- you could not read it. The writing shows on the blackboard because of the contrast. Mahavira shines as a great man for two thousand five hundred years. It could not have been possible if the social background against which he stood had been white and clean. Really the society of his time must have been corrupt and ugly. A few great men shine for ages because the rest of mankind has been like a blackboard on which white writing shows.
Never was the whole human society good. It was not even as good as it is today. Every day we are progressing towards goodness, but we are victims of a false idea that we are declining, that we are going downhill, that we are getting worse and worse. We say that it was satyug, the age of truth, in the past, we say that we have left our golden age behind, and now it is the kaliyug, the dark age, now it is downhill and downhill all the way ahead.
And the downfall of a community is a certainty if this thought takes hold of its mind that decline is its future, because it is thought that makes us move. But we firmly believe that our golden age, the best times, have already happened, that we left behind us all that was good and that now there is only evil and darkness in store for us. This has become our conditioning. We really believe that it is going to be worse and worse in the future.
Now when someone stabs someone in your neighborhood, you cry kaliyug, you cry
"wolf"; you say that the dark age is now here. And when someone runs away with the wife of someone else you scream that the worst of the dark age has happened. But when your saints and seers, your rishis of the past ran away with others' women, then it was satyug, the age of truth and righteousness! And it was satyug when the gods of heaven came down and seduced the wives of others -- your own saints! And now it is the dark age just because the abductor happens to be an ordinary man living in your neighborhood! It is a strange reasoning. It was a good world when the wife of Rama was stolen. And when the wife of some present-day Ramchandra living in your locality is stolen, it becomes evil, dark,
abominable.
No, man is becoming better and better each day. And if we have to make our future better, then we had better have our golden age in the future and leave the dark age behind. This should be the order of things: darkness in the past and light in the future; the dark age behind and the golden age ahead. If a bright future has to be created. hope, intense hope is necessary. Without hope you cannot build a beautiful future. In my view, lack of hope is one reason why modern man is stumbling in his onward journey. He is without hope for his future; it seems all is dark ahead. This darkness is of our own making.
Never was man so good as he is today. There was a famine in Bihar recently. Twenty million people would have perished, as the famine was so great, but only forty persons died. How is it that twenty million lives were saved? -- the whole world came to their rescue. School children in far-off countries who had not heard of Bihar before, saved their pocket money and sent it for the succor of the starving people. The whole world rushed to save those in Bihar who were all unknown to them and with whom they had nothing to do. It had never happened before; it happened for the first time. Again, it is for the first time that Bombay feels disturbed when there is a war in Vietnam. The whole world feels hurt for a wrong happening in any corner of the earth. Humanity has attained to this sensitivity, to this awareness for the first time. It is unprecedented. Man has grown
-- his understanding has grown; his happiness has grown. One last word. Two or three friends have asked, Question
YOU ADMIRE AMERICA SO MUCH, YOU SAY THAT SOCIALISM WILL COME
FIRST IN AMERICA, BUT IT IS IN AMERICA WHERE HIPPIES, BEATLES AND
BEATNIKS ARE INCREASING IN NUMBER, WHERE PEOPLE ARE TAKING
INCREASINGLY TO DRINKS AND DRUGS LIKE LSD AND MESCALINE,
WHERE CONSUMPTION OF SLEEPING PILLS AND TRANQUILIZERS IS ASSUMING ALARMING PROPORTIONS AND WHERE PEOPLE ARE DISTURBED AND RESTLESS. CAN YOU SAY SOMETHING ABOUT IT?
You should know that no animal ever gets disturbed. Have you ever heard that a water buffalo lost his peace of mind? Have you ever seen a donkey spending a sleepless nights or getting bored? Have you come across a bull committing suicide, because life became meaningless? No, no animals ever get bored. disturbed or worried; nor do they commit suicide. Why?
The reason is that the mind of animals is very undeveloped. The more the mind develops, the more you become sensitive and understanding. As the mind grows, your vision grows; you begin to see things around you with clarity. As your mind expands, your being expands in the same measure. And with the development of intelligence begins the search for the meaning of life, its significance. If there are hippies and Beatles and beatniks in today's America, if its young men and women are getting rebellious, they are the barometer of the fact that consciousness is touching new heights there, that they see things that are not yet seen by us.
Man's intelligence has developed in a great way, and it iS this developed intelligence that is making him restless. The more intelligence, the more restlessness.
And remember. the greater your restlessness, the greater peace you can attain. Levels of peace and restlessness -- their proportions are always the same. If man's restlessness is say, only two milligrams, the peace he will attain is not going to be more or less than two milligrams. And if his restlessness grows to be a thousand tons, his peace will grow to be the same thousand tons. Our capacities in both directions -- dialectical directions -- grow together. They are coextensive. If I become very sensitive to ugliness, I am bound to be as sensitive to beauty too. The man with a high sense of beauty will have a high sense of ugliness also. Of course, ugliness will hurt him, but beauty will comfort him in the same measure.
As man's consciousness expands, his world of anxieties will equally expand, because now the anxieties of others enter his awareness. Man, today, is much more intelligent than before, and that is why he is so anxious and unhappy too.
But because of our mounting anxiety and unhappiness we need not despair and retrace our steps and turn back to the past, our new difficulties and problems are only a challenge and we have to accept the challenge and go onward and forward. We have to find new paths of peace --
peace commensurate with our restlessness. Old paths will not do; new ones have to be found.
Man is, today, on a brink, and his consciousness is nearing a great leap forward, a quantum leap.
For example, when the first monkey came down from the tree and for the first time walked on two legs instead of four, he must have felt very awkward. And then the older monkeys, his elders, who remained sitting in the tree must have jeered at him, saying,
"What are you doing, you fool? How stupid it looks. Is it becoming for monkeys to walk on two legs?" And the monkey walking on two legs must have gone through a lot of worry and anxiety, any amount of sufferings. Maybe his backbone had ached, his sleep had been disturbed. But it was from this monkey that humanity came into being and developed to its present state. In the same way man's grown-up consciousness today --
which is undergoing such pains that it is driving him to the point of committing suicide --
is soon going to give birth to a new humanity, a higher humanity.
The emergence of a new consciousness in man is at hand. And remember, the aboriginals still living in the jungles are not going to participate in this quantum leap, nor are the saints and priests sitting and singing in temples and mosques going to take part in this great transformation. They are all seeking comfort and contentment, and they are so afraid of discontent. Only they are going to be partners in the glory of giving birth to the new man who are prepared to walk through the fire of discontent, and who have the courage to go beyond it.
In this respect, we are a very unfortunate people. We cannot produce hippies, we cannot be that anxious, we cannot suffer so intensely, and consequently we cannot attain to that deep peace. America today stands as a vanguard on a forward line from where a leap is possible. It is a very critical situation where
many times one may feel like escaping and retreating. That is why men like Mahesh Yogi have influence in America. The people who feel panicky and want to go back are being influenced by Mahesh Yogi and others.
