Karl Marx on "Being" and the sham of "Having"

Marx has given a beautiful analysis of the prevalent state of things in society on the aspect of "having" over "being". It goes as follows - 

That which exists for me through the medium of money, that which I can pay for (i.e, which money can buy), that I am, the possessor of the money. My own power is as great as the power of money. The properties of money are my own (the possessor's) properties and faculties. What I am and can do is, therefore, not at all determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful woman for myself.COnsequently, I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its power to repel, is annulled by money. As an individual I am lame, but money provides me with twenty four legs. Therefore, I am not lame. I am  a detestable, dishonorable, unscrupulous and stupid man, but money is honored and so also is its possessor. Money is the highest good, and so its possessor is good. Besides, money saves me the trouble of being dishonest; therefore, I am presumed honest. I am stupid, but since money is the real mind of all things, how should its possessor be stupid? Moreover, he can buy talented people for himself, and is not he who has power over the talented more talented than they? I who can have, through the power of money, everything for which the human heart longs, do I not possess all human abilities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their opposites? 

If money is the bond which binds me to human life, and society to me, and which links  me with nature and man, is it not the bond of all bonds? Is it not, therefore also the universal agent of separation? It is the real means of both separation and union, the galvano-chemical power of society....

Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, co-founds and exchanges everything, it is the universal confusion and transposition of all things, the inverted world, the confusion and transposition of all natural and human qualities. 

He who can purchase bravery is brave, though a coward. Money is not exchanged for a particular quality, a particular thing, or a specific human faculty, but for the whole objective world of man and nature. Thus, from the standpoint of its possessor, it exchanges every quality and object of every other, even though they are contradictory. It is the fraternization of incompatibles; it forces contraries to embrace.

Let us assume man to be man, and his relation to the world to be a human one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust etc. If you wish to enjoy art you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you wish to influence other people you must be a person who really has a stimulating and encouraging effect upon others. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return, i.e, if you are not able, by the manifestation of yourself as a loving person, to make yourself a beloved person, then your love is impotent and a misfortune. 

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The discovery of my real self – Creative Spontaneous Activity

The following article is inspired from the book – “The Fear of Freedom” by Erich Fromm.

In the quest of the truth, this is another threshold I am crossing, while I am continuing my research, contemplation and synthesis of the ideas of Erich Fromm. Most of his ideas related to social psychology are captured in his following books – The Art of Loving, The Fear of Freedom, The Sane Society, Man for himself, an enquiry into the psychology of ethics, To have or to be. 

In the book – “The Fear of Freedom”, Fromm delves into the post industrialized world, and analyses the overwhelming impact of the rising capitalism, modernization and materialism on human psyche.  He explains in detail how with rise of freedom and individuality in the post modern world, there has been an increase of loneliness, separateness and split in human nature. He shows that freedom from the traditional bonds of medieval society, though giving the individual a new feeling of independence, at the same time made him feel alone and isolated, filled him with doubt and anxiety, and drove him into new submission and into a compulsive and irrational activity. This compulsive and irrational activity to which man has been driven into out of this feeling of fear, separateness and discontent, take the form of either sado-masochism, or a total submission.

Sadism is a form of being which is totally authoritative. A sadist kills the individuality of others, and forces his thoughts and ideas on the other. This way he overcomes the separateness he has with the other. An example might be an old fashioned father, who in the name of love for his child, decides what is best for the child, and does not allow the child to grow and realize her real self.

Masochist is a person who is totally submissive to an authority. By being so, the person succeeds in resolving the separateness, by discarding his real self. A masochist derives pervert pleasure out of being in pain, being mutilated by the Sadist. A typical example might be one’s masochistic relationship to his idea of God, as an all powerful entity, punishing him when he behaves against His will, and loving when he behaves as per His will. In this relationship, God takes the place of the Sadist individual, and the follower becomes a masochist.

In the case of total submission, the person forgoes his real, authentic self, and submits to the pseudo thoughts and philosophies from external sources. For example, if a person who does not have any training and interest in visual arts, visits a world famous museum, and looks at a classic painting, he appreciates it. But the appreciation is a pseudo one. He neither has the authentic appreciation of the painting, nor is interested in it. He appreciates it just because he should appreciate that. This certainly is different from one’s intellectual quest to learn more and experience more, from outside sources; in which case the person learns, reflects, contemplates and synthesizes the truth for himself. That is more about discovering one’s own real self, being informed from the works from the exponents in the past, in the related domain. But an in-authentic submission is about just aping outside ideologies superficially. Submission helps the person to be a part of the crowd, and hence resolve his separateness.

