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: Why don't you participate in politics or in social reform?

: Have you noticed how politics and social reform have become extraordinarily predominant in our lives at the present time? All our newspapers and most of the magazines, except the purely escapist ones, are full of politics, economics, and other problems. Have you ever asked yourself why they are that way, why human beings are giving such extraordinary importance to politics, economics, and social reform? Reforms are obviously necessary because of the economic, social and political confusion and the general deterioration of the state of man following the two wars. So, crowds gather round political leaders; people line the streets, watching them as though they were strange animals trying to solve the problem on the economic, social or political level, independent of the total process of man. Are these problems to be tackled separately, unrelated to the whole psychological problem of man? You may have a perfect system that you think will solve the economic problems of the world, but another will also have a perfect system; and the two systems, representing two different ideologies, will fight each other. As long as you are fighting over ideas, systems, there cannot be a true, radical revolution, there cannot be fundamental social transformation. Ideas do not transform people. What brings about transformation is freedom from ideas. Revolution based on ideas is no longer revolution, but merely a continuation of the past in a modified state. Obviously, that is not revolution.

The questioner wants to know why I don't take part in politics or in social reform. Surely, if you can understand the total process of man, then you are dealing with the fundamental issues, not merely trimming particular branches of the tree. But most of us are not interested in the entire problem. We are concerned merely with reconciliation, superficial adjustment, not with the fundamental understanding of man as a total process. It is very much easier to be an expert on one particular level. The experts on the economic or political level leave the psychological level to other experts, and so we become slaves to experts; we are sacrificed by experts for an idea. So, there can be fundamental revolution only in understanding the total process of yourself, not as an individual opposed to the mass, to society, but as an individual interrelated with society; because without you there is no society, without you there is no relationship with another. There is no revolution, no fundamental transformation, as long as we do not understand ourselves. Reformers and so-called revolutionists are really factors of retrogression in society. A reformer tries to patch up the present society, or create a new one, on the basis of an ideology and his idea is the conditioned response to a pattern; and such revolution, based on an ideology, can never produce a fundamental, radical transformation in social relationships. What we are concerned with is not reformation or modified continuity, which you call revolution, but the fundamental transformation of man in his relationship with man; and as long as that basic change does not take place in the individual, we cannot produce a new social order. That fundamental transformation does not depend on belief, on religious organizations, or on any political or economic system: it depends on your understanding of yourself in relationship with another. That is the real revolution that must take place, and then you as an individual will have an extraordinary influence in society. But without that transformation, merely to talk about revolution or to sacrifice yourself for a so-called practical idea - which is not really sacrifice at all - , is obviously mere repetition, which is retrogression.


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