Insightful newsletter of Drishtikone: Issue #251 - Weapons of Bespoke Misery
Creating custom miseries to address is an industry. An enterprise. The powers-that-be use career moral busybodies to unleash the Weapons of Bespoke Misery.
Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay
“Even when she walks one would believe that she dances.” ― Charles Baudelaire
“I want to do Good.”
What does that really mean?
That I want to do an ‘Action’ that will yield a ‘Good Result.’ Just see that Good is not the adjective for Action, but the Result.
Action is colorless.
Those who assume they are doing Good, are also assuming that their Action will necessarily and absolutely give a Good Result.
Playing God, isn’t it?
You can just “Do”. Not “Do Good.”
Anyone who says the latter is either delusional believing he is God or a scoundrel.
Most of the moral busybodies aspiring do-gooders are one of these.
Those who take up “Doing Good” as a business are not delusional. They are scoundrels. For, they will invent misery. And work to address it.
More importantly, they will invent a misery that pays.
You see, every misery is a power tool. So those who are in the business of power, use certain kinds of miseries to create outraged masses who can be unleashed on adversaries.
And who to help in selling and addressing those miseries than the moral busybodies? The “Doing Good” scoundrels.
Diversity and Differences
Equality is a very dangerous concept. It starts out with asking for equality under the law and social treatment but very soon morphs into obliterating any notion of diversity.
Men and women, people of any two races or even societies are not the same. They are different. And that is beautiful. Diversity is a strength on which this entire existence is built upon. No two leaves are the same. No two living beings are ever the same. That is what makes this existence so amazingly beautiful and different at every step.
The notion of equality, the way it is being brandished by the intellectuals, hits at the root of diversity - being different.
Women do not have to be equal to men. They need to be different. The former notion implicitly holds men as the paragon. They aren’t. No one in the ‘equality business’ says that “men should be equal to women”. As if the capabilities that women bring to the world are inferior and so not aspirational!
Why, for example, can not the men be pushed to inculcate feminine aspects of care, love, nurturing and grace? Instead of women being expected to be ruthless leaders, why can’t men be taught how a woman would lead?
In fact, why has no one looked at a model where the masculine and feminine characteristics are brought together to form the new “human management framework”?
You see, pushing for “women to be equal to men” assumes men are worth being equal to and women’s different ways are not worth the ascendancy that they may actually deserve!
More importantly, it hits at the root of this existence - diversity. Making it bad. Because everything needs to be’ equal.
And, strangely, in that quest to make “everything equal,” the activism industry creates bubbles around every different entity in the society.
Have you seen how Dalitism is now an industry with that card being flashed at every forum for every topic? All in the name of “equality.”
The activism industry does not brandish the “difference card” as a way to call for improvements of the downtrodden but as a call for vengeance against real or perceived adversaries that their profit motive has conjured up.
Made-to-Order Brahmins and Manufactured Caste System
Dalits who were treated badly need to get a better deal. So they should get access to the opportunities. But does that mean anyone and everyone who has a name that tags him as a Brahmin should be targeted? Or should his “caste”, for that is an imported concept, be used as a pejorative?
If being a Brahmin in a power sense is regressive, then being a Dalit in the sense of power struggle is equally bad.
For, one could not exist without the other.
Those, who proudly call themselves “Head of NGO” or “Head of Marketing” or extoll someone like Barack Obama as the “Head of State”, but go on to abuse Vedic scriptures for saying Brahmins are the “Head of the divine” rarely understand the irony of their own identity.
The so-called Brahmins were not always a caste really.
If you check the explanation of Indian society by Arrian, the Greek historian in 100 AD you see a different world. He spoke of a very different reality, which had no relationship to the castes that the modern leftists (informed by works of Christian missionary historians) have been shouting hoarse about.
Sages. Not Brahmins. And they had the worst quality of life!
At that time there was no such thing as Brahmins as a caste!
