Understanding the Left, the Right and the Bhagavad-gita’s vision

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Question, what exactly are the left and the right? And how are they perceived from the perspective of Bhagavad Gita’s wisdom? And would the Gita’s wisdom be a fall on the right or the left? Answer, words can have different meanings in different contexts.
And also different people may conceive of different concepts differently. And each word is associated with a concept. So I’ll give broad definitions or broad understandings over here.
Specifics will be a matter of individual context and consciousness. Basically, life is filled with trouble, with problems. And unless problems are solved, people suffer and die.
And for solving problems, some effort has to be made. And that effort needs to be organised so that it can benefit the maximum number of people. And the problem can be of hunger, it can be of inclement weather, it can be of stop, it can be of dealing with invaders or whatever else.
But now whenever an organisation is created, that organ for effectively dealing with the problem, so now a written hierarchy is formed. Because for dealing with the problem, different people have different levels of competence. And some people will be at the top of that hierarchy.
And most likely, those people will be at the top of the hierarchy or they should be at the top of the hierarchy because they are the most competent in dealing with the problem. Say, if one group of people want to communicate with another group of people, with whom there are some important issues that need to be discussed, then the people who write the letter of communication will ideally be people who are the best at English writing, so that things can be expressed clearly and articulately. Of course, it may happen that the people who craft that letter may also be the most powerful.
And they may craft a message that may suit their interests, the top of the power ladder or hierarchy rather than to everybody throughout the power hierarchy. Now, writing important letters or writing important documents is hard work. So, those who occupy the, if you consider the hierarchy of people who are stakeholders in that particular communication, most of the work is done by 20% of the people, broadly speaking.
And that is known as the Pareto Principle. 20% of the work, 20% of people do most of the work, you could say 80% of the work or larger, whatever. But so the 20% of the, in a hierarchy, most of the work is done by 20% of the people.
And most of the benefits may accrue to 20% of the people, the top 20. And now these 20 may or may not be the ideal, may not be the same. And then the benefits will percolate down to the remaining people in the hierarchy to different degrees.
So, within a hierarchy, if the people at the top are the most competent, then that hierarchy works for the good of everyone. But if the top, people at the top are power-hungry, exploitative, self-seeking, then that hierarchy becomes a system of exploitation. It can even become a tyrant.
So, now broadly speaking, the right focusses on the hierarchy. And the right wants order and stability. And for that, there is organisation and for the organisation, there has to be hierarchy.
So, the right in general stresses the tradition in which the order has been embodied and which enables hierarchy to be sustained. Or rather, in which hierarchy has been a central feature and which enables order to be sustained. And thus, the right maintains order.
A right is concerned with the maintenance of order, of tradition, of continuity, of stability. The left, on the other hand, is primarily concerned about the dispossessed, those who are at the bottom of the hierarchy, and those who may be either neglected unintentionally or deprived intentionally or even exploited maliciously, malevolently. And for that purpose, the left campaigns against those who are at the top of the hierarchy.
And they try to, it tries to topple the hierarchy and seeks equality. So, the left challenges the existing order to prevent and correct the abuse of power within that order and the exploitation of those who are deprived. Now, both the left and the right can go towards the extreme.
And at one level, if we consider from a broader perspective, the right which is concerned about order, if it focusses only on the order, then it can become at best cut off from the rest of the humanity and living in an ivory tower. And at worst, it can become dictatorial, war-like, where they feed on and exploit the lower. So, the extremism of the right, there can be very specific ideologies which place people in a hierarchy and place some people on top.
So, the Nazi ideology was a hierarchy which placed Germans who were claimed to be the Aryans at the top. And thus, it can say put Jews and gipsies at the bottom, so much so that even their humanity was denied, they were called and treated like animals and their existence itself was considered a curse, not on this one themselves, but on the all of humanity and they were eliminated in millions. So, this is an opportunity of the extremism on the right.
Now, the right is often associated in today’s world with religion, because religion also imposes or proposes some kind of order in society. And usually within that religious order, those who are religiously most evolved are placed at the top of the hierarchy. And those who are not religiously evolved, in fact, those who are religious, those who are not at all, those who are irreligious, either in the sense of being atheistic or in the sense of not agreeing with that particular religion, they are placed at the bottom of the hierarchy.
