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Opinion    
Back to the Future
Urbanization, Globalization and Consumerism

One impact of the unremitting, relentless media blitzkrieg and urbanization is the denigration or stifling of the culture of noble emotions. Examining this, Hutokshi Doctor[[1]61] refers to George Simmel who, early in this century, wrote in The Metropolis and Mental Life that metropolitan man, bombarded uninterruptedly with rapidly changing stimuli starts reacting with his head instead of his heart to protect himself against the sweeping currents that would uproot him, until he hardens into the blasé attitude. Comfortably numb, he zeroes in on the one thing that requires no emotional response: the money economy where men and things are all reduced to one question: how much? Yet, thereby money hollows out the core of individuality, devaluing the whole, which ultimately drags down one’s own personality into a sense of the same worthlessness. One begins to wonder how much one really matters to parents, spouse, children. The number of failed suicides has risen because of this feeling of not being of any consequence. Rates of depression have been doubling in many industrial nations every ten years. 15% of Americans have a clinical anxiety disorder. Urban rates of mental illness are twice those in rural areas in America. In 1998 suicide was the third most common cause of death among young adults in North America after car wrecks and murder. Between 1950 and 1994 the number of Americans aged between 15 and 24 committing suicide jumped from 4.5 to 13.7 per lakh. The WHO estimates that the global total of suicides due to depression is 8 lakhs a year, more than a quarter the number that dies from TB.[[1]62] The 1998 situation developed into a much more alarming situation by the time the World Health Report 2001 came out:

“Major depression is now the leading cause of disability globally and ranks fourth in the ten leading causes of the global burden of disease. If projections are correct, within the next 20 years, depression will have the dubious distinction of becoming the second cause of the global disease burden. Globally, 70 million people suffer from alcohol dependence. About 50 million have epilepsy; another 24 million have schizophrenia. A million people commit suicide every year. Between ten and 20 million people attempt it. Rare is the family that will be free from an encounter with mental disorders. One person in every four will be affected by a mental disorder at some stage of life.”[[1]63]

The World Health Report squarely blames urbanization and modernization, overcrowding and hunger, for the sharp increases in the incidence of psychosomatic diseases—depression, dementia, anxiety, chronic stress, violence, alcoholism, schizophrenia and suicide. Mood disorders affect 59 million people world-wide and top the list of disabilities. The Harvard School of Public Health report predicts that in the coming couple of decades 90 million Indians—more than the combined population of the four metros—will suffer from major clinical depression caused mostly by stress. Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director-General WHO, said in October 1999, “Today, as many as 300-400 million people worldwide are estimated to be suffering at any given time from some kind of neurological or psychological disorder, including behavioral and substance abuse disorders (this figure went up to 450 million after the Mental Health Survey 2000). Mental disorders account for 12 % of the burden of all disease in 1998.” She also pointed out a very significant fact: “The share was greater in high income countries at 23%, than in middle income countries at 11%.” The cause of this, she noted, “Rapid change for the worse…is an especially fertile breeding-ground for mental illness. It is no coincidence that nine of the ten countries with the highest suicide rate in the world are in Eastern Europe.” One of the most important factors in tackling this enormous problem she identified is the institution of the family and the community, both of which are cracking up: “Both in mental health promotion and in treatment and care, the family, often extended by the closest community network, has a central role to play…we need to fully recognize the crucial role the family plays - and we also need to recognize that the family needs support.” It is not urbanization per se that is causing increased levels of stress but urban lifestyles that build up walls between individuals. “American-style individualism has reached the point of exalting lifestyle as a primary concept: self-reliance turned into self-indulgence and even self-destructive behavior, as evidenced by political inertia, hedonism, litigation and crime.”[[1]64] In India, the breakdown of the extended family and the growth of an intensely consumerist culture, which gives rise to aspirations that often cannot be met, create mental stress. Lacking the deep sense of belonging to a community, family or tradition, “the atomized individual begins to seek meaning in various pseudo-solidarities …the lonely individual compensates for an empty social life by consuming”, says psychologist Ashis Nandy.[[1]65] Man turns to TV, pager, alcohol, drugs, mindless music. There is a definite increase in psychosomatic problems like ulcers, psoriasis and bronchial asthma, stress taking its toll on the body. Under stress humans react much as rats do: sweat, heart-beat and body temperature rise, adrenaline is pumped up. “Are cities cages and people in them rats?” asks Hutokshi Doctor. Poverty, social isolation, discrimination, sharply increasing social inequities and overcrowding make up a deadly urban stress cocktail in which 33% of the Indian population is immersed. By 2001 the metros alone will accommodate 12% of us.

