WORLD GOVERNMENT, ECONOMICS, EDUCATION, RELIGION AND ETHICS

CONTENTS

FOREWORD
PART I
MEMORANDUM ON WORLD GOVERNMENT   1-39
1. Preamble 3
2. Genesis 11
3. Other Partial Approaches 15
4. Unique and Positive Qualities 19
5. Active Programme  23
6. Jurisdiction, Revenue, Resources, etc. 31
7. World Law  33
8. Conclusion   37

PART II
ONE-WORLD ECONOMICS   41-151
9. Introduction 43
10. Gold in Wisdom's Language 53
11. Towards a One-World Economic  71
12. Proto-Linguistics Applied to Economics  147

PART III
ONE-WORLD EDUCATION 153-245
13. Introduction  155
14. World Education Manifesto 163

PART IV
RELIGION AND ETHICS   247-259
15. One Religion  249             
16. Ethics Normalized  255                  

INDEX                                               375

PART I
MEMORANDUM ON WORLD GOVERNMENT

PREAMBLE
The subject which concerns us here is that of World Government. In the light of Samuel Johnson's statement that "politics is the last refuge of scoundrels"; and in view of the more than evident nuisance-value created by the din of rival politicians at the time of political elections, contemplatives are naturally expected to steer clear of all politics. The question arises then as to why spiritual and contemplative persons like ourselves, speaking of Unitive Understanding (advaita), and taking our position on the long spiritual tradition of India, should dabble in such subjects as government and politics at all; and the general reader would be justified in wanting to know the place of Advaita Vedanta in such a context.

Vedanta comes into contact with the problem of human welfare only indirectly, and sometimes after prayers there is a sort of ending benediction of "shanti", which consists of saying, "let all people in the world be happy". The welfare of humanity is thus not altogether outside the scope of the Vedantic tradition of India. Suffering anywhere in the world must be considered as belonging to the subject. Every such situation has the subjective side or the self-aspect which 

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might be outside the context of actual suffering, and the objective side or the non-self aspect, which is the actual seat or scene of such sufferings.

Advaita Philosophy, which is no other than the way of Unitive Understanding in its essence, must be capable of equating the self and the non-self as interchangeable terms. The suffering of fellow man thus equates itself naturally with the suffering of every true Vedantin. Bliss (ananda) and suffering (dukha) both take place within the self, which has the absolute status of cancelling its own subjective and objective prejudices. Advaita is a supposition taken between two rival aspects of the same problem. Thus the welfare of humanity and the suffering of even the smallest animal, such as an ant going to be lightly trampled upon by a vedantin, become subjects of equal concern to him by the two sides of the situation in which he is to be correctly situated.

It is not the suffering as we see it in the headlines of a morning newspaper, glanced at before breakfast in a light-hearted way, that is to be kept in mind here. Headlines big and small reflect major or minor disasters which take place in this world; and what is read in one daily newspaper is forgotten by the next morning's breakfast. This is the common way of taking a casual interest in politics. The difference between this way and the contemplative way that belongs to the Gurukula is that our interest does not fluctuate between morning and evening, or even between weekdays and Sundays.
Newspaper politics has to be reduced to a common numerator or denominator. We get thus a dialectical approach to politics which is, in our case, to be distinguished by two other terms besides Unitive Understanding. Firstly, we are interested in geo-politics, and not just politics. This implies that we treat of the planet Earth as a unit called "geos", in which politics is to be discussed in terms of Ius Solis, the Justice of the Earth. We are thus interested in world politics, and not just local or even national party politics. Secondly, our politics is based on a dialectical approach, the essence of which can be stated by the formula inscribed on the shields of the two female figures in the

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monument of the Swiss Confederation in Geneva, Switzerland. One tall female figure holds a shield bearing the inscription, "One for All"; the other corresponding counterpart of the same tall woman holds another shield, though placed on the ground, with the reciprocal part of the formula, "All for One". Thus between the General Good and the Good of All there is a dialectical interplay of values. Politics emerges into view, as amply proved in the "Social Contract" of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, when two factors, one standing for the General Good and the other for the Good of All, come into interplay.

These subtleties require much more elaboration than we can make in these short preliminary remarks. Geo-politics, thus understood geo-dialectically, is a special branch or discipline. We cannot go into all the detailed aspects here, but we can refer to some of the salient features of the geo-dialectical approach to World Government by way of indicating some of the highlights and by way of underlining some of the characteristics of this kind of politics, to show that such a subject is not outside the scope of a contemplative or spiritual way of life, especially at the present time, when mass communication portends a time when humanity will receive messages which cannot be distinguished from the medium, nor the medium from the message.

HUMANITY IS ONE
This is the a priori given basis of the World Government outlined in this memorandum. The recognition of the unity and solidarity of mankind follows from the correct application of the scientific or unitive approach to the problems of humanity. Just as belief in many gods is incorrect, so when humanity is considered relativistically as consisting of closed groups - however big or justified in the name of power or practicability - such a view violates this first and fundamental principle of the indivisible unity of Man. Humanity is one by its common origin, one in its common interests and motives of happiness here on earth in everyday living, and one in its relation to the aspirations and ideals which bind human beings together by bonds of sympathy for each other.

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A unitive and absolute value is at the basis of human life. This high human value knows no frontier, either actual or ideological. It makes no discrimination between rich and poor, high and low, civilised and backward. Sympathy for suffering and indignation against injustice to fellow men transcends time and clime, and reaches out evenly or pointedly, as the case may deserve, to the uttermost recesses of the one world which man inhabits.