And often, those at the top exploit and abuse and even eliminate those at the bottom. So, that’s for example, you have Islamism, which is not Islam, but it’s ideology which rises from the intersection to a huge degree between Islamic worldview derived from the Islamic texts and an intense craving for political power at all costs. So, within that, those who do not follow Islam, say if they are following the other Abrahamic religions, they may be accepted as the people of the law, and they may be given status as second grade citizens.
And so that’s how Jews and Christians may be tolerated. But Hindus and Buddhists who are considered idol worshippers, they are very strongly condemned. And often, either they could be eliminated, but Muslims came to India, there’s just too many Hindus to eliminate, they didn’t have nuclear weapons at that time.
So, then they forcibly converted or they were disproportionately taxed and throttled in various ways. So, the right creates some kind of hierarchy. And often we use the word right with religion, because religion creates a hierarchy, and that hierarchy can become abusive and exploitative.
Now, the left is much more complicated, because the left generally seeks equality, that the dispossessed also have rights, the dispossessed should also be treated like human beings, and the dispossessed should also have opportunity and prosperity. So, the left always champion the minorities, the sidelined, the exploited. And in that sense, to correct the wrongs of the past, and throughout history, there have been wrongs, no doubt, and they need to be corrected.
So, to correct the wrongs of the past is a laudable goal of history, just as of the left, as maintaining order and stability is a laudable goal of the right. But now the extremism of the right is well documented, and we are all very leery about any kind of hierarchy gaining power in today’s world. But we are not that cautious about extremism on the left.
So, extremism on the left means that there is a thin dividing line between the desire to do good for the underprivileged, for the dispossessed, and the desire to harm the privileged, the desire to demonise the privileged, and the desire to disempower them and even cripple them. So, the left often focusses more on the second than the first. And historically speaking, if the left has gained power, as it happened in Soviet Russia, as it happened in China, as it happened in several other smaller countries, that has resulted in the most vicious of murders.
Because actually, the left gets motivated by, in general, concern for doing good, is of course very good. But doing good to any disempowered community requires long term sustained effort. Whereas, hitting out at the powerful, although it is difficult also, but once power is gained somehow, hitting it out at the powerful becomes much, much easier.
And it is much more visible, say, to build houses for thousand poor people in a village is much more difficult than to bring down the palace of a wealthy landlord in that village. And that can be very well done with righteous anger. Because that landlord is seen as the very visible symbol of the prosperity of the, that has come from exploiting all the poor people.
So, overall, wherever the left gained power, their aim was equality. But the result was more of violence and destruction of those who were considered to be in power, of those who were at the top of the hierarchy, or even were considered to be at the top of the hierarchy, and were deemed as exploiters. So, in communism, essentially what happened was that the extremes of the communism is the magnitude of the murders that happened in communism far outweigh those of the Holocaust.
And there, what happened was that any person, you could, we have multiple kinds of identities. Say, somebody might be a Brahmin, somebody might be a, say, belonging to a particular financial group, a particular caste, a particular financial group, a particular race, a particular geographical area. And if you could perceive, you could place a particular person in any particular category, they might have 10 identifications, you could choose one of them.
And in that one category, we associate with exploitation and exploiters in some way. And that person can be persecuted and eliminated because of that. So, there was a, the Marxism saw itself as a struggle of the proletariat and against the bourgeoisie, the landowners against the land workers.
Now, if somebody is a landowner, they are ruthlessly slaughtered, many of them. But somebody who is a land work, somebody might not have been owned any substantial land at all, but even if they had owned, if their grandparent had been a landowner, the people were considered guilty by association and even they were killed. And like this, millions and millions of people were killed.
Now, here, when the left becomes motivated much more by hatred for a particular group that it considers privileged, then it can become a force of great destruction. And history has documented that in a very gruesome way in recent times. Unfortunately, the media attention focusses much more on the extremism of the right than on the extremism of the left.
So, now, in today’s world, the left has penetrated into the academia to a significant extent. And the academia often champions, presents itself as a champion of the underprivileged. And thus, for example, now, one of the problems with the left is reductionism.
They reduce all of history to a power struggle. So, for example, one narrative could be gender studies. But all of history is seen as a power struggle between men and women, where men have been exploitative and abusive and they have abused and exploited women.