But most of these mechanisms – sado-masochistic cravings, and submission to the external world, are in-authentic and temporary methods to cover up that fear. Modern man is starved for life. But since, being an automaton, he cannot experience life in the sense of spontaneous activity he takes a surrogate any kind of excitement and thrill: the thrill of drinking, of sports, of vicariously living the excitements of fictitious persons on the screen. Fromm goes ahead to investigate the real solution to overcome the fear.  He terms it as freedom and spontaneity.
Fromm says that man can be free and yet not alone, critical and yet not filled with doubts, independent and yet an integral part of mankind. This freedom, man can attain by the realization of his self, by being himself. He continues -

Idealistic philosophers of the guild of Plato and the neo-Platonists, have believed that self-realization can be achieved by intellectuality, so that man’s nature may be suppressed and guarded by his reason. The result of this split however has been that not only the emotional life of man but also his intellectual faculties have been crippled. Reason, by becoming a guard set to watch its prisoner, nature, has become a prisoner itself; and thus both sides of human potentiality, reason and emotion, were crippled. From says that he believes that the realization of the self is accomplished not only by an act of thinking but also by the realization of man’s total personality, by an active expression of his emotional and intellectual potentialities. These potentialities are present in everybody; they become real only to the extent to which they are expressed. In other words, positive freedom consists in spontaneous activity of the total, integrated personality.

While spontaneity is a relatively rare phenomenon in our culture, we are not entirely devoid of it. In the first place, we know of individuals who are or have been spontaneous, whose thinking, feeling, and acting were the expression of their selves and not of an automaton. These individuals are mostly known to us as artists. As a matter of fact, the artist can be defined as an individual who can express himself spontaneously.

Spontaneous activity is the one way in which man can overcome the terror of aloneness without sacrificing the integrity of his self; for in the spontaneous realization of the self man unites himself anew with the world – with man, nature and himself. Love is the foremost component of such spontaneity; not love as the dissolution of the self in another person (masochism), not love as the possession of another person (sadism), but love as spontaneous affirmation of others, as the union of the individual with others on the basis of preservation of the individual self. The dynamic quality of love lies in this very polarity: that it springs from the need to overcoming separateness, that it leads to oneness – and yet that individuality is not eliminated. Work is the other component; not work as a compulsive activity in order to escape aloneness, not work as a relationship to nature which is partly one of dominating her, partly one of worship of and enslavement by the very products of man’s hands, but work as creation in which man becomes one with nature in the act of creation. What holds true of love and work holds true of all spontaneous action, whether it be the realization of sensuous pleasure or participation in the political life of the community. It affirms the individuality of the self and at the same time it unites the self with man and nature. The basic dichotomy that is inherent in freedom – the birth of individuality and the pain of aloneness – is dissolved on higher plane of man’s spontaneous action.

In all spontaneous activity the individual embraces the world. Not only does his individual self remain intact; it becomes stronger and more solidified - for the self is as strong as it is active. There is no genuine strength in possessions as such, neither in material property nor in mental qualities like emotions or thoughts. There are also no strength in use and manipulation of objects; what we use is not ours simply because we use it. Ours is only that to which we are genuinely related by our creative activity, be it a person or an inanimate object. Only those qualities that result from our spontaneous activity give strength to the self and thereby from the basis of its integrity. The inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and resulting necessity to present a pseudo self to others and oneself, are the root of the feeling of inferiority and weakness. Whether or not we are aware of it, there is nothing  of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves, and there is nothing that gives us grater pride and happiness than to think, to feel, and to say what is ours.
This implies that what matters is the activity as such, the process and not the result. In our culture the emphasis is just the reverse. We produce not for a concrete satisfaction but for the abstract purpose of selling our commodity; we feel that we can acquire everything material or immaterial by buying it, and thus things become ours independently of any creative effort of our own in relation to them. In the same way we regard our personal qualities and result of our efforts as commodities that can be sold for money, prestige and power. The emphasis thus shifts from the present satisfaction of creative activity to the value of the finished product. There by man misses the only satisfaction that can give him real happiness – the experience of the activity of the present moment – and chases after a phantom that leaves him disappointed as soon as he believes he has caught it – the illusory happiness called success.

