Bhandari: The Structure - Or Lack Thereof - Of India
Authored by Jayant Bhandari via LewRockwell.com,
Even in the urban centers in India, you can hire a daily wage worker for as low as US$4 per day. This laborer has no day off, no employment insurance, no vacations, no health benefits, and no pension. If he cannot find work one day, he must sell a utensil or two to buy food. He is always in debt, a slave of loan sharks, and lives in a stinking, feces-ridden slum with pigs wallowing in the cesspool and starved, agitated, rabies-afflicted stray dogs ready to pounce. He must pass on a monthly “rent” to the local goon, who passes on a cut to the police. When a family member falls ill, a common occurrence in his disease-ridden environment, his financial option is not always to take the sick to the hospital.
Based on the 2011-12 survey, a staggering 65% of Indians find themselves in a shape akin to or worse than that of our daily wage worker. India suppressed the 2017-18 report, for it likely showed a worsening situation.
In the dog-eat-dog, no-trust society, he is vulnerable to predation, not just from the conventional crooks but more importantly from his own family and friends, the society, and the government, with the only saving grace being that he hasn’t much to lose.
He endures being spat at and slapped with equanimity. Dignity is an alien concept; he would suffocate if he understood it. Empathy is impossible to find; instead, he encounters schadenfreude from those around him. They are atomized and clueless that institutions should exist for their protection, not to prey on them.
If his daughter gets raped when she goes out to the bush at night to relieve herself, they are unlikely to go to the police, partly for fear that she will be raped again and even “disappeared” if the rapist bribes right, but mostly because he and she feel no righteous indignation. They are part and parcel of the same society, well-adjusted to its degradations and depravities. Depending on the situation, they are opportunists, oppressors, victims, or, more suitably, jellyfish.Sports Research Triple...Buy New $26.95 ($0.30 / Count)(as of 07:43 UTC - Details)
It is hard not to sympathize with her. However, without understanding her mindset and moral structure—or lack thereof—one cannot appreciate the complex entanglements that are Indian depravities and how virtually impossible it is to create a civilization. Christian missionaries of the past, deeply rooted in moral sentiments and, hence, unknowingly, in economics, had a sense of these challenges.
The modern progressive, thinking that all successful people are wrong and the poor are inherently good, is, at best, stuck in a Groundhog Day. Lacking an understanding of the complexity and often driven more by virtue-signaling than wanting to do good, he fights for meme-level actions such as ending the caste system and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Our daily wage worker is submissive and harbors an extreme inferiority complex, addressing you with “sir” in every sentence. However, if you afford him respect and a seat at a table, he transforms into a roaring tyrant. He sees all social relations through an oppressor-subservient lens. Even in moments of submission, you must watch your back, as his show of respect is transactional. Gratitude and honor are foreign concepts to him.
If, through the magic of diversity quotas—potentially reaching 50% or more—he gets into a position of power, he will likely outdo his thoroughly corrupt predecessors in sadism, venality, and, of course, incompetence. He will be particularly ruthless with people of his kind. This is an essential part of India’s karmic cycle, the never-ending cycle of depravations. And without consciousness, the karmic cycle cannot be broken.
Unhinged from any moral values, he and his daughter cannot discern right from wrong, perpetually swaying based on expediency, materialistic desires, and survival, fluidly, instinctively, without any thought or emotional reaction, compromising with the milieu.
As if no emotional stress is involved, they don’t see their adjustments as compromises. When exploited, they willingly capitulate. Their instinct is to go after someone weaker to recoup their losses. When they have an opportunity to prey on someone, they feel no shame but a sense of achievement, openly advertising their exploits.
In a society without a moral fabric, street-smartness and crookedness are glorified if successful.McCafe Premium Roast, ...Buy New $34.93 ($0.42 / Count)(as of 07:43 UTC - Details)
The happy-go-lucky adjustments to the savage society do not imply a carefree life—quite the contrary. Being both a predator and constantly being preyed on makes them cunning, as they consistently calculate when to attack, dodge, or submit. She, being a woman and physically weaker, makes up for it by being extra-cunning.
Their minds work on magical thinking and superstitions, rendering them immune to reason. Unanchored to anything objective, they have no toehold. This condition leads to an existential crisis and free-floating chronic anxiety and makes them willing victims of quacks, cult leaders, and psychopaths.