They are telling them, "Why worry? Get out of this mess; close your eyes, chant a mantra and go back to the past." For the same reason Gandhi has influenced America more than he has influenced his own country. The backward-going mind has panicked and it says,
"Yonder is an abyss; let us go back! Gandhi is right to say that technology and skyscrapers are useless!"
The cry of "Go back to the past" has always been there, and it has done us no good. We have to go forward, there cannot be any going back. There is no way to do it. And even if there was a way, it would be so dangerous to do so. Nothing can be gained by returning to the past. If a grade four student wants to go back to first grade because the homework was easy, there is no sense in doing it. And even if he actually goes back, he will find it to be meaningless. He has now the maturity that comes with passing three grades; he cannot stay in first grade. So with his highly developed mind, man cannot go back to the times of Rama. He cannot return to the caves. Of course, he may enjoy it for a change if he returns to the forest for a while.
Recently about two dozen of my friends from Bombay had gone to Kashmir with me. In fact, they had escaped from Bombay and they were with me in Pahalgaon, a scenic spot in Kashmir. The man who cooked for me at Pahalgaon told me every day that he would be grateful if I took him with me to see Bombay. I said to him, "You seem to be crazy.
You see the friends here with me, they are all from Bombay and they are here to see Pahalgaon. You are fortunate to be in Pahalgaon itself; better enjoy it." He then said,
"Life is so dull here that I wonder why people come here at all. There is nothing here. I crave to see Bombay." He wants to see Bombay, and I want that he should have the opportunity to see that city. Why? -- because then he will be able to enjoy Pahalgaon too.
That will be his gain if he visits Bombay.
Man has to go forward. Once in a while he can go back to the past to have a brief holiday.
That would be pleasant. But a return to the past for good is not possible. It is different if for fun you sit sometimes at Rajghat with a spinning wheel as the leaders do. It is a pleasant hobby and a cheap one at that if you occasionally take to spinning and get photographed and filmed. But it would be utterly wrong if we make the spinning wheel the kingpin of our industries. That way the spinning wheel will be dangerous.
No culture of the past, be it Hindu, Mohammedan or Christian, can make man happy if he returns to it. Man has to go ahead and ahead into the future. In that future no Hindu, no Mohammedan and no Christian will survive; only man will survive. In that future only man will live.
The future belongs to man. And here we have to think together about how much creativity we need to bring that future in. We also have to consider how much wealth and health will be needed to make man happy, so that from his happiness he creates music, he goes on the search for his soul, and ultimately reaches the temple of God.
There are many questions to be answered. I will take them up tomorrow. And if you have any more questions, you can send them in writing.
I am grateful to you for having quietly listened to my talk with so much love. And lastly, I bow down to the God residing in each of you. Please accept my salutations.
Beware of Socialism Chapter #4
Chapter title: Democratic socialism is a lie 16 April 1970 pm in Cross Maidan Archive
code:
7004165
ShortTitle:
SOCIAL04
Audio:
No Video: No
A number of questions have been received; they are in the context of the previous discourses. A friend has asked: IN THE COURSE OF YOUR TALKS ON SOCIALISM
AND COMMUNISM YOU DID NOT GIVE ANY THOUGHT TO DEMOCRATIC
SOCIALISM. CAN YOU SAY SOMETHING ABOUT DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM?
It would be useful to understand a few things about democratic socialism. Democratic socialism is a contradiction in terms; it is a combination of two words that contradict each other. It is like saying "a barren woman's son", which is again a contradiction in terms. If a woman has a son she could not be barren; and if she is barren she could not have a son.
There is no grammatical mistake in the composition of the phrase "a barren woman's son", but it cannot be true. In the same way there cannot be a thing like democratic socialism; it is just an empty phrase, a meaningless cliche. Why?
Democracy and socialism, as socialism is currently known cannot go together, because the one cancels the other. Because democracy has to be destroyed in the very process of bringing socialism, the so-called socialism cannot be brought without murdering democracy. And it is necessary to understand why democracy will have to go for socialism to come.
The first principle, the foundational principle of democracy is that it gives every individual person the freedom to live, to work, to earn, to produce and to own,
use and amass his production, his property. It is one of his basic rights. The next fundamental principle of democracy ordains that there should be no injustice to anyone. And another basic principle of democracy says that the majority cannot subject the minority to any injustices. If, in a village, there live a hundred Mohammedans and ten Hindus, and the Mohammedans decide to kill the Hindus and say that they are going to do it democratically, because the majority is in support of killing and only the minority is against it, then we will say that it is wrong, it violates democracy. Democracy means that even if there is a minority of one, the majority cannot subject it to injustices, and deprive it of any of its basic rights.
Capitalism, or the capitalist, is a minority today. If the majority, whom the so- called socialism claims to speak and work for, uses democracy to destroy this minority, then it knocks out the very foundation of democracy. And minorities change with time. Today one group is in the minority, tomorrow another may take its place. Now some people say that wealth should be distributed -- someone should not have more and others less --
because wealth creates jealousy and bitterness. But it is necessary to ask if it is justice that those who did not do a thing to produce wealth, who took no part whatsoever in its creation, who were just spectators, should now, when wealth is created, come forward and demand its distribution.
It is interesting to note that whenever a great invention was made, an invention which later on became an instrument of great production, it could not be easily sold, it had no buyers. The inventors and innovators have always been looked upon as crazy people.
I have heard that a scientist took an inventor to any number of people and introduced his new design to them. And the inventor was ready to sell his design for just fifty rupees, but nobody wanted to oblige him. The first design of the motor car was thought to be a piece of madness, and so was the first design of the airplane. No one was ready to buy and try them, because one could not really believe they would be worthwhile. They must have been men of rare courage who worked on those new designs and opened unheard of doors to production. But now that the wealth is there, all those who had been idle spectators, who had called the pioneers mad and crazy, come forward and ask for a share in that wealth, saying that wealth belongs to all.
A handful of people have created wealth, but after it has been created, all those who have had no hand in its creation are claimants for a share in its ownership. But this is not what democracy means. Democracy means that the producer should own his produce. And if he distributes it, shares it with others, it is his pleasure. But the so-called claimants have no right to it. And if it ever became a matter of right, then nobody knows where this matter will end.
Wealth is the creation of intelligence and talent. Today we envy that intelligence and say that wealth should be distributed equally. In the same way, tomorrow we will say that we cannot tolerate that a few persons have beautiful wives while others have ugly ones. We will say that this is inequality, it cannot be tolerated; everyone should have equal rights to beautiful women. We will not be wrong if we say that, because basically it is the same logic; there is no difference at all. And then the day after we will say that it is intolerable that a handful of people are intelligent while others are stupid. This too is inequality; we demand equal distribution of intelligence and talent. It is again the same logic that demands equal distribution of wealth.
But the whole approach is anti-democratic. In fact, every person is different and unique.
Every person is born with distinct and different potentialities, and they will seek and develop their own potentialities, and they will create what they are made to create. And as such they will own their creation. And if they share it with others, they do so for their own joy. But we have no right to claim it; it would be grossly unJust.