HUMAN NATURE, 'GOOD' AND 'BAD' AT ONCE
To say that evil does not exist and that God created all men of good will sounds unrealistic to modern ears after all the experience of humanity which historians have recorded. To state, on the contrary, that evil is the basis of human life, leaves us equally unconvinced. The wary man would back out of the paradox involved by saying that the verdict would depend on the particular case, and refuse to generalise. He might even go further and say sophistically that the possibility of error or evil in human nature is what makes man human at all; and by the same token it could be argued that even evil must have a basis of goodness. Such arguments have brought human affairs up against impasses again and again. We are no nearer to the right answers to such questions than we were thousands of years ago. General scepticism drives people to sit on the fence.

Irrespective of time or clime, wise men have repeatedly tried to teach us a way out of these dilemmas. There is a method and a theory of knowledge proper to wisdom, which is not the same as that of logic, ratiocination or even 'objective' or mechanistic intelligence.

A NEW YET TIME-HONOURED APPROACH
Such an approach should be scientifically formulated. It will then resolve conflicting counterparts of a given situation or problem unitively, without conflict. Just as one humanity is true; so one absolute justice for all mankind, one goodness applicable to all mankind, and one God or ideal of human happiness could be stated to be at the basis of common human existence. The ordering of human life on unitive lines is the function of the World Government envisaged in the present memorandum.

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THE SCIENCE OF DIALECTICS
Whether human life is fundamentally good or bad does not concern us here as directly as whether it is possible to cancel out evil by the good residing in human nature itself: i.e. whether there is still hope for humanity to overcome ignorance by wisdom. The static verity of human goodness or badness should be viewed dynamically as belonging to the flow of human life shaping itself in time. Living unitive thinking is concerned with the progressive shaping of human life based on values which fuse into an ever newly-integrated flux which is subject to a constant process of becoming. The old order changes, giving place to the new. It is in this sense that wisdom is a perennial way of contemplation. This wisdom forms part of a science which could be called dialectics. The truth that makes men free and the knowledge that gives power are open and dynamic human values to be understood in the light of dialectics. The 'evil' that is necessarily present in human nature, when viewed unitively according to dialectics, is as true as the 'goodness' inherent in human nature, when viewed in a similar way. All values, positive or negative, when unitively understood, belong to a vertical scale of values which man must recognize, and at every moment he has to choose between opposite alternatives. At each step here a constant process of dialectical revaluation is involved, whether in the life of each man, each unit group, or of humanity as a whole. Such an approach to world affairs is what this memorandum recommends, and it is this which makes it so unique as legitimately to claim the attention of all lovers of humanity who are interested in a World Government, which for the first time is scientifically conceived. This newly formulated science, wherein pure dialectical reasoning is applied to problems of the world, may be called the 'Science of Geo-Dialectics'.

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THE GEO-DIALECTICAL METHOD
The geo-dialectical method consists of clearly recognizing the two counterparts which belong together in any given situation or problem to be eased or resolved in human affairs. Man is caught in necessity or bondage on the one hand; and on the other reaches out towards the contingent factor of freedom. If we could say that his necessity is symbolized either by the need for bread or by common hunger; contingency is symbolized by the need to live and breathe freely, and in fulfilling one's life according to the inner urges within each man. Man has to fulfil life according to his own nature without being stifled or suffocated. Bread and freedom, resolved into unitive terms of a central value, spell happiness. When each man is happy, all mankind is happy. When there is a general happiness of mankind as a whole, each man has his happiness most secure. No mother is happy unless her child is also happy; and no ruler is happy unless the subjects too are happy. To recognize and deal with the dialectical counterparts - while respecting fully the nature of the individual or the integrated personality of normal units called nations in such a manner as to cancel out counterparts in unitive terms of positive human values conducive to human happiness - is the basis of the geo-dialectical method. Being an applied part of pure dialectics, the full implications of this statement can be clarified only after studying dialectics. (1)

ANOMALIES, ABSURDITIES AND DANGERS OF THE MECHANISTIC APPROACH
The non-dialectical, non-unitive, mechanistic or unilateral approach which does not respect the integrated personality of nations or individual citizens gives rise to many anomalies, absurdities and disasters. If the case of a mother is taken up without including with it the case of the child; if the case of a ruler is taken without considering the ruled; or the master's case without the servant's - and even if we should forget to take into account that the one and the many are interdependent or reciprocally interrelated in a subtle dialectical manner - we invoke disasters large or small and sow the seeds of injustice and consequent suffering.

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Each man consists of what he is subjectively and what he holds as dear as life itself, such as his money, his family, or even his faith. These adhere closely to each person and result in the happiness that he craves for. National and cultural groups also have integrated personalities of their own which cannot be subjected without injury to a mechanistic treatment which is merely based on quantitative statistics or facts. Such roots of integration lie deeply buried in history. The partitioning of nations has resulted in genocidal tragedies.

Operating through decades or centuries, historical necessity gives the raison d'être to the jigsaw-puzzle-patterns of the differently-coloured patches on the mapped surface of the globe which school children are taught to distinguish as self-contained or autonomous political units, entities, states, countries or nations. Sometimes such patches tend merely to mark an area where lives an amorphous mass of people who are dictated to by external forces. Even while the child is being taught political geography, the patches change their outline or encroach on each other with a strange irrationality. These patches are not the result of any scientific ordering of the world, but are arbitrary and haphazard in their origin and growth.

