Even in the urban centers in India, you can hire a daily wage worker for as low as US$4 per day. This laborer has no day off, no employment insurance, no vacations, no health benefits, and no pension. If he cannot find work one day, he must sell a utensil or two to buy food. He is always in debt, a slave of loan sharks, and lives in a stinking, feces-ridden slum with pigs wallowing in the cesspool and starved, agitated, rabies-afflicted stray dogs ready to pounce. He must pass on a monthly “rent” to the local goon, who passes on a cut to the police. When a family member falls ill, a common occurrence in his disease-ridden environment, his financial option is not always to take the sick to the hospital....
...It is hard not to sympathize with her. However, without understanding her mindset and moral structure—or lack thereof—one cannot appreciate the complex entanglements that are Indian depravities and how virtually impossible it is to create a civilization. Christian missionaries of the past, deeply rooted in moral sentiments and, hence, unknowingly, in economics, had a sense of these challenges.
The modern progressive, thinking that all successful people are wrong and the poor are inherently good, is, at best, stuck in a Groundhog Day. Lacking an understanding of the complexity and often driven more by virtue-signaling than wanting to do good, he fights for meme-level actions such as ending the caste system and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion...........
.....Unhinged from any moral values, he and his daughter cannot discern right from wrong, perpetually swaying based on expediency, materialistic desires, and survival, fluidly, instinctively, without any thought or emotional reaction, compromising with the milieu.
As if no emotional stress is involved, they don’t see their adjustments as compromises. When exploited, they willingly capitulate. Their instinct is to go after someone weaker to recoup their losses. When they have an opportunity to prey on someone, they feel no shame but a sense of achievement, openly advertising their exploits.....
.....India has no core moral values, nothing like the Ten Commandments. Indian temples are dedicated to cathartic rituals involving singing or expecting material rewards from the gods, such as success in examinations that lead to positions that earn the most bribes. “Sins” are dos and don’ts, like how to deal with the cow. Searching for meaning and truth or seeking a higher purpose are concepts alien to the Indian mind. Such a society cannot even create leaders, let alone recognize and elevate them to higher positions.....
...The inertia of amorality was so potent that today, even Christianity has become voodoo.....
....Civilization does not exist in nature. You have to fight and work towards it. And the process is messy, as Europe experienced over three millennia. The necessary ingredients—honor, work ethic, integrity, fairness, respect for the individual, gratitude, empathy, and rationality—are conspicuous by their absence in India, even in the middle class, which is supposed to be the moral spine of any society. Alas, without civilizational values, one is left with the base, animalistic values, and might-is-right paradigm of resource acquisition and sensual pleasures. All you can have in this milieu is unbridled envy, hate, and covetousness.....
....I have been to a hundred countries and lived in several. What I say about India is primarily true for today’s Third World, all regressing to their pre-European savagery and barbarism. They represent the vast majority of the human population. Thus far, if they haven’t descended into the kind of chaos witnessed in Rwanda, it isn’t due to their democracies but because of the institutional inertia left by the colonizers and the apprehension of the USA—Pax Americana. Unfortunately, the USA is becoming weaker, and the Third World is poised to become extremely dangerous and chaotic.
Full text: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/12/jayant-bhandari/the-structure-or-lack-thereof-of-india/