It has always seemed strange to me," said Doc. "The things we admire in men - kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest - sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest -are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second.

• John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

The Symptom

Khatta Meetha (2010) is a movie best remembered for the comedic genius of Johnny Lever's brief role, but equally tragic is the subplots of the sister's forced marriage to a corrupt politician in exchange for political favors and influence. The bride's father, who is the patriarch of the family and the movie's moral anchor (like Emily Blunt in Sicario), initially holds off the pressuring family members under the excuse of her education but soon finds himself in a losing battle as he slowly runs out of money to support her and had to surrender to their demand.

When the news of this arrangements reaches the hero, he tries to confront his parents but the father snaps and starts speaking of the family's financial predicament and the hero's role in it:

The Hero begs, "But Babuji, some things matter more than money..."

"Nothing does," the father cuts him off. "I will listen to all you have to say. First go make some money and then you can get Anjali married wherever she wants."

He briefly stops himself before storming off and delivers the punch line:

"He who does not have money in his pockets should not speak of principles."

Later in the movie, the sister ends up tragically dying after being violated and dehumanized by the gangster politician and his friends.

Is it mere negligence that the hero was not allowed to speak about the corrupt gangster being overlooked as a source of emotional abuse and existential threat to his sister? The helplessness justifies a father in a priori rejecting the son's right to even have a moral opinion by the virtue of his misfortunes, let alone express one. Instead of being stopped in the track by the moral claim regardless of where it's coming from, he decided to go all in on the genetic Fallacy and treats morality as a previliged he can no longer afford, and is irritated at his son's insistence that he does. The upright father's decision to knowingly surrender his own daughter to the cruelty of such a wedding is treated with a casual regret that is alarmingly similar to the Arendt's Banality of Evil in the face of processes.

Contrast this with a different view from not too distant past, the one presented in the famous dialogue between the brothers in Deewaar (1975):

Amitabh Bachchan: Aaj mere paas buildings hain, property hai, bank balance hai, bungla hai, gaari hai. Kya hai tumhare paas? (Today I have buildings, property, bank balance, a bungalow, a car. And what do you have?)
Shashi Kapoor: Mere paas maa hai! (I have the blessing of mother!)

Did the triumph of the moral in the face of the brute fact of affluence retreat into a humiliating and self-conscious trauma? If the father would have his way, he would ask Shashi Kapoor's character to get all of the above before opening his mouth. Extreme as the father's negligence may seem, we make similar decisions on a daily basis.

The Empty Pockets Fallacy - ad pocketum

In Matthew 6:24 and Luke 16:13, where Jesus states that "You cannot serve both God and mammon". "Mammon" comes from the Aramaic word for "material wealth" or "money", forcing a choice between that and the salvation found in divine obedience and afterlife.

Benjamin Franklin's advice to the young man is identified by Max Weber as the embodiment of what he called The Protestant Ethics i.e. the faith that Time x Work = Money + Respect. This sets up a correlation where the causal arrow can move in both directions: if hardwork causes money, then you must look at his possession to investigate a man's moral character. That's how Marxists also counter Weberians : it isn't religion causing material conditions, but the material conditions causing ideology, a disagreement through which the collectivism of Marx evolved into Sorelian and Leninist influence. These terrible theories of causality give birth to the empty pockets fallacy (i.e. one must buy his way into a moral opinion) among other fallacies like The Law of Attraction, The Prosperity Gospel, Hustle culture and the Neoliberal faith in lassaiz faire economics and the invisible hand. It's their version of the Halo effect.

Adam Smith says in his letters on Jurisprudence, "It remains now that we consider the last division of police, and show the influence of commerce on the manners of a people. Whenever commerce is introduced into any country probity and punctuality always accompany it ..... When the greater part of people are merchants, they always bring probity and punctuality into fashion, and these, therefore, are the principal virtues of a commercial nation. "^[1]

The emergence of Proof of Election (the unspoken 'sola pecune') under Calvinist Protestantism forced an inversion of the original relationship between the 'moral' and the 'pragmatic'. This has the effect of weakening or reducing all ethos to pathos, and all pathos is anti-logos. Ends justify the means, abhorrent or realpolitik-y as they may seem to the moral subject.

graph LR
Affluence -->|is| POE(Proof of Election)
POE --> AM(Authentic Morality)
Trade -->|gives| Affluence
AM --> Salvation
Laziness --> Poverty --> COP(Culture of Poverty) --> TM(Too Much Morality) --> NS(XX Salavation)

This presumes the guilt of the depraved, and burdens him with having ot prove that his moral proclamations aren't motivated by envy, inauthenticity, laziness or lack of ambition i.e. culture of poverty.

