Crisis of calibre as common in business as in politics

Men highly skilled in the art of manipulation and intimidation have maintained their dominance for so long in this country that it has become necessary to grapple with words and definitions just to remind oneself that these sort of people, despite the deference shown them by the populace, are in fact the dregs of humanity.

Although such a description might be contrary to common sense expectations, would any other description fit better the sort of people who are, and have been, in charge of things in the country?

They are the sort of people who have been adept at gaining power in Sri Lankan politics since the end of colonial rule. They confuse the good with possessions, and are impervious to the idealizing love of beauty. They crave for prestige but have no wish to rise to the dignity of an animal having the powers of thinking and knowing. They feel everything is subjective and nothing is false. The limitations of inducing co-operation through reasoning, when confronted by them, do not inspire in them a tragic sense of life; and instead of bowing to such limitations with dignity, they venture to cut across the limitations of rational co-operation, and end up perfecting by habit their skills in the art of manipulation and intimidation.

Men after their kind are riding high today, not just in politics but also in other socially indispensable endeavours, and doing so amid unstoppable poverty, political paralysis and cultural atrophy.

Take business. There is nothing there to write home about, except to remind how difficult it is to be a business leader without the cunning to be as agile as a monkey in our political system of patronage and favouritism. The impression of our business leaders to which we are accustomed is one of cynicism and of thuggish assertiveness. Seldom do we encounter the sort of business leader who would be counted among the innovative doers, whose assertiveness is more a function of professional excellence and self-confidence than of animal aggression and feminine wiles, and whose drive and tenacity are fuelled by the wish to have a feeling of achievement. Moreover, when business leaders are moved to assert their own importance publicly, to be admired by the populace, it is now the fashion to do so on the basis of philanthropic activity, leaving some to wonder if the honour of philanthropic activity is a substitute for the honour of innovative activity.

In other words, it is not difficult to see why lesser men rise in Sri Lankan business. To all intents and purposes, this is not a business friendly country, and when business takes place amid economic and emotional hostilities to capitalism on the one hand and political corruption and lawlessness on the other, the advantage is decidedly with base and sycophantic types.

Business achievement is built essentially on foresight, judgment and thrift. However, human foresight is imperfect, and business requires ingenuity, courage and perseverance to compensate for the imperfections of human foresight and the fallibility of human judgement. Again, thrift, like any virtuous activity, is not a precise science but an art perfected by habit; and in the management of resources, the natural tendency might be to err either on the side of liberality and be extravagant, or on the side of ‘illiberality’ and be mean.

Nevertheless, one might cut across such ethical and intellectual challenges – and yet be successful - but to do that one would have to be mean, duplicitous and thuggish, while being as agile as a monkey at exploiting the politics of patronage. Is it any wonder that our “blue chips” have yet to produce anything exciting in goods and services, and that their success should lack distinction and be parochial?

Our professions too are beginning to mirror business and politics of the country, at least, in the sense that professional success is today more a function of tricks, cunning stratagems and glibness than of knowledge, skill and rigour. Only the most credulous among us would credit our doctors, lawyers and teachers with rigour. In fact, one would be hard pressed to name a single profession in this country which is distinguished for the rigour of its practice.

We have also long felt that the dominant personalities in our religious hierarchies ideally belong with the discarded matter. The monks are preoccupied with defending the seat of religion and appear to show scant regard to the task of honouring the monastic ideal – a preoccupation that, regardless of its motive and historical imperative, is certain to stimulate the pleasures associated with chasing power, prestige and other delights of this world and become enslaved by the thrill of that chase.

The clerics too are fixated on the city of man, and instead of preaching salvation, which they once did with considerable fluency and erudition, are now preaching reform breathlessly, which given their devotion to pacifism often smacks of treason in the present context of terrorism.

While, neither monastic vows nor ecclesiastical rules are a guarantor of piety and spirituality, social praise is the standard by which many of us come to recognise virtue and the virtuous. However, what is virtue in a society that is hell-bent on honouring men in religious garb, even “certain lewd fellows of the baser sort”, for having the agility of a monkey in our political jungle? Would virtue and truth ever be deemed superior in value to expediency in such a society?

Aptly revealing was the public quarrel between the high priest of the temple by the Beira Lake, to whom the President had recently given the glad eye, and the faltering leader of the opposition, to whose family the temple owes its very existence as a magnet for political networking as well as for solace when the pleasures of power, greed and lust have turned into dust. A perfect microcosm of the wider problem discussed here.

There is clear evidence to suggest that the dregs of humanity have had the advantage for some time in our country and they are now in charge of socially indispensable endeavours. No one could know what the future holds for us. It might even be the case as a Hobbesian sort recently remarked that cultures that are ruinous for people who live in them are not historically freakish aberrations: “the natural state of the world is Darfur, and the freakish aberration is America and the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world.” However, what we do know is that we have fallen into decay as a nation, and barbarism is an eventuality well within the forecast of possibilities and conceivable in a calendar.

The rise of lesser men in our society appears to be more a symptom than a cause of our decay. Not only are we accustomed to the practice of attaching a superior value to expediency over nobility and truth, we are also happy to give the nod to the apparent effectiveness of the cynical and thuggish sort. It is as if the yearning for order and efficiency has generated in us a taste for such men. Experience must have taught us that we are amenable only to brute force, intimidation and manipulation, because we live more by passion than by good habits, foresight and vision.

What makes the situation apparently hopeless of solution is that most of us do not even have the occasion to experience in a direct way the insistent demand of progress for imported practices, ideas and ideals to clarify, criticise and enlarge our own customary ways. Even more, the nation is long past finding out that imported ethical and intellectual traditions, as critical tools, simply mean for us the traditions of the Western civilization, specifically after it its return to the naturalism of Greek thought from its odyssey of Euro-Orientalism or dualism.

It is quite fitting that a nation marked largely by deficiencies and excesses - and because of that, one in which the citizenry is made either dispirited and servile or overreaching and sycophantic - should be the outcome of the heritage of over two and a half millennia of adherence to the belief that desire is the source of suffering. For such a belief is wholly subversive to an ethic of achievement, which aims at the formation of good habits of living well and of supremely well when the conditions are favourable.

Since desire is the immediate spring of action, amid hopelessness and squalor, it might be emotionally satisfying to imagine that peace of mind could be had if only the right path is followed to stamp out desire. However, the fact that all human action proceeds from desire is a circumstance for which we are not responsible – we are made, or have evolved, that way; and the struggle to stamp out desire is a rebellion against the very structure of the human being as a living organism.

From the ancients who came upon a noble path to stamp out desire, to the moderns who practiced collectivization as a path to stamp out the feeling of personality or soul, what we have is a long line of Oriental prophets trying to create a world without hopelessness and misery in utter ignorance or disregard of the structure of things.

However, the effect of their rebellion against Nature has been horrifyingly wicked – having given rise to oversensitive, unruly and sycophantic souls who crave for prestige with hardly any awareness of the dignity and the greatness of the human spirit; and to societies that have gulags for tragic heroes, stubborn in their loyalty to justice, freedom, truth or beauty.