IV. International Changes and Modern Mutations : What Future of Humanity?

I think I made mention in passing of the idea that man is born in a world hostile to him. A child experiences being always in danger, threatened by everything around him, and later by human beings. As he grows up, the feeling is confirmed all the time, and he begins to feel afraid, in dire need for protection, security and sense of security. This fear becomes compulsive like an instinct, and gets implanted in the human psyche, and develops into the only major motivating force through man’s life.

Search for protection, consciously or unconsciously, begins in earnest. In his wild life as a pastoral or a nomad, he lived in a herd or in a tribe for protection, where he developed a primitive idea of a guardian spirit or a tribal god represented by an idol. However, he was all the time yearning for better protection in a more settled mode of life. He learned to get married to more than one wife to increase his offspring, and get tied to a stable mode of habitation, where he can breed sheep, cattle and camels and have a pasture land and a settled home, with a tract of land around him. He learned to have league with neighbouring settlements against enemies. The idea that one is always afraid of enemies and that one has one’s own identity took root, and this identity should be protected against enemies for one to feel secure.

Here man began to feel that security implies that you are different from everybody else, far and near, and that everybody around is Gentile and you are distinguished. Property, slaves, confederates, fortresses, and means of defence became essential, especially weapons. Groups must have armies and have weapons for security from fear, and the more secure one is, the more insecure he becomes, and this may be the nucleus of arms race.

It is noteworthy that man’s first concern has been to develop an arsenal stocked with weapons always under development to make them more and more deadly. I think that civilization is created to provide security in the first place through money and through arms. Money, however, has proved to be more effective.

The view that the motive for the Western civilization is not the welfare of man, but the acquisition of money, and the deadly weapons are subservient to this endeavour. It looks also that the Western civilization seems to have destroyed security on spiritual and religious grounds and made it dependent solely upon money and made weapons a handmaid.

Perhaps one may say that the advance of Western civilization has been marked by complete unconcern for the human welfare and has been attacked by repeated destructive wars which killed mercilessly millions upon millions of human beings. There is also the fact that this civilization has a reverse side expressed in pollution, in the destruction of the earth atmosphere, in a phenomenon of man-made diseases, in the death toll of millions of people dying of starvation and others reduced to abject poverty or to stifling slavery, and everybody will be offered either the carrot or the gun. This will be the end-result of the Western civilization and this is looming in the distance. Will this be the cure for the deficiency of security? Human beings in their search for security have committed against their fellow creatures acts of savagery unprecedented in human history for their severity and brutality, unbelievable, and in cold blood. It will be blood-curdling to relate the stories about the horrible crimes of war perpetrated by the most civilized Western powers in various parts of the world, especially recently. For instance, the Palestinians, at the hands of the Israelis, in the period after 1947 suffered 51 massacres, not to mention the latest massacres in 2002. The massacres of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo are well-known. But one thing is notable about these massacres lately is that the victims are all Muslims. Other massacres also against Muslims in Iraq, Iran, Libya and Sudan are in the offing. Muslims everywhere are accused of being terrorists before and after 11.9.2001, especially after the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine. In the West, a fiction can be turned into a fact and a fact can be turned into a fiction, as attested by McCarthyism and the cold war. The crisis between India and Pakistan about Kashmir will definitely show that the Pakistanis, being Muslims, will have no genuine sympathy from the West. The whole of Afghanistan, a Muslim country, has been devastated in looking for a mare’s nest. Other Muslim countries are on the list for sinister punishment. It is very strange, as it looks, that the only criterion used for the infliction of the punishment is religion. Bosnia, Kosovo, Turkish Cyprus, Arab Palestine, Eritrea, Kashmir, and Muslim Phillipine have been denied self-determination, and other Muslim countries are under sanctions, and under threats of military attacks. This is on top of the attachment of the charge of terrorism to all Muslims everywhere. This onslaught is aimed consistently against all Muslims and also against Islam without any evidence to support it. Apparently, this prejudice against Islam is rooted in a religious crusading spirit. In all this Islam is sinned against rather than sinning, and the only explanation for this hatred is that Islam is opposed to the inhuman course taken by the West against an alternative system based on three principles, namely egalitarianism, peaceful coexistence and justice.

