Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. -Abraham Lincoln
The relevance & virtue of above quote will prevail forever, in recent times competition has forced man to become a sophisticated schemer than a free minded thinker. As the quest for power increased, the traditional virtue based leadership was no longer a sustainable model. Ambitious men in the name of business & globalization were trying to consume as much resources for their own good. The idea of a strong nation was mostly based on their ability to amass wealth, power and strategies that intimidate other weak nations..and then it happened, the judgement day !!
It must have been envisioned early enough that this world would be inherited by the ones that have stayed gentle through the evolutionary cycle : the only qualifying creatures turned out to be bees, earthworms, sparrows , dogs and a few gentle souls.
The buddhist monks have practiced leadership without the need of undue harshness, yet surprisingly there are no institutions in the world that have build their leadership education model on them.
There are mentions of smart governance and robust communication channels, yet there is no nation that is 100% happy with their elected leaders, more. A model to build greater consensus among humans has been never taken seriously for it defeats the purpose of a leader driven decision making. Man has grown to be a selfish creature & if he stands up to do something , he makes sure that it’s for his own good.
The ancient Manu dharma shashtra (ManuSmriti) had early mentions of a framework of a governance model that was driven from the common man to the kings & leaders. This was mostly on the concept of inversion of control , it made perfect sense at that point of time. This was a very relevant & successful model as it put the ownership of micro governance in a pyramid of pyramids like model. These rules were however extended from the philosophy of Artha & Dharma. With extensive stress on why Dharma is foremost followed by Artha & Kama which paves the way for Moksha.
In Mahabharata there are mentions of debates on the priority & order of Artha,dharma,karma,Kama and moksha, it is interesting to observe that they vary in precedence based on age groups and the work personality of the individuals.
The work based classification of ‘praja’ or the people helped determine a more contextual application of the rules. Problem arises when lack of wisdom led to a lot of misconceptions by people who failed to understand the complex framework that they later termed as ‘caste’. The concept of feudalism , communism, fascism was all created to leverage insecurity as a tool for manipulating people via social engineering.
The world as it is today has come to terms with the fact that Artha,dharma, karma are located in mutually exclusive quadrants of ones life and Kama is another dimension that everyone is burdened with. Occasionally we shift from one quadrant to another to compensate for our overtime in the other.
It’s time to look at life from another perspective, take a timeline of every big dharmic transaction of your life & put it on a scoring chart. That’s the report card of your exam called ‘living a good life’.
As it’s mentioned in the Mahabharata:
Morality is well practiced by the good. Morality, however, is always afflicted by two things, the desire of Profit entertained by those that covet it, and the desire for Pleasure cherished by those that are wedded to it. Whoever without afflicting Morality and Profit, or Morality and Pleasure, or Pleasure and Profit, followeth all three – Morality, Profit and Pleasure – always succeeds in obtaining great happiness. — The Mahabharata
— incomplete & lost my train of thought — will come back
