Are Darwinian theories, Laissez Fair economics and keeping up with the Joneses the only realities that matter? Is there something like good and bad, or just good 'goods' and bad 'goods'?
17th Century western economies flourished because of slave trade and labor - is that wrong or just a sensible merger of market economics and Darwinism?
Was Xanthippe right? Was Socrates just an old fool looking for wisdom, when he should have been looking for riches? Was his contribution of no value other than to obtain obscure Ph Ds?
Gandhi and Nehru were supremely talented people who could have said exactly the same things that you contend and made themselves rich beyond measure-they could have been the Joneses with whom everyone else had to keep up. After all, are not untouchability, indigo slavery, usurping land, all manifestations of the 'survival of the fittest'? Why characterize those as unacceptable, spend your life in prison, get shot so that your descendants can have gemstone fireplaces?
Should we even revere these cranks? Isn't Bill Gates a better deity, the pinnacle of Darwinian evolution, being the swashbuckling tradesman that he is?
The truth about capitalism:
“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”
That was J. M. Keynes, father of modern economics. The reality is that governments do not really follow Keynesian principles. Instead of efficiency, they practice externalizing of costs- in other words, someone else pays for your excesses, while we window-dress them with economic parlance. The 17th Century achieved success by externalizing labor costs through slavery. The US externalizes social & environmental costs by outsourcing mining and chemical industries to India. We, the urban elite of India, externalize the cost of our orgies by destroying our ecology and transgressing the rights of the poor.
Definitely, let us have democracy and capitalism- let us defend the rights given to folks under the constitution that so many people painstakingly put together. Let us account all cost properly and then protect capital.
And yes, things were worse in India earlier- but the failure of an earlier generation need not be our precedent. It is not like Gravity, inevitable and inescapable. And what India had in the past centuries was not power, but wisdom (also other cruelties, of course). Let the balance of power shift to China, but let us keep our ancient wisdoms.
The truth about the environment: And as for the environment, we are so out of touch with it that we cannot distinguish between evolution and destruction. If we venture from our cities and study nature, we would then see the enormous intangible value that nature has- and I am not talking economic benefits here. A passivity based on a belief in the immutability of Darwinian laws is like being a policeman at Jalianwala Bagh, unable to exercise his individual judgement as he bends to the laws of the state.
Unlike what our bowdlerized Darwinism tells us, the reality of nature is more about cooperation & symbiotic living than about competition. And that is what we should be focusing on.
OK, with that I shut up, and Krupa, you can have the last word, unless someone else wants to jump in.
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