The fortunate man is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate, beyond this he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced he deserves it and above all that he deserves it in comparison with others. Good fortune, thus wants to be legitimate fortune. - Max Weber (A History of World Religions)

Marx's move in the opposite direction also make money the arbitror of your rights, a solution which ultimately leads to more explicit claim of this type under the category of 'standpoint epistemology'. This ultimately adds more and more criteria than just money or lack thereof, and again the causal arrows flow on both directions. I've had twitter debates with informed feminists that wanted to seriously defend the idea that a female president can never start a war because she has maternal instincts, I suppose just like election of Obama represented the end of racism for the liberal mind.

VIP-rīta : the Unnatural Law

The fashion of wealth becoming the first value and the last word gives a certain amount of shock to every common man's perception of reality and the natural law, which prepares the ground for a new explanation of reality and natural law, despite its absurdity, circularity and obvious reverse engineering. An explained humiliation is better than suffering a Karmic misfortune without knowledge of past life's sins. The orient also underwent the same experience at the civilizational level. Any moral reaction not preceded or accompanied by wealth becomes shameful and inauthentic, attracting a sharp diagnosis. There's no doubt that morality is capable of becoming a rhetorical tool for virtue-signaling or a cover for cowardice, but the skepticism needed to reduce all moral expressions to these negative motivations itself seems pathological.

It is a law like causality because it is not necessary, but it lives through constant validation in everyday experience. It is through perpetual humiliation and defeat that these the moralist finally loses faith and is silenced.

Under social darwinism is and the neoliberal dogma and the invisible hand, your riches are indicative of your merits, despite Adam Smith insisting on the opposite:

This disposition to admire, and almost worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.' - Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiment.

In other words, the archbishop of neoliberalism can't be more clear that that causal arrow can't move in the opposite direction, but Adam Smith has been uniquely unfortunate in being repeatedly dragged out of context by his wig.

Nietzsche's slave morality

There was an unhealthy psychological emphasis in Nietzsche's critique. With the rise of authenticity culture and permitting its supremacy over morality in the hierarchy of values, the definition of inauthenticity ended up covering all moral proclamations by a poor man. In fact, the honor of poor man is not worthy of respect being it was never tempted or tested.

The person who insists on appearing "too moral" has simply failed to adopt to the changing realities, and is using his morality as a defense mechanism to resist the change necessary for his survival. One is only capable of being moral, not expressing morality, and any expression of a moral dictum is a sign of ineptitude or pride. This genetic fallacy is used to convert the affluent subject into an authentic, and therefore a moral one. Morality, reverse engineered from law of attraction type thinking, is repackaged as the culture adopted by the affluent, minus the things too obscene and profane for the bourgeois sensibilities. Law of attraction is just proof of election for deism (karma instead of karmaphaldata), whereas prosperity gospel is a race to disprove your election. Children being educated in english schools etc. are listed as respectable things the hero should pursue. Just like Kant wanted to reduce Metaphysics to experience and Marx/Hegel wanted to reduce morality to history, there's a certain instinct to reduce morality to natural law.

This culture where invoking shared or transcendent values becomes a symptom and where the moral subject is pathologized must emerge from modernity's faith in the possibility of a relativist world without the necessity of shared values (McIntyre) where everyone simply has the "freedom to choose, regardless of what is chosen".

Like the "pseudo-secular" and the "too-forgiving" (Prithvi Raj Chauhan), The Indian also invented categories like "too-moral" (not the same as hypermoral) to allow the bourgeois subject to critique the particular embodiment or expression of tradition as 'inauthentic' (like a literalist orthodox, or someone going on dates with an actual checklist) without having to deny the universal tradition or its values, always assuming but never specifying what the 'authentic' tradition entails. Inauthenticity replaces heterodoxy as the true enemy of tradition, and morality, just like romantic love, becomes a impulsive or instinctive property of the free and affluent subject, not a trained quality.

Middle Class Religion / Bourgeois Hinduism

See Brian Hatcher's Bourgeois Hinduism and Sanjay Joshi's Fractured Modernity

Political Theology of Hindutva Liberalism, how Hinduism believes in theology and tradition for me, and law and reason for thee. And this middle class religion which started popularization through control of mass media (Bramho Samaj to Gita Press) slowly enshrined itself in institutions like RSS shakhas to trickle down its control ideology to the masses, similar to Brahmanism before it, and how Gandhi popularized the Nationalism of Bankim etc to masses through mobilization, movements and myths of miracles (Shahid). Partha Chatterjee deals with this in his work on Nationalism as an elitist project, asking the important question of "Who's Nationalism".

