Harmonious Economics or The New World Order

In the light of the foregoing, in the following sections we will study the civilisational differences of various cultures to determine their common and divergent points. Only after such analysis will it be possible to work out the preferable economic principles for people living across the globe to fully reflect their expectations and cultures, while conforming to the laws of the Universe.

1.1.2. Differences between western and eastern cultures and their influence on the economic structure

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.12

R. Kipling

Let us proceed with the study of the profound differences that exist between civilisations. The theory of hierarchy of civilisations that presupposes the supremacy of some civilisations and the backwardness of the others is by far disputable. In reality, as Honoré de Balzac wrote, “Things that we admire in Europe are punishable in Asia, and a vice in Paris becomes a necessity when you have passed the Azores. There are no such things as hard-and-fast rules; there are only conventions adapted to the climate’13.

At the same time, significant differences in the lifestyle of peoples cannot fail to influence their economic organisation. Indeed, the overall purpose of economy is to provide people with the means of existence. This objective serves as an incentive as well as a source of well-being for nations. No nation or people could survive if they did not employ their entire life potential, including natural, intellectual, and cultural potential. Otherwise they would not be able to make the best of their advantages and curb their weaknesses, would not aspire for economic structure that conforms most with their mentality. And, consequently, people would fail to preserve their specific mentality. It is well known that a good gambler does not always win at chess. In this light, as Joseph E. Stiglitz believed “Each country should have its own economic policy based on the specific characteristics of this country; there can be no common, universal policy for all reforming countries’14 [16].

In order to prove this affirmation, we shall consider the fundamental differences of such distinct cultures as eastern and western cultures. Their most conspicuous representatives are the European and the Indian cultures, respectively. This does not mean that other civilisations, such as Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, Slavic, or else Arab civilisations are of less importance. However, it is the cultures of India and Europe that provide an example of a most striking contrast. What are their fundamental differences?

European culture is relatively young. It was shaped by the rationality of Rome reinforced by the Greek Romanticism. Indeed, “… take Rome out – and the entire European edifice will collapse’ (Valentin Ivanov). If we analyse the map of the Roman oikumene at the beginning of the first millennium AD, including the territories of the Germanic tribes that the Roman Empire fought against, it is evident that the oikumene reunites precisely the states that make part of the modern Western Europe. All the tribes inhabiting this territory were inevitably and profoundly influenced by the sophisticated culture, language, order, and the very image of the rigorous Roman mind. The successors of the Empire naturally inherited its organisation, its harmony, rationality, democracy and inherent homogeneity.

But at the same time, they inherited the egotism, cynicism, cruelty, arrogance and pragmatism of Rome of those days, which in the end brought the Empire to ruin. For it was in the depths of Rome that the pagan cults of violence, hedonism, thirst for luxury, and permissiveness flourished. It was there that double standards, the modern plague of the western society, appeared. Within that system, everything that benefited Rome was considered good, while evil was all that ran counter to its interests. Then, the notions of truth, conscience and justice were employed as needed, often, as an excuse.

The Indian civilisation is more ancient. It is based on occult learning, manuscripts and cultural monuments that the legend attributes to the ancient Aryan civilisation. That is why all notions of this culture have already been tested by the time, and they tend to be more profound and precise. For this reason, as Carl Gustav Jung [17], a recognized expert in the western and eastern cultures, said, not only the lifestyles, but also the types of mentality of the western and the eastern societies are remarkably different.

Indeed, in the West, thinking, intelligence and logic are deemed the best tools for discovering the truth. As the result, the western mentality has become rigid, it does not tolerate deviations and unjustified assumptions. Besides, the area of rational use of mind has been significantly restricted in the West. While people there trust exact observations and logic, they also shun the unconscious and its dubious fantasies. The East has different demands. While the European mind can only process what is visible and tangible, the eastern mind strives to discover the nature and the essence of things. Consequently, a European sees the World around as a system of hierarchies, and an Indian – as a whole. Knowing the way to control the supreme power inside a person is the highest good for an Indian; a European only values what his eye sees.

To illustrate this idea, it can be mentioned that the a maiore ad minus15 (Latin for “from the bigger to the smaller’) principle is seen in the East as the key tool for learning about the reality. All inferences are drawn from the general principles. In the West, the road towards the truth takes the opposite direction: from the simple to the more complex. Western thinkers believe that the process of learning about the world can only be consecutive, it advances as new data is collected and processed; eastern thinkers discover the world through studying and elaborating the way the general Laws of the Universe are manifested. That is why it is these laws that the western philosophers usually study.

