New slave morality

An education system that emphasizes meekness and obeisance to authority and a historically engrained sense of caste roles in society is currently proving detrimental to the interest of the modern malayali; be it in his work environment or home environment. At his corporate job his ingrained sense of reverence to authority serves to put him in a position of never ending moral perturbation. His psyche fails to comprehend his role in the new establishment as a commodity. The larger historicity of his link to the old establishment affirms in him his role as that of a slave or a person of lower caste; morally obligated to please his masters. 

The malayali must realize that the old establishment is paving the way to a new establishment.  This establishment takes root from the self esteem movement of America and as such favors people who have been educated in an environment that gives prominence to the growth of self esteem. As a consequence to this emphasis, self esteem grows in them as a moral feeling (this is in contrast to the casteist moral feeling prevailing in Middle class India). This self esteem lends itself to Americans excelling at the new establishment. He an impartially negotiate the position of the commodity that he is without casteist moral hesitancy. 

The middle class malayalee inevitably will have to change his way of thinking to align himself with this new reality. He must own up to the inevitability and accept the the consequences (including the most evil one of individualism) and accept death of the old slave establishment and the growth of the new slave  establishments. 

What scares us.

The  fears of both conservatives and liberals are reactive. Only they react in fear to different things. A person of liberal mindset is  programmed to fear authority. So a news article on the lynching of someone for their religious view would effect a liberal  more than a case of a shoot out or a mass killing or a lone wolf terror attack. The random act violence by a lunatic or a fringe group is not as scary to them as the wilful action of an establishment.

For a conservative however, it's disorder they fear the most. A random act of violence by a fringe element is seen as a threat to the establishment that they look to for security and symbolic meaning. Any act of violence perpetuated by it or in its name is a necessary cost for the survival of the establishment. Ultimately it can be written off.

The temporality of will.

In our assumptions of will there is one aspect that is overlooked. That is time. We as so accustomed to seeing the so called will manifest in timeframes that are conducive to the clock rate of our minds that we shut ourselves to the possibility of a natural will manifesting in a much larger or smaller time scale. It would be a worthwhile thought experiment to think of a will manifesting over a thousand year. An awareness in nature that spans multiple individuals species or generation. A flash of consciousness lasting a thousand years to form. 

The reactive thinker.

In his youth man gets an idea that he is a freethinker. Sometimes this thought is carried forward into his older age. But it for most people the false sense of freedom diminishes over time. Sooner or later he realises that there are much larger forces at play.

For the young man it may seems like social convention are the main impediment to man's freedom. It seems like most men are enslaved by religion and arbitrary customs, while he himself is free of such chains. What else could be described as free thought. Like I said, there are larger forces at play, and they are history and biology. What is custom next to the whole of human history much less to whole of life's history. Let us not delve into the realm of physics.

Freedom of movement

Contrary to popular belief people of olden times had much more freedom of movement than modern man. Not only was the population lower allowing man to utilise the free spaces, there was lesser cultural limitations placed on travel. This would seem counter-intuitive considering our concpetion regarding the past as a time of institutionalised discrimination, and our own time as more egalitarian one. But the crux of the matter is that the modern urban man lives in an extremely constricted environment. He is free to travel. But only through the narrow and conjested conduits that is the modern tarred roads. Here too he must follow a myriad of written and unwritten rules. Not only must he keep to a particular side of the road at a particular velocity, but he must be aware and ready to use a large number of legally and culturally mandated manoeuvres to make his way through. It is not surprising that he finds the whole exercise tiresome.

An even more insidious barrier to human movement are those that are not legally mandated, but that which are culturally self imposed. An olden man walking the earth could squat on the side of the road when his legs got tired. He could put a blanket down on the earth to take a nap. What worried him was the Elements and the possibility of being ambushed. The modern man if he chooses to walk the earth can't sit down if it is not a place designated to sit in. He cannot sleep on the side of the road. He not only risks getting his cloths dirty he is at risk of being branded a hobo or even worse a rebel. One pattern that can be noted in our time in India is that the degree of freedom decreases as one moves up the social ladder. In kerala it is acceptable for a Bengali labourer to swat in the foot path. A lower class malayalee may sit on a shop step. An middle class malayalee loses that privilege. Maybe a bust of bench for him. Moving higher up options and space is limited even further.

As we move higher up the scales our freedom is being limited to basically our bedroom ; or even the toilet seat.

Banking

People, even economists misunderstand the nature of banks on the modern economy. Most people hold on to an ancient concept of banking: that bank take money from the public and give out loans charging interest for it while giving interest for deposits. This concept is woefully outdated. This would have held true when the economies of the world were on gold standard and banks were independent. The money supply was limited by physical factor: that of gold production. Economiea today rely on fiat currency, that is not backed by anything other than institutional assurance, that is RBI governors signature. The currency has a floating value that keeps changing with the social, economic, political and cultural landscape. In today's economy the central banks, retail and commercial banks, the government, private citizens and businesses for part of a nexus that keeps the value of money at a more or less useful level. The idea of the individual being a banks customer is outdated.

Banks don't depend on your deposits to give out loans. They get their money from the reserve bank as loans. That is loaned to people for interest. The difference in interest is the profit.

As it stands now the service provided by banks in terms of providing ATM's and savings account are only a convenience. It is a cost on the bank. Banks would be right to charge for these services. And the value provided by these services are actually worth what is charged. For example, your money is kept safe in a public place under AC for you to withdraw at your convenience.

The high rate of cash usage in a India is actually justification for using these means to achieve higher levels of cashlessness. In foreign countries the charges maybe low, that is because large transactions take place through cashless means. The number of cash transactions are lees, so they don't incur high cost for cash transactions like in India, where even educated IT professionals use cash for high value transactions. Our IT professional will go to atm 4 days in a row to withdraw 1lakh to buy something.

Regarding the cost of digital transaction. It doesn't matter becuase there is hidden cost in cash transactions that are not easily apparent. You are paying more than the 2 percent charge when cash is used. Think of this. For a cash transaction you need a clerk at the bank, how many transaction does a clerk do a day. What is he paid. If he does 50 transactions a day and he is paid 1000 Rs a day that is 20 Rs per transaction. This is surely passed on to consumers.

Island universe

When contemplating about the achievements and limitations of past civilizations one often fails to take into account the difference in population of the past times compared to our own. Greek civilization in its entirety was contained in a population of 10s of thousands as compared to a 100s of millions of our time. One thought that comes from this contemplation is the possibility of having island universes in this world. This is a concept much different from countries. Why cant there exist a Greek nation state somewhere in this earth. Why is it that human culture should always tend towards assimilation and a pan human communism.

Future Historians

While one of the issues facing current historians and archaeologists is the lack of evidence of the past, for future historians and archaeologists, it will be an overabundance of evidence. The future historian will have available to him many different narratives of the same historical event. Constructing a new narrative from these contradictory sources will be as hard as the task of filling in blank pieces that contemporary historians need to do to come up with their historical narratives. 

The social animal

They say man is a social animal. The  evidence for this can be seen in man's need for an audience; be it an audience for his self perceived moral superiority, his superior acumen or his birth rank.

Structure of power

The naturally evolving structure of power emanates from the psyche of the individual. It resides there primarily as well.

The structure of power which in many traditional narratives is seen as being forced upon unjustly on some by a few is actually a cultural perspective. Nature doesn't deal in parts, it deals in whole. Power structures are distributed over the whole cultural sphere where individuals can be taken as a convenient and symbolic point of reference. But individuals are not the sole points. Various other frameworks maybe erected,  which can provide cultural structures that interlap and engage in various ways and degrees.