The Rising Global Cost of Inhumanity
What do we want the new decade to usher in?
The quality of life globally is on a steep decline, despite hard won scientific and economic battles on longevity, prosperity indices, and Gini coefficients. The growing insensitivity of the human race is fast nullifying the effects of exponential technological progress we have made in the past few decades.
We have grown tolerant of many societal ills, because they have become prevalent globally.
From ruining our own home earth, to rendering rare species extinct, from waging wars on other countries for an inconsequential prize, to aggrandizing of power at the cost of everything, myopic chasing of instant gratification at the expense of legacies worth building over the long term, and indiscriminate decimation of everything lofty and noble — like freedom of the individual, fearless journalism, standing up for human rights, democracy, secularism, women’s right to their own bodies — have come to characterise the act of the modern man of the 21st century. I am not alluding that every one of us is a degenerate committing above crimes. But, our silent witnessing is as bad as committing the crimes, in failing to preserve our collective moral fabric.
Peter Thiel argued in ‘Zero to One’ — In a democracy, wrongdoings are only prevalent when the moral compass of the electorate isn’t evolved enough to recognise them enmasse as wrong doings. The moment the entire electorate judges or agrees on something as wrong, that practice ceases to exist in a democracy.
Leaders with a strong moral compass fill in for a majority that might not have one
Implicit in this statement is the fact that morality falls on a bell curve, and some are far more evolved in their finely attuned humanity and sensitivity to the world’s wrongs, and others with less attuned moral compasses stand to benefit from moral leadership of a few for the betterment of all. Examples of such moral leadership are Gandhi, Ambedkar, Martin Luther King who not only identified a wrong first, that the society was already well accustomed to, but fought to eradicate it for their fellows. Implicit in such moral leadership is a self-sacrificial gene opposite to that of Richard Dawkins’ ‘selfish gene’, and a commitment to the universal as opposed to the narrow periphery that most of us are content with. (Nasseem Nicholas Taleb also makes an astute argument in ‘Skin in the Game’ that it is the super exclusive niche minorities that get to define rules for a collective, because a minority can take a strong objection to something which the collective has to accommodate it even if it were not the optimal outcome for the majority. For example, if a minority likes eating a particular kind of meat in a country, the country cannot impose a blanket ban on eating such meat without being seen as suppressing human rights of the minority.)
Such moral leadership is a rarity these days. While on one hand, current day capitalism has left very few men the freedom to really pause and reflect on life and its profound wisdom due to the treadmill of labouring to stand still, on the other hand, ironically the winners of capitalism are also prisoners of it as they indiscriminately chase more without pausing to enjoy what they have earned — the time and leisure to reflect on life and its profound wisdom. So, we are all equally (mostly) deprived when it comes to capturing the essence of life.
There are successful popstars and silicon valley billionaires, but no spokespersons for the society — icons who know RIGHT from WRONG, and can stand steadfastly for their beliefs
This gaping abyss between material success and true solace of the soul is sharply juxtaposed by lack of respectable multidimensional leaders like Gandhi, Martin Luther King in our generation that stand for universally regarded values. Our modern icons are shallow, if not philistine. We have on one extreme, instant successes of the Instagram era like the Kardashians, or the Dalai Lama and the Pope on the other, and nothing in between. On one hand, we have the Silicon Valley self-made billionaires with money and clout of their platform monopolies to affect our whole generation, but immersed in their pursuits wont speak up about issues that don’t directly affect them in the near term. The last icon who was a legendary success who also advocated the right to privacy in tech was APPLE founder Steve Jobs. On the other hand, we have vigilantes, activists, Wikipedia and martyrs whose collective outcries still don’t amount to much, in a world that is steadily growing inured and apathetic to assaults on our collective humanity. It is akin to people hiding in delusional safety in underground bunkers in a city under siege, thinking they have nothing to worry about.
The shifting of our collective moral compass
The compass for warranting our mass admiration has given way regrettably, from moral leadership to an abject worshipping of power, hedonism and consumerism, and an ethical morass where the more degenerate an icon is, the more successful he/she appears to the masses. Why else would we have Weinsteins and Epsteins in our very midst, with victims numbering in thousands, if we did not glamorise their profligate lives and instead were instinctively repulsed by their way of life? Whether it is naivete on part of society, or knowing connivance, both are objectionable. I am making a case for sensitising ourselves and those around us to morality. It is the responsibility of those with finer attuned morality to lead the others.