They have been traced by wars old or recent, whether just or unjust, and the de facto status of certain units does not correspond to their de jure status in the present set-up of nations. The status of member-nations in present-day international bodies such as the United Nations depends on the veto or whim of the powers that be. No public or objective norms prevail here. Neither the natural law of the jungle, nor any law consciously formulated in any manner in keeping with the much-vaunted dignity of man, regulates internationalism at present.

THE ZERO HOUR FOR THE DECLARATION OF A WORLD GOVERNMENT IS PAST
In the days of chivalry, willing combatants fought duels in strict accordance with certain codes of honour consistent with human dignity as understood in those olden days. But the day has now come when a brave general is reported to be proudly contemplating the extermination of whole sections

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of people by the latest weapons which human intelligence itself has placed at the service of irresponsible adventurers. Instead of the knight-errant helping women and children in distress, humanity today hears of threats against the innocent and the unarmed. We hear of war criminals punished after wars have ceased, when we are not sure whether the punishment or the crime violates human codes of honour or justice. While their children wait for the horrible news outside the prison, parents get the electric chair for not keeping their own intelligence from helping those whom one nation or other suspects for the time being. Politics too keeps strangely changing its own complexion from day to day. Concentration camps and the lot of millions of displaced families who are denied papers year after year, making illegal even their right to work and earn a living - thus in effect taking away their de facto status as fellow human beings - prove that the days of barbarity and slavery are not over. Exposed to fear and insecurity, humanity knows not which way to turn for consolation. Helplessly, it looks on with impotence when the dignity of humanity itself is at stake. The zero hour for the declaration of a World Government, at least in principle, is long past. Such a Government must voice human honour and self-respect. It must preserve the wisdom-heritage of humanity and hand it down to coming generations. Those who love humanity and absolute human values at every level and in every department of life must be protected. Those who hate their fellow men for reasons that are not universally valid are as good as not existing. Those who adhere to rival relativist values are bound, in any case, to cancel one another out. There is no real need to name the enemies of humanity, because their days are numbered if humanity has any hope of survival at all. That humanity will survive, the supporters of World Government do firmly and solemnly believe.

Therefore the time has come for all lovers of humanity to take a definite stand, avoiding double-talk, duplicity, compromise and doubt.

NOTES
 1. See "Dialectical Methodology", "An Integrated Science of the Absolute", and other allied works by the present author.

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2. GENESIS

WORLD GOVERNMENT IS AN ACCOMPLISHED FACT
The World Government came into being (in principle at least) at Long. 63° 25' West, Lat. 44° 32' North on Sept. 4, 1953. Utter necessity was its justification. Very special states of stress, both personal and global, ushered it into being when a stateless person was forced into a closed territory against his own will or consent. Even a de facto citizen of the world already, with a fine record of service to the same closed territory or 'nation', was denied the right to make a living or pursue his own happiness. There was no government to represent him or stand by him. The World Government had therefore to be conceived, as though immaculately - though neither illegitimately, disloyally, nor dishonourably - born. "Time waits for no man"; "Better now than never"; "Necessity knows no law"; "All is fair in love and war" - these are some of the sayings that hold good here. It takes only two to start a quarrel or sign a pact, and only one to tell the truth. It is not numbers that can justify a government, but its intrinsic quality based on Absolute Truth or Justice. It takes but one to steer the ship to safety, though hundreds may weep and wail in vain.

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THE VALIDITY OF THE WORLD GOVERNMENT IS NOT QUESTIONABLE
If even today the simple accident of being born in a so-called royal family can justify the formation of an absolute monarchy. It can be seen that no principle of geo-dialectics is violated by the formation of a World Government. The World Government has no territory other than the surface of the globe. It is not conceived as a rival to any existing government, it does not intend to duplicate any of their functions, nor does it wish to be a parallel government, nor has it ambitions to be a super-state. On the other hand, it has no wish to occupy a second place among nation states. It has an absolute status of its own as understood in the light of the science of geo-dialectics already referred to in the usually- understood sense. The World Government has no programme of action or territorial ambition. It does not rule by force or by the power of magistrates or the police. Knowledge is its power and, instead of threats or punishments, it relies on the dictum that a word to the wise will suffice. Just as a ball of iron can be made white-hot without the ball itself suffering division, change, or control from outside, so the World Government proposes to influence humanity in and through humanity, and for humanity. Nothing is to be disrupted in the process. A certain type of truth which has been called the 'pearl of great price', the 'little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump' or that 'dharma' (right way of life), 'even a little of which will save from great fear' is the pinch of absolutist wisdom which is to be added to the chaotic world-situation so as help us to reorientate, reintegrate and regulate human affairs. In other words, the World Government applies a subtle form of vertical pressure corresponding to spiritual heat or electricity. Order then emerges, as with magnetised iron filings from non-magnetised chaos.

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CONFIRMATION OF THE WORLD GOVERNMENT
A second step forward in the formation of the World Government was taken at Long. 77° 38' East, Lat. 12° 58' North, on May 15, 1956. A recessive part of the world, never even to be suspected of any intention to dominate the world through its power, has been chosen this time as the location from which to confirm and sanction the first formation of the World Government in a dominant part of the world. To rise above suspicion, World Government has to be established neutrally between the dominant and the recessive aspects of world political life. No one carrying the threat of the atom bomb in one hand and a message of peace in the other can be trusted by others who sail in the same boat. Relativism breeds rivals while the correctly dialectical or absolutist approach unites and frees men in the name of a humanity which is understood unitively.

