We: Commodities in a market

Money has become the measure of everything. Your social stature depends on your wealth. Your health depends on it too because our hospitals have become expensive multi-speciality industries. Your children’s education depends on it because what the top schools charge as annual fees is more than what majority of people earn in ten years. Interestingly, even your spiritual salvation depends on how much money you can contribute to the earthly reps of your heavenly gods.

Economy became the heart of our socio-political system in the last few decades. We thought economy was the panacea for all our problems. Creation of more and more wealth was the ultimate goal of globalisation. More wealth would mean more happiness. We were told so.

When wealth became the ultimate goal of life, everyone obviously chased it heart and soul. That chase became the new pilgrimage. Not only is your worth measured by your wealth but wealth is the very purpose and meaning of your life. The means you resort to for making wealth do not matter anymore. You may swindle banks out of billions and leave your country. You may run a spiritual industry like an ashram or ayurvedic centre. Even the government has funds that are above auditing. A time may soon come when your government just declares certain bank deposits of yours to be the government’s hereafter. Certain institutions and organisations may be banned and their assets taken over.

The last of the above things are possible not because the end justifies the means but because the single-minded focus on wealth has engendered a system which justifies many evils in the names of putatively noble ideas or ideals such as nationalism.

Human life is not an economy. In other words, people do not exist in an economy. People need a lot more than wealth to add meaning to their existence. Religions, morality, art, literature, and so on serve the function of adding meaning to life. Today these things have been subsumed under the chase for wealth. Consequently there is a feeling of inner emptiness. In India today, nationalism seeks to fill that emptiness. No wonder, it is a highly vengeful nationalism. It is founded on certain hollow notions like ghettoising certain communities of people so that their properties, wealth, jobs, and whatever else possible can be taken over.

It is not the majority who benefit from this, however. It’s just a tiny minority whose wealth increases year after year. The others keep becoming poorer. But they are fed with vindictive feelings against certain others who are projected as the cause of all the misery in the country. What a nice system for enriching a few at the cost of all the others!

We inhabit a marketplace. You and I are just commodities there. We are being sold day after day. Again and again. Think about that.