Bill Gates noted the technological paradox of our times in 2012 — “ Innovation is faster than ever before. Yet, Americans are more pessimistic about the future”.
In 1965, Eric Hoffer had warned that “a skilled population deprived of its sense and usefulness would be the ideal setup for an American Hitler.” Sadly, this prophecy has come true for India, a nation which was at the precipice of great heights as an Asian Tiger, merely 6 years ago.
India’s Conundrum of The Great Demographic Dividend
At a time when India should be reaping its natural demographic dividend (two thirds of its population is under 35, in their most productive years), where youth ought to be chasing the technology dream and positioning India as a leader of the fourth industrial revolution, the contrast could not be more striking. India’s talented and intelligent youth are on the streets creating another sort of a revolution, protesting the disastrous Modi government, braving police brutality, barbaric crackdowns on Freedom for peaceful protest, Freedom of expression, internet shutdowns, and deaths by indiscriminate police gun-firings meant to subdue swelling protests. Indian youth are desperately in need of jobs, which they cannot find, and no government is creating for them. India’s unemployment statistics are the worst they have been in 48 years! On the contrary, Govt. is piling on youth tax, by reducing budgets for education, skills training, and removing subsidies from institutions of excellence that have levelled economic differences in nurturing talent.
This revolution numbering in millions and spread all over India, is also imposing indirect costs — on lost productivity of a nation through the opportunity cost of protesting. But, protesters have no choice, as the core of India’s constitution and the very existence of the minorities and their civil liberties are under severe threat in a Nazi-style govt. which brought a sinister Citizenship Amendment Act in Dec 2019 dictated by a racist and bigoted Hindu supremacist cult backing the govt. It is so easy to enjoy these supremacy theories when your race is supposed to be the superior one. The common refrain of some bigots who still support the govt on these ruinous policies is that this BJP govt. was elected by a majority vote. Yes, certainly, but does authority give one the right to destroy civilisations? If so, then Hitler was also right in wiping out Jews because he had sanction of the people when he architected the holocaust, and there was not enough opposition to Nuremberg laws. It takes finer morality to recognise the criminality involved in stripping other world inhabitants of their basic human rights.
Normalising inhumanity
The price for dissent is too high, to sufficiently dissuade those who are not willing to take their moral leadership to the extremes, so the majority just look away and ignore such repulsive attacks on humanity!
China has been torturing and persecuting UYGHUR muslims for a while. Abhorrent and gory tales of the Chinese Detention Centres have come to light where the oppressor Chinese draw blood from the detainees everyday and inject them with a secret substance that saps them of all energy so they vegetate in the filth and ask for nothing. Rest of the world does not notice! Or if it does, does not think it relevant enough that they should protest. Or people feel powerless to effect change. And, so people do not even voice protest. Yet, we sing paeans of the internet and social media non-stop and say there is no excuse for anyone with an internet connection and a smart phone not to be making a decent livelihood. Why can’t the same mass weapons of recreation aka smartphones which are making billionaires out of Instagram and TikTok owners, also be used to voice resistance, disapproval, bring out positive change, to reduce the agony of the most suffering lost, like the Uyghurs? If the world thought that CHINA is unbeatable in human rights violations, one only needs look at India where Modi has stealthily built detention centres in Assam and has approved several others in BJP ruled states, where the squalor, deaths and dehumanising of detainees were exposed by a recent BBC documentary. Modi has a history of lying on record about personal matters such as his and his cabinet’s non existent degrees, his marital status etc, but the gall to publicly deny the existence of such detention centres in India from Ramlilamaidan, Delhi on 19 DEC 2019 shocked the world, which stood divided in half — watching in utter admiration or bewilderment. So the world is infested today with self-serving leaders who blinded by their single minded pursuit of power even in democracies, peddle lies on a loop and take humanity for a ride, and we watch on helplessly in 21st century! Armed by all the mass communication tools to expose such abhorrent acts, and the international human rights courts that can bring culprits to justice, we still mutely accept status quo because there are no strong self-sacrificial leaders today who are offended by such acts. I say self-sacrificial because, the price is indeed high for such moral leadership, as those that stand to get exposed have a lot to lose — their carefully built mansions of power, carefully constructed fake personas, and are not hesitant to take extreme measures to lull those whistleblower voices, as we learnt in the case of Jamal Khashoggi and Gauri Lankesh who sought to expose their regimes’ corrupt supremacist leaders. When we look away from one such incident, we add to society’s apathy and indifference and enable a few more such occurrences till it becomes accepted by masses as commonplace — in essence normalising inhumanity.
