The world is made of humiliation and insult
“If the insults and humiliations of all time
were woven into a cloth would not the tapestry wrap the earth many times
over?”
There are times when I feel the world is made of advertisements. Look
around you. So many people, so many ideologies, so many businesses, each
of them with something to sell, each of them trying to persuade us to
make a purchase of one kind or another. Blank out all signs, all words,
all visuals and all subtle appeals whispering ‘buy me, buy me’ and it’s
still a lot of advertising. Look around and try counting the number of
walking CVs you encounter. It’s a world of like me’, love me, hold my
hand, feel my pain, let’s make a deal, I am better than he/she, I am
pretty, I am honest, I am strong, I am sensitive etc.
Perhaps it has always been like this, but I like to think that there
was a time when work was the best advertisement, when action counted
more than anything else and I like to think that someday we will revert
to that time. Perhaps I am being nostalgic and nave.
World full of insult. Courtesy: rocksnyc.com |
A few days ago I thought to myself ‘if only it was advertising and
nothing else!’ I am saying this because even as the glitter really
covers a lot of nasty stuff one doesn’t exactly need a magnifying glass
or some special kind of training to see that the world is made of
advertisements and also humiliation.
I am not a fan of ‘weak-equals-good’. The ‘weak’ when empowered are
no less bad than the strong. They too exploit, they too humiliate and
they too derive profit and joy in these processes.
Perhaps, therefore, it is a condition that is part and parcel of
being located in the higher rungs of structured hierarchies. Should it
be this way always, though? Is it possible for there to be exploitation
without humiliation or vice versa? Is ‘revolution’ the answer? I am no
longer sure.
One set of hierarchies being replaced by another will only change the
so called masters of our fate; they will replace one kind of
exploitation with another, the humiliating and humiliated with another
set of people looking down their noses at another set of people who have
to ‘grin and bear’ or worse.
It’s about belonging to clubs. Non-members are shown the door if
that’s possible. Or they are made uncomfortable.
They are made to understand that they don’t belong. No, that’s not
enough, they are also made to understand that they are somehow lesser
mortals. Check out the hierarchies around you. Take an office. Take
parliament. A defence establishment.
A sports body. An I/NGO. A diplomatic mission. A village made of
multiple castes. A church. A school. We are insulted by the media, its
lies and covering-up.
We are insulted by ‘scholars’ who defend and justify all kinds of
tyrannies.
We are humiliated when Barack Obama wants to hide footage of what his
troops have done in Iraq, when the British Prime Minister tells us that
there’s no ‘Britain’ in ‘British Petroleum’ and tries to wash the hands
of white capital in the destruction that is spewing out in the Gulf of
Mexico.
How many times have you seen a word dropped or glance thrown with
deliberate intent to insult the ‘receiver’? How many times is a question
passed without being answered and the questioner made to feel that
silence is a legitimate answer? How many times is a person turned away
and asked to come the next day or next year for the flimsiest of
reasons? How many times have you heard of a teacher adding insult over
and above punishment warranted by need to correct?
How many times a word dropped to point to some social category that
is held to be ‘lower’ in some structured hierarchy? How many times has
this happened to you? How many times have you done it?It is not just in
formal settings. It happens within families, in the household.
The older and the stronger protect and provide but sometimes exact a
price for this by exercising some kind of ‘right’ to ridicule,
humiliate, control and punish. It happens to little children. It happens
to women. It is a quickly learnt practice, with older children doing to
younger siblings what their parents and other elders do to them.
Time passes, and when the older get very old and the powerful become
weak, they are returned the favour. It’s called ‘bossing’.
What can stop bossing? It is a two-way street isn’t it? The boss has
to do a re-think. The bossed too. At some level it is about negotiating
the terms of bossing; what is acceptable and what is not.
That’s the reality of power relations. Somewhere along the line we
seem to have resigned ourselves to this ridiculous situation that is
sometimes used as excuse for all kinds of violence: ‘the poor ye shall
always have’. It can be extended, this line: ‘people will always be
subjected to humiliation’, ‘what will the world be without bosses?’ and
‘if we have to have bosses, how can we stop bossing?’ I am of the view
that anything and everything in this world can be justified.
I watched recently a special screening of Athula Liyanage’s amazing
debut film, ‘Bambarawalalla’ (Whirlwind), which won the Remi Award for
2010 at the World Fest International Houston Film Festival.
One line struck me down: ‘Good and bad exist only when we are alone
with our thoughts; out there when among others, in society, in the
world, they don’t count’.
For all the talk of ethics, morality and even the more formalized
structures of coding behaviour and defining boundaries that mark
‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’, the truth is that it is all a lie.
Paradoxically.
We can do as we like as long as we don’t get caught and even if we
do, there are ways of escaping depending on factors like money, power,
ability to arm-twist, friends in high places etc. Worse, even if we
don’t get away, the fact that there are hundreds and thousands out there
‘free’ even though they are as guilty as we are, makes a mockery of all
such processes frilled with righteousness.
I return, again and again, to the incomparable teachings of
Siddhartha Gauthama, the Enlightened One, the Buddha and the teachings
of ego. We are not on that path, I know. We do not explore and when we
do we neglect to investigate the non-negotiable: self. Still, even a
cursory reading of the Buddha Vachana (Word of the Buddha) would teach
us the virtue of examining this thing called ‘ego’ and all the bile it
dishes out and bathes us with.
I am convinced. It boils down to self and what we do and do not do
with it. My friend Pradeep Jeganathan is right.
It’s about ethics. And ‘ethical conduct’ despite the implication of
social contract and relevant codification the term is decorated with, is
a personal choice and draws from that moral universe we inhabit when we
are alone, that place of solitude and terror where along ‘good’ and
‘bad’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ has relevance, as Athula Liyanage points out.
That’s what gives us ‘hope’ in the end, it is what makes things that
little bit more bearable. We need more of it. A lot more.
I spoke of a tapestry. Would it be a bandage that covers for a while,
or a healing paththuwa, a fermenting pack that draws out the world’s
poisons? What will we do with it when its work is done? Toss it into the
night sky, with pus and blood and all that’s not nice? No, we retreat to
self. We go out to ‘self’. We sober up.
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