By Dr. Sawraj Singh
When a man loses human qualities and human spirit, then he is dehumanized. Western consumerism has, for all practical purposes, reduced human existence to a mechanical and robotic state where the purpose of life becomes only to earn money and buy comforts and conveniences. Men enter this rat race which has no endpoint. They keep earning and spending until they are exhausted. They keep running in the rat race until they are either physically or mentally broken. There is no other way to get out of the rat race. People keep running until they collapse like the man in Tolstoy’s story, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” In the story, the King rewards a man as much land as he wants, on the condition that he runs over the land without stopping. The man starts running at sunrise and keeps running until sunset. However, the man collapses and dies from exhaustion. The story ends with the man being buried in two and a half square yards.
Consumerism keeps increasing your desires. However, the desires can neither be defined nor fulfilled. The end result is always the feeling of un-fulfillment or dissatisfaction. The unfulfilled desires keep making a person more frustrated and unhappy. True happiness comes from moderation, contentment, and tranquility. Eastern ideology has always promoted these values. However, western consumerism incites the opposite tendencies. It creates turmoil, dissatisfaction, and crisis in the mistaken belief that these make a person more productive. It felt that a contented and tranquil person will become complacent and less productive. Western capitalism deliberately makes people insecure, anxious, and fearful of losing their jobs. It feels that by doing this, people will become more efficient and productive because they will always be on their toes.
This may be true that in the short run, capitalism increases productivity of man. However, in the long run, society has to pay a tremendous price for the short term gain. The insecure, anxious, and fearful men make the whole society unstable, which is ultimately pushed toward chaos and anarchy. When people are insecure, anxious, and fearful, then the society and its value system cannot remain stable. The end result is that capitalism hops from one crisis to another. In other words, crises are an integral part of the capitalist system. Since its inception, capitalism has faced cyclic crises. Look at the Great Depression of the thirties, and about 80 years after that, we have another major crisis which started in 2008.
Some admirers of capitalism laud it for its resilience. They say that capitalism has emerged stronger from each crisis and has the ability to face and come out victorious from each crisis. I feel history is going to teach these admirers a bitter lesson: with each crisis, capitalism has not emerged stronger, but has become weaker. The scope and magnitude of the crisis continues to widen. From a pure economic crisis in the beginning, it has become truly global with social, cultural, and moral components adding on to the economic crisis. Ultimately, the crisis will grow beyond the capability of capitalism to control or solve it. The truth is that the point is not coming but has already come. In all probability, the present crisis is not cyclic but is terminal. Without making fundamental changes, the present capitalist order is not going to survive. The fundamental cause of the present crisis is that western consumerism has reversed the time-tested concepts of Eastern wisdom. One concept is that creativity is higher than productivity. Another concept is that human awareness and consciousness are the essence of life rather than physical existence. Still another concept is that ethics are above economics.
Even though consumerist capitalism has elevated the productivity of man to be his highest aspect, yet the fact remains that productivity is limited by material conditions and it is comparatively short-lived. Generally, productivity decreases with age. Let us say that many people are most productive in the age between thirty to fifty years. After fifty, productivity usually starts declining. However, there are no limits on being creative. Creativity can transcend material conditions or age. Creativity is based upon imagination, which is not limited by time or space. Man can be creative at any age. In the consumerist capitalist society, the value of a man decreases as he becomes less productive. It is no exaggeration that capitalist society treats human beings as machines. When machines become less productive, they are thrown away as junk. Capitalist society treats human beings in the same manner while the fact remains that they can still play a very useful role for society by being creative.
In the same manner, capitalist society treats the physical existence of a person as the essence of his existence. However, the essence of human existence is the human spirit. When a man loses the human spirit, he no longer deserves to be called a human being. His physical existence alone does not qualify him to be called a human being. Human awareness or consciousness makes him different than other creatures. All other life forms struggle to maintain their physical existence and for the survival of their species. It is only the human being who struggles to keep his spirit alive. If the human spirit dies, then the physical existence becomes irrelevant.
The Eastern concept of putting ethics above economics also puts creativity above productivity, and keeps the human spirit above physical existence. Under capitalism, once these time-tested Eastern concepts were reversed, the human being was reduced to a subhuman existence. In other words, the human being was dehumanized and was reduced to a mere consumer. We have to re-humanize these consumers to make human beings out of them. This can be done by accepting the Eastern concepts of putting creativity above productivity, human spirit above physical existence, and putting ethics above economics. These concepts are very well illustrated in Sri Guru Granth Sahib.
Dr. Sawraj Singh, MD F.I.C.S. is the Chairman of the Washington State Network for Human Rights and Chairman of the Central Washington Coalition for Social Justice. He can be reached at [email protected].
