The Fatal Precipice of Progress: Three Reflections on Nature, Poverty and the Tyranny of One's Own Desires

 **November 2006**

Isn't it that, in advancing on the path of modernisation, we are moving—as a species—towards extinction?

From an environmentalist point of view, every step ahead on the so-called path of progress is, in fact, taking us towards the ultimate chasm, where the system is bound to fall headlong.

It is a vicious circle: the so-called solutions themselves spawn numerous additional, unseen problems while helping us tackle the particular problem at hand in the present.

So the best solution is to move back—to get away from the fatal precipice.

Dumping all our jingoistic egos, we should run to the safety of nature.

Return we will have to in the future.

But I am afraid that by then it will be too late.

We might return to barren, dead dunes, with the orchards having disappeared years ago.

So, fella, let us move back.

Back to our Mother Nature.

* * *

Should a poor man marry?

Logically considered, it normally adds to his worries: puts more pressure on his starved resources.

But just as one poison becomes the antidote for another poison, marriage, while adding to a poor man's frustrating responsibilities, also provides him with a possible antidote to his despair.

The more the problems, the greater becomes the need for a possible solution.

A poor man's arena of life increases. He is forced to look more and more optimistically towards the future, and when a child is born to him, he has more reasons to engage in the struggle for survival than a rich man.

A better future for his children becomes a mirage, and moving spellbound in its direction, he is less aware of the burning sand around his lacerated feet.

Now consider the opposite: a poor man not marrying.

The world definitely is not his, and the tiny world of matrimony, which could have been his own, with himself as its sovereign, is also snatched away from him.

Circumstances are the same, but in that dreary desert he no longer sees the mirage.

So he moves destinationless, deprived of the yoking force of life.

Thus, the need of a poor man for marriage is far, far greater than that of a rich one.

* * *

Do the reproaches of your acquaintances matter?

Of course they do.

But just like the oft-repeated superficiality and shallowness of such criticism, they are, after all, merely abrasive on the outer crust of your being.

It is simply a bodily battering.

Its tremors are seldom felt inside.

Reproaches by a well-meaning self, on the other hand, have that terrible girth and gumption which shake the inner core—the soul—of our being.

When one understands it crystal clearly that he has been practically wrong, that his ideology, his passion, the very force with which his soul boils, have been impractically surviving like a parasite, bestowing doom upon the self as well as upon those who, given their well-justified attachment and feelings for us—and whom we are indebted to reciprocate in concrete, helpful, material terms—also suffer.

When one feels their pains, it is still more painful to realise that their sufferings are driven more by your own losses than by their own unfruitful pursuits of a relationship with you.

You then become a culprit in your own eyes.

Your conscience pricks at your soul.

Thus struck, you want to do something for them.

But there can be no greater torture than finding yourself almost incapable of taking even a single step in that direction.

The path with all the nicest prospects for you and your near and dear ones lies ahead in the clearest of manners, and how torturous it is to know that you ought to take at least a few steps on it.

Yet you find yourself with your soul madly pining for that dreary path where some vague glimmer of hope shines at the distant horizon.

You know that even if you manage—some day—to reach that place, isn't it that by that time too much water would have flowed through the rivers?

Maybe by that time those who would have enjoyed that goal reached by you even more than yourself will be gone.

Does the goal, in that case, serve its purpose?

Isn't it selfishness of the utmost type?

Are you not the person with the least sense of kindness and magnanimity?

So reciprocate the feelings if you can.

Otherwise—O ye followers of blind passion—you stand a culprit in the court of God, as one too tightly chained to his own desires to fulfil his obligations towards others.

Happiness is no absolute.

It is relative to the relations around us.