At the start of anything new, like New Year, Hindus look towards Ganesha. We want him to remove obstacles from our lives, and usher in prosperity. We have been conditioned to see his big belly or lambodara as a symbol of wealth. We have forgotten that this is the symbol of contentment: for the snake around his belly does not chase the rat at his feet, who in turn does not nibble the modaka sweet that Ganesha holds in his hand. The obstacle to our happiness is the discontentment that seems to be our Zeitgeist.
Business schools tell us never to be satisfied: we must aspire more, compete for more, crush the competition and grab more, because it is a dog-eat-dog world, where losers get nothing. Meanwhile, students of the humanities are shown how unfair the world is, full of the elite and privileged who plunder the earth, and corner wealth and power, by enslaving the rest. So we have to constantly dissent, revolt, push back. It has now even created the cult of ‘woke’: forever angry, relentlessly triggered and totally helpless, despite great privilege.
The discerning eye can see the influence of Western operating systems on both the ambitious Right and the revolutionary Left. The West has been shaped by Greek and the Biblical stories, which have always been at odds with each other. The Right celebrates the individualistic ‘heroic’ ways of the Greek gods that gave us the mighty Roman military, which subjugated the Mediterranean. The humanities, though avowedly atheist, are curiously aligned to the collective Christian way where obedience to the ‘leader’ is celebrated, as in the holy Roman empire, the Knights Templars and the Jesuit missionaries.
Both mythologies made their way into the East India Company that colonised Asia. They also gave rise to capitalism, and socialism, the former indulging the ‘heroic’ elite, the latter indulging the ‘saviour’ leader who leads the exodus against the enslaving pharaoh. We are being told there is no alternative — Greek individualism or Biblical collectivism, the Western way, or no way. We are being fooled that this confrontational stance between the haves and the have-nots is rational, and universal. It is not. It is cultural.
Devdutt Pattanaik is an Indian physician turned leadership consultant, mythologist, author and communicator whose works focus largely on the areas of myth, religion, mythology, and management.
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