Corridors of Organized Hate where Love Suffers

 

Jimi Hendrix  says: “When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.”

Well, it may appear too much to ask for. But aren’t the evil effects of love of power too evident to at least reconsider Jimi’s advice? More so because the corridors of power almost unerringly become the corridors of hate. The urge for power bears a directly proportional relation with breeding hate. Sadly, when hate becomes the mantra at the top, it is hardly possible to stop its cascade effect from creeping into the normal functioning of day to day life of the citizenry.

Deepak Chopra nails it completely: “Enlightened leadership is spiritual if we understand spirituality not as some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight and focused attention.”

Absolutely correct! Spiritually suffused leadership becomes a tool to work in the garden full of flowers for a fragrant humanity instead of stinking muck.

Cal Thomas maintains: “One of the reasons people hate politics is that truth is rarely a politician's objective, election and power are.”

Your humble brother thinks that is where the problem starts. By being power-centric you surrender a large portion of your compassionate self to feed the rapacious bug of ambition. The bigger problem is that you are able to let loose the waves of hate because you are in a position to influence.

Friedrich Nietzsche captures the grey shades of reality when he says: “All things are subject to interpretation and whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”

So brothers and sisters, the functionaries of power end up suffering from a natural helplessness to fall in the trap of lies, conceit, falsification and what not.

Your humble brother is not inimically ill-willed against the agents of power-seeking brigade. You know there is a very thin line between one’s skill set and its honestly hardworked rewards on the one hand and the endeavor to use the same set of skills by using the disability and ignorance of the fellow human beings. The latter sadly turns an ambition into a profession called politics, which entitles the power hungry to climb the ladder for more and more glories. It’s never enough in the palace of power and politics. The misdirected self is ever dying to control the destinies of millions.

The leadership is churned out from a sleazy concoction of mudslinging, aspersion and whole lot of bull-shit. They have huffing and burning souls behind the smiling expression. It carries its momentum to the larger set of policies because more than what you are doing to make, you are focusing on breaking the opposition. You may think that by such broad generalization I am almost leaving the solution impossible. No. My only point of raising the issue of this typical political malady is to highlight the importance of more compassionate beings in leadership positions.

All we see in political systems world over is literally war-mongering among hateful brigades. Does violence and hate come so naturally to us? No, it doesn’t. It’s simply darkness in the absence of the lamp of love and compassion, which is facing furious winds as we raise storms with our stampede. In any case, I reserve my right to call a spade a spade and nurture my utopian dreams of an all-loving system because that is what we are destined for. So kindly allow me to crib over the spools of darkness formed due to the absence of the light of love!