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Will Santa gift a new conscience this X’mas?
View(s):Every man considers his conscience to be his temple — supreme and infallible, as eternal as the icon Truth enshrined therein. But to another it may seem like the devil’s workshop where, upon temptation’s anvil, the conscience can be hammered into any shape and form as personal expediency and inclinations dictate.
If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel then the appeal to conscience to justify a questionable course of action has to be the first port of call for the blackguard, the easy plateau for the smooth talking humbug to make his stand. It is nothing but a convenient moral hanger for the unscrupulous opportunist to hang his garb of deceit.
Like Pontius Pilate asked ‘What is truth?” ask yourself “what is conscience?”
Isn’t conscience, by which we proudly say we are ruled, really a ragbag of our conditioned thoughts, our wants, our desires, our fetishes, our fanaticisms, our religious beliefs, our hopes, our fears, our wishes, our phobias, our lusts, our hates, our loves, our greed. A sorry collection of conditioned thought, a baggage we are burdened with from birth unto death; and carry with us, adding more prejudices, on the samsaric road; clinging, though no iron chains bind, to the amassed junk in the trunk, studiously collected by each according to his own predilections?
And it is to this glorified conscience we make reference to and say we bow with reverence to its judgment. It is that which the Buddha stated we must first shed for enlightenment to dawn. Conscience made up of conditioned thought is that which gives rise to ignorance. It’s the fog of the night that bars us from seeing the dawn of the breaking morn. It is the stumbling block that prevents us from seeing the pure light of wisdom. And, through ignorance, we put Maya’s creation on a pedestal and proudly say we are guided by it. And think we are better men for heeding it, when we are only heeding the grotesque motley of our own accumulated prejudices.
Take a simple example. To those guided by the teachings of Gautama the Buddha it is against their conscience to kill animals, even for food. To those believers in the Bible, in the Old Testament, God created man to be a vegetarian and, though he gave man dominion over the fish of the seas and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth, He said, “I have given you every herb bearing seed and the fruit of a tree yielding seed shall be for meat.” But to the Christians, according to the interpretation given to the New Testament the fish, the fowl and every living thing that moved upon the earth existed for man’s use; and thus it was neither against the will of God nor the conscience of the Christians to kill for meat. To the Buddhists and the Hindus, it is against their conscience to kill. Not so for the Christians and the Muslims.
Now who is right? Who is to be the final arbiter? Our concept of truth is based on our own individual idiosyncrasies and, though it might justify one’s own actions by one’s own yardstick called conscience, it carries no water in the other man’s eyes.
The manifest danger of taking Polonius’s advice to his son when he said, “Be true to thyself, for then you can be false to no man” is self evident when one considers that one can be true to one’s conscience and commit the most heinous villainy without a qualm. To those whose conscience holds that the end justifies the means, whose motivating ambition is to achieve the ultimate goal they have set for themselves, be it to sate their lust for power or thirst for riches or craving for pleasures of the flesh, then however vile or depraved the actions taken in pursuit of achieving their aim maybe, they will consider themselves to be acting in perfect accordance with the dictates of their conscience and will experience no remorse. Guilt will come to only those who stray.
A sadist who inflicts pain and torture and gains perverse delight watching the sufferings of others is, in his own eyes, acting perfectly according to the dictates of his ultimate ruling passions. A paedophile committing the most depraved sexual assault on a child, may well say he is only acting according to his conscience for his conscience dictates that he obtains gratification of his perverted lusts at whatever the cost. To all sense and purpose he will be telling the truth if he says that he could not go against his conscience and therefore decided to be true to himself, even though he was breaking a man made law, which incidentally his conscience does not recognise as being valid.
The consciences of Hitler and his senior Nazi Generals dictated to them that the Jews must be exterminated from the face of the earth and that the Aryans of blue eyes and blonde hair must reign supreme as the master race in the world. Had the leaders of the Allied Powers made a special appeal to him to halt the genocide of the Jews, he would have deemed it perfectly legit for him to reply that he had given serious thoughts to the matter and after grappling his conscience, he had come to the decision that his conscience did not allow him to end the Jewish Holocaust but only urged him more to expedite the process by building even more gas chambers. Hitler though the devil incarnate in the eyes of the world, would simply have been true to himself, true to his conscience and proud of it.