If the individual realizes his self by spontaneous activity and thus relates himself to the world, he ceases to be an isolated atom; he and the world become part of one structuralized whole; he has his rightful place, and thereby his doubt concerning himself and the meaning of life disappears. This doubt sprang from his separateness and from the thwarting of life; when he can live, neither compulsively nor automatically but spontaneously, the doubt disappears. He is aware of himself as an active and creative individual and recognizes that there is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself. This way he gains strength as an individual and he gains security.

The idea of spontaneous activity needs more explanation. It is not the mindless act of giving up to one’s irrational whims and fancies. I feel Fromm should have qualified his spontaneous activity as Creative Spontaneous Activity. By adding the extra qualifier – creative, I would want to stress on Fromm’s idea of originality, constructive and positive aspect of one’s own action. Through his spontaneity man has to realize his real self, engaging into an activity which affirms goodness – both within and outside. It is not enough just being spontaneous in certain private and spiritual matters, but above all in the activity fundamental to every man’s existence, his work. It is about engaging in a creative enterprise, which not only helps the person to express his real self, but also that activity should uplift humanity per se.

The Creative Spontaneous Activity should come from the place of love, compassion, dignity, respect, beauty, positivity, growth, freedom, joy, courage, decency and kindness. It should be firmly grounded in the belief of human equality and individual uniqueness. At the same time, there has to be the perspective of general good – that insight of positively impacting people and institutions.  The only criterion for realization of freedom is whether or not the individual actively participates in determining his life and that of society, and this not only by the formal act of voting but in his daily activity, in his work, and in his relations to others. Modern political democracy, if it restricts itself to the purely political sphere, cannot sufficiently counteract the results of the economic insignificance of the average individual.

I have tried to express this philosophy using the following diagram -
http://criativ-mind.blogspot.com/2012/01/copy-right-all-rights-reserved-samrat.html

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The darker side of capitalism

The gradual evolution of the society since the middle ages to the renaissance has witnessed a stark change in the character of the society, from a more connected, secure and related community to a society with an increased amount of individual freedom, but at the same time an increased sense of insecurity, loneliness, and fear. In his book – “The Fear of Freedom”, Erich Fromm articulates this dual aspect of the new gained freedom, out of the modernization of society, in a beautiful and elaborative fashion. Following excerpt from the book, tries to touch upon the new found vulnerability of mankind, as a result of increasing capitalistic outlook on life. It gives a better perspective on our work life situations. At this season of performance appraisals, I found this part of the book pretty relevant.

..But although man has reached a remarkable degree of mastery of nature, society is not in control of the very forces it has created. The rationality of the system of production, in its technical aspects, is accompanied by the irrationality of our system of production in its social aspects. Economic crises, unemployment, war, govern man’s fate. Man has built his world; he has built factories and houses, he produces cars and clothes, he grows grain and fruit. But he has become estranged from the product of his own hands, he is not really the master any more of the world he has built; on contrary, this man-made world has become his master, before whom he bows down, whom he tries to placate or to manipulate as best he can. The work of his own hands has become his God. He seems to be driven by self-interest, but in reality his total self with all its concrete potentialities has become an instrument for the purposes of the very machine his hands have built. He keeps up the illusion of being the center of the world, and yet he is pervaded by an intense sense of insignificance and powerlessness which his ancestors once consciously felt towards God.

Modern man’s feeling of isolation and powerlessness is increased still further by the character which all his human relationships have assumed. The concrete relationship of one individual to another has lost its direct and human character and has assumed a spirit of manipulation and instrumentality. In all social and personal relations the laws of market are the rule. It is obvious that the relationship between competitors has to be based on mutual human indifference. Otherwise one of them would be paralyzed in the fulfilment of his economic tasks – to fight each other and not to refrain from actual economic destruction of each other if necessary.