Between the initial formation of the World Government and its later more precise formulation and confirmation, nearly three years of experimentation, meditation and study have been undertaken. This second time, as stricter geo-dialectics would require, there were two sides, represented by two men, in the solemn pact before the declaration of the World Government. One of these contracting parties represented the good of all and the other represented the general good. This subtle dialectical contract sets the pattern for the growth of the World Government. Such a formation of an actual government, at least in a nuclear form, has been duly announced. More conferences could be contemplated in the near future in different parts of the world, involving those who represent the general good or the good of all, or both. The nuclear yet actual government will gather momentum by the good will of the people of the world from day to day, so as to become an efficient and effective instrument for the reorientation and regulation of human affairs under the aegis of the most high principle of Goodness, or the most supreme value of happiness that humanity can accept to regulate its life.

This memorandum hereby greets all lovers of humanity with the happy news of the birth of the World Government. Its presence is to be felt, not especially in any fixed locality or centre, but in every part of the world, wherever it can best serve its supreme purpose which is the political happiness of humanity

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It is however the global, unitive one-world politics of all mankind with which we are concerned here. Because of its absolutist character, this can be called both politics and no-politics at once, or a politics that gets rid of politics. In other words, the World Government is based on the pure politics to be known as geo-politics.

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OTHER PARTIAL APPROACHES

ALL APPROACHES HITHERTO ARE EITHER NEGATIVE OR RELATIVISTIC
To the natural question why we should not join hands with other organisations working already in the field of internationalism, we have to answer that there is the fundamental drawback that all of them are vitiated by either a negative or a relativistic approach. What we mean by these two expressions must be somewhat clear from what we have already said.

By negativism we mean that proposals for peace or disarmament have been based on a regret or a fear connected with wars just fought or wars expected. At such moments there is great volume of collective emotion available and those who offer quick results get nations to pay large sums for preserving peace, or in the name of security. The regret, however, passes, as also the fear. Positive attitudes take their place, and one organization which failed to fulfil its contract is succeeded by another in a modified form. This is how the League of Nations was displaced by the United Nations.

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The latter may be expected to go the way of its predecessor as soon as its impotence in the matter of securing peace becomes evident to all. It is patent that, in spite of its declared intentions, the UN has not been able to make its member-nations reduce their armaments, nor has it been able to mitigate the national excesses of its member nations. Of course in some matters it is better than nothing, but in other matters it is worse than nothing. Representatives of major nations get the chance to call each other names at the glorified debates held under the auspices of these bodies. With points of order, explanations of votes, amendments, counter-amendments and arbitrary powers of veto or methods of filibustering or blocking through satellite members, the UN has no power to implement even the smallest item in its own Declaration of Human Rights, not to speak of objecting to the dangers of atomic tests. Actually, it is used by power-groupings to sling mud at each other. At best it is a glorified debating society employing thousands of interpreters, stenographers and clerks who live and move in a beehive of modern buildings. They are obliged to keep the powers that be in good humour.

Every effort has already been made by the sponsors of the present World Government to try and work through the UN. The story is too long to relate here. Suffice it to say that it has been a signal failure.

By relativism we mean that some sort of duality, as between free nations and others who are not so, is still retained in the structure of the organization. The organization is not unitively conceived according to any science of absolutism. Representation, admission, or expulsion are based on no uniform norms of any science universally or publicly formulated.

PRIVATE, PARTIAL OR PARTY ORGANIZATIONS WITH WORLD PROGRAMMES
There are various religious, political or even commercial bodies which influence world affairs. There is the Communist Party, which shapes the trend of world politics. Then there is the Catholic Church and various other bodies which have world programmes.

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Commercial combines and banking agencies fulfil, openly or secretly, many functions which properly should belong to a World Government. These serve humanity in good, bad or indifferent ways; but as long as a correctly-formulated World Government is not there, no one has any right to find fault with whatever service they render or even with whatever exploitation they consciously or unconsciously exercise in world affairs.
International organisations exist in many departments, such as the Universal Postal Union, etc. Member nations may or may not ratify their resolutions, and even when they do so, the limitations of their own arbitrary sovereignty or nationalism are not wholly discarded. The approach to such problems is not based at present on any exact science such as we claim to be at the basis of the World Government envisaged in this memorandum. This class of organisation can be almost good or the next best - but just as one cannot jump a chasm in two leaps or expect a prize for the number nearest to the one that wins the prize, so the wholesale scientific basis of the World Government is all-important. The science of geo-dialectics is based on a rare and precious way of higher reasoning without which no World Government can be expected to succeed. Such undertakings would not be justified even if they should obtain a large measure of success. Here almost true is not good enough. This same verity is couched in the old saying that 'good government is no substitute for self-government'. The mandate for any government has to be derived from the people who are to be governed on the one pole; and from another pole, derived from the absolute justice implicit in any such government. Like religion or morality, there are two different sources to World Government. It has to be the resultant of ascending and descending dialectical counterparts. Such principles, however, can be made clear only in the light of general dialectics, which has still to be formulated and taught in the proposed Institute of Dialectics. Meanwhile we are here obliged to state with seeming dogmatism that partial and unscientific approaches to the problem of World Government are not valid.

