Skip to main content

Incomplete Minds


Delivering a Martin Luther King Jr Memorial lecture, actor Kamal Haasan said that “incomplete minds that somehow manage to reach the seat of power” create inequality.  He went on to say that enlightened minds are with the poor. 

Power is something that attracts only “incomplete minds,” generally.  Power is one way of completing oneself, filling up the blanks within.  Why don’t we find scientists, philosophers (writers), artists and other such people in politics running after power?  Probably, their minds are not so “incomplete.”  Or they find better means of filling the blanks within: by inventing something new, thinking new ideas or creating works of art.  Those who are incapable of such creative contributions hanker after power.  Boss over others and prove your worth!

Imposing oneself on others is precisely what’s wrong with these incomplete minds.  We find them imposing their ideas, religion, culture, food habits, dress, anything and everything on others.

Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley carried out substantial research into the nature of power.  Power corrupts necessarily: that was one of his discoveries.  (Nothing new in it, of course, except that he proved it with research.)  Even the good people, once they reach the top of the ladder, morph into a very different kind of beast.  “It’s an incredibly consistent effect,” Mr Keltner says. “When you give people power, they basically start acting like fools.”

Mr Keltner went to the extent of comparing the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that’s crucial for empathy and decision-making. Even the most virtuous people can be undone by the corner office.

Power makes people less sympathetic to others.  This is a psychologically proven fact.  People in power rely more on certain stereotypes and generalisations while judging people. 

Power makes us less human, in short.  Power makes people quasi-neurotics.  Look around and you will find umpteen examples.  Examples of incomplete minds that try to fill in their internal vacuum with hate speeches and divisive attitudes based on stereotypes and generalisations.


Indian Bloggers




Comments

  1. It's said that "Power tend to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's a classical truth proved by experience. We can also see it in actual practice.

      Delete
  2. I think power gives a high to those in it.. and in that stupor nothing else matters to them but themselves.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Precisely. They are drunk with power. And their stupor makes them think they are the greatest. They want to set the world right.and they ruin the world.

      Delete
  3. Power, the word that corrupted humanity. Probably incomplete minds gained power and created an uneven world. Yes, complete minds do not need power, do not need this myth.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Complete minds don't need slaves for filling inner vacuum. Anyway most people have some vacuum within. But the power-hungry people need subjects to sing alleluiah to their ego.

      Delete
  4. May be that's why The Holy Book says that the meek will inherit the world some day. Because, they can feel the compassion of the masses and their views aren't tinted according to their own comfort. Power twists the perspective and renders it unrecognizable.

    Very introspective post, Tomichan sir!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have serious reservations about The Holy Book's conjectures. There is no sign of the meek inheriting the earth. They may inherit the heaven if there is one!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some