The relationship between employer and employee is permeated by the same spirit of indifference. The word “employer” contains the whole story: the owner of the capital employs another human being as he “employs” a machine. They both use each other for the pursuit of their economic interests; their relationships is one in which both are mans to an end, both are instrumental to each other. It is not a relationship of two human beings who have any interest in others outside of this mutual usefulness. The same instrumentality is the rule in relationship between the business man and his customer. The customer is an object to be manipulated, not a concrete person who0se aims the business man is interested to satisfy. The attitude towards work has the quality of instrumentality; in contrast to a medieval artisan the modern manufacturer is not primarily interested in what he produces; he produces essentially in order to make a profit from his capital investment, and what he produces depends essentially on the market which promises that the investment of capital in a certain branch will prove to be profitable.

Not only the economic, but also the personal relations between men have this character of alienation; instead of relations between human beings, they assume the character of relations between things. But perhaps the most important and the most devastating instance of this spirit of instrumentality and alienation is the individual’s relationship to his own self. Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity. The manual laborer sells his physical energy; the business man, the physician, the clerical employee, sell their “personality”. This personality should be pleasing, but besides that its possessor should meet a number of their requirements: he should have energy, initiative, this, that, or the other, as his particular position may require. As with any other commodity it is the market which decides the value of these human qualities, yes, even their very existence. If there is no use for the qualities a person offers, he “has” none; just as an unsalable commodity is valueless though it might have its use value. Thus, the self-confidence, the “feeling of self”, is merely an indication of what others think of the person. It is not he who is convinced of his value regardless of popularity and his success on the market. If he is sought after, he is somebody; if he is not popular, he is simply nobody. This dependence of self esteem on the success of “personality” is the reason why for modern man popularity has this tremendous importance. On it depends not only whether or not one goes ahead in practical matters, but also whether one can keep up one’s self-esteem or whether one falls into the abyss of inferiority feelings.

There are factors to help him overcome the overt manifestations of this underlying insecurity. In the first place his self is backed up by the possession of property. “He” as a person and the property he owns cannot be separated. A man’s clothes or his house are parts of his self just as much as his body. The less he feels he is being somebody, more he needs to have possessions. If the individual has no property or lost it, he is lacking an important part to his “self” and to a certain extent is not considered to be full-fledged person, either by others of by himself. Other things backing up the self is the prestige and power.

Such is the petty state of the so called modern civilization with all its advances. Most of these aspects are interestingly hidden from conscious realm of humanity, and the society behaves as a herd of sheep, intoxicated with such capitalistic propensities.

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The Futility

No matter how much you earn,
Futile it is to be proud of.
For soon comes the yearning for more,
When you see people even richer,
Having all those possessions, which you still don’t have!

No matter how high you climb,
Futile is the rest.
For always you are below someone.
Always there is a man you want to become,
There are powers you still don’t have,
Status you have still to earn!

No matter how creative you are,
Futile it is to be complacent.
For there is always that budding prodigy in coming,
To make your art look without sheen!

No matter how many hearts you have won,
Futile is to feel accepted and absolute.
For you will in a moment discover,
People who have just opposite takes,
Rejecting you forever, with smiles fake!

No matter how talented you are,
Futile it is to feel gifted.
For you will come upon soon,
People with many folds talents more than you!

In this ocean of futility,
Futile it is even,
To be hopeless!

It is about how better one can be.
It is about how much one can use oneself –
Ones time, energy, knowledge, and skills,
To create something that makes a difference!
It is about how genuinely and authentically,
One can leave the stamp of one’s own self,
In what one does,
Each time leaving a better version of the self – one after another!

It is not about reaching a destination,
Or to be like someone, someday!
Rather it is about what is done,
That expresses who one is at her core,
And what one stands for!

It is about achieving those incremental victories,
Each and every day – in one’s own ways,
No matter how small in scale!

It is about being consistent in the direction,
The direction of the full blossoming of one’s own unique self!

At the end of the day,
It is not about what you do.
But how meaningful was it what you have done!
It is about creating a difference,
No matter how insignificant.
But the point is about making a difference,
A positive difference!

It is not about what would have been,
It is neither about what went wrong.
It is even not about that you fell down.
Rather it is about the direction you looked at,
After the fall!
It is about the road you took,
After being defeated!
It is about the story you create,
At the face of the frustration!

It is not just about the journey.
Destination is important!
It is the grandeur of the destination,
What keeps the journey on!
It is the passion for the destination,
That creates the power to face perils,
And keep the journey continued!