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UNIQUE AND POSITIVE QUALITIES: WHAT THE WORLD GOVERNMENT IS NOT
We have already stated in passing that the World Government is not based on power with weapons or threats of punishment. Its authority is derived from humanity's need for it and from its rightness and justice. It has been mentioned also that it has no territorial ambitions or designs. It does not propose to arrogate to itself any functions that are already being fulfilled correctly by existing governments. No overlapping or duplication of functions is in the scheme presented here. Neither is diarchy or a parallel form of government contemplated. However, in spite of this position, the World Government will not be second to any other government. It will consciously avoid functioning even as a supra-state in the usual sense. If we should want to think of the political theory on which it is to be based, it can be said here in advance that it does not subscribe to the laissez-faire doctrine. Much less does it adhere to the doctrine of 'might is right', which, though more positive, is still outmoded. The Benthamian doctrine of 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' is also not in keeping with the principles of the present Government.

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It does not think quantitatively at all. That would make it fall into the capital error of being mechanistic or relativistic in its approach - which we have stated to be the very drawback we wish to avoid. It is based on a dialectical approach to world problems. What this implies we shall clarify as much as possible below.

BASED ON A SOLEMN PACT
The World Government is based on a solemn pact between the people of the world and their own dialectical counterpart in the form of a wise lover of humanity representing the general good of humanity as a whole. Although stated in the form of two aspects, these counterparts form the obverse and reverse of the same coin called Absolute Happiness, Goodness, or Justice of Humanity. This is a unitive central value, whatever the word-stimulus employed may be. Moreover, it is essentially a human value in keeping with the dignity of the human species. Bread and freedom will be provided for all when such a government comes into its full swing of effective and efficient working, by the conscious co-operation and understanding of the people of the world. Stated in the most general terms, the task of the World Government will be the intelligent ordering of human life-activities in a manner normal and natural to man, without violating his own innate dispositions, legitimate interests, or aspirations.

THE WORLD GOVERNMENT MUST GOVERN ITS SUBJECTS ACTIVELY OR POSITIVELY
It must be practical and effective in its functioning. Mere pious hopes like that of wanting to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth will not improve matters. A government worth the name must deliver the goods or benefits belonging to the domain of politics. It must make human life on earth less full of humiliation, helplessness or suffering. While this is right, the World Government must guard itself from falling into the opposite error of getting involved in a maze of overt actions which will fan feelings of rivalry and create more warring camps than ever.

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To avoid war, to guarantee collective security, to make co-existence possible or to practise the virtues of the "panca-sila" (the 'five principles' of the Bandung Conference, ED) of non-interference, or to cultivate an attitude of positive neutrality, have been the recommendations of some of the world's politicians for improving human affairs. These recommendations, though good as far as they go, embody the negative side of the virtue of international life. To leave matters well alone and not to make more rules than are necessary, are cardinal virtues for the World Government to cultivate. Stopping at harmless virtues which are still relative will not make a World Government function normally. The positive programme of the World Government has at every stage to balance or cancel out the negative, so as to strike the just mean between war and peace, activity and passivity, hot and cold attitudes, co-operation and competition. A constant pressure has to be maintained between these opposing tendencies so as to throw up constantly a higher value as an ideal for humanity.

POSITIVE PRESSURE AND VERTICAL ASCENT
A man becomes a better man by intensely and consciously wanting to be good. When he is good he should mind his own business and not interfere with others. His own inner urges as a man, insofar as they are in keeping with human nature as understood scientifically in all its bearings, have normally to get the full play of expansion and expression, without clashing with others who want to have the same chances. Those deep-seated specific qualities which distinguish man and make him unique and unrivalled, must be brought out into creative expression instead of lying dormant or unfulfilled. If virtues such as these apply to the individual, they could apply equally to families as normal units of human life. Rural or urban units could have personalities cultivating the same virtues or moral principles in keeping with a science or philosophy of human life. Bloated amorphous political units must also attempt to conform to the requirements of this geo-dialectical absolutist morality. When all formations follow the same laws, the order which constitutes World Government can be expected. No feverish horizontal activity is here involved.

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A certain positive pressure resulting in a vertical ascent is what needs to be constantly maintained in human life. This pressure can also be compared to a moral or spiritual heat or to the magnetising influence of a current of electricity. The principle of double negation and double assertion as known to scholastic philosophy in Europe should be understood as implicit here. Only a fuller treatise on geo-dialectics itself can clarify such matters more completely or elaborately.

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ACTIVE PROGRAMME: WHAT THE WORLD GOVERNMENT ACTUALLY PROPOSES TO DO
What the World Government actually proposes to do is first and foremost to bring to bear a new and total world-outlook upon world problems. It will help to turn out more and more world citizens. They will be human beings who have attained the full status of persons who represent the general good and the good of all. While making themselves happy according to the light of dialectical wisdom, they will constantly strive for the happiness of their fellow men in a manner consistent with the same wisdom. Such a balanced life between two interests, unitively treated, will enhance the value of the individual in society. He will carry with him a subtle influence or presence. Such a person would be a modern version of a knight-errant seeking the right kind of adventure to face in the name of his love of humanity. He would soon be appraised of innumerable opportunities presenting themselves to him where he can render signal service to his fellow men without going at all out of his way. Many such functions might lie outside the scope of geo-politics proper, with which alone we are primarily concerned in this memorandum.

