Poverty of Mind

While poverty of material wealth is a widely acknowledged source of tribulations, another type of poverty frequently goes unnoticed, and that is the poverty of mind. Poverty of mind is manifested in various forms – like corruption and nepotism, where gathering of material wealth at any cost is considered to be the very purpose of existence and where little consideration is displayed towards others, crime, vulgar display of wealth and power, fanaticism, bigotry and intolerance, biases and prejudices, deliberate maligning of whatever or whoever one dislikes ( You may be good, but I don’t like you and therefore I’ll say only bad things about you), lack of compassion, indifference towards injustice and evil ways, and so on. The drivers are ego, lust, greed, pride, jealousy, and so on. They obfuscate truth and cover mind just like fog covers a landscape. Poverty of mind is ubiquitous. One can see a rich spending millions in his daughter’s marriage while some poor and hungry suffers not far from the venue. In this case who is poorer? One may say that the rich person is entitled to spend his hard earned money in his own way, but is that really the case? If we think objectively, spending for enjoyment is not the bone of contention, the amount spent is also not an issue. The point is that we are often oblivious of the fact that we are indebted to the society in many ways, however hard we’ve worked to establish ourselves, in whichever way – straight or crooked. We may have got our education funded by state, an amount which could have been utilized to subsidize the education of a more deserving and financially weak candidate. That education often forms the basis of earning a livelihood. We have probably established a business and amassed wealth not completely by ourselves, but through the diligence of employees who may have sacrificed their personal lives for establishing my business in return for a meagre source of income, help from lending insititutions who may have used the money deposited by a poor or a middle income person to fund my ventures, patronage of customers, generosity of suppliers, support of retail shareholders who trusted my business with their life savings, and so on and so forth. Therefore we are accountable to the very society which has provided us all these wealth. However without returning anything if we spend heavily on our personal enjoyments, isn’st that kind of unjust?


Similarly when we are corrupt, biased, fanatic, indifferent, we are negelecting a vital side of the story of life, that nobody can really sustain and survive on his own in this world. We need to deal with various kinds of persons and pursuing selfish agenda can bring in short term gains but can be dangerous in the long run. If everybody becomes self serving there cannot be any society at all but only individual egos. That means relationships cannot develop or sustain and rule of jungle follows – In jungle every animal has to fend for itself, there’s no social security, might is right there. Just as a rich and and powerful has right to enjoy material wealth a tiger in a jungle has right to kill, but unlike human beings, tigers do not have a higher, discriminating mind, so they are better than human beings with poverty of mind. Animals are driven by basic instincts. Human beings with poverty of mind fare worse as they are driven by a purely selfish agenda despite being endowed with a higher form of intelligence above instinct.