Socialism, however, approves of many such injustices, because it is easy to win the majority in support of injustices. But injustice will not become justice and a lie will not become truth just because the majority supports them. Freedom to own private property is one of the fundamental human rights, and democracy accepts this right of the individual.
So when somebody says that socialism with democracy is possible, he is saying an outright lie. Socialism violates the basic principle of democracy. Democracy and socialism cannot go together.
The second thing is that socialism only talks of the great values, which make for the basis of its philosophy; it cannot achieve them. So it will be worthwhile if we
go into some of these values at length.
Freedom is perhaps the greatest value in man's life. There is no greater value than this, because freedom is foundational to the whole development of man. That is why bondage or slavery is the worst state of human existence and freedom its best and most beautiful.
And socialism cannot be established without fighting and finishing freedom. It is, of course, possible that the majority may consent to destroy the freedom of the minority. But still it is unfair and unjust. Destruction of freedom can never be democratic.
Freedom of thought is the very life of democracy; it is its very soul. But socialism cannot stand freedom of thought, because freedom of thought includes the freedom to support capitalism. It is difficult for socialism to swallow. Socialism wants to destroy capitalism root and branch, and therefore it has to destroy freedom of thought. And it is unthinkable how, after destroying the right of the individual to hold property and his freedom of thought. socialism can be democratic.
Democratic socialism is a blatant lie. The fact is that the word democracy has respectability, and socialism does not want to forego this respectability. That is why Russia is democratic, China is democratic, and the rest of them are democratic. Man can misuse words in a big way. He can label Satan as God. Who can stop it? It is difficult.
Let it be clearly understood that democracy is a value that goes with capitalism, and not with socialism. And if democracy has to live, it can only live with capitalism; it cannot live with socialism. Democracy is an inalienable part of the capitalist way of life, and as such it can only go with capitalism.
Similarly there are other values -- we are not even aware of them -- which can be destroyed easily. And they are already being destroyed. The individual has the ultimate value. But in the eyes of socialism it is not the individual but the collective, the crowd, that has value. And socialism accepts that the individual can be sacrificed for the collective, the society. The individual, in fact, has always been sacrificed in the name of great principles, and for the sake of big and high-sounding names. He has been sacrificed sometimes for the sake of the nation and sometimes for the sake of religion, and sometimes for the sake of the
KORAN, the Gita and innumerable other things. But man refuses to learn from history. When old altars disappear, he creates new ones, and continues sacrificing the individual. Socialism is such a new altar.
If man has to learn anything from his history, the one lesson that is worth learning is this: The individual cannot be sacrificed for anything. Even the greatest of nations does not have the right to ask for the sacrifice of a single individual. Even the greatest of humanity does not have the right to sacrifice the individual for its sake -- because the individual is a living consciousness, and it is dangerous to sacrifice this living consciousness at the altar of a system or an organization, however great it be; because the system is a lifeless arrangement, a dead entity, and it is not proper to sacrifice a living man for the sake of a dead system.
But we have gotten into the habit of killing the individual, and even now we are seeking new avenues, new altars at which the individual can be sacrificed. The new altar is socialism.
Socialism is not democratic. The socialism that is sought to be forced on us can never be democratic. In only one way can socialism come without sacrificing freedom, and that is when it comes effortlessly, naturally and by itself. Otherwise it is not possible for socialism to be democratic.
Only today a friend told me that he had read in some newspaper about a unique little island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The population of that island is not large, some hundreds of people live there. But the island is so rich in phosphorous mines, and those mines yield so much wealth that every person earns at least eight thousand rupees from them. In that island no one is poor, no one is rich, just because men are few and wealth is plentiful. This little island is perhaps the first socialist society on this earth at the moment. But the people of the island don't even know that they are a socialist society -- it is not necessary for them to know it.
Abundant wealth and scant population make for socialism.
The friend also told me about a unique custom that exists in that island and perhaps nowhere else. If a guest in a family admires a thing -- say the radio in the sitting room --
then the family immediately makes a gift of the radio to the guest. Because they
believe that if a person has a liking for a certain thing, it should go to him; it really belongs to him. This custom exists there because they have abundant wealth and so their clinging to wealth has withered away.
Someday we may have socialism on the whole earth. It is necessary, and it will come, if the socialists are not in haste. But if the socialists continue to be in a hurry, as they are, then the chances are that it will never come; it will be delayed forever. Socialism will come without sacrificing democracy when we have created a situation with plenty of wealth and less numbers of people. But then we will not know when it came, how it came. It will come silently, as every significant thing in life comes.
There is another thing that deserves attention, and it should be understood well. Many friends have complained that I say that labor has no use in the creation of wealth. I never said that labor has no use in the creation of riches. I only said that sooner or later labor will increasingly become a non-essential factor in the production of goods. over a long period it has already been losing its place. Labor has a hand in the creation of wealth, hut it has not been the central factor, the basic factor of production. It does not play a pivotal role. The basic factor, the pivotal factor is the mind of man -- his intelligence, his talent.
It is man's intelligence that has discovered new dimensions of creating wealth.
It is also important to know that labor is a perishable commodity; it dies soon and readily if it is not used. Unused labor dies every day. If I have not worked today, then my unused labor cannot be preserved in some safe for future use. I will not do the same work ever again that I could have done had I worked today, because labor cannot be saved. It is lost every day; it is perishable. It is not that a worker will escape being exploited if he does not work in a field or factory for all his life. He will die nonetheless, because labor cannot be preserved; it cannot be put in a safe deposit.
Capitalism, for the first time, found ways and means to preserve labor. It made labor, a perishable commodity. preservable in the form of wages in money; that is, capital created out of it. So it is again capitalism that made it possible. If I work this very day and save five rupees of my wages, it is labor made durable. If it had not turned up in the form of five rupees, it would have gone to waste. It is not that my unexpended labor would have remained with me even if I had not worked to earn the wage in money. But it is strange that I say that while I had put
in ten rupees worth of labor, I was paid only five. The fact is, that if I had not worked at all, my labor was not worth a single paisa. It is desirable, however, that some day I should be paid ten rupees instead of five that I receive right now. But it does not mean that ten rupees will come after destroying the capitalist mode of production. No, this system has to be retained and progressively developed.
As it is today, the capitalist system is not adequate. And don't think, as many friends have said, that I support the system as it is. The system as it is needs to be tremendously improved and developed. As it is, it is primitive; it is just the abe of capitalism. But the socialist cry is coming very much in the way of its growth, and it will not allow it to grow if it has its way. But if capitalism is allowed to grow it will be quite possible for it to pay the worker ten rupees, even twenty, in the place of today's five. It will be possible to pay even the person who does not work. And if we go through a full technological revolution, which is in the making, it is just likely people demanding work will be paid less and those agreeing to enjoy leisure will be paid more. It will be so because the utility of labor is connected with so many other things.