The above explains why a western person takes a detached view of the World, striving to distance themselves from it, to acquire an absolute personal freedom, and an Indian, on the contrary, tries to merge with the World. Therefore, a western person draws conclusions regarding their inner world based on external sensations, while an Indian person is guided by their internal meditations.

Consequently, western mind has a wide knowledge of the Nature, and knows very little about it essence. Europeans always try to make use of things instead of understanding them. They see the reality as something that works, that is connected with the world of phenomena, while for an Indian only the soul, the spirit is real.

Science, with its tendency for systematisation, for logic and consistency, is undoubtedly an invention of the western world. Science conforms with its capacity for logical thinking and reality management. However, about 80% of the scientific knowledge considered evident is proved wrong every 100 years. Although the physical world view as presented by modern science is logically rigorous and justified, it allows no space for life. So, this theory will suffer no changes if the humans disappear from the Universe. Now what is the real value of science if the only being it was created for is excluded from its structure?

The East, on the contrary, glorifies the rational dominant of feeling, elevates the spiritual component of the World, and perceives the truth through intuition, feelings and emotions. That is why eastern knowledge is indifferent to time running, and what was valued a thousand years ago is still valued today. To give just one example, “The supreme good of the human-beast is health; the supreme good of a spiritual human being is truth’16 (from The Gems of the East [15]). Is there anything to oppose this statement? Indeed, what is eternal is immune to change, and what is constant is eternal.

All this eventually shaped the different views of the people who live at the opposite points of the planet, both their views of themselves, and of the World around them. One of the cultures under consideration underestimates the world of consciousness, the other rejects that of the Uniform Spirit. The West celebrates “objectiveness’ sacrificing to it the beauty and the integrity of life. The East substitutes objectiveness with wisdom, peace of estrangement and psychic immobility that help human beings return to the source and leave all troubles and joys outside. “Subjectivity is really an advanced or preparatory stage for objectivity’ (Satprem [18]).

Having completed their historic development, the Europeans have gone so far from their origins that their minds have finally split into faith and knowledge. This is not surprising, as any psychological exaggeration leads to a split into the inherent opposites. Thus, a European person, equipped with the bad habit of believing and, at the same time, with a developed scientific and philosophic criticism, is inevitably trapped either in blind adoration or in an equally uncompromising rejection of foreign opinions and lifestyles.

The East believes that “Everything requires for its existence its own opposite, or else it fades into nothingness’ (Carl Gustav Jung, [17]). The World is stable as long as its composing factors are balanced. It understands that “Where there is faith, there is doubt; where there is doubt, there is thirst for faith; where there is morality, there is temptation’ (Laozi). That is why “The West can galvanize and separate, but it can neither stabilize nor unite’ (A. J. Toynbee).

An Indian take care both of the body and the mind, and a European keeps forgetting to attend to either the one or to the other. Where there is a will, there is a way, claims the West, and a European person takes this as a life motto. Thanks to persistent energy and forgetfulness, the Europeans have conquered the entire planet. And, at the same time, they have lost their planet. “That is the sickness of western man, and he will not rest until he has infected the whole world with his own greedy restlessness’ (C. G. Jung [17]). This is why the western man has become a symbol of the material component of the World, this is why he has made impressive material achievements. However, he has failed in the spiritual ones, as an increase in one place will always be balanced by a decrease in another, according to the law of conservation of energy.

In fact, neither of these two highly contrasted viewpoints is universal. As the great medieval scientist, theologian and poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī [19] said, there are two tools for discovering the world: logic and sense. And these two are inseparable and irreplaceable, just as the two sides of the coin. Rumi believed that the more one tries to push apart two opposites, the more power they have.

Obviously, a person’s mood and their understanding of the good and the evil, the moral and the immoral is profoundly influenced by the religious dogmas that the person lives by. It is evident that people with different psychic and incomparable values cannot pray to the same god. And for a Christian, notwithstanding his confession, the structure of the religion, i.e. the difference of its rituals from other religions, is more important than their sense. A Christian transposes these rituals onto himself and, as the result, feels the competition between the religions, but cannot imagine their union.

For an Indian, on the contrary, the apparent differences of the religions are of little consequence, as he instinctively tries to discard the superficial to glorify the common features of all religions. An Indian would rather give up dogmas than circumscribe the essence of God, making God universal through limitation. “One, He presides over all wombs and natures; Himself the womb of all’17 establishes Shvetashvatara Upanishad (V.5). According to the eastern philosophy, God and man are linked by indissoluble ties: “In whatever way people surrender unto me, I reciprocate with them accordingly. Everyone follows my path’18, reads Bhagavad Gita (IV,11 [15]).

