In the second part of this article we had asked ourselves whether a majority of human beings on this earth was free to use natural resources for its survival. Before answering this question we must keep in mind that in this modern age natural resources are being treated as commodities. Perhaps the air that we use for breathing has not completely become a commodity as yet; but for all other things we have to pay according to prevailing man made laws of the market and economics. In fact air is also not that free. Poor people living in slums of big cities in many parts of the world cannot afford to breath in unpolluted air.
Man has body, senses, mind (mana), intellect and Ahamkara (I am-ness). Out of these only intellect can be used by man ‘to decide’ whether to make efforts to know the reality of his existence and live accordingly or to go on living satisfying one’s needs, desires and to completely submit to insatiable sensory pleasures. If man decides to use his intellect for producing things that never existed earlier and make his life more comfortable and enjoyable than ever; do we foresee any problem? Let us discuss this.
We start with a real situation. Reports reveal that 75% of the world’s population owns mobile phones and out of the people who use mobile phones 44% feel that it would be hard to give up use of mobile phones. 25 years before we did not have mobile phones but were able to manage our lives pretty well. I can give account of how I lived about fifty years; many can speak clearly about life 65-70 years before. I could write a letter then, and expect a reply in about 8-10days. Perhaps, we planned well, but, we also missed many opportunities, good or bad.
The available findings claim that many improvements had been possible due to mobiles/internet in many fields that concern human life. I do not deny this. But, it will be fair to view things in proper perspective if we are interested in living a better life. I will give an example to elucidate my point. In 1980s small sugar cane growers might have loaded their produce in bullock-carts and reached the closest sugar mill to find that crushing had stopped in the mill due to some break down. That could have resulted in drying of sugar cane for a few days causing losses to the growers as well as the mills. Today, they can dial the number of sugar cane collection centre and find the status and losses could be avoided. But, I cannot avoid imagining the situation when no sugar mills existed and people prepared jaggery (gur, unrefined sugar) in the village itself without any mental stress and physical efforts necessary to carry their produce to a sugar mill and waiting for the payments there against. It is also reported that jaggery is better than refined sugar for health. I do not want that the readers should hurriedly conclude that I am inclined to suggest some kind of reversal in our movements. Moreover, that cannot be voluntarily done.
Human desires based on sensory pleasures, ability and tendency of human intellect to explore, basic nature of human mind to wander and the tendency of our Ahamkara to get attached with whatever is material; all these propel us to move ahead of wherever we are and search for ‘greener pastures’. This movement is rarely within the physical capacities that have been granted to us by the nature. We cannot run with the speed of a leopard but we want to run faster, we cannot fly like an eagle but we want to go the moon, we cannot live three feet deep in water for five minutes but we want to roam about on the sea bed. Our senses, mind and Ahmkara motivate us to achieve more and more, and our intellect shows us the way.
Unfortunately, the picture drawn in the preceding paragraph is flawed. The fact is that only a part of human population moves faster than the others. Only those who have abilities and resources, primarily due to historical reasons, put in their resources and deploy their intellect to progress in materialistic terms. They do it to make themselves more secure, more comfortable and to enjoy more sensory pleasures. It is not denied that exploration, by itself, is intellectually satisfying and one does not have sensory pleasures and comforts always in mind while in the process of discovering and inventing. However, deployment of resources that are needed to support exploration and invention is seldom done for intellectual gratification. Practically, there is a class of people who have more resources than others and there is another class that agrees to put in intellectual efforts to serve the former. The combination makes materialistic advancements possible. Those who can neither deploy resources nor make intellectual effort constitute a large majority because only a few can accumulate wealth and gain desired intellectual ability to discover and invent by depriving many of what should be naturally due to them.
Inequitable materialistic growth adds salt to injury. Man who lives beyond his physical abilities using the clutches of intellect finds him surrounded by others who somehow try to survive in an environment devoid of rich comfort of nature. I am referring to such conditions as the ones existing in metropolitan towns where a few live lavishly and majority tries to keep its body and soul together by carrying out drudgeries of monotonous life. It is a well known fact that the gap between the rich and poor is decreasing.
It is not that man’s desire to explore has caused an increasingly materialistic world. In past, Man used physical strength to deprive other human beings of what was rightfully due to them. Man used the weak or the defeated to serve him like slaves so that they could live in comfort without doing any physical labour themselves. Those with strength controlled and used more and more natural resources to gain still more strength and wealth. More output with lesser natural input, including that of human labour, was possible due to scientific inventions. The wealthy and powerful recognized the value of science (a product of human intellect) and joined hands with those who could deploy their intellectual ability to produce more with lesser resources. The combination was deadly. It cornered more resources to earn more. They even made more devastating arms to make the wealthy more powerful so that they could snatch more resources from others and become wealthier and still more powerful. This continues. An ordinary engineer or a technocrat is not even aware of the contribution he is making in perpetrating violence in the world. On the contrary, he feels cheated by the system that pays more to those with mediocre intellect just because they can manipulate things to help the owners make more money.
The chain of servants acts like this; those who do continuous eight hours of physical labour are the lowest in the ladder, those who put in honest intellectual labour are somewhere in the middle and the people with ordinary intellectual ability but superior manipulative ability are at the top. This part of discussion cannot be completed without discussing about those who neither have natural resources nor occupations to feed themselves properly because technology has replaced human labour.
[Fourth and concluding part of this article will appear shortly.]