If tomorrow your town is equipped with every kind of automatic machine, soon tens of thousands of people will be out of employment. But what will you do with the huge wealth that the automatic machines will produce? You will have to give it away in the form of compensation to the unemployed people. But someone among them may say that he cannot sit idle for twenty-four hours, he must have at least two hours' work every day, otherwise he will go crazy. This man will have to be paid less because he wants both: work and money. And another man who agrees to sit idle and be content with only money, will have to be paid more than the one asking for work.
This can be possible in fifty years' time if capitalist production is fully developed and automatized, and no efforts are made to sabotage it at its various points.
The ways of sabotaging are devious; they are not easily discernible. On the one hand the leaders shout that the country is poor, and production. more production, is the need of the hour, and on the other hand they go on imposing higher taxes on those very people who produce more. This is utterly foolish. If you really mean production of wealth, the pattern of taxation will have to be radically altered. People who produce more should pay less tax and those producing less should be made to pay more tax. The person who produces two hundred
thousand rupees worth of goods annually should pay less tax than the one who produces only one hundred thousand rupees worth of goods. Similarly, the producer of five hundred thousand rupees worth of goods should pay less than the one producing two hundred thousand rupees worth of goods. And he should be exempted totally from paying any taxes, who produces, say, a million rupees worth of goods in one year. And if someone produces ten million worth of goods, the government should pay him instead.
Then alone, wealth, abundant wealth, can be created. The key to production is incentive.
If an entrepreneur today earns two hundred thousand rupees in profit, he is made to part with ninety percent of his income by way of taxes. And if another entrepreneur earns, save five hundred thousand, he will have to part with his entire income to pay the taxes.
And in case someone dares to earn a million rupees, he will have to sell his assets to pay the taxes. Under the circumstances the producer thinks -- and thinks rightly -- that it is useless to produce. Thus you are obstructing those who can create wealth and you sing hymns Of praise to that largest group, the idlers who do not produce and earn at all. Can there be a better way of destroying the country than this?
The hymns of praise meant to placate the masses may be pleasant at the moment, but they are going to prove very costly and dangerous.
It is very interesting to note that a great majority of mankind is wholly uncreative. This majority is contented with eating and producing children. It has done nothing else. Only a very small fraction of humanity has engaged itself in creativity and produced great results. Take any field, be it poetry or great painting, production of wealth, science or religion -- only a handful of men and women have attained to peaks of creativity. The tragedy is that it is these very people who are being maligned, thwarted and suppressed.
And it is a very absurd logic at that. On the one hand you say that wealth is urgently needed and on the other you praise those who are without any wealth. Why don't they have limit.
They have been on this earth for millions of years. Their forefathers were here. Have you ever thought why they did not have wealth? They produced children
and not wealth --
and it is thus they have always remained poor. It is amazing that creators of wealth are made to feel guilty about it, they are treated as criminals and are going to be put on the cross of the society. Their only crime is that they did not produce children and sit idly by, like the rest of mankind. And their worst crime is that they produced wealth. Now those who did not take part in the production of wealth will take revenge, they will strangle them on the grounds of being exploiters. This is quite strange. This wealth has not come through exploitation; it has been created with great intelligence and hard work. It has been created through the adventure of the mind in many dimensions.
But we give no thought to it and we are determined to destroy those who create wealth and prosperity. This is our strange logic all the way down. This is a dichotomy.
I happened to visit a family-planning center a short time ago. The whole country and its government are engaged in an effort to limit the size of the family with a view to controlling the exploding population of the country. But our logic is upside-down everywhere. If we have to have family planning it is necessary that we think about it in its total perspective. As I said earlier, that if we have to have wealth, the producer should be given full encouragement and incentive to do it, but the contrary is happening -- he is being punished and persecuted. And why should he then produce if he is going to be punished for it? And the people who are not productive will not do it in any case. And those who can produce, will withhold their hands in despair. And consequently the country will suffer and go down the drain. It can never be rich.
When I arrived at the center I saw a lot of propaganda being done about the importance of family planning. I asked the officer in charge of the center if he knew about the rates of income tax for the bachelors and the married couples and couples with children. The officer said that there was no connection whatsoever between taxation and family planning. I then said that in that case there is no connection between intelligence and family planning.
If the government wants to limit the family it should levy heavy taxes on those who produce more children than the prescribed number. But the contrary is happening on this front too. Parents with many children pay much less tax than those with less or no children. And this law works against family planning. If it
is to succeed, parents with more children should be made to pay a larger amount of tax than the others with less or no children. A family with three children -- if three be the limit -- should pay much less tax than the family with more than three children. And if a family exceeds the number of five then the schools and hospitals should be asked to charge higher fees for their children's studies and treatment. Then alone will families feel compelled to limit their size.
But, currently, parents with a larger number of children are given higher rebates in income tax. The bachelors pay higher taxes than the married ones. It is utterly foolish.
Bachelors should receive full exemption from taxes, or if they have to be taxed at all the rates should be much lower so that young people abstain from marriage or marry late. On the other hand married people should be taxed heavily so that marriage becomes costly.
And let there be a graduated increase in tax rates with every increase in the number of a family's children Then there will be a system a logic in the management of the state affairs; otherwise the whole thing, as it is, is simply ridiculous. What does it mean that while you cry for limiting the family, you go on rewarding those with unlimited families?
The same chaos prevails in the field of production. And it is so in many dimensions of life that for lack of a clear perspective we just go on drifting. If we want to end poverty then all avenues of production should be opened and every facility and incentive given to those who have the talent to produce. If the country's poverty has to be liquidated, then capital from all over the world should be invited for investment in India. But we think that if people from other countries come here, they would exploit us. As I said, if labor is not used, it just perishes.
So if international capital is allowed to be invested here, it can convert the entire unused labor of this country into solid wealth. But we are afraid that we will be exploited It is a very wrong way of thinking. International capital will not exploit us; on the contrary, it will help us immensely. It will utilize the huge unemployed manpower of this country which is just being wasted everyday like the waters of the Ganges and Narmada -- when you don't use them, they disappear into the ocean. If we fail to utilize our labor energy that is abounding it will disappear into the cosmos and be lost to us forever. Let it be used and transformed into
wealth. Then alone it can be preserved.
But we are a strange people. We say that it does not matter if ten rupees worth of labor is wasted, but we will not agree to work for five rupees and be robbed of the other five, as if we have five rupees in cash on us and someone is going to grab it. No it is not so; nobody is robbing you.
The whole concept of exploitation is full of nonsense.
Capitalism is an instrument for converting labor into wealth and if capitalism is allowed to grow unimpeded it call find ways to convert the entire labor of the country into wealth but the socialists say that they will hand over everything -- the means of production and labor -- to the state The irony is that the politicians are, and have always been. the most inefficient and worthless class of people in the world.
There is a reason for this. It is that merit is valued in every walk of human life except in politics. In politics alone merit has no value at all. The person who cannot be employed in a shoe-shop to sell shoes can very well become the education minister of a country --
there is no difficulty in it, because it is not necessary that a minister of education have any educational qualifications. In fact, politics is the refuge, and the only refuge of the misfits and the nincompoops.
