As a reaction to my long harangue about the scientific basis of socialism and communism my good friend Shubhash has again raised some pertinent questions. Here is his mail verbatim together with my reply:
Arjun
I think my attention span is getting shorter by day (am I getting younger or older?) and therefore cannot digest or even read through the thoughtful write up that you have. However a couple of quick observations:
* Firms and production: It is important to remember that the firms are essentially just legal and organizational entities and by themselves, do not accomplish anything. It is the people owning it, running it, doing work in it that causes production. So it is humans who
produce, not just reproduce.* Motivation: Motivation is as much a factor, or perhaps a bigger factor, than the ability in producing – whether it is autos, food, paintings, or children. Any economic system that does not take into account it is likely to be quite incomplete and misleading.
Subhash
Dear Subhash,
Sorry for not replying to your questions earlier mainly because I was a little too tied up and, more importantly, the questions you have raised are as usual difficult to answer.
I am also aware that apart from these questions you have also raised other questions and commented upon my answer to Dharu’s question about whether India is Hindu or secular. I apologise for not replying yet to that set of reactions as well. I can assure you I have not ignored any of your views but as promised in my reply to Jose earlier I have taken them very seriously indeed and will surely try to answer those questions or reply to those comments as best as I can and as soon as I can.
However, that topic is even more difficult (Hindu or Secular) as is evident from the long discussion that is still going on at the BITS73-74 Yahoo Group site on the topic and the various issues that have been raised and are being raised almost everyday. So let me first try to tackle what seems to me the easiest of them all. This is the question about motivation that you have raised.
One way of answering that question is to adopt the typical Marxist approach and say that because of your class bias you are worried about motivation because you are worried that if the poor become collective owners of all resources they will have no reason to work hard anymore and therefore what will happen to you, the rich, who become and stay rich by exploiting and usurping the produce of the poor?
This approach has obvious difficulties as it leads to a dead end – a clash between two irreconcilable world views or as Gota (another BITSian friend) has aptly pointed out, a clash between belief systems.
We should try to go beyond that and try to adopt a truly objective and scientific approach to the question. So let me try to give you a more scientific answer.
Let us do a thought experiment. Let us assume that you and me are from outer space, from another world in another part of the Universe and we have somehow lost our way and come to this part of the Universe. Let us also assume that we are two specimens of a species, a life form that has evolved in another part of the Universe and whether we are carbon-based (like on Earth) or not we are at least as intelligent a life form as the human species if not more so.
Having reached Earth we decide that well, there seems to be life forms including intelligent ones on this planet and since we have come such a long way let us observe and study them before going back to our part of the Universe billions of light years away. Why waste this golden (or in our part of the world the most valuable thing could be say carbon) opportunity to do some path breaking discoveries about other life forms in the Universe? Maybe when we go back and announce our discoveries to our fellow beings on our planet we are surely going to be rewarded with some Nobel prize or whatever is the equivalent in our world.
Now we begin to observe and we find some very strange things:
1. We find that there are thousands of life forms on this planet, they are all interlinked and there is a biosphere and an ecosystem in that biosphere where all the different life forms are interlinked to each other so much so that existence of most of the species is dependent on the continued existence of all the other species. (I am making some minor simplifications here for the sake of argument but this assertion, as most biologists among us would confirm, is generally true. In fact, that is the reason why there is so much hullabaloo about protecting bio-diversity and ecological balance etc etc.)
2. We also find that except for one species, the most intelligent species, a biped animal which is intelligent enough to be conscious of its own existence, is capable of scientific discoveries and developing technologies for changing the ecosystem in which it lives to suit its own purposes and calls itself Homo Sapiens, all the other species have one single motivation for existence: species reproduction. Although different species have different cranial capacities and show different degrees of intelligence depending on their position in the evolutionary ladder – the highest being the primates and the lowest being the unicellular organisms which are hardly more than strands of DNA – all of them are only engaged in producing and reproducing their existence by living off the ecosystem based on their genetic endowments and in their own ecological niches and are driven by only this simple motivation of species reproduction. (Here let me point out that by producing existence I mean doing whatever it takes for any particular species to go on living on a day to day basis (biologists will be more rigorous and define these tasks as metabolism, respiration etc. etc) and by reproducing existence I mean doing whatever it takes for any particular species to reproduce offspring (mainly sexual mating although there are quite a few lower forms of life that reproduce through asexual processes) so that by species reproduction I mean both these acts together since only if most members of the species live on a day to day basis and also reproduce, that is produce offspring, can the species as a whole exist while if most members are not doing that or become unable or incapable of doing that they become extinct).
