Degeneration

Coming to India is always very educational and it becomes more so every time I visit. It goes without saying that India is an entirely different world than the US is and it serves to wake me up from the stupor that is the easy precipitate of the well structured American life. Things are still very chaotic here and I can go on and on about how that chaos has a certain seduction to it and how it is, in some sense, the very essence of life. The life whose color, vitality, unpredictability, taste, and brutality has been tamed, domesticated, and reduced to the question, 'What ethnic food do we fancy today?' in America. I can wax eloquent as to how the external chaos which exists in India has been cynically channeled into utter commercial servitude in the US but let's not be so simple minded shall we. The truth is not black and white and the glass most certainly is half full. But we shall take it as half empty because there is nothing quite so entertaining as a little polemic.

One contrast that draws my attention is the difference in the means of popular delusion in both places. America is a young country and it was created on ideas which, in principle, were very noble. It could afford to do so because it was not burdened by the weight of 5 millenniums of history and culture. The noblest principle of them all was perhaps the implicit idea of personal freedom but freedom, writ large, doesn't sit very well with a structured and domesticated society. It's a great idea but nobody who is in charge likes it very much. However, it could not just be wished away because people, however shortsighted they may be, generally would not give it away if asked simply. The solution was to cloud up the issue, to create diversions and to dangle all sorts of carrots in front of the collective consciousness. The solution was to create all sorts of races which would keep everyone occupied throughout their entire lives. Race to the top, to success, to beauty, to lose weight, to health and fitness, to salvation, to personal improvement, to a respectable and quintessential American dream. And an entire population was thereby straitjacketed into a brilliant deception. Perhaps there was a time when freedom of choice really did exist in America and I am sure that was a chaotic and interesting time. Now, however, there is merely an illusion of this freedom, at least for most people. The incessant materialistic run is Americas delusion and the 21st century religion of atheism fits neatly into this scheme. It is the perfect religion for the shallow, materialistic, and entirely superficial idiot of the modern world.

India, on the other hand, has its own very interesting collective delusion which is again a watering down of the high principles where the country finds it roots. The country itself is a recent invention but its philosophy runs deep in history. It is a highly sophisticated philosophy in front of which the sorry philosophies of the Abrahamic religions appear crass and entirely unsophisticated. Too bad then that almost nobody in India seems to know what it is. What they do seem to know is merely a badly done caricature of the same. There are temples galore where I see a lot of people standing in lines to look at what is otherwise just a stone. They live their lives by a set of principles which is a gross simplification and distilling of the original spirit of imagination and inquiry. They proudly proclaim it their culture and get in line with flowers in their hands and prayers on their lips. Dimwits peddling ridiculous superstitions infest the popular consciousness and they are caricatured in embarrassingly simple minded ways by the popular media. There is no sophistication to be found in either the practice of the faith or its ridicule. What a fall from grace for a people of such illustrious intellectual history! Perhaps there was a time when the popular discourse was informed by the brilliant philosophy of the Hindu religion. When it encouraged them to ask the real questions of life and to face its many challenges with courage and vitality and not with delusion and cowardice. This isn't that time, however.

So what do we have here? Here we have two societies which had very different beginnings. In some ways, very noble beginnings. Both societies have degenerated, at least in my inconsequential and humble opinion. But they have degenerated in different ways and it is entertaining for me to compare and contrast the two. The merchants of drivel, it seems, have customized delusions for sale to suit the needs of all ages. And it sells them to people who just want to sleep and dream.