A person who has no qualifications whatsoever, is qualified for politics. Politics does not ask for any particular qualifications, specialized knowledge, on the part of those who want to enter its arena. It is a strange profession, which calls for nothing except that you can shout slogans and get some followers behind you. But what will he do by becoming the education minister? Vice-chancellors and academicians will dance in attendance on him and the man will put his thumbprint in place of his signature. It is an outrage on education that it should be directed by one who cannot sign his name. A person who does not know what medical science is becomes the health minister to take care of the country's health.
Politics, which is the haven of the nincompoops, is trying to take over the wealth of the country as well. It says that trade, commerce, industries -- including all means of production -- should be put in the hands of the state, which is another name for the politician. So the politicians will manage and control the economic
life of the country. It seems that they are under a vow to ruin the country forever. And they will do it; they will not stop short of it.
My vision is different. It is that the politician can be prevented from ruining the human societies of the world if he is prevented from directly controlling the government and the administration of the state. The elected representatives of the people. of course, should form the parliament, but the parliament or the majority party in parliament will not form the Cabinet or the council of ministers. The majority party should find highly qualified and experienced specialists and experts in different fields of government -- like education, health, finance and the rest -- and form the council of ministers with them. For example, it will be the task of the majority party to find the best educationist for the job of education minister. Similarly it will appoint the best physician as health minister. The right to select the specialist members of the Cabinet will certainly belong to the majority party, but no popular representatives will be appointed as education minister and health minister, or any minister for that matter.
What we have at the moment is mobocracy; it is certainly not democracy. It is all right for the people to choose their representatives for the parliament, but it should be the clearly defined task of the majority party in parliament to find the best men of merit to administer the various divisions and functions of the government. They have to see to it that the selected ministers are fully qualified for their different jobs. Then we will have meritocracy in the place of the mobocracy that we have. Unless democracy is wedded to meritocracy, i will remain a tool in the hands of the ignorant and stupid people. And unless democracy it allied with meritocracy, democracy will continue to be the instrument of man's downfall and degradation; it can never be the instrument of his uplifting and glory.
I am all in favor of the people electing their representatives; it is their right -- but they have no right to make their representative the education minister of the country. The representatives will have this much right: They will search for the best educationist and invite him to shoulder the responsibility of education minister. The Cabinet and the administration of the country should be in the hands of the experts. Meritocracy means the rule of the experts, the specialists, the qualified people; it is the rule of men of merit.
It is the age of specialization -- we have specialists even for small things of life. Those days are gone when you had to go to the village doctor who just checked
your pulse and prescribed medicine without asking you if you suffered from headache or bellyache. It happened in pre-specialization days when the village doctor was supposed to know every thing. Things have changed since.~
I have heard that fifty years from now a woman visited the clinic of a doctor and said that she had eye trouble. The doctor took her into his consultation room and enquired which particular eye was giving her trouble. When she pointed to her left eye, the doctor said,
"Excuse me, I am a specialist for the right eye. The left-eye specialist lives in the neighboring building."
Even one eye is such a big thing that a single doctor for both eyes will not last long. Even a single eye is a great phenomenon -- much too complex in itself. It needs specialization and its own specialist.
The eye is certainly a complex organ, but the most complex organ is the state, which is in the hands of the most incompetent, the most inexpert and unskilled people. They will continue to ruin the country. And the inexpert want to monopolize everything. They want all power for themselves. Besides political power, they want to monopolize economic power too. They want trade and industries and everything in their hands. Even science and religion are not spared
-- they want everything under the sun. They may desire so, but if we allow their desires to be fulfilled, danger is guaranteed.
That is why I place this idea of meritocracy before you. Meritocracy is not opposed to democracy; meritocracy is a concept of working through democracy. And sooner or later, with the growth of understanding, the specialist is going to be significant in the whole world. Maybe, sooner or later, everything will be in the hands of the expert, the knowledgeable.
A friend has sent this comment to me:
AS YOU SAY THAT ONLY THE CAPITALISTS KNOW HOW TO PRODUCE
WEALTH, THE brahmins IN THE PAST CLAIMED THAT THEY ALONE COULD
PRODUCE KNOWLEDGE. WHERE ARE THOSE brahmins AND THEIR
MONOPOLY OF KNOWLEDGE? NOW ANYONE IS CREATING KNOWLEDGE.
IN THE SAME WAY WHEN THE CAPITALISTS WILL HAVE DISAPPEARED, EVERYBODY WILL CREATE WEALTH.
I would say to this friend that he is not aware of what we have said on this matter. We have not been saying that only the brahmin can create knowledge, no; we have been saying that he who creates knowledge is a brahmin. And this is so even today; it is the brahmin who is creating knowledge in the whole world. Einstein is a brahmin, not a businessman. And Bertrand Russell is a brahmin. And so is Marx. All of them are brahmins. If Marx had been born in India he would have been a maharishi -- a great seer -
- a long time ago. But what do I mean by a brahmin?
Nobody is a brahmin by birth. It was a grave mistake, all injustice at that, that the concept of brahmin was joined with birth. The concept that there are four types of men on this earth is very significant. It is really a concept of deep insight. The error came in when it was tied with birth. No one is a brahmin by birth, or a tradesman or a warrior by birth.
But there are people for whom the search for knowledge becomes their very breath, their soul. There are people who search for wealth with the same passion and commitment.
Then there are others who seek power like they are seeking their lives. Similarly there are people whose life's central theme is work, labor.
This concept of four types -- the brahmin, the knowledgeable, the kshatriya, the warrior, the vaishya, the tradesman, and the shudra, the workman -- was very meaningful. When it came to be associated with birth it became diseased and distorted. Otherwise it was very different. In its true sense the concept meant that there are only four types of men in the world. And this concept has not gone wrong even today; it will never go wrong.
There are only four types, not more.
There are people who can produce wealth, and they are a few. It is not necessary that the son of a rich man should produce wealth; he may do something else. So
an element of liquidity is there in this concept. But some persons are born with the talent to produce wealth, and they make for businessmen. And a few others can produce knowledge. Here is Karl Marx who spent twenty years in the library of the British Museum so that he could write DAS KAPITAL. He used to be so absorbed in his studies that when the library closed each evening, the clerk usually found him Lying unconscious in his chair and had to help him go home. He read so much all through the day that by the evening he fell into a swoon. This man is a brahmin. The fact is that knowledge cannot be created without the brahmin. He who brings knowledge to any part of the world belongs to the category of brahmins. So also, only a few men can create wealth.
And the pursuit of power and politics is different from the pursuit of wealth. If the passion for politics is right and pure, then the pursuit belongs to the category of the warrior. The warrior totally goes in pursuit of power and spends his life in that pursuit.
And the shudra, the worker type, is not going to disappear from the earth. Of course, nobody should be a shudra by birth. Shudra means a type of person who works, eats, procreates and dies. And many people are shudras, workers, and they are found all over the world. They are found in the families of brahmins, warriors and businessman. Shudra is not a derogatory term. Shudra is one who does no more than fulfill the basic needs of nature; he just works, eats, sleeps, produces children and dies. He ends his life living on the plane of an animal .