We would do well to recall the warning voiced by the greatest of Arab historians, Ibn Khaldun, echoed by Michael Wood in Legacy, that in civilization there is a limit that cannot be overstepped. For, when prosperity and luxury come to a people, they are followed by excessive consumption and extravagance, with which the human soul itself is undermined, both in its worldly well-being and in its spiritual life. Marilyn Ferguson writes in The Aquarian Conspiracy, “Countries like ours are full of people who have all the material comforts they desire, yet lead lives of quiet (and at times noisy) desperation, understanding nothing but the fact that there is a hole inside them and that however much food and drink they pour into it, however many motorcars and television sets they stuff it with, however many well-balanced children and loyal friends they paraded around the edges of it… It aches.”[[1]66] A great spiritual master, The Mother, identified this “hole” as the need for experiencing fullness and integrality, for that something worth living for:

“The unselfish movement, uncalculating, is one of the most beautiful forms of psychic consciousness in the world. But the higher one rises in the scale of mental activity, the rarer it becomes. For with intelligence come all the skill and cleverness, and corruption, calculation… Take a human being…the moment his mind is active he tries to get some advantage out of his beauty and cleverness; he wants it to bring him something, either men’s admiration or even much more sordid gains…This kind of wish to gain by what one has or does is truly one of the ugliest things in the world. And it is one of the most widespread.”[[1]67]

In 1844, Marx had warned that capitalism’s true standards are excess and intemperance, for which the industrial producer takes recourse to contriving an ever-calculating subservience to inhuman, unnatural and imaginary appetites, pandering to the most depraved fancies, exciting the most morbid appetites. Shall we pay heed and shake ourselves out of the mesmeric haze of electronic mass media to realize the dangers of following create more desire as the first commandment?[[1]68] Such a world-view considers others only as tools to achieve personal ends, at best, or as resources to be exploited, generally, and obstacles to be removed at worst. Other human beings are, therefore, never ends in themselves, but also merely means to achieving selfish ends.[[1]69] The military-industrial complex in the developed nations also pursues this same principle of creating more desire permitting no distinction between producing land mines and medicines. The slogan is that whatever contributes to the GDP and generates employment is desirable (land mines do contribute more than blackboards and pencils; polluting industries make the state richer but also spread debilitating lung-disease among children). Such moral blindness of a knowledge without human concern only produces mountains of indestructible garbage, death stalking continents and social chaos.[[1]70] The strategic focus of the philistine swell of cultural inundation following in the wake of globalization is not only on promoting consumerism for expanding markets for transnational corporations working in close alliance with multinational banks, using the World Wide Web to bypass borders and regulations of nation states, but it also “aims at implanting in people’s minds bland, illusory and often downright false and reactionary perceptions of national and international environments…develop consumer instincts in the people to the utmost, to transfer the people’s consciousness on to philistine narrow-minded lines, to emasculate as far as possible the socio-political activity of mass consciousness, and to divert people from advanced social ideals,” ultimately enervating civil society.[[1]71]

Our own culture is being systematically appropriated and “commodified”. Folk and tribal festivals are being packaged and marketed through electronic media, plucked out of context and cut off from their roots. The danger of losing touch with their original form and content is real.[[1]72] Romila Thapar, eminent historian, condemns the celebration of the new millennium as indicating how “we have been taken over by the impatience and insatiable greed of commercialization and by the intensity of the urge of marketeers to make a profit even out of a moment of time.”[[1]73] George Steiner, Cambridge historian, warns that the spread of a technological civilization relying on the electronic screen produces a creeping sameness sourced by the advertising and entertainment industries that threatens local cultures. This is what environmentalist Vandana Shiva describes as the creation of the “monoculture mind” which spawns “monotonic” values that do not countenance diversity and options. This mindset forces a deadening homogeneity and thus impoverishes the world culturally and ecologically. The consequences are:

“There are two histories that the monoculture mind simultaneously erases—that of the struggle for survival of Third World Peoples and that of the real economic interest that drive the only existing superpower to force its vision and will on all peoples and nations of the world…By accepting the perspective of the monoculture mind that there are no alternatives, we risk the slavery of an arrested social imagination.”[[1]74]

Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s noted intellectuals, describes globalization thus:

“I would call it the extension of transnational corporate tyranny…Their first interest is profit—but much broader than that it is to construct an audience of a particular type …addicted to a certain lifestyle with artificial wants, an audience atomized, separated from one another, fragmented enough so that they don’t enter the political arena and disturb the powerful.”[[1]75]

How vicious a form this can take becomes evident from Italy’s offering Guinea Bissau four times its GDP for allowing dumping of nuclear waste. Some developed countries are reportedly planning to dump 29 million tonnes of toxic wastes in 11 African countries. In 1996 Australia alone exported at least 8569 tonnes of hazardous waste and 1.3 million scrap batteries to non-OECD or developing countries. India was the leading destination for waste exporters followed by Indonesia, the Philippines and China. From April 1996 to January 1997, over 15,000 metric tonnes of lead and battery waste was exported to India. 67% of that came from OECD countries. In the same period almost 12,000 metric tonnes of zinc waste came onto India.[[1]76]Analysing the impact of globalization on Australia, Wayne Smith and Sauer-Thompson have emphasized the need for protecting the bio-region and the nation from “the eco-destructive market cowboys, with their naive internationalism, free trader fantasies of endless growth and social engineering designed to adapt people to economic development.” Those typical characteristics of a people that have arisen from living together and give the region and its inhabitants their unique identity are surely worth preserving. The nation-state is a way of defending and fostering the cultural achievements and traditions in the face of transnational forces seeking to flatten everything into one pattern. Otherwise dangerous reactions like racist, alarmingly chauvinistic walled-in communities appear.[[1]77]

V.R. Krishna Iyer, former Chief Justice of India, expresses himself more stridently:

“The country’s greatest enemy is GATT and the pro-MNC politics…leading to decolonization of India…Their capacity to corrupt, terrorize, propagandize, destabilize, colonies and subvert…has been the disaster of our country and of many others. And who invites them into our hallowed Bharat? The greats who have taken the oath of office under the secular socialist constitution and worship Gandhi as the Father of the Nation! Et tu Brute!”[[1]78]

The Cybernetics guru, Stafford Beer, notes that politicians in the Third World play along with the rules of the international economic game despite being conscious of the tragic destruction of their indigenous culture that this is causing and writes, “I…am shocked at the willingness of the West to presume to teach low-variety ideological models which have already and demonstrably failed.” Corruption consists in reveling in the pay-off for inhibiting one’s personal or cultural variety.[[1]79] The economic crises in South-east Asia and the failure of the World Bank and the IMF to change their modes of intervention bear out Beer’s insights. Sharon Burrow, president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, recently said at the World Economic Forum in Melbourne:

“If companies continue to carve up the world and unchecked capital speculation makes the securities of communities increasingly volatile, then the tide of protest against globalization in its current form will grow.”[[1]80]

It is ironic that Hillary Clinton should now lash out at the irresponsible advertising that only seeks to arouse the desire to buy at any cost which has been the American hallmark. In her syndicated column Talking It Over she writes:

“The pervasive influence of exploitative advertising touches every aspect of our lives…in the case of commercial marketing, we are purposely teased and titillated with sex and violence simply because they sell.”