India is among the world’s most stressed and unhappy nations.
In the new-age books, the poor people are depicted as happy, smiling, and satisfied with their meager possessions. Haven’t you seen their cute kids? Alas, politically correct and virtue-signaling readers want what is facile and easy on the brain. They want to feel good, not do good. Who will object to their talking about kissing and hugging dark-colored, wretched kids on the other side of the world whom they will never touch? They advocate for positivity as if it were a magical charm capable of altering reality.
In their wretched existence, poverty-stricken people do find White visitors amusing or even godsends who can pass on some crumbs—and ephemeral catharsis and relief from their everyday drudgery. However, a true development economist—a profession rife with political hacks—instinctively knows that material poverty is often a symptom of inner, spiritual, moral poverty.
Outsiders ushered in waves of civilizational influences to India. The British brought Victorian morals. Together with Christian missionaries, they bestowed a straightjacket of values, nutrients, institutions, social opprobrium, disinterested justice, equality, and the rule of law.
This created an ecosystem for the emergence of a minority of Indian leaders. Most of these were petty, self-serving tyrants who used the façade of the fashion of the day, socialism, and the safety umbrella of British liberalism for their power-hungry projects and to undo the emerging liberal order. Many of these had been to universities in England, or the vague idea of self-governance would never have crossed their minds. This is worth mulling over. The concept of an individual being a sovereign of his life is uniquely Western.
Not being grounded in Western values, they didn’t have the moral and rational faculties. At best, they learned in England the simplistic ideas of socialism, which, given the mental makeup they formed in their early years in India, is all they could see.
A scarce one who grasped Western values desperately wanted the British to stay on.
While everyone foresaw the inevitable consequences of British departure, the emerging “freedom fighters,” driven by an amoral psyche, hypocritically failed to factor in the repercussions. Many chose to relocate with the British, and some did so even earlier. The masses, devoid of the option to emigrate, preferred British rule over the arbitrary tyranny and sadism of Indian rulers. This unequivocally explains why Indians were silent bystanders and even aided foreigners when they arrived. There can be no patriotism without common values rooted in universal principles.
The departure of the British consigned India to perdition.
India has no core moral values, nothing like the Ten Commandments. Indian temples are dedicated to cathartic rituals involving singing or expecting material rewards from the gods, such as success in examinations that lead to positions that earn the most bribes. “Sins” are dos and don’ts, like how to deal with the cow. Searching for meaning and truth or seeking a higher purpose are concepts alien to the Indian mind. Such a society cannot even create leaders, let alone recognize and elevate them to higher positions.
This is bewildering to those who were brought up in societies with the Ten Commandments ingrained in them, even if they are themselves atheists. What they think is a part of nature’s law isn’t.
Actively encouraged by the British, a series of movements swept through the 19th century to eliminate some of the most brutal, inhuman, and superstitious practices. This came to be known as the Bengal Renaissance. The British believed that to have moral values stick, they had to find references to those somewhere in the local scriptures. I call this the Christianization of Brahmanism. With the departure of the British, the movements went off the rails.
The inertia of amorality was so potent that today, even Christianity has become voodoo.
A couple of hundred years of European rule wasn’t enough. Indians had and continue to have no capacity to build a civic fabric. They have failed to show a capacity to imbibe complex thinking. In their hands, what the British had left had to fall into disrepair, hallowed out, and eventually fall apart.
India’s institutions have been worsening and are on their way to their pre-European (and even pre-Islamic) wild existence. Why is this happening? Indians do not have a moral consciousness, and no one has worked out a way to ignite it. Had the British stayed longer, India would have kept improving and done much better. However, there is no evidence that it would have ever become self-sufficient in governance and sustaining civilizational values without the straightjacket provided by the British.
In the post-Christian world, the assumption is that prosperity and education must automatically lead to enlightenment. The results have, however, been quite the opposite, as these factors have instead provided leverage to the underlying irrational, amoral “system.”