But we are used to thinking that a person is a brahmin if he is born in the family of a brahmin. The brahmin by birth is no more. And the businessman by birth is not going to last long. But if somebody has talent to produce wealth, his freedom to do it should be secured. Similarly, the worker should be free to work and the priest should be free in his own pursuit.
Socialism is going to come in the way of every pursuit; it is going to control knowledge itself. In Russia today there is a basic restraint on the quest for knowledge. Every kind of knowledge is not allowed to be sought and found. If someone in Russia wants to do research on meditation, it is simply impossible. There is no way to be a sannyasin in today's Russia. The sannyasin is also on a quest, and who can say that this quest may not prove to be the ultimate. When all knowledge has exhausted itself and failed, maybe the quest of the sannyasin is proven right. Because a researcher like Einstein says at the close of his life, that after all his search, he came to a point where he could only say that he knew
nothing. The more he searched the more he found that he was ignorant. And the more he searched the more he found that there still remained an infinity to be found. At the end he could say this much: that life is a mystery -- beginningless and endless.
Now this man is a sannyasin; he has reached the very shore of mystery. But in Russia you cannot talk of mystery. The search for God is forbidden; it is considered to be dangerous.
This means that there is no way to be a brahmin in Russia. Even the search for wealth is prohibited.
Only today someone informed me that the Russian government has invited Ford to build a motor factory in their country. Now they invite Ford from America, and they destroyed, in the past fifty years, the possibility for a Ford to be born in Russia itself. Ford could have happened in Russia; it was not necessary to import him from America -- but they had to. Why? What is the matter? Russia, too, had its business class with the acumen to produce wealth. What happened to it? In fifty years' time the socialist government regimented it, suppressed it and ultimately destroyed it. It is in shackles at the moment; it cannot move a finger.
Socialism does not give freedom to any of these four types of people. And that is why I believe that socialism is inhuman. On the other hand capitalism is a humanistic system which gives full freedom to all kinds of people, and in all directions of life, to grow and be themselves. If it is not giving full freedom right now, then efforts should be made that it does. If there are any impediments, they should be removed. But there are people who say, "Why get rid of the disease? Get rid of the diseased himself." They say that there is no use treating the patient, better to kill him. In fact, there are flaws in capitalism, but they can be removed. But the socialists argue that the flaws are so numerous that it is better to finish the system itself. They don't know that the death of capitalism may turn out to be the death knell of man himself.
In this context I would refer to another matter.
Yesterday I called Gandhi a bania, a businessman, and some friends felt hurt about it.
Gandhi was a businessman; he was a businessman in the same sense in which I referred to four types of men a little while ago. Somebody has said that I used a
derogatory term to describe him. Some people think that "businessman" is a derogatory term. Even the businessman feels so. But no word is derogatory. Businessman is a fact; he is a type of man. And I say that Gandhi is not a brahmin, not a warrior, nor a worker; his basic personality is that of a businessman. But it is just a statement of fact; there is no condemnation implied in it.
We have become so feeble in our thinking that we understand only the language of praise or condemnation; we do not accept a fact, that there is something like "fact". If I say that so and so is suffering from T.B. he may say that I slandered him. But it is simply a fact that he is suffering from TB. -- there is no condemnation involved in it. I called Gandhi a businessman just because he is a businessman. I did not mean to condemn him in the slightest. His whole personality was such. But the friend wants me to give a few more illustrations.
A thousand illustrations can be given, but I will mention only a few. Mahavir Tyagi has mentioned an incident in his book of memoirs. One day Gandhi visited his town and addressed a largely attended public meeting in the evening. At the end of the meeting he asked for donations from the audience. Many people gave money; women gave away their ornaments, like earrings, bracelets and anklets. Gandhi accepted them and piled them on the podium. Before he left the meeting he asked Mahavir Tyagi to carry the donations to his residence.
Tyagi arrived at Gandhi's place at about midnight. He thought that Gandhi had gone to bed; he also thought that he himself could have waited until the next morning before he saw him. But he had no idea of the mind of a businessman -- he never goes to bed before finalizing his accounts. And so he was surprised to see that the old man was wide awake at that hour of the night.
As soon as Tyagi arrived Gandhi enquired if he had brought everything from the meeting place, and immediately he opened the bag and examined it. He found one earring missing. "No woman will give only one earring; she will donate the pair. So go back to the meeting place and find the other," he said to Tyagi. A tired Mahavir Tyagi returned to the meeting place at one in the morning and found the missing earring with the help of a gaslight. When he returned to Gandhi's place he again thought that he had gone to bed, but no, he again found the old man awake. When he received the earring he was satisfied and said to Tyagi, "Now you can go; the account is okay."
I did not say anything derogatory about Gandhi. This is also a kind of mind; there is nothing of condemnation about it. And if we had rightly understood the personality of Gandhi, it would have made a great difference in the life of India. Because if the leadership of this country was in the hands of a businessman, the danger was inevitable.
It was really the job of a warrior which Gandhi, a businessman, undertook to do. Bhagat Singh would have done it well; Subhas Bose would have done it still better. But it could not happen that way. And Gandhi did what his type was capable of doing. The country was partitioned and it was a mutilated and lifeless independence that we had, because the businessman is always for compromise; he cannot afford to be an extremist. He says,
"Let us settle on the basis of fifty-fifty." India's partition was the result of Gandhi's leadership. Because the mind of a businessman does not like fight, he chooses compromise instead. He believes in settlement on the basis of give-and- take. He avoids conflict and confrontation. Whether Gandhi said so in explicit terms is not the question. It was the mind of a businessman that the country acquired from the leadership of Gandhi.
This is precisely the reason why Gandhi found accord with the British, because they also are a community of businessmen. The British could not have found this accord with anyone else. It was impossible to have accord with Bhagat Singh or Subhas Bose. They had accord with Gandhi because their mental type was the same. The British were essentially businessmen, who by mistake became rulers of a country and wielded power.
And the person who confronted them was, to their good luck, also a businessman. It is surprising to see that the British government provided every security to Gandhi, something no government on earth had ever done to their enemy. We could not save Gandhi's life after the British left India, but he was alive as long as they were here. It is such an interesting episode of history.
The British gave full protection to Gandhi because it became clear to them that sooner or later he would prove useful to them, and so they should be on good terms with him.
others in his place would have been difficult to deal with. There was a sort of inner communion between him and the British rulers of India. This relationship
was bound to happen, because it was so natural -- they belonged to the same category as far as their mental makeup was concerned. They could understand each other, and so a rapport was established between them.
That is why India could not win her independence; it was given as a gift, and such an independence is worse than slavery. Independence is wrested, it is achieved, it is not had by begging. Independence is not had through negotiations and compromises; it is always wrested from unwilling hands. And the freedom that is wrested is alive and dynamic; it has a verve and vitality of its own. And one that is granted and received as a gift is as good as a corpse. It was a lackluster independence that came to India in 1947; it missed the glory and grandeur that comes with it. And it came with all the ugly consequences that independence coming as a gift brings with it.