Now, the reality is far different that a very small percentage of men have had enormous power and privilege over the rest of women, over the rest of men and over women. But it is not that all men had privilege over women. The men often had to do some of the harshest jobs, fighting in wars, living in great conditions of privation, even when they were soldiers, trench warfare was a horrible phase, men had to work in mines.
And so, there are many complex forces at work in history. But the left reduces all hierarchy, all of history to particular hierarchies, and then it reduces that hierarchy simply to a power struggle. But that is a very short sighted view.
So, in the West, it might be that another narrative could be race. But actually, the whites have exploited the blacks. And while that is true, that is not the only narrative.
In India, the narrative could be that the Brahmanas have exploited the lower castes. And while that could be true, that is not the only reality. The Brahmanas have also guided, spiritually counselled, educated and stabilised the whole social structure.
So, by reducing history to hierarchy and reducing hierarchy to just considerations of power, the left reduces the complex history to very, to a alarmingly simplified caricature, almost simplified to the extent of being trivialised. And then it aims that those in power need to be brought down. Now, the fact the hierarchy could be because of power, but the hierarchy can also be because of competence.
And if those who are in on the top of the hierarchy are brought down, simply because they are considered to be there at the top, and it’s considered that it’s bad, that they just by being at the top, they must be bad people, that often those who replace may not have that level of competence. And society can succumb to terrible chaos, if that happens. So, if we consider that the, so there is equality.
Now, equality is a very natural and desirable aspiration. But there is equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. So, equality of outcome means, let us say in a class, all students will get the same marks, that will throttle creativity.
And that may in the experimental communism that led to not have all students getting top grades, but practically all students, equality outcome was that everybody failed. So, that there was mass poverty. And there is again, now, if we say there has to be equality of outcome, who is going to monitor and make sure that the equality of outcome comes up.
And those who are going to do that, they get enormous power over the destinies of everybody else. And thus, the British social critic and commentator, George Orwell said that in communism, everyone is equal, but some people are more equal than others. So, those who determine the outcome get an outrageously disproportionate chunk of power.
And the remaining become dependent on the whims of those in power. So, ironically, those who think that they are they are toppling the hierarchy, they end up creating a new hierarchy in which they are at the top. And they occupy the top moral righteousness that is breathtaking in its narcissism.
So, now the solution. So, this is how there can be destruction of the social fabric. Because at one level, power corrupts everyone and power can corrupt even those who are champions of the left.
And if they get power, then they can destroy anyone and everyone to facilitate equality of outcome. But equality of outcome also chokes creativity and talent and equality of opportunity. The class would mean that all students get the same books, all students are able to attend the same class, all students are able to attend the partake of the library facilities, do the lab experiments, whatever they are.
So, basically, equality of opportunity is what a school should provide. But if a school starts mandating equality of outcome, it will kill talent, energy, inspiration. So, when the left’s focus shifts from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome, that is often not very rigid, clearly differentiated.
And thus, the left can become alarmingly exploitative and destructive. Because equality of opportunity is desirable, equality of outcome is disastrous. And we see this insistence on equality of outcome in various ways in today’s society.
That, say, if somebody says that, in literature, we study Shakespeare and we study Wordsworth and we study so many writers, because they are white males. And white males always had power. Well, that could be one aspect.
But Shakespeare was a great writer. And we study Shakespeare because of the greatness of his writings, not because of the fact that he was a white male. So, if somebody says that we will no longer study Shakespeare, we will study some black author, we will study some female author.
Now, of course, if those authors have written great work, and that work has been sidelined, then that should be given due attention. But to make it a principle that their work should be studied simply because they are blacks or they are females, what it is mandating is not equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome. It is not that their work should be given a fair hearing, to evaluate on this merit.
Assume that the merit of their work is because they belong to a particular group. And because another Shakespeare belongs to a particular group, therefore, his work must be lacking merit. It just got to the top by power.
So, here is a good example of the top of the hierarchy being presumed to be because of power, when it could well be because of competence. And then some author who is not great insightful, but just if that author happens to be female and black, place that author’s narrative at the top, not because of competence, but because of, because it’s a reversal of the power grabbing that was there in the past. Now, in the religious reading of say, Indian texts, of Indian history, of Indian society and culture, this kind of leftist shifting or even reversing of the narrative is alarmingly visible.
