Assault on Honesty

Blooming Stars - Swami (Dr) Snehananda Jyoti 

The following snippet will illustrate how the world changed in the last 30 years.  It will be difficult for generations to come to believe what happened to me on a day in February 1982. That day I landed in Kennedy Airport in New York on an Air India flight from Mumbai. As the flight was late, I literally ran to the Domestic Terminal from the International Terminal to reach a connecting flight to St. Louis, Missouri.  I knew at least a dozen close friends including my future wife would be eagerly waiting for me at the airport, and I did not want to disappoint them and myself. With the flight coupon in my hand - no boarding pass as the counter had already closed – I rushed through the door of the airplane just about one minute before it closed shut. I do not think that day will ever return since the event of September 2011. And a long air-travel from Munnar, India, to St. Louis, USA, can take up to 40 hours depending on the ticket, and can include five to six take offs and landings and change of 3 planes. Plane journey now has become so tiring and unpleasant with numerous checks, re-checks, and verifications. The worst demoralization and assault on the spirit is:  Whereas previously everyone was innocent and trustworthy unless proven otherwise, now everyone is guilty and suspicious unless proved otherwise. This great reversal for humanity, this 180 degree turn-around in the wrong direction needs to be urgently stopped. This sorry state of affairs is totally unacceptable, and does not become a people such as we who call ourselves civilized, cultured, and spiritual.

The paranoid culture is the silent cancer that is eating up the vitals of spirituality that is so essential for humanity to survive. It makes deception easy. It gives so-called respectability to deceit. Often I hear people say that persons in all strata of society engage in corrupt practices or take bribes, and that it is difficult to find an honest person, and it is difficult to survive in society as an honest person. Certain learned helplessness and hopelessness indicating their impotence are detected. This reversal has to be arrested with all our heart and all our strength. The moral high ground of the United States quickly eroded. The detention center at Guantanamo Bay, the morally reprehensible methods used at Abu Grab prison in Iraq to extract information from the inmates – all showed how our savagery is covered only with a thin veneer of decency and humanity, how our democratic leaders deceived us and betrayed our trust. We have not still learned that a good end does not justify a bad means. Developments in technology and medical field unleashed a whole slew of procedures that would change people’s appearances. We are constantly bombarded with overt and covert or subliminal advertisements where we are told we are saving while we are actually losing. For instance, we are being persuaded to buy something that we do not need at a rebate sale and save. The consumer culture is anything but phony. It ingeniously caters to our wants, and tries hard to make us believe that our wants are truly our needs. It is also a coercive culture in that it markets to children and sweet-hearts who do not have their own financial resources, and creates wants within them, that can only be satisfied by parents or lovers. Expensive items such as houses and cars are bought in a competitive spirit to show off one’s material standing or to catch up with or exceed one’s neighbors or competitors. Competition not cooperation is the name of the game. The culture of lie is our making. We can unmake it if muster all our energy and will to change it in the light of the Theology for the Modern Age I have earlier propounded. (To be continued)

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