Correspondence with Martin: New Indian Budget [2]

This is in continuation of this.

14th July 2014 (KM wrote)

Thanks for sharing the summary findings of both the authors. In fact I had not heard of them. But what either of them say is actually quite in line with observed reality and quite intuitive.

Indeed, as per conservative estimates 50% of India's GDP is black money and unaccounted for from a tax perspective. And at least for people like us who have lived in India for quite sometime it is obvious that this money is generated out of what a taxman would call "Income from capital gains" rather than "Income from salary" or "Income from professional fee or services". That is, all this wealth over-flowing in the hands of the few is purely from buy and sell of assets. This is what Piketty means, I guess, when he says "return on capital" outpacing the growth.

And I am not sure if there is an economic answer to this problem. One answer is political. But every political solution has spawned a counter-political solution. The simple answer to the problem, well, is very simple: a man should earn and appropriate for himself what he can by dint of exercising hard his own hands and mind in the right way. And after a point, he should stop endeavouring for himself and endeavour for others. If these two axioms are adhered to there would be no occassion for any inequality.

But as is equally obvious to see, these axioms will never be realized as universally lived thoughts. And any atttempt to capture them in a political construct or even a hard religious construct (like a church or a temple) has never worked. One comes to the conclusion that it is the fundamental limitation of the average human mind to not have the discipline to adhere to this simple truth. Because at one level it is too simple and boring. And at another level, from an evolutionary perspective, the human mind is trained to seek pleasure for self.

If Darwin were alive today, maybe, he would say that the human species has yet not evolved to its full potential when it will be able to outgrow the force that has driven evolution till date. If the evolutionary construct is applied then I am not sure that human beings were more charitable before and believed in the goodness of community and somehow nowadays they have turned less so. I feel even the act of living in a community was borne out of necessity and self-seeking behaviour. At that point in time a harmonious communal living would be the most optimal solution possible.

I greatly admire the french mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincare. He wrote a book called "Science and Hypothesis" and the very first chapter that dealt with arithmetic has been a most profound revelation into the inner workings of human minds for me. He showed in a very simple to understand manner how the human mind, starting from basic symbols of "1", "+" and "=" is in a position to arrive at extremely complicated algebraic formulations that seem not even remotely to be connected to such basic symbols. And all that the human mind needs to construct mathematics is just symbols and a "convention" to assign meaning to them. Rest it leaves to its power to combine, power to generalize, and power to reach for what it believes is the infinite.

Mathematics is a harmless example of the power of human mind. Unfortunately, the mind does not discern when to apply this power and when not to. Our economic, social and political lives are harmful examples of the mind being drunk in the knowledge of its own power. The capitalist model is the extreme example of this power. Those few who happened to be in a favourable position compared to others, their minds just ran and ran and ran seeing possibilities that more common folks did not have the energy and the time to see. The outcome is the system we have today helped in greater measure by industrialisation.

That is why I do keep coming back to finding what is rational wtihin religion. It is the only force that can alert the mind when it is getting carried away. As all of us would agree "If there was no God, we would be forced to invent one". For, the notion of God (or its equivalent) is the only one that can restrain the mind and re-direct and re-focus its energies into an idea that is at once infinite as well as harmless. However, as we all know even that notion has been completely politicised in the history of mankind.

So man dropped the notion of God and turned to science and in the process invented the current thing we call society. In this context, I never tire of repeating the quote I find on Umberto Eco's site (which in turn is borrowed from an English author) "When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything". It is extremely easy to verify this statement today, at least in India. A visit to any shopping mall in India will confirm this. In more developed countries the pursuit of more refined ideas, scientific knowledge and general boredom with life and its near perfect quality will confirm this.

At the root of it all is a simple fact: that the most powerful thing that a human mind can discern is, well, a "human mind". The day the mind figures out the destructive power of it's own potential is the day it will cease all that is harmful to itself. When it does so it will not feel the need to "construct' or to "create": for every creation of it has within itself the seed of destruction of that very thing that is created. (This too is simple to verify from physical natural systems --- every physical system that comes into being carries the surity of death, including the human embryo).

Once the mind tames down it's desire to create and be content with what it has, is the moment when the very notions of what is equal or inequal will vanish, for then the mind will know no other state than to be equal. The very fact that our dictionary has a word equal today means it also needs to have the word un-equal. To remove one (un-equal) means to efface the very notion of 'equality' itself.

Again this thought is very simple. I learnt this from Henri Poincare and while building computer programs (which are an excellent analogy of human mind). But to accept this thought and carry it to its logical conclusion is a challenge that evolution has not yet taught most men to come to terms with (except those few exceptional beings whom we have sanctified in Churches and temples). For me, thereforce, the foundation of all efforts lie with the term "virtue". Because it is the least we could do to restrain our mind, even if most of us do not have the ability to reach and realize what would be called the divine. And that is why I get a little confused when people use the terms social, impact, etc.. quite loosely. Because the real meaning underlying these terms is not economic but for lack of a better word, religious in nature. It is interesting that a philosopher like Spinoza (who was an excellent analyzer of his own mind) called his magnum opus "Ethics". As a man of science, which he was, I am sure he had very sound reasons to call it that.

I think all our professions would elevate themselves immediately if we can find ways to ingrain ethics in a religious sense of the term into our professional practice. Fortunately, the impact sector offers a greater possibility of doing it than the corporate sector today, however meagre that measure of "greater" be. Of course, one wishes that one were a doctor or something where direct public service with one's hands were possible. That not being the case, the sector we are in today, is the least harmful of options. But the way things are moving, that may be increasingly less true as days go by.