So, it does, for example, the whole of Ramayana may be re-envisioned by some as a gender struggle. And the unfair patriarchal system so brutally victimised Sita, and that becomes the whole thrust of that narrative. The Ramayana has inspired millions for millennia.
And if you look at Indian history, we hardly see any instances of men abandoning their wives, just on a mere allegation. That is not the lesson that people have drawn from the Ramayana. The lesson that they have primarily drawn is of devotion to Ram and of selfless service to others, like Ram did when he got exiled, accepted exile when Lakshman and Sita came with him.
So, yes, now, understanding why Sita was exiled, that is important. But to reduce the Ramayana to a story of patriarchal abuse of women is a horrendous misreading of the Ramayana. And that is not the way it has been traditionally read by millions.
And the millions included not just the people who are the top of the hierarchy, the Brahmins, but also those who are at the lower levels. Many of the retellings of the Ramayana in the vernacular languages have been done by people, by saints, bhakti saints who belong to the lower caste. And they too celebrated the Ramayana and inspired them and thousands or even millions through them.
So the imposition of the narrative of power struggle on the religious epic and on the religion at large can lead to horrendous misrepresentations. Yes, the caste system in India is an example of a hierarchy that did at times become a tyranny. But that was not all that it was.
So to reduce in all of Indian history to a history of the exploitation of the higher caste over the lower caste. And in that historical narrative, because in India, say Muslims were originally outside the hierarchy. So often Muslim aggressors who pillaged thousands and thousands of villages and even destroyed thousands and thousands of temples, killed thousands and thousands of people and then forcibly converted people to their religion.
They are also portrayed as rescuers and benefactors because they freed people from this hierarchy. So now for a few people, say conversion to Islam might have been a way out of the caste system in India. But somehow, often it was found that there is power struggles everywhere.
And even the Muslims, Hindus who converted to Islam, they found that they never got all the privileges which two-year-old Muslim families got. So the demonization of everything that was good in Indian history and the glorification of everything that challenged the powerful in Indian history, no matter how horrible those challenges might have been. This is the distortion of history that has happened because of the leftist narrative, leftist retelling of the history.
And thus, many of the brutalities of Islam are minimised. Now, it is not that Islam itself should be demonised, but history, its factuality needs to be recorded. So when we impose an ideology on history, then we deny everything that contradicts that ideology.
Ideology is narrative. We selectively highlight only that which supports that narrative. So now, if the caste system had been simply exploitative and destructive as it has been portrayed, then why would it have survived for so long? There are so many invaders who came to India throughout the centuries, throughout the millennia, we could say, through the millennia, for the last three millennia, at least in documented history.
We had many invaders coming and they could have caused this complete social disruption. They did do a lot of economic plundering, but the society was resilient. Why is that? Why is it that India is among the few surviving civilisations in the world as compared to all the civilisations which are simply in the remaining history, since the Aztec, the Mayan, the Mesopotamian.
So it could well be because the social structure was not just about exploitation, the social structure itself brought some resilience. Caste was a designator of identity, but that identity also created a support system, which was bigger than one’s family. So those who belong to one caste stuck together and they supported each other.
So rather than seeing caste in terms of discrimination and domination, we can see it as also a means of connection and cooperation, that those within a particular caste, because they shared similar occupations, they shared similar situations in life, they helped each other and they stuck to each other. Even if they were competitors in the bigger sense, they were in one sense, they were also cooperative in another sense. Just like in any field, we see that, say, all minors in a particular city might form an association.
They will be rivals, but they also want to make sure that they have a lobbying power over the bigger government and local politicians, so that their interests are not compromised. And that is why they come together. So similarly, caste provided a sense of bigger belonging than just one’s family and that created connection and cooperation and that prevented, that provided resilience, that prevented the breakdown of the whole system when everything, when invaders came in.
Further, if we consider that the higher castes were so exploitative and so outrageously discriminatory, then we see in India, the lower castes have at least survived and not just survived, but survived in large numbers. If we see what was done by the power hungry colonialists in South America, entire civilisations which had existed for a thousand years before Christ, two thousand year old civilisations were destroyed in two years by the Spanish invaders. That’s how Mayan and Inca civilisations were, Aztec, Inca, most of them were completely destroyed.