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However, this should not deter such a man or woman from placing his or her high personal credit at the service of the cause of world citizenship and World Government. To call oneself a sovereign citizen of the world and consciously to affiliate oneself wholeheartedly to the noble ideal, reveals in one who does so the true human value which a lover of humanity must carry within him, thus enhancing his value at once with reference to himself and to all others with whom his lot is to live on earth. These are the rights and duties that such an affiliation at once confers.

As such a status comes from an understanding of the science involved, there is no danger of groups of such people considering themselves as belonging to any superior caste or group. The danger of such a contingency need not, however, be ruled out. On the contrary, all such world citizens should be taught to keep this danger constantly in their minds, to correct themselves consciously, and to help fellow world citizens to do the same. The danger, however, should not deter humanity from launching the undertaking; just in the same way that burst boilers or air crashes do not deter people from navigation or flying. Moreover, by the overall unitive approach which is the basis of the whole new outlook involved in the World Citizenship Movement, the danger of clannishness or caste-mindedness can always be counteracted consciously, even when the tendency is there. This unitive outlook is more deeply rooted than at that level of life where World Citizenship has to express itself, which at most is the waking world of the conscious ego. The unitive approach to reality will permeate the subconscious, the infra conscious, and the fourth stratum of transparent or direct awareness in the individual, so that the danger of exclusiveness as an individual will be countered very effectively. This is the definite advantage of this approach to world problems, being actually a particular branch of the general science of wisdom-dialectics. This will further guarantee proportion, balance, normality, wholesomeness, harmony, and humane grace or correctness to World citizenship.

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The success of the World Government depends on its ability to produce the right kind of world citizens as its champions in different parts of the world. They could be described as the most important single asset on the side of the undertaking.

POLITICAL PROGRAMMES CAN BE MADE EFFECTIVE FROM INSIDE OR OUTSIDE, FROM ABOVE OR BELOW, THE PRESENT FORMATION.
Once the reorientation of the spirit or the change of heart in regard to world problems has taken place in a given individual, and he feels keenly that he has to do something for the furtherance of his ideal, it is possible for him to do it from where he naturally happens to be. If he is a legislator he can stand for election on a World Government ticket. The immense popularity of the One World idea will only enhance his chances of success. According to qualitative geo-dialectical principles it would not be wrong for him to enter any given council, big or small, national or local, urban or rural, swearing allegiance to the head of that group or the head of several groups for the time being; for in doing so he would be recognizing only the symbolic absolutism implicit or inherent in the person (president or monarch) who happens to be at the head. Moreover, in terms of the universal human values for which he is a politician, there is no contradiction or conflict between the interests of that particular political unit and the human interests of the world itself taken as a unit. There is a geo-dialectical secret involved here which could be brought out by a homely example. If an old well should be hidden by a flood which covered it later, the water that quenches the thirst is the same water, whether it comes from the hidden well or from the lake overcovering it. There is no conflict possible between two concentric circles. This is the ancient wisdom found in the Bhagavad Gita, which comes to the rescue of world politics and by which the walls of all the Jerichos in the world must fall. The blast of absolutism from inside or outside the walls, or both together; by those placed superiorly above or in, as it were, helpless positions below - dominant or recessive men or women the world over have only to want with real solemn earnestness to make the World Government effective. Thus will the work of World Government become most practicable, positive, and irresistible.

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HOW TO PRACTISE WORLD POLITICS FROM INSIDE
When once elected to a local or national body on a World Government ticket, the man or woman concerned takes a course of action in keeping with the principles of humanity and world morality or value comprised between the two poles of bread and freedom. Taking his stand on the norms and standards of geo-dialectics, the world citizen generally takes a middle-of-the-road position in respect of leftist or rightist parties, and generally supports the president when absolute justice, morality or the ideal are not violated by his position. When resolutions are moved or voting is explained he gets a chance of placing before those who are politically-minded a new approach based on global human interests. He can bring token motions to cut armament budgets when disproportionate, and the people's sense of justice can be appealed to. If he should be ousted from the Council the people will follow him into the street if his cause is just and in the name of the interests of the common man and humanity at once.

Here, for the present, the possibilities of such action from inside must be left to the imagination. When permanent support for the world approach is certain, 'mondialisation' within such units is not impossible. Symbolic acts in keeping with the code of honour or morals proper to the world citizen could be resorted to, resembling Tolstoyan or Gandhian methods, as revised in the light of a stricter geo-dialectical science.

THE PRACTICE OF WORLD POLITICS FROM ABOVE
Men, and more especially women, who occupy positions of influence or who have resources at their command, can study the plans of World Government and bring their weight to bear on the side of supporting human rights and preserving the best in the heritage of mankind, whether in art, culture, or wisdom. Dante, Shakespeare, and Kalidasa belong to humanity first, and the claims of particular nations are for them only incidental.

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There is also the one perennial contemplative tradition based on a science of the Absolute, which is the common property of humanity. In preserving these and in protecting the common wisdom-heritage of mankind the best interests of the common man will be secured also.

