In the previous article, I delved into the absence of moral foundations in India and elsewhere in the Third World. Considering this, the institutional structure left by colonizers cannot survive. Each of these Third World countries, in its unique way—civil wars, over-population, self-destruction, hedonism—will negate the benefits bestowed by the colonizers, Christian missionaries, and Western technology, reverting to its pre-colonial state of subsistence living, savagery, and barbarianism.
Without a rational, moral fabric—the essential civilizational factors—entropy reigns, and nature asserts itself. Intellectual or financial capital cannot coalesce, fails to hold together, and gets frittered away. The following focuses on exemplifying the decay and degradation which are gaining pace in India.
A staggering 800 million Indians get government-provided free rations, equivalent to the total populations of the USA, Canada, and the twenty-seven countries comprising the European Union. The majority of the remaining 1,435 million Indians receive subsidized rations.
Su, JonathanBuy New $3.99(as of 04:42 UTC – Details)While extremely low, India’s GDP per capita of U$2,389 (2022) still gives you a misleading glimpse of reality. A significant portion of the GDP benefits a minority with political connections or a business façade.
Strategic thinking among Indian businessmen revolves around the art of transferring money—by any means necessary—from your pocket to theirs, devoid of a need to provide a product or service. The absence of shame or guilt in engaging in scams or reneging on commitments is pervasive. Even financial institutions, without exception, impose fabricated charges, including for the spam messages they generate. Social workers, engineers, and intellectuals—whose work is difficult to quantify and is distant from customer feedback—exhibit worse conduct.
Remarkably, those at the receiving end have no righteous indignation and do not complain but look for someone else to “recoup” their losses. With people around you looking for an occasion to usurp your property and money, you must forever be on guard, wasting most of your time defending yourself. Surpluses, if any, in such an ecosystem tend to get frittered away—no one knows where they come from, so society cannot focus on nurturing or preserving them.
Unless the individual in society is moral and wants to provide more value than he receives and honor his part of the deal, any economic value created is incidental and unquantifiable.
Forget about being able to operate in the globalized world, such no-trust behaviors make it very challenging to conduct any business beyond the immediate family, with the latter already laden with significant issues. Managing large firms, achieving economies of scale, or undertaking complex endeavors becomes formidable. That is why, even in today’s high-technology world, India leaves much of its society at the edge of starvation.
This environment fosters a moral hazard and a rationality trap, encouraging individuals to prioritize street-smart tactics over being value-creators with moral and rational inclinations. During my tenure working in India, expressing my refusal to engage in bribery for the sake of outcompeting others or securing an overnight train berth at the expense of someone else was met with laughter, dismissed as overly romantic.
Considering the wages of the protagonist, the daily wage worker, from the earlier article, a foreign investor might be enticed by the potential profit margins achievable by relocating manufacturing operations to India. However, many entrepreneurs encounter an immediate roadblock when attempting to move their operations to India, with most never progressing—those who do often lose money and get stuck in chaotic legal entanglements.
Some persevere, often backed by the unending monies of big corporations. When they fail, they concoct a politically correct explanation. Or perhaps, spending most of their time in five-star settings in India, their bureaucrats never figure out what happened. Why bother looking for truth when doing so might be politically incorrect and risk your lifestyle and six-figure packages?
In the early 90s, after completing my MBA from the UK, with great aspirations to participate in India’s growth, I was in Delhi setting up the Indian subsidiary of a British company. I was obsessed with “incentives.” I hired an assistant. Within a year, I tripled his starting salary in an attempt to address some of his shortcomings. Soon, he was skipping two-thirds of the days as if he had done a perfect mathematical calculation—his instincts were not to go beyond subsistence living and didn’t include any plans for the future. When the company offered him a lump sum, he vanished for six months, returning with the appearance of having spent that time in a perpetual state of inebriation.
In a society devoid of civilizational values, might-is-right is the operating principle, and the individual—across the spectrum of class hierarchy—is driven solely by resource acquisition, power, and sex. The concept of work ethic does not stick in his mind. You can pay as much as you want, but given the slightest chance, he will shrug off. Lacking reason, he cannot see the causality between his lack of work ethic and his $4 per day wage.
The cultural underpinnings of magical thinking, resulting from the absence of reason and moral values, fail to see how prosperity is generated.
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From LRC, here.