So this is now, the point here is not to say that we are not that bad because they are worse. The point is to illustrate that wherever there is power, there is always the possibility of abuse of power. But it is not that every hierarchy is characterised solely by abuse of power.
So now in Indian history, there is so much that is good, but unfortunately, it all is neglected because it is seen through the filter of the, much of it is neglected because it is seen through the filter of the product of the higher castes and often outrageously speculative narratives which have little or no basis in fact are told of how the people at the top of the hierarchy were exploitative and how the people at the bottom were glorious. So thus there is an alternative history of Hindus that is offered, alternative retelling of the Ramayana, the Mahabharata offered in which the characters who are virtuous are depicted as vicious and the characters who are vicious are depicted as virtuous. So the inversion of traditional narratives of traditional hierarchy now is done simply to serve some purposes of furthering the leftist agenda.
Whether that is true or not, that is not really examined. So there are narratives where Ravan is portrayed as actually not a bad person. And it is ironic that the same women who elsewhere would be very, very conscious of even the slightest atrocity against women, those same women will defend Ravan who actually very shamelessly abducted a chaste and virtuous woman.
So the leftist narrative has unfortunately led to an incalculable distortion and damage to India, Indian culture and to the accessibility of the culture’s wisdom and tradition for people today. And that definitely needs to be corrected. So broadly speaking, the left and the right embody, we could say order and chaos.
The left embodies chaos, which is its agitation against order. And the right embodies order. And we need both, because order, if not regulated, can become domineering.
And chaos, if not regulated, can become destructive. So we need a balance of both where the order is present, but the order is checked. So we could say that the Bhagavad Gita offers that vision of when it says that the social order was based on work, good karma bhagasha, quality and work.
That means it was social order was based on competence. That there was equality of opportunity, somebody had competence to be a Brahmana, they could be a Brahmana. If somebody had the competence to rise to the top of the hierarchy, they were allowed to rise.
And ideally, hierarchy is required, because that’s how order in society will be maintained. But the hierarchy should be based on competence, not simply based on power. So there’s spiritual competence and there’s material competence.
The Varanashram was ideally meant to facilitate both. That there is spiritual competence that comes by genuine spiritual growth, by which one realises higher spiritual realities, pursues those higher spiritual realities, and thus focusses on providing wisdom and facilities for others to pursue the higher spiritual realities. So those at the top of the hierarchy, they are genuinely spiritually advanced, spiritually committed, and they inspire others to also become spiritually advanced and committed.
So if there could, of course, be people who have no spiritual interest, but they are simply hungry for power and privilege, and they could occupy the top of the hierarchy, and they can exploit their religious followers. And unfortunately, that has happened, and that is still happening. But again, to reduce every religious hierarchy to just this, self-interested people abusing naive followers, that is reductionism to a destructive degree.
Instead, yes, there is exploitation, but there is also, those who are at the top of the hierarchy, they could also be because of reason there because of competence, because they are deeply committed to spiritual growth. And that is how they have grown there. And understanding this can enable us to genuinely appreciate competence and pursue competence ourselves.
So materially, those who are competent need to be facilitated. And spiritually, those who have competence needs to be emulated, both facilitated and emulated. So if the hierarchy facilitates social contribution, if the hierarchy facilitates spiritual elevation, if the hierarchy overall helps people to realise their spiritual equality, that beyond whatever ups and downs there might be in particular social interactions, at particular times, beyond that there is a benevolent purpose for the order which involves in hierarchy.
And a benevolent purpose is that ultimately, everybody needs, everybody is equal, and everybody is meant to realise their equality as they grow spiritually. So this understanding that there is intrinsic worth to every individual, because everyone is a part of the divine. At the same time, everybody is differently situated at the material level.
According to the way they are situated in the social system could be organised to facilitate their maximum contribution socially, while also facilitating their elevation spiritually. Then there is facility for realising that equality at the spiritual level and facility also for contributing equally according to one’s interests and talents. Of course, this is a complex system and it can all be analysed and fleshed out in much more in detail.