So what Rig Ved was talking about could NEVER have been about the leftist understanding of Brahmins. Isn’t it?
Scriptures were actually talking about what Arrian is calling - The Sages. Those who had the worst quality of life but the highest respect in the society. The Yogis. And that makes sense.
So where the heck did Brahmins come in? And how did they become so, well patriarchal?
A glimpse can be had from the work of the guy who set the whole “Brahminical” thing in motion during the British colonial rule.
The person who worked tirelessly to color the Indian social landscape with caste overlay was Sir Herbert Hope Risley. Risley conducted extensive “experiments” and studies on the tribes and social groups in the Bengal Presidency and worked with folks like Denzil Ibbetson in Punjab to proliferate the census work with his theories and concepts further out in India.
He wrote a paper titled “The Study of Ethmology in India” within The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. This set the tone for the overarching design of India’s Caste System intertwined with Aryan Invasion Theory.
Now, interestingly in this piece of his paper, Risley discusses how the changing of groups and “Brahmanization” of different groups within a matter of one, or maybe two generations, was not just common but even observed by him.
But even more importantly, he discusses how those with lands and means (money, wealth) were able to “reinvent” themselves as “Brahmins” when they were not. Risley discusses how Sir Alfred Lyal called it the “gradual Brahmanising of the aboriginals, non-Aryan or casteless tribes”. He also notes that this movement was progress on a large scale.
What was being attempted by Risley and Lyal, was pushed in an institutional manner by Warren Hastings - the first Governor-General of India in 1772.
This was the backdrop of the ‘Brahminization” of Indian society where one group was constructed - Made-to-Order Brahmins - and the state gave them the “highest posts of power, profit, and confidence” by design while demonizing them on the other hand.
It was this that political activists of today’s Dalit movements play up.
Politics of Redistribution to Politics of Recognition
Diversity was the basis of the Indian milieu. But that has been used against Indian society. And, it has intensified by the Leftist intervention.
Why?
Because, as useful as the Caste system was for the politics of redistribution for the communists in India, it was still a class struggle until a few decades back.
When the Soviet Union fell, the leftist focus changed. From Politics of Redistribution, it became Politics of Recognition. Identity became the new profit center!
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the anti-capitalist economic preoccupations of the old Left began to take a backseat to a new way of understanding oppression: the politics of redistribution was replaced by a “politics of recognition”. Modern identity politics was born. (Source)
What does “Politics of Recognition” do?
See, “Activism” has been a funded profession. A business. Many powerful (and unscrupulous) people have money that they can use to fund the politics of “morals.” As long as you can carry the bucket for a master, he will fund your enterprise. Caste became the new NGO corporate goal in India for many leftists once the class plank was gone with the Soviets, who were no longer funding the erstwhile redistribution business.
The new funders, who wanted to use the infrastructure of insurgency that the Soviets had created, could simply offer to fund the souls of the activists while changing the focus of their outrage.
But why is this “Politics of recognition” so vile?
Because it solves nothing. Rather it uses the very differences that need to be eliminated in the society and creates further chasms such that the opposing forces of society take positions that are even more firmly entrenched!
Politics of recognition is also the politics of identity and deepening of differences.
As Oberlin professor Sonia Kruks writes, “What makes identity politics a significant departure from earlier [movements] is its demand for recognition on the basis of the very grounds on which recognition has previously been denied: it is qua women, qua blacks, qua lesbians that groups demand recognition ... The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of ‘universal humankind’ ... nor is it for respect ‘in spite of’ one’s differences. Rather, what is demanded is respect for oneself as different.” (Source)
There are two alternatives to a diverse society:
Apply formal laws and norms to all indiscriminately
Emphasize and accentuate differences
The latter breaks societies. The former eliminates abuse if it was there when only one group had political hegemony.
The way to handle structural abuse in any diverse society is not to take the identity of the erstwhile victims - imagined or real, organic or made-to-order - but to take the power of law-making to a common body without discrimination and make it color-blind.