No doubt he, along with the sadists and the paedophiles, would have received the ready canned applause of some of the misguided Lankans today who ignorantly hold one’s conscience to be the supreme sacrosanct justifier of personal individual actions and rush to sing hosannas of praise to every unscrupulous braggart in town whenever he dares to bare his breast in public and flaunt the ‘conscience’ symbol of purity to cloak the true ulterior vile motive of his actions and decisions. These braggarts are the jackals in sheep’s clothing preying upon the naivety of the brainwashed public. How their foxy hearts must echo with hyenic hoots of laughter as the gullible lambs, brought to be skinned alive at election time, pay them worship before television altars.
Such have been the pathetic nauseous scenes enacted recently in front of television cameras for the sole purpose of edifying a credulous public, presumed and taken for granted as mugs of the most naïve kind who will readily gulp down the offal, have been forced to watch as politicians have come forth to deceitfully bleat their supposed reasons for changing and re-changing their principles on the basis that it goes against their much sung conscience to do anything to the contrary.
But what is their conscience made up of? What’s the grain of the fabric? Is the texture colour fast? Is it shrink proof? Given to the soft touch? Or does it crumple easy with the gentlest rub of the oiled palm? Can it be ironed out with a warm press, lined with small, though dear, rectangular wads of paper? Its wrinkled edges smoothed out by deft handiwork? Does it come cheap or must the price be right?
Some consciences are appreciated for their durability. Especially, those that serve as a palimpsest where a testament can be written today, erased tomorrow and rewritten the day after with a totally opposite version.
Where there is demand, there is supply and market forces do actually work.
What brings up the vomit is the blatant attempt to present these sleazy horse trading exercises as honourable ones done on the basis that conscience is the motivating coin.
Come Wednesday it will be Christmas Eve. And the wishes and prayers of the kids around the Christmas tree will be that Santa will bring them toy planes and train sets and walkin’ talkin’ livin’ dolls for Christmas.
The politically ambitious adults, observing national trends and hoping to follow suit and hit the big time in the quickest possible time, will search Santa’s sock for their individual designer made Teflon consciences to follow their political masters and realise their dreams of instant fame and undreamt fortune
But the great majority will be absorbed in meditation, willing Santa to gift this nation with a new collective conscience shorn of deceit and corruption, saved from wretched degeneracy and gross hypocrisy; blessed with the moral fibre to transcend the enveloping darkness and rise anew to transform this nation to be not a mere economic hub of the region but the guiding Light of Asia.
| Turncoat Gamman plans another turnaround SUNDAY PUNCH 2 JHU turncoat, twice crosser Udaya Gammanpila’s conscience is an extraordinary item in the man’s set up and has so far never fallen short of being able to rebound at an instant’s notice. Given the bashing, its proud owner says it has been subjected to this month – two whole sleepless days of shadow grappling with the invisible Holy Ghost – Gammanpila is a lucky bloke to own such a versatile, all weather product which shows no sign of wear and tear, coming as it does highly insured, in case it is accidentally left on a Polonnaruwa bus or is parked in another’s Colombo 4 garage by mistake and the address forgotten. Remarkably it also comes up with clever by half money raising ideas. Consider earlier this year how Gammanpila hit the jackpot when his inner voice told him how to finance his Western Provincial Council election campaign. He asked the money from the public. He said he has powerful rich friends who would singlehandedly fund his election bid but that he does not like being under any obligation to them. For that would have meant, he said, he would have to do favours for them. Far more comfortable to ask the Great Lankan public to delve into their pocket bottom and come up with the hard earned dough to put Gammanpila on the easy road to provincial power.  