Every sincere and honest person would sooner or later realize that the world does not do what it preaches. In fact it does the opposite in every instance. These are not the words of a disillusioned person. These are the words of a person who has learned to live with it, who has learned to make use of it to thwart the guiles of the very wicked (oh they posture like the embodiment of good intentions, did you expect some thing else?)
In fact the more integrity that you have the more you are looked down upon. The more sincere you are the more you are laughed at. The intelligent and the cunning believe that the only way to live is to live with a double face. They follow the supreme law of the evil empire, that to hide what is inside amount to the highest level of intelligence. The more honest you are the dumber you appear to them. The only integrity that they know of is the integrity among thieves and tarts. They are very thick among themselves. Talk of birds of the same feather!
It was a shattering experience to learn that the world was not as it was supposed to be. I had implicitly believed everything I was taught when I was young. I had thought that ones good deed returns good and ones bad deeds return bad.
My understanding of causality was very pedestrian then. I did not know that helping some one would end up in the greatest enmity between the helper and the helped. I have had occasion to undergo the after effects of helping some. It was as if I have committed the greatest heinous act in the world. They would go black in the face the moment they set their eyes on you. Strangely you would also feel as if you have done some thing purposely to hurt them.
Strange are the workings of human mind. By doing something good you should feel happy and upbeat as per the reports that are dished out every now and then by the learned. But instead you feel like wanting to hide from the general public. In fact you are ashamed too, of being in a position to help others. This mostly happens where money is involved. I must say that I soon got tired of this and began adamantly to refuse the pleas for help.
Wonder of wonders, things began to improve from that moment onwards. A wise friend of mine once came up with something like-
“If you don’t give them any, both you and the other man would be unhappy for a few minutes. But if you give them any both of you would go on being unhappy for a very long time.”
It took me sometime to learn this basic fact of life.
This is a world where Mr. Hyde is respected and Dr. Jekyll is considered a fool. It seems strange that H.G .Wells the creator of these characters went on in life with the belief that people are inherently good. He could never understand how humans have become interested in killing the members of their own species. His theory was this was an aberration, not characteristics of the race.
Perhaps he was too nice a man in life and never realized the real nature of man in his life. But his artistic talent recognized it from the very start. It is curious to see the man and artist side by side-One with the implicit belief in the natural goodness of his species and the other so skeptical as to create Mr. Hyde. It’s a kind of triumph of art over humanity.
Human badness is not a new theory. Heraclitus considered those intelligent who held forth on human vileness. The rest appeared just as liars to him. I haven’t seen someone capable of refuting this. The armchair intellectuals speaking from the security of their positions in life would not agree to this. But if they have seen life in all its aspects, with its brutality, with its scant respect for norms of behavior, with its terrible desire to exist against even impossible odds, the senseless murders, passion, hate, faithlessness, deceit, evil in all its forms would undergo a life changing transformation.
They would not see life as something romantic, some thing pleasant, something worthy of having. They would soon understand that the romantic notions that they had about life was all a terrible lie.
In fact every one of us is living a lie. As long as we do not realize it, we are happy in our imaginary worlds.
When we realize what it really is to most people we would shed a few scales from our eyes.
No comments:
Post a Comment