3. In the case of Homo Sapiens, however, and although they call themselves the most intelligent life forms on earth – the smartest guys around so to say – they are doing all kinds of strange things and they are driven by all kinds of strange motivations (like wanting to become wealthy and rich, or wanting to become powerful so as to be able to exercise the power of life and death over others of the same species as also over all other species, wanting to own more and more things including if possible the whole planet etc., etc. – as to why these motivations are strange, just wait for what follows). And this despite the fact that biologically they too are just another life form and if they have to go on existing, that is if they have to avoid becoming extinct they too have to willy nilly engage themselves in species reproduction and they too cannot really afford to do anything that endangers their species reproduction.
I hope I have been able to make myself clear up to here without need for any debates and arguments since to avoid extinction it is obvious that Humans too must carry out species reproduction just like any other life form.
4. We find that these Humans who through their scientific advances have learned to control and modify the five basic elements – earth, air/wind, water, fire and ether/space (the ancient Hindus, Greeks, Japanese believed this while the Chinese were slightly different but you can use the modern concepts as well, namely solid, liquid, gas, plasma and informatics because I am using these only as conceptual elements only to show that Humans believe they have learnt to “control” to greater or lesser degree all the basic elements or states of Matter/Universe)- and by modifying their ecosystem and biosphere based on this knowledge are great producers of things that they use and consume for carrying out their existence – what you call “autos, food, paintings” etc etc but not children for which the act of mating is required or these days even a test tube may suffice provided you have the right human genes to start with. I find that you are constantly getting confused about production and reproduction of existence but I am sure by now you have a better grip on this.
5. Anyway to come back to our story, the surprising and strange thing is that a great part of their productive enterprise is devoted to making things which are means of their own destruction rather than means of existence. To take even the crudest quantitative estimates nearly 30-40% of their GNP is used up in producing highly destructive arms, spending on defense or military R&D, spending on the military and maintenance of the military and so on. This 30-40% figure is a crude estimate because this figure is based on information in the public domain. If you now include information that these Humans keep highly classified, the figure will probably jump up to 50-60% of the $30 trillion total global GNP that they are now spending (or when seen from the global systems point of view the same thing as producing because what is spent is what is reflected as production in a crude sense) on how to destroy themselves rather than on how to exist and exist in a better way.
6. We also find that in this mad pursuit of producing more and more destructive products rather than what may be called existential products they are also destroying their biosphere and their ecosystem, the very basis of their existence as a life form. They are polluting the atmosphere and their rivers and seas and their land, they are making other species become extinct and destroying the biodiversity, they are finishing off their plants, trees and forests, they are creating ozone holes thus destroying the protective atmospheric layer which protects them from fatal cosmic radiation, they are releasing copious amounts of carbon into the atmosphere thereby causing global warming and melting of the polar ice caps, in short they are totally destroying their own habitat, their own ecology, their own biosphere. Instead of species reproduction they are engaged in species extinction.
7. Moreover, we will observe that when it comes to reproduction too they are doing absolutely mad things like letting nearly 15% of their children worldwide suffer from hunger and malnutrition while nearly a 10% of their children worldwide die before the age of 5 due to hunger and malnutrition while the balance limp through life stunted, diseased or in one way or another unhealthy through the rest of their lives. (Again these are crude statistics and carefully worked out statistics are likely to reveal an even grimmer picture. WHO/Unicef/World Bank etc take a lot of care and put in a lot of effort to keep these figures as complicated, obfuscated, sterile and underestimated as possible so that if you want a proper and accurate estimate of how many children actually suffer due to poverty and hunger worldwide you have to do enough research to earn you a Phd. In fact, many are doing so in various univs around the world and coming up with similar under estimates simply because of the absence of raw data about the poor. But that is a side issue since even the official figures are quite alarming).
8. We will also observe that in some of the areas of the world where population density is highest – in south east Asia for example – the incidence of hunger, malnutrition, diseases due to malnutrition, death and deprivation is the highest and while China, another high population density area, also has problems, the problems there are somewhat less severe because we from outer space due to our higher intelligence would have discovered that in that country there was a guy called Mao and he led the poor people of that country to get organised under a communist party to throw out the rich and their imperial supporters and had managed to create a social system which was somewhat, mind you only somewhat, in some sense only marginally, better than the situation obtaining in other places of the world where population density is high and therefore incidence of poverty too is high. This is, of course, changing now as the rich are coming back there but that society is still the most egalitarian one in the world. In short, we would find that most of the species – a very large majority – something like 60-70% of the species were barely existing indicating that there must be something very mad about this species which instead of using their intelligence and scientific discoveries for ensuring a decent existence for the members of the species were actually ensuring that a large majority existed in the most depraved conditions possible.
