A couple of days ago the finance section of a newspaper talked about a buoyant market as a result of the heavy Christmas-New Year spending. People, we were told, have more to spend and the markets have more to sell and this was a perfect setting for the ‘feel-good factor”.
Today, an ‘end-of-the-year’ new-paper report talks about the dramatic increase in alcoholism, aggression, suicides, rapes, road-rage incidents, et al. The ‘feel-good factor’, clearly, is only in the market place and not in peoples’ hearts and homes.
The confusion is, as it has always been, between ‘consumption’ and ‘satisfaction’. We tend to believe that the more we consume the more satisfied we would be. The truth is just the reverse. Excessive consumption is only an indication of the hollowness within. We seek to fill up our emotional, spiritual, intellectual hollowness with odds and ends purchased from bargain stores. I know people who, whenever they feel ‘low’, go off shopping to get over their gloominess. ‘Buy three for the price of two’ functions as a therapy for overcoming hungers that have their origin elsewhere. It works – but only as a placebo, a painkiller, that addresses the symptom not the problem, and leaves one more desperate than before. So we have people who are given to shopping devoid of requirement, to eating devoid of need, to sex devoid of relationship.
I hear that “Kaun Banega Crorepati” is being revived. The original KBC was a huge success – it filled up the hollowness in so many lives through the vicarious delight of seeing someone like themselves being suddenly catapulted into a state of fiscal nirvana. And that, many believe, is the only nirvana there is. I wonder if anyone has tried to find out what happened to the lives of those who won big money at KBC. Once I did come across a survey of people who had won lotteries and the conclusion generally went on to uphold the adage ‘easy come easy go’.
In some ways this situation is reflective of the failure of education. We have an education that refuses to acknowledge the real world and would live in its own ivory tower. And we have another education that only kow-tows to the ‘real’ world with no eyes to see beyond the dollar signs or ears to hear beyond the cash-register, no vision of the ideal, no concern for the need to constantly and continuously humanize the homo sapien species.
Perhaps it is time we began to bridge the gulf between these two educations.
The confusion is, as it has always been, between ‘consumption’ and ‘satisfaction’. We tend to believe that the more we consume the more satisfied we would be. The truth is just the reverse. Excessive consumption is only an indication of the hollowness within. We seek to fill up our emotional, spiritual, intellectual hollowness with odds and ends purchased from bargain stores. I know people who, whenever they feel ‘low’, go off shopping to get over their gloominess. ‘Buy three for the price of two’ functions as a therapy for overcoming hungers that have their origin elsewhere. It works – but only as a placebo, a painkiller, that addresses the symptom not the problem, and leaves one more desperate than before. So we have people who are given to shopping devoid of requirement, to eating devoid of need, to sex devoid of relationship.
I hear that “Kaun Banega Crorepati” is being revived. The original KBC was a huge success – it filled up the hollowness in so many lives through the vicarious delight of seeing someone like themselves being suddenly catapulted into a state of fiscal nirvana. And that, many believe, is the only nirvana there is. I wonder if anyone has tried to find out what happened to the lives of those who won big money at KBC. Once I did come across a survey of people who had won lotteries and the conclusion generally went on to uphold the adage ‘easy come easy go’.
In some ways this situation is reflective of the failure of education. We have an education that refuses to acknowledge the real world and would live in its own ivory tower. And we have another education that only kow-tows to the ‘real’ world with no eyes to see beyond the dollar signs or ears to hear beyond the cash-register, no vision of the ideal, no concern for the need to constantly and continuously humanize the homo sapien species.
Perhaps it is time we began to bridge the gulf between these two educations.