Retrospective retribution for descendants of those who may have abused the system can NOT be a way to solve the history of injustice in any society.
It has to be common law and a new start.
The only reason why someone who wanted to make a positive change to society would get sucked into doing such work is that this is the only thing available now in the “progressive” circles.
The so-called “progressive” world is now in the throes of being dismantled from what it started out to be and becoming a tool in the hands of those who use NGOs as a weapon against their enemies.
Islamo-gauchiste and France
In France, meanwhile, a new controversy is brewing. Frédérique Vidal, the French minister for higher education, has said that 'Islamo-leftism' - or Islamo-gauchiste - has taken over French universities. The Left has been behind this change that is occurring in the background. (Source)
Why would the left align with Islamism?
Politics and votes.
Last year, Jean-Michel Blanquer, France's National Education Minister, had said that "Islamo-leftism" was rampant on campus.
The threat of extreme Islamist-led Wokeism from the US, backed by certain leftist (erstwhile liberal) media outlets, is being recognized in France.
Top French politicians, journalists, and intellectuals are warning that “woke” social science theories “entirely imported from the United States” regarding race, gender, and post-colonialism are a serious threat to France. “Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture,” The New York Times reported this week. “With its echoes of the American culture wars, the battle began inside French universities but is being played out increasingly in the media. Politicians have been weighing in more and more, especially following a turbulent year during which a series of events called into question tenets of French society.” (Source)
France, as we discussed earlier in our newsletter, was the home to the very concept of enlightened democracy in the West. But the erstwhile liberals - now Islamist-Leftists - in the US are repackaging treachery as liberalism backed by their entitled ways of American exceptionalism.
The ashamed and rudderless Indian intellectual brigade may feel the need to get certified for their liberal credentials from the American left, the French have no such necessity. In fact, they are sure that the concepts that the Americans are brandishing around as their own are really French ideas bastardized by compromised American intellectuals. And they aren’t off.
If this American Wokeism was just a method to commit suicide by the US society, maybe the French wouldn’t have cared. But like every other “cool new thing,” this is being exported to other societies in an attempt to overpower them.
So, the French are now looking at this whole woke fetish as an existential threat to French liberal society.
American “woke leftism” was an “existential” threat to France that “fuels secessionism,” “abets Islamism,” “gnaws at national unity,” and “attacks France’s intellectual and cultural heritage.” Macron made the remarks in a speech about fighting against separatism where he warned that many topics that France used to excel in teaching from an academic standpoint “have been undermined and we have abandoned them.”
“And in so doing, we have left the intellectual debate to others, to those outside of the Republic by ideologizing it, sometimes yielding to other academic traditions,” Macron warned. “I am thinking of Anglo-Saxon traditions based on a different history, which is not ours. And when I see certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States, with their problems, which I respect and which exist, but which are just added to ours, I say to myself that it is reasonable to make this choice. And so we must, very clearly, re-invest, on a massive scale, in the field of social sciences, history, understanding of civilizations by creating posts, by stepping up dialogue, academic and scientific debate in order not to allow the knowledge, the understanding of Islam as a religion, of the civilization it underpins and its contribution to our country and our continent to become ideological and exclusively political debates.” (Source)
France and its leadership of Western enlightened democratic scholarship is a great vantage point to start the pushback that is needed against the devastating movement by the American wokes to destroy societies. These wokes are nothing more than errand-boys to exclusivist forces of Communists and Islamists.
An open debate with clinical and scientific precision underpinned by scholarship needs to happen.
The errand-boys of Islamo-Leftist forces who have a new vocation in running Politics of Recognition and canceling every debate that attempts to engage with them in any critical way, cannot be given the keys to the future of our societies.
The barbarism of exclusive Islamist forces has played out enough in human history, including in the current generation - ask the Yazidis whose women have borne the brunt - for us to know as a species that this story has only one ending.