The West in return seems to be bent inexorably on the old basically religious system of seeing things in black and white and on dividing humankind into those who are “chosen” and those who are “gentile”. This system, based as it is on discrimination and divisiveness, is patently unjust and encourages lawlessness in the human society and the application of the law of the jungle in international affairs. Things are drifting rapidly towards this phase and life on this globe is threatened with a gloomy prospect. The downtrodden in the world must look out for dear life.

I am not trying by citing such instances to grind an axe, and to pass judgement on the present Western civilization from a narrow angle. What I am saying is simply that this civilization seems to be unjust and uncharitably based upon the grinding of the faces of the poor and the weak, in its pursuit of wealth and power, using might as the sole instrument. It is asserted now by anthropologists that the international modern situation has ignored justice and morality, and seems to be heading towards something worse.

The first thing that strikes one’s eye is the frequency of aggressive wars and the impotence of everybody, including the United Nations, to establish peace. If a problem inherited from the same civilization is solved, the solution itself has the seeds of other problems, and the circuit goes on, ad infinitum. One thing is certain in this rotational process is that there are no equitable standards to go by, and the situation is again chaotic.

The second noticeable thing is the indifference to the plight of the poor and the weak, hardly for no fault of theirs. The poor are getting poorer and the weak are getting weaker. Some unkind thinkers, like the American Ayn Rand, seem to lay the blame on the poor and the weak and seem to suggest obliquely that they should be eliminated, perhaps because they cannot compete in the marathon race.

The third noticeable thing is the lust for money, coupled with the lust for power. Lust for money is considered to be the root of the evil, and has given rise to the lust for power. But how lust for money came about and how did it shape the Western civilization?

Power is the protector of money, and wars are for money. Technology is for money, and medicine is for money. Philanthropy is no more, and the welfare state is dead. Any attempt at egalitarianism is doomed to failure, and it is unthinkable that the “Chosen” should be reduced to the status of quality with the ‘Gentile”. If one lives in an equitable security, anything in the way of “Chosenness” is odd, but if he is bred on “Chosenness” anything in the way of egalitarianism is nefarious. And the West is irretrievably bred on “Chosenness”. As it is unthinkable for a Jew to be equal to a non-Jew, so it is unthinkable for a Westerner to be equal to an Asian, African, a Muslim or a negro. The system of South Africa is a living example of the discriminatory spirit of the Western civilization, which is basically religious.

To change this inhuman disposition, it is essential that the Western psyche or subconscious should undergo a drastic reversion to the natural and human attitude. The first step to be taken is to abolish religious education in all Western schools.

The fourth noticeable thing is the present trend towards globalization, and unipolar hegemony, the protagonist seems to think that the World can be likened to a system of satellite states all revolving round a central pivot, like the sun in the solar system. Like satellites round the central celestial body. This relationship is like a bond of servitude or a yoke of slavery. If the states acquiesce in that, well and good, otherwise they will be forced to acquiesce under various trumped up pretexts such as the charge of terrorism, on the accusation of an attempt to build up an arsenal of mass destruction weapon. Other pretexts may be made up when necessary. This hegemonic picture is like a Jewish or Christian messianic dream, but its being messianic gives it a sense of reality like one of the myths which is more likely to be believed in the West than a hard fact. The Palestinians, an egregious example, are accused of being terrorists at a time when everybody knows the glaring truth about how the Palestinians were despoiled of their land, evicted from their homes and forced to live in refugee camps till now. The West is an accomplice in this human tragedy. After all this, the Israelis and the U.S.A. accuse them most audaciously of being terrorists. This is a specimen of how the West judges things most arbitrarily and thinks at the same time that it is sane and civilized. The Western mind should be distorted and blindfolded, as shown by the era of colonialism which makes it a fact that man can live a life of  lies.