Western religious practice is based on prayer, on the worship and the adoration of God. A person from the East mostly communicates with the Deity by being immersed in unconsciousness that they believe to be the supreme conscience. A European echoes Saint Paul, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me’ (Gal.2:20). And the Indian surah promises “And you shall know that you are Buddha’ (Taittirīya Upanishad X). This is the reason why the spiritual approach of the East stupefies western man, and vice versa. A good Christian cannot save himself, just as a Buddha cannot worship a God other than himself. And even though the western civilisation is not as blessed as it seems, it is also incapable of accepting the spiritual approach of the East. And similarly, the East cannot cast away its culture to adopt another one, raised from foreign ground.

The Hindu people believe that the Deity inhabits all things and, above all, any human being. In western religions, on the contrary, only humans are endowed with a soul, as well as some other living beings. In eastern cultures, human soul is identical to the souls of other natures of the Universe, to those of all things existing. This soul is described as follows: “He is the child of the waters, the child of the forests, the child of things stable and the child of things that move. Even in the stone he is there’19 (Rigveda, I.70.20). In the West, however, nature is inanimate, and the man is a consumer, capable of governing Nature and all of its components.

A Christian attains the supreme knowledge through losing his own self, while an Indian preserves the immutable foundation of his nature through rigorous respect of its unity with the deity or the universal nature: “The heavens beyond are great and wonderful, but greater yet and more wonderful are the heavens within you’ (Sri Aurobindo [18]). On the contrary, a European is more convinced by the visible reality with its materiality and weight. That is why a western man seeks rising above the World, while an Indian turns to the original sources of Nature.

As the result, the western Christian culture sees man free but at the same time fully subordinated to the will of God. Or, at least, to the church – the only institute of salvation on earth authorized by God. Thus, a European wants to mollify this “authority’ with his fear, his vows, his prayers, with obedience, self-humiliation, good deeds, and glorification. And, from time to time, with indulgences. A western person is tortured by the belief in absolute gods that share human passions and weaknesses, but in fact are nothing else than a veil of illusions woven by the imperfect human mind.

Deep down the western man feels his insignificance before God and therefore does not dare protect his “I” against Him. On the contrary, in the East the man is the creator of his fate and the author of his self-perfection, as well as an integral part of God.

Suffice it to tweak this formula and substitute God with a different entity, for instance, with power, money or passion, to render a portrait of a European complete: a diligent, timorous, humble, and enterprising person who avidly clutches to the certain goods of the world he lives in, such as property, health, knowledge, money and material values. These are the founding elements of the liberal economic model forged by the Europeans. The western man is convinced that wealth comes from the outer world, that is why he avidly tries to fill his empty soul with it. He wants to seize the earthly comforts from other people to assure his own well-being at any price. “The western civilisation prefers having to being’ (A. Macchirgiani). And this should not come as a surprise, as “who holdeth not God as such an inner possession, but with every means must fetch Him from without’ (Meister Eckhart’s Schriften und Predigten)20.

While eastern philosophy and its perception of the world are directed inside the human being, western philosophy looks on the outside. It understands the dialectics of the opposites but cannot conceive their harmonious coexistence. That is why such philosophy is bound to run to extremes: it accepts fight and competition but is alien to cooperation of people, things or notions. As the two civilisations we have been dealing with so far understand the main questions of the world in strikingly different ways, the life within each of them is easily disconnected from the whole reality to become artificial and inhuman.

It is all logical then that the economic lifestyle and the production and distribution methods could not remain untouched by the profound differences between western and eastern civilisations. Thus, the eastern path consists in the subordination of the man by the state or by his own inner self. As opposed to the East, the West seeks to break the dead unity and give freedom to the individual forms of life. At the same time, it gets beyond harmony to encourage global egotism. This is why capitalism, based on the individualism cult, is alien to eastern mentality and ends up distorting it. The West does not admit other economic system than one driven by self-interest, the most shameful among the human qualities, and not by the desire to provide people with the means of existence, that is why unmercenary economics would not work as well in the West as in the East.

Selfish economics conforms more to western mentality, and, consequently, it is more beneficial for it, assuring prosperity of the West. However, people of other cultures feel uncomfortable within such economic system, and that is why they often lose to the West. Western economy is detrimental for the life of other cultures, and it does not correspond to their understanding of Truth and Justice.

The East admits that the common prosperity stands above personal well-being: “The manifestation of unity vanquishes even armies… The entire world is divided along a boundary line between individual and general welfare. If we act within the sphere of the general welfare with sincere intentions, then in support of us stands the entire reservoir of cosmic accumulations’ (Agni Yoga – The Living Ethics).21 The East is capable to “learn above all to separate Head-learning from Soul-Wisdom, the ‘Eye’ from the ‘Heart’ doctrine’ (Helena Blavatsky [15])22. The West, meanwhile, keeps worshipping logic, intelligence and rationality, and often ignores the heart with its uncertain, illogical and erratic ways.