If the destination chosen
Is in competition with someone else,
If it is a passion to out-do someone,
Or be “like” someone,
Or might be to prove something to someone,
The journey taken is futile –
A war already lost!

It is about being aware of oneself,
It is about leveraging one’s own unique circumstances,
It is about making best use of what life has to offer,
It is about being receptive about
One’s own uniqueness –
Uniqueness of one’s temperament,
Of one’s own interests and likes,
Of one’s strengths and weaknesses,
Of one’s own life circumstances!
And then, creating something unique, something novel,
Which has the imprint of all that is unique –
All that is special with one’s own existence –
Creating a never before painting,
Expressing one’s own true self –
Never in competition with someone else!

Time is to take a break from the rat race,
Detaching oneself from
The apathy in human soul:
The ever faster pace of our lives,
The lack of contact with nature,
The artificiality of our relationships and communications,
The ephemeral and utilitarian goals we set for ourselves!

The time is to be an authentic human being:
Who can distinguish between,
The essential Vs the non-essential,
And yet give both their proper values.
Who can be creative and free,
At the same time responsible and graceful.
Who keeps her journey on,
Inspite of obstacles many!
A journey towards her chosen destination,
Unique and very personal to who she is,
And what she stands for!

It is about keeping the glow of the destination alive,
With fuel of faith, love, hope and courage!
It is about defining one’s own worth,
With the scale, beauty, meaning and novelty of that destination!

It is about being busy walking the road less taken,
Persevering the peril of time,
Incrementally improving oneself,
Making one worthy of the beacon emitting destination!

It is about seeing the unseen,
In the darkness of reality,
Through the light created from within!

Futile it is to sing someone else’s song.
But rather breaking open that silent music,
Deep hidden in one’s own heart,
To resonate with the sky and the stars!


It is about waking up from the slumber of futility.
To the new dawn of
Meaning, Freedom, Creativity, Grace and Responsibility!

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The Verdict of History

They say that Rome was not build in a day. One of the richest civilizations every formed – The Romans were astounding in many ways – Their strong military, the economic system based on markets, Their effective governance and bureaucracy. All these were comparable in many ways to the modern system of society. It is commendable for humans to have reached that high level of sophistication around 500BC!

But then this dominant civilization became stagnant and decaying after reaching their pinnacle of evolution. Barbarians came and the great Roman Empire collapsed. To be precise the Western part of the empire went on the hands of the barbarians. There is one thing very interesting in all these. Till the Roman civilization was prospering and continuing to grow things were ok. But when it became stagnant, contributing little if anything to the march of its evolution, it was taken over by the Barbarians.
Barbarians had a great affinity to the civilized way of living that they inherited from the Romans. They immediately adapted the same, and continued the evolution of Roman memes.

The barbarian role of cultural demolition crew is especially important when you consider how often cultural reconstruction is needed. Many of Rome’s glaring defects – slavery, exploitation, authoritarianism, corrupt self-aggrandizement – flow from deeply human tendencies. Time and again these human vulnerabilities have transformed promising civilizations into decaying, oppressive monstrosities.

It is just not that Romans were now lethargic and were not being able to maintain their cultural supremacy. Rather things are a bit more involved. Romans were just not able to adapt to the technological evolution they themselves started. With coming of standard, universally accepted coins and fully phonetic alphabet, complete with vowels, the potential existed for a more decentralized economy than ever before. So, for example, slavery – the ultimate in exploitation – now carried a higher cost of forgone productivity; the better lubricated the market, the more it can benefit from untrammeled participation. A mind, as they say, is a terrible thing to waste.

The Eastern half of the Roman Empire which survived the collapse of the west, was less guilty of some of these sins. The east seems all along to have had fewer slaves than the west. In the east the economy was less afflicted by such stultifying policies as the virtual ban on changing convocations. And, for historical reasons, the east had a more integrated economy.

The historian Chester Starr once wrote – “Every so often civilizations seems to work itself into a corner from which further progress is virtually impossible along the lines then apparent; yet if new ideas are to have a chance the old systems must be so severely shaken that they lose their dominance”.
Of course, technology isn’t some extraneous force, visited on the planet from outer space. It is selected by human minds through cultural evolution; people are the arbiters of technology. But technologies – in a broad sense, at least – are in turn arbiters of social structures.