The fifth noticeable thing is to live with a split personality in the West. The West which is highly civilized is wont to believe in two incompatibles at the same time. A Western man is ambivalent. He can believe in God, who is a man as a god. Hearsay evidence is legally inadvisable, but it is a true evidence in religion, and this tends to make a Westerner susceptible to believe lies as under McCarthyism or during the cold war. This abnormal tendency is the stuff of the subconscious, essentially religious. A man can be a god, and a god can be a man. The Christ is a true man and a true god.

On the social side, the split is between the “Chosen” and the “Gentile”, between “us” and “them”, between the “elect” and the “damned”, and between those who are with ‘us’ and those who are not. Now there is a nascent split developing fast between those who are terrorists and those who are not, and perhaps between Muslims and non-Muslims, or between Jews and non-Jews. The sum total of all this is that the West, to survive, must always live in conflict and must always have an enemy, real or imaginary, to contend with. This enemy now is Islam.

Finally, I think that if the West continues for a long time to function on the way it has functioned so far, the world must expect a catastrophe sooner or later, but the people from the other parts of the world must, from now on, look out for themselves before it is too late.

What I have been hoping to hint at is that the world in general and the West in particular are living in an artificial atmosphere of concepts turned upside down under exceptional circumstances. Any concept from the past, relating to egalitarianism, justice, morality and humanitarianism seems to be eroded and replaced by arbitrary opposites without sanction or criterion. Nothing seems to have any validity, not even the rights of man or laws among nations. Aggression is to be continued, because it is in self-defence. State terrorism is justified for the faked reason that it is against evil. Small nations are being threatened with punishment for the alleged reason that they are producing or planning to produce biological, chemical and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. These countries: North Korea, Sudan, Iraq, and Iran, are described by the U.S.A. as axis of evil. Before, the Soviet Union was described as the focus of evil. The whole thing centres round the meaning of the word ‘evil’. It looks that anything claimed to be possessed by the small nations is evil simply because it is in the hands of a small country which is not friendly. The mere fact that the possession of such weapons by such a nation is the proof that this nation is evil.

This is only one instance of how concepts are losing their conventional meanings. This loss is affecting the word “terrorism”. However, in the West for many centuries there have been pairs of opposites, and the whole society has been riddled with these opposites. A Westerner who feels that everything around will be unconsciously urged to disturb peace, and if there is no enemy he will find one. He is always living in two communicating compartments in which one will always activate the other. If a Westerner has a friend he must necessarily have a foe, but the foe is first priority. When he seeks to be superior, it is because he wants to have underlings, and the desire to have underlings is original and primordial. The U.S.A. wants to be superior, and therefore it is necessary for the underlings to be cowed into subservience and the small states which are being accused of practising or supporting terrorism are the underlings. There will be no peace in the world, and wars will be inevitable.

This attitude is psychotic, the whole Western world is suffering from this aberration, and I think that this world has been responsible all the time for what is happening in the globe whether good or bad, but the good things have to be counterbalanced by the bad things, and it all comes to naught. The brilliant Western civilization has a nature of bestowing untold benefits on mankind, and of inflicting untold harms in consequence. It produced all manner of comforts to the human body, but at the same time it produced nuclear weapons and others which are capable of wiping out all humanity, on top of diseases, pollution, poverty, and degradation. This balance and counterbalance are fundamental.

What is noticeable about this pattern is that this civilization does not fit in with other civilizations in the world, especially, for instance, the Eastern civilization or the Islamic civilization. The other thing is that it is psychotical and very dangerous. The Western civilization appears to have the nature of a thing that has come to stay, and incapable of being dislodged, much to the misery of mankind. Its being psychotical is the crux of the problem. The basis of the psychosis is fear, abnormal fear.

This fear, because it is psychotic, seems to be of a permanent nature, and cannot easily be removed by conventional methods.