She goes on to plead for a revival of sound values, for leaders setting examples and, for the first time, America’s First Lady stresses duties first and only then mentions rights:

“What modern culture desperately needs are internal values that call on us to exercise our responsibilities, as well as our rights, as citizens. Instead of trying to justify inappropriate behavior, people in positions of power must start to behave responsibly and show restraint. Sadly, we seem to be a long way from that.”[[1]81]

There seems to be serious rethinking about the over-arching, transcendent value assigned to freedom and the realization that it needs to be balanced against other equally important values such as social order, morality and equity. A sign of this altered viewpoint is the Communications Decency Act 1996 seeking to control Internet pornography to protect children from pedophiles. Political pressure has forced TV producers to provide a system of ratings for violent or obscene programs. “America is reconsidering its famous love of freedom…correcting the libertarian excesses of first-amendment judgments…since the media has come to saturate American life, protection of free speech in the broadest sense may not be possible without certain limitations.[[1]82] Around the same time the Indian President stressed “the need for persons in prominent public offices to be in the forefront in setting a salutary example of rectitude and of high standards of personal conduct and accountability,” urging “a clear and unwavering moral and ethical commitment to the securing of true progress.”[[1]83]

Do these exhortations from abroad and from within the country hold any lessons for India? In 1940 H.G. Wells had sent Mahatma Gandhi his document “Rights of Man” for comments. Gandhiji’s reply remains a beacon light in the murky darkness enveloping us today:

“You have begun at the wrong end. Begin with a chapter on Duties of Man and I promise the rights will follow as spring follows winter.”[[1]84]

Elsewhere, he had said:

“Economic progress should be harmoniously coordinated with real progress. By economic progress I mean material advancement…and by real progress is implied…ethical rejuvenation.”[[1]85]

In the context of the celebration of individualism, which forms the bedrock of consumerism, it is opportune to recall an anecdote about someone who said to a sage, “I want to be independent! I am an independent being! I exist only when I am independent!” The sage replied, “Then that means that nobody will love you, because if someone loves you, you immediately become dependent on this love …it is indeed love which leads to Unity and it is Unity which is the true expression of freedom. And so those who in the name of their right to freedom clasp independence, turn their backs completely on this true freedom, for they deny love.”[[1]86]

As the world runs faster and faster after urbanization, it is instructive to look back at Sumer, where Eridu, the first city in the world, came into being. Sumerian mythology speaks of the goddess Inanna approaching Enki, the god of wisdom, for the gift of civilization. Enki warned her that civilization was a Pandora’s box, veritably a devil’s bargain. For, it offered all the joys of life: the arts of music and sex, law, justice and the noblest ideals of humanity. But, along with that, destruction, violence, cruelty, fear. All these, Enki warned Inanna, have to be taken together, none can be refused. And, once taken, civilization cannot be given back. It is for man to use it with restraint and wisdom. But, then, who is bothered about ancient myths that feed our roots and contain profound lessons for the present?

It is in this context that the opening up of the country to the global market forces has special implications. The dramatic changes in the lifestyles of the upper and middle classes with the rapid spread of TV in rural areas will widen the existing chasm between the haves (estimated at 150 to 300 million) and the have-littles (around 700 million).[[1]87] The latest evaluation of the integrated rural development program states that the percentage of families below the poverty line was 33 in 1987-88 but had increased to 49.61 in 1995-96 and that employment generation showed a shortfall of 2.24 million per annum despite a significant increase in funding for this sector.[[1]88] The consequent heightening of existing social tensions might well lead to explosions that presage ill for the nation. While bowing to the much-touted spirit of competitiveness and individual freedom, it will be foolish to overlook Galbraith’s statement that American companies do their best to crush competition and that freedom in the USA means having enough money to exploit others.[[1]89] The UNDP’s assessment is that 500 corporations now control 70% of the world’s trade and 80% of its foreign investment.[[1]90] The Human Development Report 1997 makes the telling point that while the rich are improving their lot through globalization, the poor are worse off. The average income in the richest 20 countries is 37 times that of the poorest 20, and this gap has doubled in the past 40 years.[[1]91] The share of the poorest 20% of the world’s people in global income was 2.3% in 1960 and 1.4% in 1991. Now it is just 1.1%, while the top 20% in high-income countries earn 86% of the world GDP. The ratio of the income of the top 20% to that of the poorest 20% was 3:1 in 1820, 11:1 in 1913, 30:1 in 1970, 60:1 in 1990 and 86:1 by the end of the 20th century. The IMF and the World Bank admitted in their meeting of 20-21, 2002 “that globalization and liberalization have in fact created more poverty in the world than at any other historical time.”[[1]92] Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Paul Allen, the world’s three richest men, own assets equal to that owned by 600 million in the world’s 48 least developed countries. The combined assets of the top 200 billionaires was $1135 billion in 1999 whereas the total income of 582 million people in all the least developed 49 countries was $146 billion. No wonder economic historian David Landes writes that, “the greatest single problem and danger facing the world of the third millennium is the gap in wealth and health that separates rich and poor.”[[1]93] Way back in 1864 Abraham Lincoln had warned: “As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed.”[[1]94] How prophetic!