But in principle, we could say that the Bhagavad Gita’s broad wisdom, I integrate the virtues of both the right and the left. It integrates the virtue of the right, that is, that there has to be a hierarchy for order to be there in society to effectively deal with the problems that people encounter in their daily lives. There has to be a hierarchy, but the hierarchy should be based on competence, not simply on the capacity to grab power by hook or by crook.
And it does provide a hierarchy based on competence. At the same time, the left’s idea that people at the bottom of the hierarchy should not be discriminated against and treated as lower, that is also acknowledged because everybody being seen as a spark of spirit is seen as having intrinsic worth. So that is the, broadly speaking, the concerns of the white and the black, of the left and the right can be integrated together.
So, to summarise, this is a complex subject. We could say that to deal with life’s problems, effectively order is needed and that order, the preserving that order is the primary concern of the right. Whereas, whenever any order is created and the resulting hierarchy comes up, that hierarchy puts some people at the bottom and those can be dispossessed.
So, protecting the interests of those who are at the bottom of the hierarchy is the concern of the left. And both these concerns are laudable, but there can be extremism on the right as well as the left. The right extremism means those at the top of the hierarchy start abusing their power and they exploit and even destroy those at the bottom of the hierarchy.
This has happened in godless ideologies such as Nazism and it can happen even in religious settings where, say, a particular religion demonises those who don’t follow that religion and destroys them or alienates them. So, that is extremism on the right. Extremism on the left is where those concerned with the abuse of, the exploitation of the dispossessed become instead motivated by hatred for the possessors, for those at the top of the hierarchy.
And then they start bringing down people on the top of the hierarchy simply because they are at the top, irrespective of what purpose that hierarchy served and what got the people at the top. So, then they mandate, extremism on the left mandate equality of outcome instead of equality. Equality of opportunity would facilitate those who are dispossessed to rise up.
Equality of outcome means that irrespective of merit, people based on certain classes have to be at the top and that leads at best to incompetence because, say, if instead of reading Shakespeare, if some female black author is read who is never in the same league as Shakespeare, then the study of literature ends up becoming far less enriching. And if somebody gets a post in a government, a ministerial post simply because they belong to a particular caste or a particular social underprivileged group, they are not competent, they can cause great havoc in society. And worse still, as happened in Marxism, hatred for those in power, for those who are exploiters, led to mass killing of the exploiters and eventually even to killing of anybody who was in a remote way designated as being connected with exploiters.
Those, so the leftists can also get disproportionate power, so they create their own hierarchy because they get to mandate the equality of outcome and the redistribution of power and thus they become powerful in absolute sense and further the mandating of the equality of outcome, it chokes creativity and totals talent. So the extremism of the left is not so well documented today, but it is also a matter of great concern. And in Indian history, the extremism of the left has manifested, the extremism of the right has manifested through the discriminations that happened because of the caste system and they are definitely a regrettable and reprehensible chapter.
But all of Indian history is not just that. Unfortunately, that’s how the leftist narrative sees all of Indian history and the result has been catastrophic in terms of the horrendous reinterpretation of narratives that have been immensely inspiring in virtue for millions for millennia. Seeing the Ramayana as a gender struggle and gender exploitation narrative is horrifyingly wrong and it misrepresents what the epic has done, inspire millions for millennia in selflessness.
So similarly, portraying the virtuous as actually vicious and pursuing the portraying the vicious as virtuous or at least not that vicious, this kind of distortion of the traditional narratives, it has led to a lot of misrepresentation of the broad Indian tradition of Hinduism in the mainstream academia and through the academia in the mainstream media. And just as we need to be on guard against the right’s extremism in terms of abuse of power at the top of the hierarchy, we need to be guard against the left’s extremism also when they put themselves at the top of the hierarchy. And the Bhagavad Gita’s outline that we are all souls who are parts of the divine with intrinsic worth because of that connection the divinity is a foundation, can address the leftist concerns for equality and the Bhagavad Gita’s outlining of a social order based on competence of people and their compatibility for particular professions that indicate that a hierarchy will be based on competence and not power.
So, this vision which integrates the valid concerns of the left and the valid contributions of the right can help balance the disorienting destructive forces that have plagued humanity throughout history and promote a more equitable as well as constructive in terms of competence social order. Thank you.