Oppressors and Common People

What enables oppressors to show such unity? Look at mafia, terrorists, smugglers, corrupt politicians, businessmen, imperialists. They all are hand-in-glove when involved in something vile. Somehow, their teams are extremely strong, despite being much smaller than the number of people they oppress. It's got to do with the common urges which drive them to do what they do. Greed, ambition, anger, fear, ego, vanity etc. are very potent motivators and unifiers.

On the other hand, common people never seem to come together? Because most people are cowards. They would rather hide behind their busy life etc. than come out in the open and speak out. They fear unpleasantness and messing it up with the 'important' and 'influential'. They would sometimes even turn against the very people who are trying to stand for them, just to avoid being marked as an agent of change in the existing social order. And agents of change are a set of creatures oppressors hate the most, and go to any length to get them out of their way.

The dominating emotion among the masses is fear. And here's another way fear works: as a paralyser, which is exactly the opposite of how it works on the oppressors. 

The oppressors often hold positions of influence, and once in a while do their bit to keep the system going. This could easily be construed as a service to the common man. But it's a delusion. A parasite needs the host to remain alive to be able to suck its blood. An intelligent parasite will go to the extreme of helping its host survive when it's about to die, because if the host dies, the parasite can't survive either. An intelligent parasite will also want to keep its victim deluded that it is actually a helpful guest, who should be allowed to suck its host's blood once in a while as a payback for its services. British, when they were here, also built bridges and buildings, apart from looting the people in immeasurable proportions. And even to this day, we punish ourselves by saying that their coming to our land did us a lot of good, whereas the reality is they kept sucking our lifeblood for two centuries, and left us scarred for centuries to come.

The common man -- lazy, ignorant, fearful -- is happy to lead a subjugated life as long as the oppressors keep them away from the need to understand things and take things in their own hands. They are afraid to take responsibility, to fail, to deal with the discomfort of understanding and learning. When the common man stands up to say something, he cowers back down after seeing the menacing look in the eyes of the oppressor which seems to say: 'Speak, and I will drop everything.'

An oppressor -- a social parasite -- will do everything in his means to keep the masses deluded about the true nature of its relation with the oppressor. One of the most potent ways to do this is to keep the masses divided. Mass ignorance is a great ally of the oppressor. People who are divided can easily be dealt with by a handful of oppressors. When the voices of the people come together, it is a beacon of death for the oppressors. Hence, it's a universal characteristic of the oppressor to try and kill communication. A group of sufferers is a formidable force. A lonely sufferer is puny in comparison. He is so afraid and lacking in confidence that his voice can be silenced for ever with a rap on his knuckles.

I now gradually realise why Netaji and Gandhiji were such great leaders. Because they could make millions of cowards come out on the streets and take up a gun or fill jails. Respect!

Limits of Education

Education is popularly compared with the glow of a lamp. A lamp lights another without going out itself. Thus spreads the light of learning.

I have seen many ways in which the above doesn't happen. Here are two of them:

One: Your being educated doesn't mean a dime to anyone.

If a friend comes back from a visit to a new place, we become eager to hear from him stories of his experiences there: what he saw, the people he met, what he ate, where all he went. We ask him to share his photos and so on. If someone visits a new restaurant, we ask him about his experience with the food and services there. But if someone comes from an educational journey, why is there so much silence around it? Quite surprisingly, I find the culture of sharing one's deepest and most insightful experiences with the near and dear ones completely missing around us. That's because we relate education and learning with achievements, not experiences. If something is treated as an experience, it pleases all when we share it with others. But when everyone looks at the same thing as an achievement, you must keep quiet about it, lest your sharing any of your thoughts gets construed as bragging. This way, your old friends, your loved ones distance themselves from you fearing you would make unsolicited display of your knowledge and learning to them.

The other one: I feel, is the more serious one. It's the inability of education to reach inward, towards the soul. Here's another long-remembered Sanskrit couplet for you:

विद्या ददाति विनयं , विनायाद्याती प्रातताम 

पात्रताद्धनमाप्नोति धनाद्धर्म ततस्सुखम 

(Education gives humility, humility gives deservingness. From deservingness comes wealth. Weath allows you to do good conduct. And that's happiness.)

I don't feel, education today is designed to give us humility. Just the opposite. It makes us more and more heavy with pride that we can't handle. Our ego, our primal competitive nature to be called the number one, to stay ahead in some or the other competition, finds its expression in our education. Lamentably, this fact gets corroborated in umpteen cases where people, otherwise well recognised as scholars, can't stand others of their creed. Look at the politics in the top academic departments of the country, for instance. How many instances of friendliness, leave alone deep friendship, do you see flourishing among the PhD students or professors of intellectual groups of stellar status? Hardly any? Thousand different things come in their way of sharing amicability: professional rivalry, intellectual rivalry, conflict of principles...While so-called ignorant people would succeed to make up for their differences easily, intellectuals part ways on the slightest of excuses, and nothing can then bring them back together to share the earlier relation.

If our education is making us more and more intolerant, irritable, self-centred and narrow-minded, why on earth would we want others to get educated like us? This education, which doesn't teach us to look at it as a joyful experience but a toilsomely gained achievement, is like a disease. If it makes us forget to love and share, to be happy, to live, it's better to remain uneducated. Instead of spreading light, it draws out what light we naturally have in our souls, and leaves darkness there. Such an education can be shown off to others to make them jealous. It can't be used to make us one bit happier.

Is there a way to become learned which doesn't erect walls: between the learned and unlearned; and between the learned and learned?

Related:

Fallacy of Influencing Others

The Enemy Within