The ideology being welcomed into India is one that worships the acquisition of wealth because that ushers in power, which brings perquisites and enables increased glutting of personal pleasure. In a classic instance of confused thinking, modernization is thought to be synonymous with westernization. What we are seeing in India today is a revival of the brown-sahib syndrome and the effete babu-culture of the last century. The emphasis is squarely on selfishness, individual rights, competitiveness, not on responsibility to society, co-operation and the duties owed to others. It is a paradigm in which human well-being is equated with material consumption regardless of the impact of unregulated economic growth on social ties and the environment. 6% of the world’s population in America is usurping 40% of the earth’s non-renewable fossil fuel resources and non-fuel mining alone produces 1300 million tonnes of garbage annually. If everyone in the world were to enjoy the American standard of consumption, it has been estimated that three planets Earth would be needed! The root cause is the selective application of the principle of free global markets, for, as Dr. C.T. Kurien points out, “globalisation is more about power than about trade and markets; those who have economic and political power control and use markets to achieve their objectives.”[[1]95] In the World Economic Forum 1999 meet, Nobel laureate and UNDP Goodwill Ambassador Nadine Gordimer condemned the process of globalization for increasing consumption unprecedentedly, jeopardizing truly human prospects: “While those of us who have been the generations of big consumers need to consume less, for more than one billion of the world’s poorest people increased consumption is a matter of life and death and a basic want--the right to freedom from want.” She asserted that consumption is necessary for human development “when it enlarges the capabilities of and improves people’s lives without adversely affecting the lives of others.”[[1]96]

There is a vicious link between globalization and the neglect of human rights. Developing nations are practicing fiscal conservatism, concentrating on attracting foreign capital, at the expense of expenditure on non-market activities vital for human development such as education, health, housing, sanitation social services, protecting the environment. Moreover, the instability of market forces leads to sharp declines in real income for huge populations, soaring unemployment, rapid degeneration in health and educational services. Indigenous or traditional medicinal knowledge is patented and controlled by MNCs, who refuse to reduce prices of HIV drugs to help millions dying of AIDS. In this manner, points out Gurcharan Das, “disadvantaged people and countries risk being pushed to the margin in this proprietary regime controlling the world’s knowledge and technology.”[[1]97] Global inequalities and inequity are being accentuated by globalization, for the realization has not dawned that individual rights cannot exist in vacuum and mean nothing without their economic, social, cultural and political dimensions which have to provide the wherewithal for realizing them. That is why S.Varadarajan asserts emphatically, “Modernisation is needed, but not by…pretending that the West’s economic and political model can guarantee them (rights) in practice…Today, governments have to move beyond talking of rights merely in terms of policy objectives towards actually instituting national mechanisms of enforcement. And if that requires a break with the obsessive cult of the market, so be it.”[[1]98] In Punjab, the cradle of the Green Revolution, production has sharply fallen and indebtedness has steeply risen on account of overuse of high cost pesticides and over mechanization of agriculture. Foreign seeds are imported that cannot be replicated for sowing and every season new seeds have to be bought that are prone to pests that require costly pest-killers. This sequence is proving to be the ruin of the Punjab farmer. Further, the modernization of agriculture has created a desire among farmers to compete for maintaining a good standard of urban living, incurring large expenditure on consumption and ceremonies for demonstration effect. This has resulted in a growing vicious cycle of indebtedness.[[1]99]

