The Galileo Affair & The 3 Illusions of Life Blocking your Progress -Part II of III
“As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.”
Bertrand Russel
On 22nd June, 1633, a seventy year old man was made to admit the following at his trial, “I wrote and printed a book, in which I discuss this new doctrine which has already been condemned. And for this reason, I have been pronounced by the Holy Office to be vehemently suspected of heresy. That is to say, of having held and believed that the Sun is the centre of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the centre and moves”
The man was the famous astronomer Galileo Galilee.
Galileo after making scientific observations had dared to defend the Copernican Model in which the Earth goes around the Sun.
This went against the dictates in the scriptures, that firmly held, that the Lord had decreed the Sun to go around the Earth.
For this Heresy, Galileo was punished by being put under house arrest until his death.
In my last post, I introduced the Ancient Hindu Philosophy of Maya and the concept of Mayatic Pollution.
At the simplest level the philosophy of Maya means the world is not what it seems and Mayatic Pollution is the ability of our environment to influence and modify our behaviour without us knowing anything about it.
I wrote on length about the First Illusion of Life which Blocks your progress and called it Explicit Mayatic Pollution.
Explicit Mayatic Pollution is the deliberate changes in our environment, made with a motive to introduce a new mass habit cloaked as a tradition or authority, by agents like Advertisement Industry
This Explicit Mayatic Pollution, carried out by the Marketing Industry deliberately influences your behaviour without your knowledge.
We looked at three examples where this change in habit has been successfully carried out at a very large scale impacting billions of people.
- First is the Toothpaste Industry where your habits are positively changed
- Second is the Diamond Industry where it can be considered as neutral or slightly negative &
- Third is the Cigarette Industry where millions of lives are being ruined for the gain of few
Even though the Marketing Industry is very explicit about this being advertisement, still we humans fall for it, just like fishes going for food but getting baited.
How do these these Marketing people pull off this magic?
They do it by using as hooks your own insecurities and desires.
And to top it they use a mask of custom, credibility and authority.
With money, the advertisers generate the doctors who with authority push the toothpastes. They generate the diamond rings as a custom and create the dashing Marlboro Man as someone credible to be emulated.
But what happens after a Mass Habit has been successfully built and it becomes the fabric of the society?
And this brings us to the Second Illusion of Life and the problem which Galileo faced
What sort of Mayatic Pollution is this, in which, a scientifically made observation is forced to be sacrificed at the altar of the existing custom and authority?
Where the new thinking backed by scientific proof is so vehemently opposed that a person has to be imprisoned for thinking differently.
You might think that the case of Galileo Galilee is a one-off case.
But ask Susan B Anthony, who was arrested by US Government in 1872 for being a woman and still daring to vote.
Thomas Paine on the eve of American Revolution in 1776, famously began his pamphlet Common Sense with the following words, “Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom.”
Thomas Paine was talking about the King of England’s rights over the territories of United States. The property-owning white men of United States secured their freedom from the King and their voting rights.
But in deference of custom in which women were considered unfit to vote, white women in US managed to get voting rights only in 1920.
Black women had to wait till 1965.
Unfortunately, Susan Anthony did not live to see the achievement of women’s suffrage at the US National level.
In 1984, Dr Barry Marshall deliberately added bacteria to his soup and gave himself dangerous stomach ulcers.
He was forced to do this because the medical journals refused to publish his discovery of H Pylori bacteria in human stomach as the cause of stomach ulcers. The belief in Medical community was that it is stress which caused stomach ulcers.
But even after curing himself and getting his paper published, Doctors around the world continued to ignore Marshall’s discovery.
Instead of getting treated with antibiotics, patients were told that the stomach issues are in their heads. With lack of treatment, the patients fell so ill that many of them had to have their stomachs removed and some even bled till they died.
It was not till 2005 that Barry’s work was finally awarded with a Noble Prize in medicine and treatment of Stomach Ulcers was standardised to include a test for H Pylori bacteria.
What apathy is this that people are being allowed to suffer and die by so called Doctor’s who have taken Hippocratic oath?
In the field of Economics, it took decades of work by two psychologists ( Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky) to unmask the so-called Rational Agent of Economics as anything but Rational by establishing the new field of Behavioural Economics and discovering the science of Human Biases.
Established economists ignored this new field and even ridiculed it. Gene Fama thought of Economist’s Richard Thaler’s work in Behavioural Economics as “His work is interesting, but there’s nothing there”.
Finally after decades of work, in 2002 Richard Kahneman got the Nobel Prize in Economics (Tversky had expired in 1996) and in 2017, Richard Thaler was awarded the Noble Prize for Economics.
Meanwhile, the Finance industry with its Rational Models and profit seeking keeps on tripping the economy with a few agents accumulating extremely large risks.
Long Term Capital Management having on board the Option Pricing duo of Nobel Laureates Scholes & Merton managed to loose $4.3 billion in four months.
The sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2007–08 ended up causing huge job losses with many a Grandpa-Grandma loosing their savings.
Bernie Madoff kept on running a Ponzi scheme for decades even though the SEC was sent formal complaints multiple times before Madoff’s own sons were forced to disclose the fraud.
What crisis is brewing today which will take you by surprise and may even cause you to be laid off without any fault of yours?
While earlier we looked at advertisement as an example of Explicit Mayatic Pollution, the stubborn refusal of entrenched beliefs and customs to resist winds of change is the Second Illusion blocking your progress. I call this Illusion as Systematic Mayatic Pollution.
Systematic Mayatic Pollution is the dominant belief system which has the backing of existing authorities and this dogmatic combination of entrenched interests stops the progress of humanity for decades and centuries.
