by Naresh Jotwani

Looking back at the major military conflicts since the last century, one sees that none of them produced results which were proudly and loudly touted to be achieved. Failure is the norm, while success has had to be retrofitted into the outcome through clever PR. Examples: the two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and the current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Ordinary people are taken in by tyrants’ sabre-rattling, loud speeches, military parades and so on. An ordinary person says to himself: All that cannot be wrong, can it? Listening to a mesmerizing tyrant, he dare not even articulate the thought that the bravado is hollow and could backfire. But, invariably, it does. Ordinary people need to wake up and smell the coffee. It is not enough to say that the tyrants can be wrong. The fact is they are wrong, and their mistakes prove costly to all.

This post tries to link such failures to fickle understanding.

In a comment upon the Ukraine conflict, someone wrote: There is no deep understanding; what there is, is not sustainable.

Use of the word ‘sustainable’ in conjunction with ‘understanding’ gets one thinking. The teachings of Buddha and Christ, for example, are deep, generally applicable – and sustainable. Today they offer an approach to understand the widespread psychological malady on global display.

Every human being seeks durable happiness – that is, a way out of what bothers, hurts or pains him. One of two things can happen to an individual: (a) the drive towards happiness finds healthy expression, or (2) the drive is thwarted. The root of evil is that thwarted drive, followed by egotistic doubling down. Taken to an extreme, this thwarted drive, repeatedly doubled down, leads to limitless misery. Worse still, those who have given up on finding durable happiness truly hate those who are successful or are staying the course.

An ‘evil’ person is one who knows he is down, and going down further, but carries on regardless — shamelessly ready to take others down with him. The person is saying, in effect, ‘If I cannot have peace, I will see that nobody has it’ — that is, in effect, a scorched earth policy.

What is it that thwarts the drive towards happiness? What else but fear, anger, hatred, jealousy, ego … et cetera. All of these are ‘inner maladies’; to trigger them, external stress factors are always present in the environment.

This is true of all human beings, and therefore it applies to the ‘ruling elite’ and to the nominal ‘emperor’ as well. These people may boast of enormous power, wealth, fame … and so on; but they are also subject to the drive to find durable happiness. Otherwise why invent phrases such as ‘promised land’, ‘greatest country’ or ‘thousand year reign’?

Today it seems that many of the ‘ruling elite’ have given up on finding durable happiness – and are also in denial that things are spiralling rapidly down.

A person may claim ownership of trillions of dollars, command over huge armies, or control over hundreds of lackeys and sycophants. Let us grant that he gets A+ in all these categories; in the category of durable happiness, however, F is the accurate assessment of such a person.

Trading durable happiness for power, wealth and fame is like trading a sweet water lake for a mirage. Is that an achievement or a delusion? From delusion follow lies, hate, violence … and eventually defeat. Therefore the current ‘global empire’ should be dubbed the ‘Empire of Delusion’ – or, in its present teetering state, the ‘Empire of Lost Causes’.

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Fickle understanding is no understanding at all. Life is full of difficulties, challenges, changing circumstances … and more. That is to say, challenge is an existential truth. It makes perfect sense that sustainable understanding would help a person cope with the countless challenges of life.

The key question is: How does understanding become durable? Why does one person have this quality while another does not?

Understanding becomes durable only when it shaped and chiselled – usually painfully – by the very challenges of life which necessitate the development of durable understanding. Necessity is the mother of invention, in the ever-open school of hard knocks.

The ‘ruling elite’ create a bubble of unreality isolating them from the school of hard knocks. Belief that one has reached ‘the promised land’ or ‘the summit of power’ blocks reality. With time, anxiety and insecurity take over.

An example of an inner conflict precluding understanding is given by the label ‘white supremacist’. Such a person may have many talents, such as bravery and mechanical ingenuity. However, the person may also feel hatred towards people of other backgrounds; that hatred distorts his judgement. Tribal loyalties feed the inner conflict, which then becomes the tribe’s external calling card.

In such an instance, is it more accurate to say that ‘X hates Y’, or that ‘X is in the cruel grip of hate’? Is X a purveyor or a victim of hate? Indeed, can X be a purveyor of hate without first being a victim of it? A victim and a purveyor of hate – or greed, or lust – while being dangerous to others, is also a miserable, pathetic creature.

The hubris of science complicates further the modern mentality, which is a mentality without a working mind. Inner conflicts are suppressed, while the hubristic march to ‘ever more progress’ only creates anxiety and misery.

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Actions of the western ‘ruling elite’ today are motivated by desperation, not by wisdom rooted in understanding. No such ‘high and mighty ruler’ can deny in the heart of his heart the inner conflict and self-deception. The individual is too proud to admit to any inner malady, even as greedy lackeys are hired to reinforce his deception. Deception is good business. Instead of correcting course, the individual doubles down on lies, debt, power, cruelty, exploitation, war – the entire ‘downward spiral’ playbook.

Some ‘smart people’ in the US say: Fake it till you make it. But this implies that if you don’t make it, the fakery never ends. No person can hide his fakery from himself. The fakery eventually results in cynicism and nihilism, followed by senility and a lonely death; that is unsustainability in the extreme.

Moral choices have been faced by mankind over millennia, or perhaps longer, perhaps even in prehistoric times. The situation today is fundamentally no different from earlier ones – but with one key difference. With the spread of the internet, people around the world get a free ‘ring side’ seat to observe and understand the goings-on.

Denial of the existential, noble truth of suffering is the great lie. Durable understanding helps in coping with the challenges and vicissitudes of life. Shallow understanding leads only to tightly shutting one’s eyes, clenching one’s fists and muttering a tribal mantra from rote memory.

Do historians miss all this? Do they get it that the teachings of great prophets and saints are based on deep understanding of human psychology?

Consider Christ’s profound observation that Man does not live by bread alone. This observation – an eternal truth – has no ‘academic merit’ today. An ‘academic’ assessment of its merit would start with the question of the number of research publications Christ had to his credit!😀 The academic world of economists, historians, political theorists … et cetera … is today cut off from real life and has become a useless, noisy, self-serving Tower of Babel.

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Durable understanding lies deep, deep down in the human heart. Understanding which is thus rooted is unshakable in the face of arguments, temptations and adversity. It is this deep understanding – and not wealth, power or sense pleasures – which gives value to human life.

The huge eruption of power-lust, cynicism and greed which occurred about two thousand years ago, and lasted centuries, caused enormous violence and destruction. What consequences will the present huge eruption of power-lust, cynicism and greed have? We cannot know – but it is likely that the consequences will once again span centuries.