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Pessimism of the gods



There is a romantic at sleep in my heart who likes to believe that people were better in the good old days. The people I saw as a child were much simpler than the ones I see nowadays, for example. Fifty years can make the world quite a different place. By this logic, people who lived a few centuries ago would have been very nice creatures.

Well, not quite. It doesn’t work that way. People had more or less the same degree of wickedness at any time. What Jean-Paul Sartre said in 20th century is what Marcus Aurelius said in the second century. Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” Aurelius said, “When you wake in the morning, tell yourself: the people you deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, jealous, and surly.”

Even Mother Teresa, who being a saint would have been expected to foster a more generous view of human beings, seemed to think quite in the lines of Sartre and Aurelius. “People are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centred; forgive them anyway,” Mother is reported to have said. But I am told that those were not her words. She had adapted Kent M Keith’s words. True as that may be, the fact that the saint thought of the Keith exhortation (which is much longer than the quote above) worthy of a place at the entrance to one of her convents suggests that she didn’t hold the human soul in as much veneration as her theology would have wanted her to.

A few minutes back a student of mine raised a question in the online class. “When we are children, people appear very nice,” she said. “When we grow up, why do people become so complicated?” It is that question which led to this post. I couldn’t have made this answer in the class. All I said there was, “People are always complicated. It’s just that children see all reality as simple. As we grow up, we are condemned to see what lies beyond the simplicity.”

Mother Teresa was in deep touch with reality. She had no trace of the romantic anywhere in her heart. She was blatantly practical. She had no time to debate with people who accused her of upholding an unjust system by opening institutions for the victims. It is the system that should be changed, her critics said. She knew better. You can’t change the human nature. From the time of Marcus Aurelius to that of Jean-Paul Sartre, human nature remained the same: devilish. We can only mitigate the agony of the hells created by people. Mother Teresa did just that.

Was the Mother an optimist? This is a question that has poked my brain for years. She was not a pessimist, I know. She was not a cynic, I know. But an optimist? No, I don’t think so. Somebody who admits so openly that human nature is essentially absurd and egoistic is not an optimist. The only answer I’ve got for this so far is that Mother Teresa accepted life as evil (radical pessimism like the Buddha’s) but did whatever she could to reduce the evils of the human world. Her god, Jesus, didn’t possess a fraction of that pragmatism. He chose death over life. No, not much of optimism when we get close to religion and philosophy.

This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon.

 

 

Comments

  1. Thank you sir for this.It has thought me something that I was trying to break my head to figure out

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  2. Hari Om
    Realism, is the term I think you require here! Accepting what can and can't be changed and knowing the difference between them. Essentially what is being said in those phrases in the image is much the same as encapsulated in the famous quote attributed to Ghandi - "Be the change you wish to see in the world." No matter what is thrown at us, we all have the responsibility to rise above - or permit ourselves to sink. Or rely on others, such as Mother T to help us out.

    I would point out that Yeshu did not 'choose death'... He accepted death, but not without angst and a cry for escape from it... Martyrdom of all kinds is designed to build optimisim into the group headed by the one martyred - if optimism is considered to be hope in another guise. YAM xx

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    1. tsk -Gandhi, not Ghandi...sigh...even proofreading comments can fail one! Yxx

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    2. Whichever way I look at them, I end up seeing gloom on the faces of people like Jesus and Buddha. They smile only in encoded messages. But Gandhi and Mother Teresa smiled a lot. I like those smiles. They give us hope.

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    3. Hari OM
      ...then it is a shame the camera didn't exist in the times of Buddha and Jesus. It is necessary to appreciate when you gaze upon these two that all you see is what artists present to you and how you interpret their art. Photographs tell it how it is! I couldn't agree more that G and MT shine from such images. Yxx

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    4. I wish we could actually get some pics from those days. Life was hard. Ordinary People wouldn't have smiled much, let alone laugh. Imagine Jesus as an enslaved Jew in the Roman empire, Buddha looking at the terrors of the Brahminical system...

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  3. No comments to Mother Theresa and Gandhi,I recently came across a word called Saundering. which essentially means that everyone is the hero of his or her story and others are fringe characters. How does it matter what the fringe character does. More importantly is an intellectual understanding which I'm trying to translate to my functional world... everyone is doing the exact thing they are supposed to be doing. Its about how we want to react to it.

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    1. I hold Mother Teresa and Gandhi in high esteem for what they did. I don't subscribe to Mother's religious views. But people like her made the world a better place.

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  4. It is so true, children look at things in a simple way, and we become biased with age, and that biased thinking makes us see things in a complicated way...I think so

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    1. It can't be helped. We can't but become complicated and complex as we grow up.

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  5. A very interesting perspective.

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  6. I appreciate the thoughts expressed in the post as well as those in the comments. I, however, urge to distinguish philosophy from religion (i.e, not putting them in the same bracket). We don't need religions, not at all. But philosophy is a different business. Everybody can not only adopt but also create his/her own philosophy for life and world. I have my own. You too, may have (or may be having) your own.

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    Replies
    1. But aren't religious people like Buddha ans Jesus philosophers too to some extent? Can we really separate anything from philosophy altogether?

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  7. Maybe the whole point of the pessimism is that that choice - whether to be kind or not to be kind - is always with us. We just like to believe it is with the Gods and not us.

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    Replies
    1. Kindness is a choice that is in our control, no doubt.

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  8. Being an eternal optimist, I'd like to think that Mother Teresa was one too. Perhaps she was a pragmatic optimist?
    As far as the question your student raised, it's so true. Once, in grade 7, my class teacher mentioned that the reason we tend to recall our childhood memories more vividly than any other of our lives is because our hearts and minds are like blank canvases as children and any imprints made then are deep and intense.
    I reckon, our seeing is just as pure, hence, our world is black and white. We see good and bad but not the underlying shades of grey.

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    1. Yes, Arti, I'd like to think of Mother Teresa as an eternal optimist. She knew how to manage the innocent child in her with the pragmatic adult.

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  9. Mother was probably a realist or an optimist who saw things clearly as they are. This is never easy to understand . The dedication with which she did her duty must have been a result of her pragmatic mindset. This article is very thought provoking.

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    Replies
    1. Realism, yes we can safely apply that word to Mother. And pragmatism too.

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  10. "As we grow up, we are condemned to see what lies beyond the simplicity.” So true. The simple answer to many questions. We can neither fully decipher nor change anyone, only choose our reactions and distance. Wonderful read.

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