The same evolution of memes is so much apparent in the companies and their products. There have been a definite direction apparent in the whole drama in the computing industry – starting from mainframes, to ascent of the Windows, to the rise of Apple, Google, Amazon etc. There have been a directed evolution towards more and more freedom, openness, collaboration, higher sophistication and complexity in every product and service.

Its looks so amazing that these units of culture use humans as vehicles to expand themselves. When one meme becomes stale another meme takes its place, which is more vibrant and complex. The story of the evolution of civilizations after civilizations have been an artifact to this unique dynamics of ideas, information, dreams, hope, expressions, innovations – all creations of human mind!

Certainly it is our responsibility to keep the mind nourished with Newer Ideas, Bigger Dreams, Brighter Hopes, and of course every expanding Love and Compassion!
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The Deeper Truth

We are living in the middle of a revolution in path breaking research in human consciousness. Over past few years, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and others have made great strides in understanding the building blocks of human flourishing. And a core finding of their work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.
The unconscious parts of the mind are NOT primitive vestiges that need to be conquered in order to make wise decisions. They are NOT dark caverns of repressed sexual urges. Instead, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind - where most of the decisions and many of the most imperssive acts of thinking take place. These submerged processes are the seedbeds of accomplishments.
If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception. If the outer mind highlights the power of the individual, the inner mind highlights the power of relationships and the invisible bonds between people. If the outer mind hungers for status, money and applause, the inner mind hungers for harmony and connection  - those moments of self consciousness fades away and a person is lost in a challenge, a cause, the ove of another or the love of God! Mihaly calls this state of awareness as being in FLOW.
The unconscious is impulsive, emotional, sensitive, and unpredictable. It has its shortcomings. It needs supervision. But it can be brilliant too! It is capable of processing blizzards of data and making daring creative leaps. Most of all, it is also wonderfully gregarious. Your unconscious, that inner extrovert, wants you to reach outward and connect. It wants you to achieve communion with work, friend, family, nation and cause. Your unconscious wants to entangle you in the think web of relations that are essense of human flourishing. It longs and pushes for love.
Of all the blessings that come with being alive, it is the most awesome gift!
There are various sources of this unconscious dimension of the mind. Some are genetic. Some are memetic.
The source and inspiration of such a dimension is another topic of discussion, which I will save for another article.
But the point here is being aware of that deeper truth - that hidden aspect of being human! It is about being present to the fact that when someone loves or hates the other - the motivation of doing so - might be totally beyond the conscious self of that person! Whatever the person reasons out explaining his/her reaction or action, is just cooking up a story to fit to a conceived form of artificial reality!

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The Kin factor and Natural Selection

An excerpt from the book - The Moral Animal by Robert Wright.

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With Hamilton's theory in hand, it is easier to appreciate the connection Darwin saw between a cow that has "well marbled" beef, and gets slaughtered and eaten, and an ant that works hard all its life without issue. The cow gene responsible for the good marbling, to be sure, has done nothing for its vehicle (the cow itself), which is now slaughtered, and may do nothing for the direct genetic legacy of its vehicle; dead cows cannot have more offspring. But the gene will still do much for the indirect genetic legacy of its vehicle, for by producing the marbling, it prompts a farmer to feed and breed the vehicle's close relatives, some of which contain copies of the gene. So too with the sterile ant.

The worker ants have no direct legacy as most of them are sterile, but the genes responsible for this fact do just fine, thank you, so long as the time and energy that would have been devoted to reproduction are profitably spent helping close relatives be prolific. Though the gene for sterility lies dormant in these relatives, it is there, and passes to the next generation, where it again produces gobs of sterile altruists devoted to its transmission. 

This is the exact sense in which worker bees and tasty cattle are alike : some genes, by impeding their transmission through one conduit, lubricate their transmission through others, and the net result is more transmission.

That Darwin, working with no knowledge of genes, with no sound understanding of the nature of heredity, should sense this parallel a century before Hamilton is one of the higher tributes to the care and precision of this thought. 

Those genes that are conducive to the survival and reproduction of copies of themselves are the genes that win. They may do this straightforwardly, by promoting their vehicle to survive, beget offspring, and equip the offspring for survival and reproduction. Or they may do this circuitously - by, say, prompting their vehicle to labor tirelessly, sterilely, and "selflessly", so that a queen ant can have lots of offspring containing them. However the genes get the job done, it is selfish from "their" point of view, even if it seems altruistic at the level of the organism. 

