It was Hegel who said, “that people and governments never have learned anything from history.” And as we might expect, people and their governments keep repeating the sad fact that they are not interested in learning.
Now here is where Buddhism steps onto the scene: people keep repeating the terrible fact that they are not interested in curtailing and restricting their desires, especially for what is lustful and ultimately harmful to themselves and to others. This is also in mankind’s history.
It seems these days that the more wealth and status people acquire the more corrupt they become which manifests itself in hypocrisy which is able to hide the dark side of their character. This was shown brilliantly in Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut (1999). On the one hand, the wealthy or those with a high status, virtue signal while, on the other hand, they are involved in the most evil of enterprises, so evil in some instances that if it were made public, the first reaction of the public would be not to believe it.
For the average person who would prefer to be, eventually, wealthy and have status they, vicariously, enjoy the actions and lifestyles of their idols even though if you looked deeper into their character, their idols prefer debauchery to the discipline of curtailing and restricting their desires leading to a more noble and higher view of life and reality.
We can call this phenomenon degeneration or devolution. And recent history shows us that this phenomenon is very real. Here people have become psychologically weaker. They have very little in the way of self-control over themselves. They prefer what is, ultimately, destructive to themselves in the long run. They do not care about what is good, prudent, and wise. This can’t be a good thing for a society. Without knowing it, these weak people are the pawns of those who are most evil; who reside at the top of the pyramid and want nothing more than to turn mankind into a savage animal which, incidentally, was the goal of Moses Hess who was Marx’s guide and teacher; who also believed Communism to be the best means by which to spread annihilation!
This destructive vision of Hess first enters our schools and universities through the doors of the humanities and the social sciences in a new form called postmodernism which saps the culture of its vitality and humanity. No longer can we speak or have hope in the highest man (P., uttamoporiso), a Buddha. Certainly, none of this accords with Buddhism which demands of the individual that in order to unite with the highest truth one must be in accord with it. This requires a life dedicated to realizing the highest truth.
Comments