New look Gammanpila at this week’s news conference Furthermore, when he decided to tap, he made the pitch at the correct sum. An affordable hundred bucks was perfect. Gammanpila showed he knew his onions when it came to the value of money. And he would not be under any obligation to anyone and thus not have to pay heed to their requests. Not even those from the public. For who is the member of the general public who will come to him and say just when he is drinking from his cup of victory, ‘Hey, Gamman, I gave you a hundred bucks, remember? Can you do this small tender favour for me?” What a stroke of genius, his conscience or whatever he prefers to call it at any given time these days, had come up with to kill two birds with one stone? None knows exactly how much the public donated but that hardly matters now, does it? Gamman’s conscience knows it and for Gammanpila that is good enough for him. This December, much has been demanded of his conscience. At the start of the month he had to grapple with his conscience to betray the UPFA and, along with his party the JHU, leave the Government and join hands with the opposition candidate Maithripala Sirisena. How many sleepless nights he spent grappling with his conscience to commit the first betrayal, he hasn’t told anyone as yet. Having taken part in the drafting of the Memorandum of Understanding the JHU intended to have with Maithri, he endorsed it by signing it and thus crossed the river and ostensibly burnt his boats on the opposite banks where Maithri forces had set up camp. And last Thursday December 11, he held a news conference to announce the result of the grappling bout which had led him back to the old haunt. He had decided, he announced, to rejoin the UPFA, to desert Maithri and support Mahinda again. In making this 360 degree turnaround, he said he had consulted no one except his conscience. At the last minute he had informed the JHU Secretary Champika Ranawaka but no one else. Most importantly he declared, he had not attempted to influence anyone else to cross over with him to the UPFA back again since it grieved him to leave the party. “It is not my intention see the JHU fragmentised and broken into splinter groups,” he said. After an exist and then a re-entry followed by a slick performance in front of the TV lights justifying it all on the basis of his conscience last Thursday, Gammanpila grandly announced this Wednesday that 17 elected members of the party, including seven monks who are Pradesiya Sabha and Urban Council members in different areas had returned to the UPFA’s fold. In another turnaround, he also announced plans to form a new party to represent the Sinhala Buddhists in direct rivalry to the Jathika Hela Urumaya which only last week, he said, he never intended to wreck. Perhaps it is another one of those bright ideas suggested by his clever conscience in his now blissful dreams to establish another party for Sinhala Buddhists. For Gammanpila devoid of the JHU nest has lost his raison d’être and is now like a fortune telling gypsy without his card picking parrots. His need is understandable. But does the country need yet another bunch to represent Sinhala Buddhist. Is Kandy under Chinese occupation and does this Gammanpila think he is the Dalai Lama of Theravada Buddhism? Buddhism has existed in this country for the past 2558 years. Despite five hundred years of foreign domination starting from the 15th century, this country has remained Buddhist to the core. Since gaining independence this nation has always had a Buddhist Head of State, a Sinhala Buddhist government and, since the seventies, a Constitution which has made Buddhism the state religion, afforded it a higher status than the other religions. If at all the doctrine of the Buddha needs protection it is from these Buddhist parties that distort the message of Buddhism to achieve their own vile ends. Udaya Gammanpila should reserve his many talents for more pressing needs of the hour. How about promoting religious harmony rather than seeking discordance. With his new Sai Baba style afro hairdo, Udaya Gammanpila has all the trappings necessary to emerge as the new godman of Lanka. Soon perhaps, who knows, he might even graduate to expounding a Make Love, Not War, Love all Religions philosophy; and, instead of dishing out ash from his palms to devotees to apply on their brows, may even end up issuing receipt for each hundred rupees collected from the devotees to fund his new ashram, without any obligation to a single benefactor. To the affable, dapper, modest, humble to the commonest dust, modern day savant Gammanpila, the world is now his oyster; and with such a remarkable conscience to shrewdly guide him through every turnpike and over every pothole safely to his goal, he is surely heaven blest with that diadem of a conscience pirates would give a king’s ransom to own. What a pity it is not for sale. |