Gandhi never tired of preaching non-violence, because a businessman cannot afford violence. Have you cared to note that the Jain teerthankara Mahavira is a kshatriya, a warrior, but the community that gathered around him is entirely a trading community.
Mahavira is a warrior, and the twenty-four teerthankaras of the Jains are warriors, but not one Jain is a warrior -- all the Jains are businessmen. What is the matter? There is no other reason than the fact that non-violence made a deep appeal to the merchant community. Mahavira's non-violence made a great impact on the minds of the shopkeepers. Similarly, the businessman's mind in India found itself in accord with Gandhi's non-violence. It said that Gandhi was right: if we are not going to be violent with others, others will not be violent with us. It was because of Gandhi's leadership that non-violence became the basis of a movement for independence. India had to go through tremendous misfortunes because of the non-violent character of its movement for independence.
It was a great misfortune that Gandhi did not allow the hatred and violence that naturally surged in India's mind against the British to express itself. He suppressed it. Whenever a little violence showed itself, the businessman in Gandhi panicked and retreated, as if he thought aloud that shopkeepers could not afford violence, they were all for compromise.
He always retraced his steps.
I remember a story; it is perhaps one of the folk tales of Rajasthan. The story
says that there was a warrior, a kshatriya in a village, who was very proud of his mustache; it symbolized his brawn. He sat all through the day in front of his house twisting the ends of his mustache upwards. He had it announced in the village that nobody could pass his house twisting the ends of his mustache upwards.
One day a businessman, who had newly settled in the village and who sported a mustache, happened to pass the house of the warrior while twisting the ends of his mustache upwards. The warrior stopped him and said, "Listen, businessman, stop twisting the ends of your mustache upwards." The businessman said, "Who are you to order me about?" The warrior stood up and handed the businessman a sword saying,
"Then take this sword and let us settle the matter once and for all."
The businessman was flabbergasted, he had not imagined that things would come to such a head. He said, "Okay. But before we fight a duel let us do one thing that is necessary. In case I die, my wife and children will suffer. And if you die your wife will be widowed and your children will have to beg. It will be better if both of us go back to our houses and finish with our dependents. And then we will settle our score."
The warrior readily agreed. If he had been intelligent, he would not have made an issue of his mustache. The businessman went home, and so did the warrior. The warrior killed his wife and children and returned to his seat, twisting his mustache. When the businessman came back, he had no mustache at all; he had shaved it. And he said, "I thought there was no point in fighting to death for nothing, and I shaved my mustache!"
This is a type of mind; there is nothing derogatory about it. This is just to say that the warrior is like this and the businessman is like that. It is not a condemnation.
Whenever Gandhi was in difficulties, whether it was the Chaurichaura incident or something else that turned violent, he at once beat a retreat. He thought it was better that he shaved his mustache. Why fight? The result was that the hatred and violence of the Indian people against the British, which was simply natural, was repressed. And because of this repression, the two major communities of India -- the Hindus and the Mohammedans -- fought with each other, and bloody riots
took place throughout the country. If India had fought the British openly -- with swords -- the Hindus and Mohammedans would not have fought among themselves. As we could not fight the British, the repressed hatred, the unspent violence, had to find an outlet somewhere.
Where could it go? And it found an outlet in the Hindu-Mohammedan riots, in violent infighting.
It is generally believed that Gandhi tried his best to prevent the infighting between Hindus and Mohammedans. But I say that he was responsible for the whole tragedy. You can understand this easily if you are familiar with the findings of modern psychology.
The feeling of hatred and violence against the alien rulers was so powerful -- and very natural at that -- that it could have set fire to the British regime and thrown it out of India.
Such a tremendous energy was suppressed, and it had to find other ways to express itself.
It could not have done otherwise.
For example, there is a petty clerk working in some office. One day his boss berates him He is so hurt that he feels like strangling his boss, but he simply cannot do it; it is unthinkable. So he suppresses his anger and puts a false smile on his face and goes about wagging his tail before the boss as usual.
Then the clerk leaves for home in the evening. Watch his bicycle; he is pedaling it with great force. Why? He is just giving vent to his repressed anger against the boss. He would have beaten him with his shoes, but he could not. Now it is as if he is beating the pedal with the same shoes. And he drives fast. Now his wife should know that the lord and husband is coming home after he had some trouble with his boss. But she does not know a thing. She is fondly expecting her husband home. The husband too is not aware of what he is going to do after reaching home. But you can know that he is now going to strangle his wife in the place of his boss. He will find a thousand and one excuses to punish her --
the bread for his dinner was burned, the bed was not made, and so on and so forth. And he takes her to task, he thrashes her. In reality he had to thrash the boss, but he dared not.
So the anger deviates and makes the wife its target.
Hatred is stored in his mind; it is bursting. If you close the drainage of your house, then filth will be all over the place. As a house needs a drainage, so also our violence needs a let-go. And if it is not allowed a right outlet, it will find a wrong one. And the violence expressed the wrong way will do you more harm than one expressed the right way. It proved to be so.
But the wife is also helpless; she cannot beat the husband in retaliation. Up to now the wife has not gathered that much courage... but she should. Husbands themselves have taught the wives that husbands are their gods. Now it is dangerous to beat a god, although the wife has her doubts too. What kind of a god is he that beats his wife without reason?
But she has to believe what she had been taught to believe.
So the wife of the clerk, in her turn, waits for her son to return from the school. These are all unconscious deviations. The son is returning from school; he is not aware of what has happened between his father and mother. He comes home singing a film song. The mother immediately grabs him by the neck saying, "What a dirty song it is!" It was this very song he sang while returning home the previous evening and the evening before that. And the mother herself sang it, his father too. Their forefathers had done the same --
there is nothing new about this song -- but today the mother is about to strangle him on the grounds that he sang an indecent song.
Now what should the son do? Should he hit his mother back? But the world has not become that civilized yet. So he goes inside his room, picks up his doll and tears it to pieces.
The mind has its own energy. Gandhi caused deviations in the way of India's natural energy by thwarting it, suppressing it. If India's violence had been directed against the British -- which was its natural course -- a splendored country could have emerged out of that clean fight. Then India would not have been divided into two parts; it would have remained one and whole. A direct fight with the British power would have disciplined us as a people, given an edge and sharpness to our energy and a dignity and grandeur of our own. A straight and clean fight with the alien rulers would have filled us with hope and confidence, verve and vitality; it would have made our life lively, juicy and
beautiful. But that could not happen.
But we had to use the sword nonetheless, and we used it against our own people. This is how the Hindus and Mohammedans clashed, and clashed like savages. And who is responsible for the massive violence that blasted this country after it became independent on August 15, 1947?