9. We will also observe that a small percentage of the species – no more than 10% and concentrated in that part of the world that the Humans call North America produce the major part of the destructive products while consuming the major part of whatever little existential products that are being produced anywhere in the world. They are also the people who consume the major part (roughly 40%) of all non-renewable resources of the planet – like fossil fuels, iron ore, bauxite, tin, copper, tungsten etc and that is what enables them to produce all the destructive products which they sell to the rest of the world by making people in other parts of the world constantly fight among themselves and in return they buy from them or sometimes simply take from them most of the existential products like food products, other natural products like rubber, jute etc. Main thing is these North Americans eat up 40% of all the world’s resources and yet there are millions of people around the world like this Human Jose (my good friend K. Joseph Anthony whom you, dear reader, have already met before) who believe that people in other areas of the world like in India and China can catch up with these Americans someday through this mad enterprise that they call economic growth without realising it is simply not possible for all people on the earth to consume 40% of everything. They don’t seem to realise the simple Math that if the Americans are consuming 40% then the rest of the world must make do with and share among themselves the remaining 60% because these Humans live in a limited world with limited resources. From all indications they seem quite intoxicated by this strange intoxicant they call economic growth and technological development (Jose likes the brand India (Moon)Shine, the Chinese like the brand China (Moon)Shine and so on) so much so that sane and intelligent people who are otherwise so good at working out very difficult Maths like Fourier series and calculus and what not cannot do some simple arithmetic the moment they imbibe this intoxicant they call economic growth and technological progress.
10. In fact, the whole species seems totally intoxicated by what they call technological progress. Just like addicts in our world, like you and me for example, when we get addicted to drugs such as Heroine or LSD or alcohol we begin to believe that more of the same (another fix) will help solve our withdrawal symptoms and other health related problems without realising that such an act will make us even sicker, these Humans also believe that more of their technological progress and economic growth (another fix of the same) will solve their problems without realising that those are the very things causing the problem. You know how it is – when you get drunk you want to have more of the same thinking it will be good for you without realising that it is only going to make you even sicker sooner than later.
11. Thus we find that these smart guys – these Humans who are supposed to be the most intelligent life form on planet earth – are driven by motives which are strange by any standards. They are single-minded in their desire to commit suicide and become extinct instead of being driven by the motive that makes all other less intelligent life forms tick – namely species reproduction – somehow exist and reproduce. But these guys don’t want to do that – they want to own everything, they want to kill everybody including all other life forms, they want to become rich and powerful, they want more automobiles, more aeroplanes, more spaceships, more buildings made of steel and aluminium and glass, more of all kinds of electronic/electrical and mechanical gadgets, more and more machines, more of the same wrong kind of technological progress and economic growth without realising that their activities are surely leading them towards extinction. They are so drunk and so madly pursuing their own intoxicated motivations they cannot see where they are heading.
12. This is when we decide not to enter this mad world these Humans call Earth and we start our return journey to our own more peaceful world (which we call Dearth) where all people share all resources as equitably as possible and there is no dearth of basic life giving things for anybody and we are driven by one single and simple motive – species reproduction – so that all members of our species can live a decent life as long as they live, our biosphere and ecosystem is also protected, our biodiversity is also protected and in fact we use our scientific and technological knowledge to make sure that all the species on our planet Dearth can live happily without facing extinction and we too can live happily without facing extinction.
I hope Subhash this answers your question about motivation. I have kept my arguments as simple as possible given the various limitations here of being too rigorous but there is today a huge and voluminous scientific and technical literature on global sustainability and environment/biosphere/biodiversity protection and if you care to stop for a moment and stop drinking the heady brew of economic growth and technological progress, become sober for a few days and care to even casually go through at least parts of this literature you will realise the kind of mad enterprise that most of you seem to be supporting.
You will then begin to ask yourself: are we Humans really as smart as we think we are? Can we really “control” Mother Nature and her five elements?
Warm regards and seasons greetings to all you drunk guys out there (except perhaps Bijoy)- happy drinking India Moonshine! Have another peg!! Three cheers!!
Arjun
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October 24, 2007 at 4:34 am
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