Naturally, the level of organism is of primary concern to human beings; human beings are organisms. But it is of secondary importance to natural selection. if there is sense in which natural selection "cares" about anything - and there is, metaphorically - that thing is not us; it is the information in our sex cells, our eggs, and our sperm. Of course, natural selection "wants" us to behave in certain ways. But, so long as we comply, it does not care whether we are made happy or sad in the process, whether we get physically mangled in our genes, even whether we die. The only thing natural selection ultimately "wants" to keep in good shape is the information in our genes, and it will countenance any suffering on our part that serves this purpose.

Hamiltonian math contains a potent symbol - r - which represents the degree of relatedness among organisms. Among full siblings, r is 1/2, among half siblings, nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles, it is 1/4, and among first cousins it is 1/8. The new math says that genes for sacrificial behavior will thrive so long as the cost to the altruist (in terms of impact on future reproductive success) is less than the benefit to the recipient (ditto) times the degrees of relatedness between the two. 

When Hamilton introduced the theory of kin selection, he used as his example the very group of organisms that had perplexed Darwin. Like Darwin, he had been struck by the extraordinary self-sacrifice among many insects. He noted that, thanks to a bizarre form of reproduction, these species feature an unusually large r. Sister ants share 3/4 of their genes by common descent, not just 1/2. So altruism of extraordinary magnitude is justified in the eyes of natural selection.

So too with human beings - not groups of human beings, but the group of cells that make up a human being. At some point hundreds of millions of years ago, muticellular life arose. Societies of cells became so highly integrated as to qualify for the title "organism", and these organisms, eventually begat us. It is fair, technically speaking, to consider even so coherent an organism as a human being as tight-knit community of single-celled organisms. These cells exhibit a kind of cooperation and self-sacrifice that makes even the machine-like efficiency of an insect colony look ragged by comparison. Almost all the cells in the human body are sterile. Only the sex cells - our "queen bees" - get to make copies of themselves for posterity. That the zillions of sterile cells act as if they are perfectly content with this arrangement is doubtless grounded in the fact that the "r" between them and the sex cells is 1; genes in sterile cells are transmitted to future generations as assuredly via sperm of egg as they would be if their particular cellular vehicles were doing the transmitting. Again: when "r" is 1, altruism is ultimate.

Women are NOT equal to Men

An excerpt from the book - "The Moral Animal" by - Robert Wright.
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There is a difference of opinion over how much "respect" women get in the modern moral climate. 

Respect is an ambiguous word. Maybe men who consider woman well "respected" mean that women have been accepted at work as worthy colleagues. And maybe women are indeed getting more of this kind of respect. But if by "respect" you mean what the Victorians meant when they urged respect for women - not treating them as objects of sexual conquest - then respect has probably dropped since 1970. Women would certainly like to have more of the second kind of respect.

There is no clear reason for sharp trade-off between the two; no reason that feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in insisting on the first kind of respect, had to undermine the second. But, as things happened, they did! They did undermine the second form of respect over the first, going in the name of male - female equality.

They preached innate symmetry of the sexes in all major arenas, including sex. Many young women took the doctrine of symmetry to mean they could follow their sexual attractions and disregard any vague visceral wariness: sleep with any man they liked, without fear that his sexual interest did not signify comparable affection, without fear that sex might be more emotionally entangling for her than for him. (Some feminists practiced casual sex almost out of a sense of ideological commitment.)

Men, for their part, used the doctrine of symmetry to ease themselves off the moral hook. Now they could sleep around without worrying about emotional fallout; women were just like them, so no special consideration was necessary. In this they were and are, aided by women who actively resist special moral consideration as patronizing (which it sometimes is, and certainly in Victorian England).

Lawmakers, meanwhile, took sexual symmetry to mean that women needed not special legal protection. In many states, the 1970 brought "no-fault" divorce and the automatically equal division of a couple's assets - even if one spouse, usually the wife, hasn't been on a career track and thus faces bleaker prospects. The lifelong alimony that a divorced woman could once expect may now be replaced by a few years of "rehabilitative maintenance" payments, which are supposed to give her time to launch her career recovery - a recovery that, in face, will extend beyond a few years if she has a few children to tend. In trying to get a more equitable deal, it wont help to point out that cause of breakup was her husband's rampant philandering, or his sudden, brutal intolerance. These things, after all, are nobody's fault. The "no-fault" philosophy is one reason divorce is literally a profitable enterprise for men. (The other reason is lax enforcement of the man's financial obligations.) The height of no-fault vogue has now passed, and state legislatures have undone some of the damage, but not all.

