For the past year or more, some friends from Meditation New Zealand and I, have been running Meditation & Mindfulness programs in Auckland’s maximum security prison at Paremoremo.
People ask, “what’s it like working with criminals?” I find it very disconcerting how we, as a society, tend to ‘dehumanize’ criminals. Even our justice system tends to do this. Creating an ‘Us and Them’ mentality. Can we do better? Yes!
Crime deserves punishment but prisoners also need reforming otherwise we pay the price. Currently, prisons serve as ‘criminal higher education’. When people leave prisons they have often been trained in criminal behavior, feel some anger towards society for their treatment under the penal system and often are more hardened.
Is there anything that we can or should be doing to make it so that the recidivism rate for released inmates is dramatically lowered? So that we are creating a safer and more humane society?
In this series, we will be exploring this subject and looking for real ways to achieve this.
The cultivation of greed and envy in the public at large was consciously promoted beginning in the mid-1920’s. These two qualities were the fuel for the economic engine which was to see a rapid expansion for well over half a century. But has it really been in the interest of humanity?
“We must shift America, he wrote, from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” – Paul Mazur – Lehman Brothers (1920’s)
“For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.” – John Maynard Keynes (1930) – One of the most influential economists of the last century.
“The modern economy is propelled by a frenzy of greed and indulges in an orgy of envy, and these are not accidental features but the very causes of its expansionist success. The question is whether such causes can be effective for long or whether they carry within themselves the seeds of destruction.” – E.F. Schumacher – Economist and Philosopher
“If human vices: such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures.” – E.F. Schumacher – Economist and Philosopher
“I suggest that the foundations of peace cannot be laid by universal prosperity, in the modem sense, because such prosperity, if attainable at all, is attainable only by cultivating such drives of human nature as greed and envy, which destroy intelligence, happiness, serenity, and thereby the peacefulness of man.” – E.F. Schumacher – Economist and Philosopher
“A person who is not disturbed by the incessant flow of desires—that enter like rivers into the ocean, which is ever being filled but is always still—can alone achieve peace, and not the man who strives to satisfy such desires.” – Bhagavad-gita 2.70
Our view of the world, ourselves and others determine our purpose in life and shapes our search for happiness. These views which we hold can often result in the clash of ideas. When our hopes or aspirations bump up against other peoples’ wills and desires, when we are forced to contend with the limitations of our natural environment and its’ resources, and then, when we experience the fact that material consumption cannot buy us happiness, we experience conflict.
We’re all aware of how political differences, or differences in social philosophies, lead to clashes of ideas, but I’m not dealing with those clashes here. I want to try and take a larger view, a more macro perspective of the conflict of larger ideas, something which is frequently overlooked in the heat of political or social debate.
For example, the world is madly in pursuit of economic development. As a society we place no upper limitations on this pursuit – “I want to be as rich as I possibly can be.” This desire contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited. But we fail to see the inherent conflict in this clash of ideas, or if we do, we quickly discard the concern and push on with “making money”.
Yet the consequences of pursuing unlimited economic growth cannot end in anything less than an utter catastrophe for our planet and its’ inhabitants. But why doesn’t the recognition of this danger, even if the recognition is fleeting, incite me to action? Because – to put it mildly, I’ve lost the plot. I am so invested in the philosophy of materialism I don’t really accept I have any other choice than to move with the herd.
The degree to which we have been brain-washed is not even obvious to us. People are mostly oblivious to the reality that what I consider as my ideas, my desires, my values – are not really my own. I did not form them alone. They were often influenced, if not shaped, by others – and I have often uncritically accepted these ideas as factual. Our shift from a “needs based” society to a “desires based” culture, which was the result of focused social engineering in the late 1920’s, is proof of this fact.
If we are to find solutions to what ails us and much of modern civilization, it requires we understand exactly where we are now and how we got here.
