Rahul laments mediocrity - N K Singh, General Secretary,
Broadcast ... The Sunday Indian
It is important to reflect on Sri Aurobindo, who once said referring
to the average politician, “He does not represent the soul of a people or its
aspirations. What he does usually represent is all the average pettiness,
selfishness, egoism, self-deception that is about him as well as a great deal
of mental incompetence and moral conventionality, timidity and pretence.’’
Great jurist Nani Palkhivala in his book Our Constitution Defaced and Defiled says, “At present the main
infirmity of democracy is that the only job for which one needs no training or
qualification whatsoever is the job of governing and legislating. Election
mostly throws either mediocrity or extremism into power”. Well said.
Vivekananda's take on gold, business, and consumerism –
Business Economics Jayanta Sarkar on
Jan 30, 2013
Sri Aurobindo is one of them who saw through the veil. He wrote, “The
affirmation of a divine life upon earth and an immortal sense in mortal
existence can have no base unless we recognize not only
eternal Spirit as the inhabitant of this bodily mansion, the wearer of
this mutable robe, but accept Matter of which it is made, as a fit and noble
material out of which He weaves constantly His garbs, builds recurrently
the unending series of His mansions.” (The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Trust, 1990). In other words, what is important is how one looks at it.
Adam Smith’s advocacy of the philosophy of Natural Liberty was quite
different from laissez-faire (words he never mentioned). Natural Liberty , as expressed by
Smith, equalised the rights of all participants in commercial society,
employers, labourers and consumers. This does not prevent modern
economists from associating laissez-faire with Adam Smith’s name, a habit that
goes right back to the early 19th century and continues into
the 21st. Many, I find, conflate laissez-faire to mean both freedom for
employers and governments. The lobbying of government is big
business and by big business in many countries
It is in this area that I parted company with Ludwig von Mises in his
1966 “Human Action: a treatise on economics” – a very large tome I
read some years back – in which he derives everything that follows in his book
from a rigorous logic of the consequences of proposition.
I prefer Smith’s approach of studying what happened since some humans
left the forest and then as a minority, at first, moved to shepherding and
farming. Another minority (“at last”) moved from country
life to live in towns, inevitably and indubitably, creating (“at last”)
commercial society that first processed food and raw materials from the country
in traded exchange for processed food and later in exchange for manufactured
goods. It was that historical development of traded exchange that laid the
basis for the creation of capital that led to commercial development. Those
that remained in the forest, or in shepherding or farming, mostly remained
there for millennia. There is nothing ordained about what humans do,
nor is there a particular direction by which they pass their lifetimes, as
their archaeological remains testify.
Smith did not require the conversion of everybody to new morality or
to a universal conformity to logic. In fact he wrote of humans as
they were. He made no predictions about the future (except
about the future of the former British colonies in North
America becoming the wealthiest economy in the world by around
1875). Instead he studied the past to understand within the
limitations of knowledge the present; we might be better doing the same.
On money and macro, I am more persuaded by Friedman, Irving Fisher,
early Keynes, David Hume, and Scott Sumner, among others.
On the Occasion of the Ordeal: A Response from Joshua Ramey to
Dan Barber’s “Experimental Life and Ordeal’s Necessity” from An und für sich by Joshua Ramey
First I would like to say how grateful I am for the opportunity to
respond to these comments about The Hermetic Deleuze. Those
of us who are able to write academic books, and there are many of you following
this blog who write those books, know that it is, in the end, a solitary and
even an isolating affair, and that even with publication the chances that one’s
work will be noticed or responded to are slim. In this age of increasing
destitution and de-investment in higher education, blogs like this one are
becoming more and more important as places for those of us compelled by these
thoughts can meet and take our chances together. Each of the writers who
have agreed to respond to my book are people whose work I deeply admire, and
the opportunity to continue to think with them, and with those of you who read
and respond to that thinking, is an extraordinary occasion in my life.
To speak of the occasion, as Dan does in his beautiful and deeply
thought piece, I want to affirm, first of all, that absolutely, there is a
connection between reading and ritual, reading and mantra. There is an
occasionalism to reading… So what interested me, the more I read Deleuze, were
his attention to various procedures, from the modernist work of art to the
psychedelic experiment, that seemed to have a common goal of “absolute immanence.” …
I have very little interest in championing Deleuzian “solutions” to
contemporary “problems,” any more than I have in inviting people to fold their
contemporary desires for life back into some perennial or archaic
hermeticism. Everything remains to be reinvented. I am much more
interested in how Deleuze’s problems are still our problems, and how yes, I
think that there are hints and rumors of future possible “solutions” to those
problems, but perhaps the problems have already become unrecognizable, on
strictly Deleuzian “terms.” But if one looks at his own
“metaphilosophical” comments, I think he would agree that such a situation
defines philosophy, as such.