In the East, people understand that even though the accumulation of all the necessary things is indeed a source of well-being, no material goods would satisfy the inner world. That is why it is no surprise for the East that in the quest for pleasures humans are pestered by a growing hunger. And the greater the pleasures, the stronger the hunger. The man himself becomes the object of someone else’s craving, as well as a source of trouble and other unknown calamities. The multidimensionality and the duality of the world are to blame here.

The lack of spiritual orientation in the West borders on mental anarchy. By consequence, any religious or philosophic dogma contributes to setting up some kind of order, and becomes a source of new knowledge and of psychic duality. As dogmas can be assimilated with spiritual hygiene they contribute to the variety of knowledge. On the contrary, the East proves sufficient, peaceful, and composed. The West generates hundreds of world visions, none of which is complete or fully feasible. And there is no surprise in this, as all of such theories aim at resolving some local issues, instead of uncovering their nature and relation with other phenomena. The main tool such theories use is the analysis of circumstances and not their synthesis.

As the result, the multitude of doctrines produced in the West do not only fail to enrich the human beings, but even deprive people of the feeling of unity of the Universe, of self-confidence, and of the chance to get to know the World they live in. In the end, people are obliged to obey the element, instead of controlling it with the help of their reason. This is how competition and market are born, instead of a plan, of cooperation, harmony, and unity. At the same time, these developments cannot protect the man of the West from personal dissatisfaction. He ends up better protected from poor harvest and flood than from spiritual defects or psychic epidemics, as he is unfamiliar with any immutable principles. “The world wars have shown what a European is capable of when his intellect, having grown alienated from Nature, runs free’23 (C. G. Jung [17]).

The East is different because it has always seen the mental reality as the main and the only condition of human existence. The East realizes that human soul is rich enough to avoid borrowing from the outside world. This vision of the world lets an Indian build a strong body, shaping the images of his mental state into specific real forms that replace the outer world to him. For this reason, despite not always understanding the reality, an Indian retains an inner order and harmony. As opposed to the multiple environment, in Indian can boast the integrity of his inner world.

As the two civilisations we have been dealing with so far understand the main questions of the world in strikingly different ways, the life within each of them is easily disconnected from the whole reality to become artificial and inhuman. This is exactly why “The ancient intellectual cultures of Europe ended in disruptive doubt and sceptical impotence, the pieties of Asia in stagnation and decline’ (Sri Aurobindo [18]).

Thus, the differences between the civilisations that we have studied above turned out to be so profound that any convergence would lead to mutual destruction. The relation between the two cultures is that of the water and the fire. “East and West… have two ways of looking at life which are opposite sides of one reality. Between the pragmatic truth on which the vital thought of modern Europe enamoured of the vigour of life, all the dance of God in Nature, puts so vehement and exclusive a stress and the eternal immutable Truth to which the Indian mind enamoured of calm and poise loves to turn with an equal passion for an exclusive finding, there is no such divorce and quarrel as is now declared by the partisan mind, the separating reason, the absorbing passion of an exclusive will of realisation’ (Sri Aurobindo [18]).

The West is too intellectual, too much concentrated on the outer world to see the true state of things, while India is too deeply immersed in itself, so it lacks the determination necessary for balancing the principles it lives by with what it sees and understands. And although without unilaterality the human spirit could not develop in its complexity, due to their maximalism both the western and the eastern civilisation lose half of their total and become functionally incomplete.

On the other hand, civilisations shape people and their opportunities, and determine the most appropriate economic system for them. This is why in order to survive in this complex environment modelled by the quantitative-qualitative patterns of the Universe the human beings try to adapt to this world, making it cosy and comfortable for themselves. Hence the inevitable conflict of the unilaterality of human philosophic perception and lifestyle. Besides, the spread of a foreign civilisation into an inappropriate ground unavoidably gives birth to mutants instead of healthy and well-balanced individuals.

In the light of the foregoing, both civilisations need an intermediary capable of reconciling them. Someone who would bring together the opposites and match their values in order to shape a new attitude to culture, economy, spirituality, and quality of life. They need an incentive to unite their multiplicity rather than separate it, to compose a symphony that would replace the cacophony. The Russian mentality has been the one to come closest to this ideal. This is why Russia is the only candidate for the role of the intermediary, as no other global civilisation possesses the qualities required for the mission.

1.1.3. Russia and Europe, collision of civilisations