People are dishonest who say that the British government engineered the communal riots and infighting. Some people say that Mr. Jinnah was responsible for it. Others say other things. No, this is wrong. None of them, neither Jinnah nor the British were behind the holocaust. The real reason was that a volcano of hate and violence was smoldering in India's mind, but it had no outlet. So when India was partitioned, the suppressed volcano found an opportunity and it erupted. The pain of hundreds of years of slavery found an outlet. The country was partitioned and a million people were killed. At the price of a million lives we would have wrested our freedom from the British a long time before. If one fine morning a million people had only shown readiness to die for their country's freedom, the British government would have left the very next morning. But it could not be.
When I say that Gandhi was a businessman, I say it after due consideration. And I do not mean to slander him in the least. And it will stand you in good stead if you take him to be what he is -- a businessman. Then you will be careful in relating with him in the future. If this country has anything to do with the shopkeeper's mind, then it will never have that dynamism, that elan vital, without which we would be as good as a dead people.
The tradesman has his usefulness. He has a place in the society, and he is valuable.
Similarly the warrior has a place in the society, and he is useful and valuable. The priest is equally useful and valuable. And the laborer also. They all have their distinctive usefulness and value. And in the humanist sense no one is more or less valuable than the other.
But it should be clearly understood that socialism is going to wipe out these distinctive types altogether, because it does not accept them. It says that all men are the same -- but all men are not the same.
A friend has a question, and a few other friends have put the same question with
some variations. They want to know on what authority I say that Gandhi was opposed to railways, telegraphs and airplanes. They also say that I am wrong to say so.
I wonder if you read anything at all.
If you only read Gandhi's hind swaraj you will see that Gandhi denounced modern machines and technology a thousand times more than what I have mentioned here. But the book hind swaraj was written way back in 1905, and someone may say that it is not right to judge a person who died in 1948 from his writings of 1905. I will agree with him.
But in this context there is a letter of Gandhi's which he wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru in 1945. Nehru had asked Gandhi by letter if he still stood by his opposition to railways and telegraphs as he had written in his book hind swaraj. Gandhi wrote back to Nehru -- and this in 1945 -- that he stood by every word he had written in hind swaraj. It appears that the questioners don't read a thing. They have said that I am not aware of facts. But the truth is that Gandhi himself was not a well-read man, and his followers are still less so. In my understanding, Gandhi is the least-read man among the great men of this century. He was unaware of all the great findings of the present times. He knew nothing about Freud and Jung. And what he talked about celibacy was three thousand years old and now out-of-date. He had no knowledge of the studies done on birth control. He read Marx in jail in 1942, and I doubt if he read him fully. His grasp of Marxism, however, was never deep.
He, of course, read the GITA and the RAMAYANA, but the GITA and the RAMAYANA are the textbooks for the ignorant villagers, not for the knowledgeable.
Gandhi read poorly and thought poorly, and his followers, it seems, do not even read their leader's writings.
A last word. Another friend has said that I did not illustrate my point when I said that there was contradiction in Gandhi's professions and his practice.
I would like to give a few examples.
Gandhi preached non-violence throughout his life, but his own personality was violent, utterly violent. He never tired of talking of non-violence. You may ask
how I say it. We need to understand this thing carefully.
If I point a knife at your chest and say that I w ill kill you if you don't accept what I say, then you will say that I am a violent person. Now just reverse the process. Instead of pointing the knife at you, I point it at myself and say that I will kill myself if you don't accept what I say. Do I now become a non-violent person? Does one become non-violent by just turning the direction of the knife, or changing its target?
All his life Gandhi used this threat, this coercion that he would kill himself if his point of view was not accepted. This is coercion, this is violence. Gandhi coerced Dr. Ambedkar through fasting. He could not bring about one change of heart, though he resorted to any number of fasts and fasts-unto-death. Not one heart was changed, although he always talked of"change of heart" as the object of his fasts. Ambedkar just gave in under duress and accepted Gandhi's demands. Later on Ambedkar said that Gandhi should not be under the illusion that he changed his heart. He still believed that he was right and Gandhi was wrong, but he submitted because he realized that it would be too much if Gandhi lost his life for his demand. His heart was not at all changed; he relented because of Gandhi's coercion. Gandhi used this kind of coercion all along.
Whether you threaten to kill yourself or kill others, it is all the same and it is violence.
Both kinds of threats are violent. But we fail to observe it, and we think that the threat to kill oneself is non-violent. Truth is otherwise; it is subtle violence. It is not non-violence.
Non-violence is very different. Non-violence means that there should be no threat, no coercion whatsoever, to kill oneself or others. Ask the people who were associated with Gandhi. Ask his own sons. Ask Haridas Gandhi if his father was non-violent. If so, then why did he become a Mohammedan? If Gandhi was non-violent, why did his son take to drinking and meat-eating? If Gandhi was non-violent, why did he have to fight his father all his life?
It was because Gandhi's non-violence was so sadistic, so torturous that he tortured his own sons. Haridas left home and ran away for fear of his father, that he would destroy him. Haridas did not know that the person who could not be a right father to his own son was going to become the father of a whole nation.
Really, it is easy to become the father of a nation; it is much more difficult to be a right father of a single son. Being the nation's father you are really nobody's father. Ask Haridas and you will know whether Gandhi's personality was violent or non-violent. Ask Kasturba, his wife, about it. A lot is being written about the married life of Gandhi and Kasturba and it is trumpeted that they made a very ideal couple. It is sheer tall-talk; but in talking tall we are a matchless people.
In reality the married life of Gandhi was ridden with constant conflict and strife, but we claim that it was the ideal of ideals. Ask Kasturba; look at their whole life.But we don't see at all; we are so skilled in shouting and slogan-mongering that we don't need seeing.
Whenever they had a guest in their house in South Africa, Gandhi always asked Kasturba to clean the guest's latrine. Once Gandhi saw that Kasturba was weeping while coming down the stairs with the guest's chamber pot in her hands. He took her to task saying,
"Don't cry. Service should be rendered with a smile on your lips." The poor woman is being forced to clean the latrine of others; she is not doing it for service. She is just in the trap of her husband who, in his turn, is in the trap of a set of principles. So he coerces his wife to clean latrines with a smile. Many times he took Kasturba by her wrist and threw her out of the house at midnight, on the grounds that she did not follow his principles.
This man is not non-violent; he is utterly violent. But he swears by non-violence; it is his ideal. And it is on account of his ideal of non-violence that it becomes so difficult to understand his personality.
Life is a very complex affair; it is not that simple. So when I say something don't jump to a conclusion about it. Whatever I say is well-considered; I have given thought to it.
But Gandhi's devotees think that they are protecting him by questioning me. They are mistaken to think so. The more questions they ask, the more vulnerable they make him to beatings. There is no place in my mind for Gandhi. I consider him to be an utterly diseased personality, so don't get him beaten unnecessarily. It is not necessary to drag him in the midst of our present discussions. Right now I am speaking on the question of socialism and capitalism, and you bring him in for a beating. It is absolutely uncalled for.
I am grateful to you for having listened to me so silently, with love. And at the end I bow down to the God enshrined in the heart of each one of you. Please accept my salutations.
Beware of Socialism Chapter #5
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