A foundation of rational, moral fabric must first be laid to have any hope of building a civilization. So-called education sits unconnected in the mind without a rational, moral foundation, at best as a cog in an industrial system. Mostly, they burden the mind and make it, ironically, more superstitious and confused. Not driven by a vision and a passion for learning, education for such people is nothing more than a certificate to get a job. They never assimilate in their minds what they supposedly learn.
Technology, instead of being used for self-improvement and education, is mostly used for the satisfaction of base desires, spreading rumors and superstitions, and access to pornography. A foundation of discipline and impulse control must have been first laid.
As Indians have become prosperous, they have become more atomized, materialistic, apathetic, and hedonistic, increasingly erupting into savagery and barbarism, quite in contrast to the conventional belief that prosperity, democracy, female empowerment, and education lead to an improved society.
My generous, open-minded grandma, whose circle of friends included her tailor and a former chauffeur, used to say that you invite trouble if you pay certain people more than what keeps them at the edge. Those with no bigger vision than subsistence turn to hedonism if money is forced on them. Too much money takes away the only purpose their minds can fathom. They are then well on a path to troublemaking, savagery, barbarism, and self-destruction.
With increasing education and prosperity and the increasing distance from the British past, the Indian middle class has grown more superstitious.
Civilization does not exist in nature. You have to fight and work towards it. And the process is messy, as Europe experienced over three millennia. The necessary ingredients—honor, work ethic, integrity, fairness, respect for the individual, gratitude, empathy, and rationality—are conspicuous by their absence in India, even in the middle class, which is supposed to be the moral spine of any society. Alas, without civilizational values, one is left with the base, animalistic values, and might-is-right paradigm of resource acquisition and sensual pleasures. All you can have in this milieu is unbridled envy, hate, and covetousness.
This “underpins” an Indian’s behavior, social relationships, and India’s economy, and understanding this is the key to connecting what would otherwise be disparate, confusing, bewildering experiences of India.
Far more important than the institutions are the quality of leadership. Over time, fewer and fewer people trained under the British remained in positions of power. The top leaders today were born after the British departure.
Today, Indian elections are based on the twin policies of freebies and Hindutava (political Hinduism). There is no conversation about public policy, law and order, and governance. The mafia is now firmly embedded in the government, directly commanding the bureaucracy, while the police function as the uniformed arm of the mafia.
In the present Indian government, everything is based on bribes and connections. Attempting to address grievances by ascending the bureaucratic hierarchy leads to escalating bribes. Even resorting to the anti-corruption department comes with a price tag. If you go to court, you will pay. The British had created checks and balances. They are all gone. The bureaucrats, judges, police, and the mafia all talk with each other and scheme to extract the maximum bribes. This does not mean that they get along with each other. They look for every opportunity to backstab and undermine the other.
India is often considered a socialist country. Nothing in the above is socialism. If India became socialist, however unrealistic, mechanical, and simplistic socialism might be, I would see that as a massive improvement.
India has what I call chaos-ism.
As one tries to deconstruct India, one realizes it has no structure. The country itself is a British creation. During the British times, the word Hindu, which, during the Persian and Greek invasions, referred to the people of the Indian subcontinent, came to be associated with the agglomeration of innumerable rituals and beliefs of the region for census purposes.
The British colonizers were systems people. They encountered chaos in India, a madness that had no method. They tried to classify what they encountered. However, giving a theoretical structure to something without structure does not change the reality but confuses understanding of the fundamentals.
The British, again for the census, created a caste classification. If you ask our daily wage worker what his religion, caste, and nation are, his response will confound you and might be incomprehensible even to other Indians. He associates his “nation” with people of his tribe in his local area with an ingrained hostility towards others there. He might still regurgitate something patriotic to do with India these days based on what he constantly gets propagandized to.
Here is a better way to understand the Indian caste system. There are as many castes as there are Indians, with each Indian trying to dominate or be subservient to the other.
I have been to a hundred countries and lived in several. What I say about India is primarily true for today’s Third World, all regressing to their pre-European savagery and barbarism. They represent the vast majority of the human population. Thus far, if they haven’t descended into the kind of chaos witnessed in Rwanda, it isn’t due to their democracies but because of the institutional inertia left by the colonizers and the apprehension of the USA—Pax Americana. Unfortunately, the USA is becoming weaker, and the Third World is poised to become extremely dangerous and chaotic.