INCOMPLETE HUMANS
Our conditions of existence really reveal how incomplete we
are as human beings. The many addictions and contradictions that we endure
continuously prune us to utter imperfection. We are endowed with innate
deficiencies as part of our humanness. It is this deficiency which makes us incomplete
that also drives us to the service of many vices, including greed. We are greedy
not because we are in dire need of anything; it is because we are accustomed to
believing that greed cures our incompleteness.
So, what are these rampant vices; deceit, corruption,
mediocrity, impunity, callousness, malefactions, imprudence, violence, vitriol
and lack of intestinal fortitude to live calm, just, meaningful life in a
shared common? The answer to this dilemma is that the human project is incomplete.
The design of our immediate environment is to fetter a
feeling of inadequacy in human kind. Through the social media, commercials that
confront us daily, and the stereotype of prospects that our own guardians
orientate us with, only set us up for the panic. The future is painted grimly
as that of adversities requiring many struggles for which we are intensely schooled.
The future struggles are defined, as “taking and getting”; “accumulating and
owning”. One is raised to own property such as land and houses in such numbers
that may not be of any material benefit. Success is defined as living a life of
abundance associated with success. This is characterized by too much food to
eat for one person and leftovers to throw; numerous vehicles to drive;
countless sexual encounters and multiple children born and raised as imps in to
further this vicious cycle of logical fallacy.
The undercurrents that drive the pursuit of our “success” are
nothing but the fear of our deficiencies, our incomplete nature. We
fortuitously believe that what we lack by nature can be complimented by
accumulated material wealth. We have become accustomed to believing in money as
our religious faith and materialism as our orthodoxy. Our children learn more
about scarcity, growing up petrified of the essence of scarcity and yet, we
have enough resources for every human being.
Mahatma Gandhi once said that there is enough for everyone
to share on this planet, but there is hardly enough for the greedy. Indeed, the
more we accumulate wealth, the more we take into our custody, that which should
have been shared by the global common. The more we achieve what the society has
normalized as “success”, the more we aggravate our incomplete nature. The rich
become isolated and loose the power of social interconnectedness because in
actual reality, accumulated wealth imprisons. For the deprived - “riffraffs” - Thomas
Hobbes once observed that life becomes “nasty, brutish, and short” but fulfilling.
For, the scholar and founders of Karma Kitchen, Nipun Mehta believes that the
act of generosity and giving are always initiated by those who have the least.
The human nature will attempt to become complete and
liberated when we learn to share. True power lies in the relationship of giving
and sharing. As author Dan Hamburg once said, the consumer culture, the
bourgeoise culture, is threatened not because it is bad or wrong, but because
it is incomplete. It may have mastered the processes of material production,
but it has failed miserably in addressing the challenges inherent in the social
relations between the modes and processes of production, distribution of
resources and environmental sustainability.
So, when we give and share, we unleash transformative power
that leads to social interconnectedness within the human race. The experience
of generative power of sharing is the token by which the human project can get
set on its path toward completeness. It is the means by which humans can emerge
from isolation into public realm as a freeman. Sharing is the viable means to
cultivate networks that meaningfully link one human to another; transmit
equitable sharing of global common, configures and compliments common points of
deficiency.
Nipun Mehta, coined the term Giftivism, and defined it as “the
practice of radically generous act that change the world”. And through the
Kharma Kitchen, Mehta and his colleagues proved that the incompleteness of
human nature can get assuaged by acts of sharing. When people give to those
they hardly know and come to learn how helpful that gift was, in transforming
the lives of those who needed it, the sense of completeness becomes
indescribable.
Perhaps, through self search, we can start to understand
that we have unconsciously inhibited the human project from getting complete by
the vice of greed alone. We now know that we are a race in panic, afraid of an
imaginary scarcity in the future. We enslave ourselves with material possession
of things that have no value and place in our lives. We deprive those who
desperately need these things and we debase their utility values by keeping
them redundant in our custody. If we gave up our addiction to hoarding all the
materials in our possession, we would become more accomplished.
Go check in your storage for the tires you don’t need and
have not used, bed-frames, mattresses; go in your kitchen, look for the cutlery
and utensils you don’t really use. Look in your quarters for empty rooms; in
your food stores and fridges for the foods you are not eating. Give those out
to the people who have immediate need for you.
END.