This approach not only perpetuates poverty but actually intensifies deprivation, both economic and cultural. Gandhiji had pointed out that while there is enough on earth for every man’s need there is not enough for everyone’s greed and that poverty is really the other face of the problem of possessiveness. “It is the consumerist mode of thinking,” notes S.H. Venkatramani, “in which you estimate people according to what they have and not by what they are.”[200] Therefore, he urges, our paramount concern ought to be: how do all organizations set about working “for transformation of society towards production of life instead of production of profit”[201] It is worthwhile harking back to Chomsky:

“It’s like opening up India to international narco-traffickers, claiming you are mature enough to resist…TV and advertising are simply cultivated addictions, designed to control people in a particular way…advertisers…are not going to pay for a discussion that encourages people to participate democratically and undermine corporate power. The media believe in free market principles for others, not for themselves.”[202]

The eminent economist Prabhat Patnaik[203] points out that this policy results in stimulating imports of more consumption goods for the rich, and also in a squeeze on the living standards of the poor by reduction in productive investment on meeting minimum needs, as seen in Mexico today. It is an eye-opener to find TIME magazine writing: “Plainly more gross domestic product isn’t the answer to our deepest needs. And that’s especially true when growth only widens the gap between richest and poorest, as has done lately.”[204] It also leads to rising crime and violence on account of increasing unemployment and impoverishment, and to the secessionism of the minds of the elite (the bureaucracy, the intelligentsia, the professionals who can manipulate the metropolitan economy). Thereby commitment to the nation is replaced by desire to affiliate with the dominant metropolitan culture. Rajni Kothari[205] warns that the new elite is turning away from the twin challenges of nation-building and development to international and transnational agencies to bail them out. A new social contract has not been evolved to keep pace with the electronic revolution that has ushered in globalization, which is alarming because the problems that are cropping up today know no geographical barriers. Jerome Binde, Director, Analysis and Forecasting Office, UNESCO, writes, “Financial transactions, pollution, epidemics, organized crime and money laundering do not quietly stop at the customs post. They carry no passport, they are nomadic and borderless. Politics, sovereignty, democracy itself, seem to have lost their hold on events as if history had fallen into the hands of anonymous masters, abstractions such as financial markets, interest rates, exchange rates, commodity prices, indexes and statistical artifacts of all kinds.”[206] This has also fostered the massive proliferation of the “yuppie” consumerist stereotype among young Indians for whom the market is much more important than the nation. Arvind N. Das points out that as the share of material production in the total national income has been dropping, the share of services has been rising inexorably and steeply from 15.1% in 1951-56 to 39.9% in 1999.[207]

A second onslaught of colonization is taking the form of encouraging dependence on external technology and leaving it to them to decide on national priorities and objectives. Simultaneously, trends like communalism and separatism take root among the deprived because of the increasing pauperization. More alarming is the emergence of religious fundamentalism which assumes the facade of anti-consumerism but is basically reactionary, as is abundantly clear from the absence of any economic program worth the name.

The net impact is that the nation gets fractured. A Home Ministry report states that white collar crime—specially bank frauds, forgery—has increased significantly (from 4942 in 1961 to 26891 in 1991, a 600% quantum leap) since the economic liberalization policy and particularly in those states where industrialization has been rapid (Gujarat, Rajasthan, Karnataka accounted for 73.2% of the increase in such crime during 1988-92).[208] This only substantiates the perception of a global corporate enterprise (no longer the UN, but the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO in collaboration with transnational corporations and multinational banks) that is imposing itself upon the non-globalize regions “through a variety of technological fixes, financial speculations, ‘scams’ and a growing tie-up between international trade and banking and local corruption and criminalization with the latter, hijacking both economic and ecological resources.”[209]