When a Jamal Khashoggi is tortured and skinned alive by an establishment intolerant of dissent, the world has no excuse to look away, thanks to the internet. These daily excesses are staring us in our faces everyday. Poor lives lost in populous countries like India are even more numerous and invisible, like the many rape victims who were brutally tortured and murdered. India ranks among the world’s least safe places for women and children. The statistics of 8 year olds raped and murdered in India are appalling. The ruling BJP Govt. took out rallies in support of the accused rapists, just because the victim of one such incident in Kathua was from a poor nomadic shepherd muslim community that could not defend itself. Yet, we think it is enough to outrage on internet for a few days and when the hashtags have tired themselves out, turn our attention to the next topic worth outraging about? When will be grow tired of this permissive morality, where we have grown to accept monstrosity as the new normal? When will be stop thinking that we have done enough, when we have #hashtag outraged on twitter?
Should poverty give anyone the license to strip you of your civil liberties, outrage your modesty, ransack your livelihood, and rob you of dignity? Even when the assaulter happens to be the state, that you have elected with a majority vote, however questionable the victory might be? This is happening currently in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populated state where BJP CM Ajay Bisht, another illiterate Hindu supremacist hand-picked by Modi for his penchant for genocides and violence, has unleashed unprecedented police brutality on unarmed protesters, to quell the rising tsunami of protests that just wont die down.
State oppresses the poor — the hazards of being poor
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflow, the 2019 Nobel winners in economics, had postulated in ‘Poor Economics’ in 2011 this very concept of heightened risks that poor face everywhere, and particularly in third world countries. They presciently wrote about ‘hazards of being poor’ where besides your daily existential threat, and threats of natural calamities etc that others are protected from but the poor are vulnerable to, you also face non-systemic risks such as ‘political violence’ that is purely targeted at the poor. Demonetisation by MODI imposed on the Indian public in 2016 was an elegant example of political financial violence on the poor. As usual, Indians outraged the hundreds of deaths of poor standing in queues at the time of demonetisation, moved on from the issue, and voted Modi for another term, for him to impose CITIZENSHIP AMENDMENT ACT (CAA 2019) in his second term — a human rights violence stripping the poor of their citizenship and identity.
The conundrum of the modern citizenry is that while we show hyper sensitivity to a Peloton ad, and a wrong hashtag on twitter, we are losing sensitivity to real issues that are eating our societies and economies.
Institutions are being emasculated by the power hungry. Judiciary, Police, Regulatory bodies are being threatened into abject submission, save for some feisty voices who are made to suffer for their disobedience. Modern Media has mostly followed profits — and made the transition from fearless and fair questioner of the establishment to TRP driven, marketing juggernauts chasing emotional manipulation of their audiences. Media in some countries has been reduced to a Public Relations agency for the establishment, and worse a cowering victim of psychological abuse, stunned by their plight and even displaying Stockholm Syndrome!
A hollow, hopelessly empty and a dark future for our heirs, is the price we are paying for our collective moral complacency!
In bleak times such as these, when the old hands have decidedly failed at taking note of the grave injustices, raising voices, resolving to or preventing injustice — in a nutshell where we have resigned as unaffected fatalists to things as they are — the youth are rising against the tide and providing us the moral compass, saying ‘No, everything we see is not okay. It’s not the way things should be.’ Everywhere in Hongkong, India the youth are showing the governments the true power of resistance, fearlessness in the face of oppression, strength in numbers, and purity of beliefs. Therein lies tremendous hope for humanity’s redemption! Let us throw our weight behind our youth then, and be led by their courage and conviction!