The Yazidi women in Sinjar didn’t realise it yet, but the Isis fighters were carrying out a pre-planned mass abduction for the purpose of institutionalised rape. Initially they were looking for unmarried women and girls over eight. (Source)
market corner: 10 quick bytes
India to clear 45 investments from China, likely to include Great Wall, SAIC - more
Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) releases draft guidelines for 'influencer ads’ on Facebook, Twitter - more
From few micro VCs backing Flipkart, Ola, others, how the ecosystem has grown in the number of investors, capital - more
Online tutoring startup Vedantu acquires doubt-solving app Instasolv - more
Income tax search and seizure drives unearth undisclosed income over Rs 785 crore - more
Indian workers work longest, earn the least. Indians are already among the most overworked workers globally. Gambia, Mongolia, Maldives, and Qatar (where a quarter of the population is Indian) are the only countries where an average worker works longer than an Indian worker - more
HSBC ups India's FY22 GDP forecast to 11.2%, cuts inflation target to 4.7% - more
Yogi Adityanath-led Uttar Pradesh govt plans to develop Jewar Airport as Asia's biggest airport. The state govt has proposed to set aside ₹2,000 crores for Jewar Airport - more
Bhima Koregaon case: Varavara Rao granted bail by Bombay HC on medical grounds - more
At least half of LCA Tejas fighters to have desi radar - more
nota bene
Indigenous Radars for Tejas: In a major boost to indigenous defense technologies, at least 51% of the 123 LCA Tejas fighters that will be inducted into the Indian Air Force (IAF) will have the desi Uttam radar, replacing Israeli radars that the first batch of aircraft will be equipped with. This means 63 of the 83 will be indigenous Uttam radars developed by LRDE (Electronics and Radar Development Establishment), a DRDO lab in Bengaluru. (Source)
Near-Death: According to Greyson’s research, near-death experiences are fairly common. Some 10 percent to 20 percent of people who come close to death report them — about 5 percent of the population at large. (Source)
US producing Wolverines?: It may sound like a superpower of the comic book character Wolverine, but the US Air Force is developing a way for future warfighters to heal their wounds in an instance. Working with the University of Michigan, the team is exploring cellular reprogramming to treat wounds, burns, and other injuries on the battle five times faster than what occurs naturally with the human body. The process of cell programming modifies its genome using proteins, called transcription factors, which stop different genes 'to regulate activities such as cell division and growth, and cell migration and organization. (Source)
Australia Vs Facebook: Australia is locked in a pitched battle with Facebook. The island continent’s House of Representatives has passed a new law last night, which requires big tech platforms like Facebook and Google to reach commercial agreements and strike revenue deals with news outlets whose content drives traffic on the platforms. In retaliation against this new ‘Media Bargaining law’ as it is known in Australia, Facebook blocked people in Australia from sharing news stories. However, this attempt by Facebook to pressurize the Australian government has misfired. The latter has refused to buckle under the pressure from the tech giant. (Source)
Carbon from Fish Poop: Fish poop, breath, and other excretions produce over a billion tons of carbon every year, according to a new study. That's more than 15 percent of all the carbon in the ocean, the planet's largest active carbon 'sink,' or absorber of carbon dioxide. They determined that the carbon in feces, respiration and other excretions from fishes make up about 16 percent of the total carbon that sinks to the ocean depths. That's equal to roughly 1.65 billion tons annually. (Source)
video corner: why menstrual restrictions
Sinu Joseph is an educator and author of two books focused on Menstrual Science titled Women and Sabarimala: The Science behind Restrictions & Rtu Vidya: Ancient Science behind Menstrual practices. She is also the founder of Mythri Speaks Trust which works on issues pertaining to women, children, and marginalized communities.
Here she discusses menstrual restrictions that are there with respect to women visiting temples. She uses the understanding from the spiritual standpoint.
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