The result is a destabilization of the political and administrative structures of those very nations that had once challenged western hegemony but are now willing to accept precisely that, except in name. A new brood of buccaneers is exploiting the cybernet that respects no national borders or laws. Thus, “the market becomes the vehicle for their subjugation to a global world order, this being the latest phase of both imperialism and capitalism.”[210] It is indispensable, therefore, “not to be taken in by the growing charisma of the market, the ideology of privatization, the miasma of consumerism, and the yuppie culture (because)…these forces will replace democratic politics by emphasizing technological fixes.”[211] Kothari reminds us that even in the West the State, the trade unions and people’s movements for protection of consumers, women, the environment, had to step in to ensure that commercial organizations, research units etc complied with laws providing for distributive justice and environmental protection. Moreover, it was the pathology of unregulated market operations that produced the Great Depression. Michel Chossudovsky’s recent study[212] shows how the “stabilization menu” imposed by international financial institutions on countries like Latin America, Soviet Union, the Balkans, South and South-east Asia, consisting of insisting on the state withdrawing from key sectors of the economy and the society to enable a free market economy to grow, have invariably led to large populations being impoverished, developing cheap labor economies to augment the prosperity of the First World. Even the most successful money manager of today, George Soros[213] has criticized the unbridled flow of capital across borders as responsible for the economic crises faced across the globe and considers the entire ideology of market fundamentalism to be flawed. By this he means a paradigm that regards all human interactions as contract-based and valued only in terms of money. This bent of mind, Soros states, is a greater threat to open society than any dictatorship. According to him, open society can be defended only when people distinguish between what is right and what is expedient, and do what is right even if it is not expedient. Altruism and cooperation cannot be disregarded if society is to exist as a humane system. Kevin Phillips holds the development of “financialization” (the processes of securities management, derivates trading etc. replacing production and transportation of things) in the late 20th century responsible not only for profoundly inegalitarian results harming the blue-collar middle class but also for the cycle of financial scandals in the USA. “In the last two decades,” he writes, “as money shifted from savings accounts into mutual funds, promoting the stock markets and the money culture, corporate executives became preoccupied with stock options, compensation packages and golden parachutes. ‘More’ became the byword (we are reminded of Pepsi’s Hindi slogan, Ye dil mange ‘more’ that the media constantly bombards us with). In the new management handbook as rewritten by finance, the concerns of employees, shareholders and even communities could be jettisoned to raise stock prices. Major companies could make (or fake) larger profits by financial devices.” [214]

Dr. Vandana Shiva analyses the South-east Asian crisis to show that it is a consequence of economic deregulation and economic liberalization leading to foreign banks and companies buying up local assets, resources and institutions at throw-away prices, virtually taking over the economy. Through corporate totalitarianism, which puts capital before people, the west seeks to decolonize countries that became independent after the World War, imposing a deadening uniformity, rooting out autonomous diversity which makes for an ‘autopoetic’ system that is self-referential and transforming it into an ‘allopoetic’ system that is controlled from outside. The massive insecurity this generates breeds fear and violence in communities and societies. Gandhiji’s wish, “I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about as freely as possible, but I refuse to be blown off my feet by any”, is precisely the target fixed for demolition by these mighty global forces.[215]

A more ominous danger looms which Aldous Huxley graphically portrayed in Brave New World: pleasure can be made as effective an instrument of subjugation as terror is shown to be in Orwell’s 1984. With India having been through the Emergency, it is important to be aware of the other dimension of the same threat. Hiranmay Karlekar warns: “People who are immersed in la dolce vita often do not notice the theft of their liberty, to say nothing of resisting it. The consumer culture, which opens up a vista of endless pleasure and titillation is consumption.”[216]

Perhaps there is no better instance of this destructive and self-centered mindset than USA’s refusal to reduce its atmosphere polluting emissions (accounting for 25% of the world’s greenhouse emissions) because it will adversely affect the pace of its economic progress, imagining, ostrich-like, that it is sheltered in an impermeable cocoon from the alarming changes in the earth’s climate. Behind the specious argument of competitive efficiency and a free market economy, there is a systematic strategy to commodify human values, cultural diversity and whatever nature has gifted free to humanity.[217]

To sum up the weltanschauung, what Yeats wrote seventy five years ago in “The Second Coming” sounds terrifyingly true of the closing years of the millennium

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

– Pradip Bhattacharya
July 13, 2003

References:

Back To The Future

–  Westerners on the West 
–  The New World  
–  The First World  
–  The Western Response  
–  The World Situation 
–  The Eastern Scene 
–  Changing Asian Values 
–  India Darshan 
–  Urbanization, Globalization and Consumerism
–  Possible Solutions 
–  Bureaucracy in India  
–  The Counterpoint  
–  India's Heritage  

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