Philosopher Thomas S Kuhn, in describing the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, actually described the nature of the Systematic Mayatic Pollution. The Paradigm Shift described by Thomas Kuhn, is stopped by decades by prevalence of the previous dominating Paradigm which continuously spews Systematic Mayatic Pollution even in the face of scientifically derived proof.
Custom, Credibility and Authority hides this Second Illusion of Life in plain sight. Everyone knows that something is seriously wrong or incorrect but whoever tries to identify or eliminate the source of Systematic Mayatic Pollution is at best ignored or at worse systematically targeted by the controllers and profiteers of the system.
Unfortunately, each and every human system and endeavour is bound to this incestuous Systematic Mayatic Pollution.
Think political systems, think religious systems, think health systems, think education systems, think economic and financial systems.
When these systems work well, they can be our greatest source of strength.
If democracy is working, then there can be assurance of correct laws being formulated. If regulatory and police system work, then law and order can be maintained. If the judicial system works, then justice can be assured. If markets work, then jobs can be created. If scientific community works, then sustainable new discoveries can be made. If advertisement works, then masses can be convinced to put good habits such as brushing. If the web works, then information asymmetry is greatly reduced. Religion helps in spiritual enlightenment. These well working systems are positive super human super-spirals which become like Phoenixes on whose wings humanity soars above, faster and stronger than anyone could have done individually.
But when these systems don’t work, they become humanity’s greatest weakness, for everyone has to work against strong headwinds pulling them down.
If political, regulatory, policing and judicial systems fail, corruption becomes rampant and impacts all parts of human life. The corrupt corner the benefits and honest effort is not rewarded. Growth and progress become lip service activities subsumed under maintenance of status quo in favour of the rich and powerful manipulators. For new scientific discoveries, instead of sustainability, exploitation becomes the key. Health systems exploit the sick. Jobs go to the connected. Advertisement leads to mass adoption of sickly habits such as smoking which kill one puff at a time. Religion ends up exploiting people. These negative super-human super-spirals become like Krakens feeding on the life of humanity for the benefit of the few.
When it is heaven, we may not notice it much, but when it is hell then we can feel our life blood being sucked at every moment in this Kafkaesque world.
Subtly and without our conscious knowledge or participation these super-human super-spirals make our life a living heaven or a living hell.
Think of all the patients suffering from Stomach Ulcers who could have been cured with a dose of antibiotics, but whose life was made a living hell by lack of access to Marshall’s discovery.
The ignorance of this Systematic Mayatic Pollution and these positive and negative super-human super-spirals is the Second Illusion of Life which is blocking your progress.
This ignorance causes you to lose hope in humanity as the headwinds of these entrenched system are just too great for any individual to make meaningful change.
There are two billion obese people on Earth today who are suffering from the Obesity Kraken. There are 264 million people on Earth today suffering from Depression Kraken. A lot of them in the developed world. Today’s mega-crisis is the Lifestyle diseases. The so-called authorities in the Food Industry and the Health Industry have proved to be incapable of solving the problem of the lifestyle diseases because of the high prevalence of Systematic Mayatic pollution.
There are 800 million people on Earth surviving on less than $2 a day. What is the solution to their misery?
Greta Thunberg is grappling against the extremely massive Kraken of Global Warming.
And similar to the above massive Krakens, there are a lot of individual human aspirations and challenges which can’t be addressed due to the overhanging and ever-present cloud of Systematic Mayatic Pollution caused by the mini-Krakens in life.
A modern example is meaningless work at office. Office politics with entrenched customs and interests prevent meaningful change even at the expense of damaging the corporate. How do you solve that?
Maybe a hidden aspiration to contribute meaningfully to society. Where do you start, when your local community leadership is another Kraken — unwilling to change or listen?
And more at home, what if your own family is a Kraken — with belief systems and customs which are damaging the family itself. A divorce rate of 40% is something to ponder upon.
More serious examples are let’s say you get traumatised by a life taking disease like cancer, or something personal like divorce or even a business situation where hundreds lose their livelihoods. And the worse, losing a loved one. How do you deal with that?
How do you ensure that you never get scarred by any of these life changing traumas and you find in yourself the strength and determination and the wherewithal to face these events head on?
Facing all these and all too common human challenges may not entail bloodshed — but mark my words — it is nothing less than a personal war, a personal judgement day.
The first two Illusions of Life show that we the individual Humans live in a world beyond our immediate control. Most of us, unaware of these Illusions are simple bait for each other. How is it that, as we Humans become a large mass, common sense gets lost?
Unfortunately, as behavioural economics shows, the normal human individual regularly makes choices that sabotages his or her economic interest while simultaneously believing that they are totally rational.
We believe that we are rational but maybe we are not.
This is something to ponder on.
Maybe the Systematic errors of thinking that all of us commit are to blame for the power of Mayatic Pollution over us. And perhaps the understanding of these thinking errors and Illusions is the key to killing the Krakens and rearing Phoenixes.
For me, the findings of behavioural economics and psychology of human behaviour are like manna from heaven and a key to the third and the most pernicious Illusion of Life blocking your progress. And I will cover this in Part III of this blog series.
If you like the above article, do take the pain to connect with me. I promise this pain will be worth it.
For the last ten years, I have been on a quest to understand life. I graduated from the top universities in India, worked initially as an i-banker, then as a strategist and finally as a sales head. And all these years, there always remained a hunger in me to understand life at its core. This hunger drove me to silently observe life, digest each and everything going on and read hundreds of books of wisdom and philosophy. Experimenting with what they preach and making sense of our world and of my experience as a human.
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Originally published at https://blog.3magicspell.com on February 13, 2020.
