Krishnamurti: The Talks on Freedom - Understanding the First Cause

                                   ”You see, modern education, and also the previous education, have taught you what to think, not how to think.”
                                                   {The Collected Works, Volume VI, Banaras, 5th Public Talk, 20^thFebruary 1949}




          What lies at the very heart of the talks?

        Why is the world the way it is? (By the world here we mean civilization, global society, the world that has been created by man, not the natural world.) The world does not really have to be the way it is; it is not predestined to be this way, despite the apparent, widespread, 'common sense', consensual view.

Why is there constant war? The warring of religious beliefs, the war against fascism, the cold war, the various interminable regional wars like Vietnam, Korea, the Israel/Palestinian conflict, Bosnia, Sudan, Iraq/Afghanistan, now the ongoing 'war on terror'?

Why, with all the knowledge, wealth and technological advances of science and medicine, is there still demonstrable injustice throughout the world; why are there still millions of people in poverty, ill-health and educational ignorance? Why is there such a stark and growing disparity in inequality and wealth; multi-billionaires living alongside homeless people and families struggling daily with debt? Why is the democratic system, now the predominant worldwide ideology, such an authoritarian, hierarchical, elitist system? Why is the world completely hooked on money, power, mass entertainment, celebrity and status? What has caused all this?

A facile explanation, of course, is that the world is what it is because it is what it is. It is human nature. But then the reasonable question to ask is: why is human nature the way it is?

The central premise underlying all the talks - although not definitively spelt out - is clear, simple and logical. In the technological world, if someone goes wrong with your car, for instance, then you immediately set out to determine the cause of the problem. Similarly, if you develop a health problem, the rational and logical approach is, where possible, to determine the cause or seek medical expertise to find this cause so that you can effectively treat it. If one doesn’t take this first simple step one obviously cannot even start to resolve the problem at hand. This is not rocket science.

In the psychological realm however, this first principle, astonishingly, simply does not apply.

Take war as an example. Military conflict is universally regarded as an inevitable activity of man. There are very few people in the world who reject war per se. We adopt a consensual view on this and all other basic subjects. There is great safety in thinking in groups; there are very few people who think (so-called) ‘outside the box’ - which in the actual scheme of things is not thinking outside the group at all, when you really look at it, it’s just an attempt at minor reform around the edges.

Wars are cleverly justified for a range of reasons, which usually boil down in one way or another to ‘national security’, which is simply individual security on a national scale. As far as its ultimate origins or root cause is concerned, many reasons are put forward as explanations - political, nationalistic, religious, economic reasons. But all these issues themselves have a first cause, yet this first cause is not even discussed by the individual, media organizations or the public, let alone investigated in depth. It is obvious that the political, economic and religious structures of the world are put together entirely by the human mind. It is the mind that is behind all our actions, which on a relationship level brings on conflict and anger, and on a social, national and global scale brings about war.

Take also climate change. If you allow for the moment that the thrust of scientific thought is correct and it is caused by human activity (which appears now to be the consensual view), then what is the main origin of that activity? Obviously the bulk of CO₂ emissions comes from oil and coal and oil is the most profitable business in the world, with a strong historical connection to the coal industry. These pivotal worldwide industries, which have over-exploited the Earth’s natural resources, now prop up the entire economic system as it stands at the expense of viable, renewable energy resources. These renewable sources only require policy priority from politicians to become the world standard.

This whole capitalistic system, which underpins all democracies throughout the world, is founded on incentive, which in its essentials amounts to the reward (and punishment) system upon which all of society is based. Without sufficient incentive, there is no consequent drive by people to create, to succeed, to build, to reform, and to change. This drive is aggressive and ruinous competition, both between individuals and between nations. Nothing is done because it is intrinsically right to do it, all competitive action is taken only when there is sufficient reward at the end. In democracy, currently the world’s ruling ideology, this incentive is called private profit, and it rules everything, along with what is called 'National Interest', which is the grab for security that doesn't exist..

This overarching private profit principle has demonstrably proved to be vastly inequitable. Capitalism as a social system is essentially founded on comparison, as well as exploitation of both human beings and nature. There will always be some more clever at competing and exploiting people than others, more motivated to succeed, more intellectually adept, so social inequity is inevitable if the overarching principle of personal gain rules. Self-interest is, of course, the primary activity of the self, which knows no other way.

This competitive drive for progress and profit is simply human greed, but greed is a subject that is best avoided in polite company. It is a given. So you cannot say that the entire human race is founded on greed. The word is cleverly disguised by euphemisms, such as the stockmarket term currently in vogue: ‘irrational exuberance’.

In fact, society as a whole regards greed as good: it is the great motivator, the enemy to indolence, poverty and stagnation. Like the poor, as the saying goes, greed has always been with us and will always be with us, it is the norm. Because we are slaves to the ‘herd instinct’ and dutifully conform to groupthink, we follow and accept this greed and the social mores behind it; we accept it uncritically, mostly without even thinking. This pattern of thinking blocks any investigation into any possible change in the first instance.

Greed in fact is the underlying principle behind Adam Smith's "hidden hand", the notion that individual self-interest in commerce will be to the overall benefit of society as a whole. This whole treatise, the pre-eminent work even today of all economics, thus condones greed as the beneficial underpinning of all social activity arising from business. Hence a major philosopher has laid out the accepted foundation stone of selfishness and inequality as the paradigm for the following generations of the human race.

Likewise, tradition and experience tells us that the human mind cannot be changed, it was ever thus and it will ever be. There are apparent properties, faculties, traits of the human mind that appear completely intrinsic to it. The term we have for this is, again, human nature. Everyone knows, or assumes, or has been told, or has concluded, that you can’t change human nature. Our parents, our teachers, our peers and our social authorities have all told us this in so many ways; it is an immutable, inviolable reality of life.

Again, it’s a given, it is what it is. That’s why when someone comes along and talks for sixty years about changing our very basic ‘human nature’, which includes radically changing all of society, an inbuilt suspicion subtly arises in our minds. This goes against everything we have been brought up to believe in; it is to our minds, as we term it, ‘counter-intuitive’. Pointedly, there are very few people in the world who actually see that the present society is corrupt and failing, so why change something that is basically functioning correctly, with a few outstanding problems at the margins?

Is this deeply ingrained and apparently innate suspicion the first cause to the impediment to actual listening? That is, have we ever actually listened to the talks of this man, without any conclusions, choice, or mind-set whatsoever? Or have we been distracted by the knee-jerk reactions and wants of the mind, based entirely on our memories and experiences of the past?

So then, what is the first cause - that is, the root cause, not an incidental cause - behind all these global issues and all of humanity's problems?

Thought.

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