لاکر برہمنوں کو سیاست کے پیچ میں
زناریوں کو دیر کہن سے نکال دو

In the same way that the 'margin of appreciation' works for ECHR to grant states the right to define religion vs culture, the bourgois liberal Hindu used and continues to use the same margin to grant himself and the state rights over the minorities, and to make himself more equal than the others.

Sir syed Ahmed Khan and Rashid Shaz would represent a similar strand in the Muslim community.

Materialist Religion

The Impulse in Iqbal

Iqbal's own thought seems conflicted here. He seems to understand the problem of severing morality and pragmatics:

جدا ہو دیں سیاست سے تو رہ جاتی ہے چنگیزی

But he also seems to lament the civilizational cost of subjecting the pragmatic to the moral:

ذمی کا مال لشکر مسلم پے ہے حرام
فتوی تمام شہر میں مشہور ہوگیا
چھوتی نہ تھی یہود و نصاری کا مال فوج
مسلم خدا کے حکم سے مجبور ہوگیا ^[2]
"Dhimmi’s wealth is forbidden for the Muslim army”
This Fatwa was published throughout the whole city
The army would not touch the Jews’ and Christians’ wealth
The Muslim became compelled by the Command of God!

This sentiment echoes the critique of Prithvi Raj Chauhan's supposed too-forgiving nature, and is attempting to reach at something as the too-moral-to-survive .

The Health Check

Invocation of morality by an already affluent person, on the other hand, no longer represents a moral dictum, but is a mere description of reality. Like the futurists, the affluent are the technicians of the new metaphysical sacred, and are truly exemplary. Shahrukh Khan famously said in an interview:

"I tell everyone, first get rich then become a philosopher."

Election of Modi

Modi already had an image and it was extremely popular with a subset of people, the problem wsd that the subset wasn't enough

In the banality of evil or the silence of German populace in the face of Nazi atrocities, there's not just allowing it to happen, but being able to focus on him as a man of action, a capitalist visionary and the future of the nation required psychological effort to fight off your gut instinct about the man and your informed judgement about his true nature since there's no shortage of pre-2014 media coverage to understand his dominant image. But somehow the mention of his communal past itself became a dishonest tactic. Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Tavleen Singh type liberals kept blocking or hand-waving or dismissing the mention of his communal past as a red herring in a discussion about his economic vision. Communal violence became a petty concern against the liberal rhetoric of the great march forward. In other words, those who do not have money should not talk about principles. There's wilful blindness about the overall culture of politics where known terrorists like Sadhvi Pragya get elected to parliament and Kangana Ranavat can ask Modi to reincarnate himself into 2002 avatar.

In this respect, Modi and Netanyahu share that similarity in leveraging the amorality of those invested in the material progress. People will focus on the strong leader, technical prowess and resilience instead of a war criminal. Hemant Biswa Sharma is a similar opportunist scum who can fill his pockets and keep hatred alive as the full extent of his job description.

There is both sideism or normalisation of bloodletting before we argue for atleast one side is going to spill blood on cement streets, like the onlyfan mom saying her son, when bullied, can cry in his ferrari

Treason of the intellectuals allowed for this.

Role of leaders in modernity

US Oil

Keep the Omelas happy and the child hidden (manufacturing consent)

The split between populous and elites on Palestine issue because the elite are still following their amoral job description faithfully while the population's conscious breaks down because the suffering child has been telecast across the Omelas. US still argues selfishly against aid but the suffering children have been a key part.

Futurism, Fordism, Ayn Ran, great man hypothesis, Elon musk and misenchantment of Peter theil

Steinbeck's quite about the things we admire in men

There's the same sleight of hand as fappers when they excuse their behavior under the excuse of potentially high libido, even though research proves the opposite

Slavery

Economic arguments for slavery

Arguments from progress

https://youtu.be/W6QAqU2KpaY

Should we remain piss poor, then?

https://youtu.be/yx3iE0LuxbI?si=FLUuwEpyZIm6xthP

The Ghazalian solution of first restoring the moral worth of money. How much moral value you assign to money depends on how well the circulation of money works.

The place and function of money is to be in circulation, against hoarding as dead money (الذی جمع مالا و عددہ).

In an integrated society, reputation is a function of much stronger markers than wealth, because of which it wasn't possible for an outlaw of the past to settle into the civilian life unjudged, let alone honored and respected.