The feminist doctrine of innate sexual symmetry wasn't the only culprit, or even, initially, the main one. Sexual and marital norms had been changing for a long time, for many reasons, ranging from contraceptive technology, from residential patterns to recreational trends. So why dwell on feminism? Party because of the sheer irony that attempts to stop one kind of exploitation of women aided another kind. Partly too, because though feminists did not single-handedly create the problem, some of them have helped sustain it. Until very recently, fear of feminist backlash was far and away the main obstacle to an honest discussion of difference between the sexes. Feminists have written articles and books denouncing "biological determination" without bothering to understand biology or determinism. And the increasing, if belated, feminist discussion of sex differences is sometimes vague and disingenuous; there is a tendency to describe differences that are plausible explicable in Darwinian terms while dodging the question of whether they are innate.

Gender Equality - A Myth

A lot have been written, talked about and debated on gender equality. Coming to the ground realities of the way the society works today, in the entire world, one really gets disillusioned on this aspect.

World might have been swept with the ideas of free market, equality, globalization, democracy, etc. But, if you get into the every day working of most of the corporate houses, big and small alike, lie the dark patch of gender inequality present.

Sometimes we hear the politicians, sometimes head of big public sector corporations, and sometimes department heads of big corporations – all expressing their bias towards male community for getting things done. A lady is always taken appropriate as a thing of beauty – to be adorned when you want to make something charming, or eye catching. Be it advertising, public relationship department or the front office desk. It looks like that the fairer sex has to hit the glass ceiling beyond these roles.

The proponent of the male camp has various instances to prove that their bias towards male makes lot of business and economic sense. They say after all a women need to go for maternity leave, she cannot work late at nights; she is very emotional, she cannot travel, etc etc.

Having a woman in the team makes it dicy. You never know when she needs a very long vacation. And then the fate of the project is uncertain!

The other day there was some “big guy” proclaiming in one of the news channels how much business sense it makes not to have a lady pilot for the Indian air force. It looks like having a lady as the pilot does allow the Indian Air Force to do a break-even for the investments done on the pilot’s training!

Unfortunately many among us approve the idea of having equal opportunities for women just on paper, to sound good, and be politically right. When most of us are on that decision making chair, we prefer to have a guy for the post, not a girl.

Unfortunately most of the enterprises – mainly the small and medium scale industries in India as well as abroad, do not give the fairer sex its fair share. Somehow most of the management fraternity is not sensitized about the gender equality. Infact the issues like these and other of its genre – like corporate social responsibility, global warming, etc always takes a back seat. The most important agenda for most the corporations is – short term gain.

Well, it might be unjust to expect a for-profit business organization to have the social welfare on its primary agenda. But, labeling gender equality as yet another social welfare scheme, is blasphemous.

It not only is utmost social responsibility of the corporations to maintain its gender diversity, it certainly makes lot of business sense.

It is really questionable to think that if a couple of months of vacation taken by a person in his entire career in an organization would impact the bottom-line of the organization. Certainly the organization has to create back up plans to support its lady employee needs.

In many cases, the gender inequality goes completely unnoticed. With all good intentions decisions are taken without even thinking about this aspect.

Mostly in the technological companies, it is very hard to find woman in top positions. It is an urgent need for the corporate heads to un-learn their superstitions of male superiority and surrender to the fact that female representation in the company makes the workforce well rounded. In the long run, it has a major impact on the company’s culture and organic development. Certainly in short term, going through the economic objectivity, the male camp might win. But, going into depth, looking towards the long term future, it makes real business sense to have gender equality in an organization.

The best way to mandate gender equality in corporations is to link it to the performance report of the organization. This might help giving the issue its legitimate importance.

Today big corporate houses like PepsiCo, ICICI Bank, BioCon, to name a few, are all headed by lady CEOs. Gradually the male dominance on the management bastion is losing up. It is nice to have this well rounded picture. But it is certain that we have miles to go before gender equality is taken seriously.

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