Poor men, who have to make a living wherever it is at present available to them, are kept from freely reaching out to their God-given opportunities by artificial man-made rules. These rules must be broken down. Travel becomes more and more difficult and rules are piled upon rules by nations big and small, for no valid or justifiable reason except to retaliate in the name of national pride or exclusiveness. Parochialism, tribalism, casteism, and nationalism have much in common with fanaticism or blind orthodoxy. A world-philosophy and religion, critically and scientifically ordered, will help to relieve the existing asphyxiating conditions wherein miserable men and women have to live in the prison of criss-cross rules which is the present world. All modern people are keenly aware of this stifling atmosphere. The well to do, the influential, or at least their wives, must take interest in the poor, not to disrupt anything or anybody, but to bring just that kind of legitimate pressure which will ease the trouble of the common man. There can be a World Order of Ladies or Knights who could function as supervisors, permission authorities, world guards or witnesses of natural integrity, peacemakers or arbitrating advisers in the numerous walks of life in all matters ranging between the gaining of bread and the gaining of personal or spiritual freedom.

Premarital, post-marital and familial arbitration or advice, helping juveniles and children with possible maladjustments, the re-education of delinquents, psychological guidance, a pedagogy which respects the personality of the child, co-operative centres for the reclamation and relaxation of persons caught in the stress of life or in conditions of tension, and occupational guidance or treatment - these are only a few of the fields in which the world citizen could help the lot of humanity from wherever he or she might be living. A complete philosophy and a way of life shaped on unitive and absolutist lines are of course presupposed here. It will be the task of the World Institute of Human Affairs to elaborate, formulate, and make this available in the different languages of the world.

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THE PRACTICE OF WORLD POLITICS FROM BELOW
Individual men and women are caught in the barbed-wire frontiers, both ideological and actual, of rules and interdictions against freedom to pursue happiness freely and peacefully on the surface of the God-or-Nature-given earth. There has been no way hitherto for the articulation of their grievances. Not content with enforcing the rules of their own country, police belonging to one country have begun to help other countries in enforcing wrong rules in the name of internationalism. There is thus a double barrage of many absurd rules which themselves are multiplied beyond reason or necessity. The clever ones somehow get around every restriction, but the lot of the ordinary man becomes difficult. One only has to linger for a few minutes at passport or permit offices to be convinced of the large volume of suffering to which men and women are subjected. To refer even to a few typical cases would be outside the scope of this memorandum and would mar the sobriety of style which we wish to preserve here as far as possible. In one of his works, Ruskin had a paragraph from a daily newspaper printed in red ink because the subject was shocking to all decent human sentiments. The untold sufferings of the common man because of red tape and regulations would have to be printed in some other ink if they are to find a place in a memorandum such as this is intended to be.

What the common man could do is to register with the World Government as a world citizen and try to bring a vertically- conceived pressure to bear on the situation. He has to rely on numbers here to cope with the machinery of governments, which have a great deal of inertia in them. All shoulders have to be applied to the wheel to set affairs going normally. The trumpet blasts for absolute fairness from outside the walls of Jericho have to resound in consonance with the trumpet blasts from above or inside.

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THE OVERALL FUNCTIONING OF THE WORLD GOVERNMENT
The inarticulate feelings of the soul of humanity or the emergent personality of the people of the world, have to find a voice in the World Government. The point of view of the World Government has to be broadcast unhesitatingly, in no uncertain terms and even with authority. Truth must be given a chance to prevail. Relativistic compromise is what makes humanity weak at present. These are facts which need no repetition here. As the World Government emerges more and more into public view, it will represent the conscience of humanity and will spotlight from day to day the errors detrimental to humanity's interests. In such a task it must keep clear from tacitly or openly becoming a tool in the hands of any existing power-block. Even if help should be obtained from one quarter more than another, the World Government must be above suspicion in pointing out mistakes. The cheap headline-world of propaganda must be avoided. A Voice of Humanity and a World News Agency may be started to serve the cause of the World Government.

THE ISSUANCE OF WORLD PASSPORTS
The issuance of World Passports has already commenced. This would ease the situation arising in the cases of millions of persons who have no national status within nations. The response of nations is already there. Such persons will henceforth belong to the World Government. Their combined voice will and must be heard through the instrumentality of the World Government.

PROCLAMATION OF THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
The proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights made by the United Nations in Paris in 1948 gives a legitimate overall function covering many points so far remaining unimplemented. Many major and minor nations are already committed to the thirty articles in this declaration. In bringing vertical pressure to bear on this matter of implementation of that declaration, the World Government would be in fact only helping the great number of nations to be true to their avowed undertakings.

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TO HAVE A WORLD COMMITTEE
To have a World Committee to give assent to the World Government and its functions from time to time, to hold World Conferences to compare notes, and do all that is incidental to the formation and correct functioning of the Government, are also matters which are naturally to be provided for as normal to the programme of the Government as it is expected to unfold and expand quickly or gradually, as outside conditions and innate forces warrant. Powers of supervision and assent may be vested in a representative Select Committee of those who are wise normally or who have received proper training in the Institute of Dialectics connected with the World Government.

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6
JURISDICTION, REVENUE, RESOURCES, ETC., TERRITORIAL JURISDICTION
The territorial jurisdiction of the World Government is the surface of the Earth. It does not think about owning any limited area to run its own primary government with land taxes, frontiers to protect, and defence arrangements. Overweighed with these items, present governments are in many ways outmoded remnants of the past which must all be subjected to drastic revision. These revisions will take place automatically when the World Government as envisaged here begins to be more and more effective. Globalisation of select units of administration is not to be ruled out.
 
REVENUE
Revenue is to be derived from the principle of indirect taxation as it prevails even now. Though indirect, the revenue will be by mutual consent. Services rendered by the Government could be charged for and, while prime necessities will be exempt even from such taxation as far as possible, items of luxury could be freely taxed.

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Such matters will be attended to by the World Service Authority under the World Government. Indirect taxation is a form of profit which it is open for the World Government to make against services rendered. In fact, there exist even now trade combines and banking corporations - not to speak of religious bodies - which have enormous assets, sometimes as large and general as those of many existing governments. Economic and financial experts can see through the irregularities of some of the present monetary and other arrangements in which, by words such as 'going off the gold standard', or in dividing the world into 'hard' and 'soft' currency areas, wealth is conserved in pockets which, when examined by standards of absolute justice, do not belong to them. Gold is stored in vaults without use, for the artificially inflated credit of power blocks, and various book-adjustments are made behind the back of the common man to whom the money really belongs.

World banks and world currencies exist already without the regular consent of the people of the world, and what is called a loan to one country from another is not really a loan, but a long-term commercial deal. It would not be impossible for the World Government to have its own credit and currency, valid the world over, and planned on some rational human basis, such as having one day's labour equal one day's food and shelter, with a working week of 30 or 40 hours or even less, in a world where competition has been counteracted by co-operation, and where labour-saving devices are employed for more humane conditions.

As we have already said, the most valuable single asset of the World Government is the world citizen. Since world citizens can be found by virtue of the rightness of the cause in any part of the world in unlimited numbers, the assets of all well-intending people anywhere in the world are already in effect those of the World Government. A revised, living and organic system of accounting and budgeting has to be devised. There being no duality of ends and means in this work, receipts and disbursements need not necessarily show large figures. After all, on final analysis, large-scale banking is nothing but book-keeping.

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7
WORLD LAW
When we think of World Law, and of somebody who is able to conceive it on concrete lines, we are at once confronted with two rival aspects of the same question. A law is made to benefit a group of people; such a group of people, whether in a particular state or country or political unit, geographically understood or merely ideological in status, must consist of individuals. Each individual is likely to differ from other individuals in some detail or other at least. Temperaments and tastes have to tally with what each person receives or deserves to receive. One man's meat could be another man's poison. What a man needs may not be the same as what a woman needs, nor what a child might need. Thus, what is called the general good can never be the same as what is conceived as the good of each individual, or the good of all. One has necessarily to bring in the mathematical notion of the greatest common multiple or the least common measure when thinking of any one item that caters to the needs of a group treated as comprising individuals, or else as a general totality treated as one unit. To give a concrete example, a municipality might have 10,000 Rupees to be distributed generously. This amount might be spent in two ways: it could be used for giving a prize or

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scholarship to the best student at school; or else it could be evenly distributed to buy books or slates for every student in the municipality. In the latter case, it is the good of all that is behind the motive for the benefit conferred. On the other hand, in the first case of helping the best student, it is through the satisfaction of the individual that the benefit is supposed to be conferred on all the students. Thus in formulating beneficial laws for any group, one could think in only one of these two alternative ways. But law has to be conceived primarily for the benefit of the general good, and it should harmonise within its scope the good of all secondarily.

Between these rival claims of the general and the individual there is a subtle dialectical formula which has always to be respected. This formula could be stated in the words, "One for All and All for One". We thus arrive at the famous formula on which Rousseau's Contrat Social is based, and on which the Swiss Confederation has been conceived. A socialistically- conceived law respects the same dialectical formula when it lays down the maxim, "From each according to his ability and to each according to his need."

Thus, the lawmaker can take his stand on the general good or on the good of all when he formulates his laws. Just as an umpire cannot be a player in the game, it is not possible for one and the same person to fulfil these two roles, which are necessarily dialectical counterparts. It is therefore that Rousseau says that the man who lays down the law should be "oceans removed" from the problems of the group itself, so that the general good and good of all might have a healthy interaction. What could be good for a small group might not be good for a big country, although the overall structure of both might conform to the same pattern. Good government or law is the resultant of an equilibrium established between what represents the good of all individuals in it, and what is conducive to the general good of the group taken as a whole.

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THE GLOBAL STRUCTURAL PERSPECTIVE
Keeping this dialectical secret in one's mind, World Law must conform to an abstract structural pattern within which these two rival considerations can have a full and free scope for attaining a harmonious equilibrium, where individual interests cancel out against collective interests in every walk of life coming within the scope of government. Thus, World Government and World Law need not necessarily be thought of in terms of a world that is only geographically true. Whatever the extent of the population or government, the same structural pattern and the same dialectical counterparts are found to prevail within its total frame of reference. A World State has therefore to be conceived of first as a structural abstraction, while the functions of the state and its head - who is always a singular person - with all the other ramifications constituting the functions of a government, whether de jure or de facto, have to be thought of, as Rousseau has been able to do masterfully in his "Contrat Social". But Rousseau remains even to this day a much-misunderstood man. Let us therefore briefly turn our eyes elsewhere to see if this same dialectical approach is found acceptable to any other tradition or civilization. Here we are confronted with a surprising coincidence. In ancient Sanskrit literature, there are revealed norms and patterns of behaviour attributed to celebrated kings such as those of the Solar Dynasty descended from Manu, the first lawgiver. Kalidasa's "Raghuvamsa" is an epic of nineteen cantos, each of which depicts a king who conforms to this same dialectically-conceived and structurally balanced pattern of behaviour. Economics, ethics, aesthetics and education are all woven inextricably into this general political fabric in the works of Kalidasa. The King, who is a ruler of earth, is treated as a replica of Indra, the ruler of heaven and its denizens, the only difference being that of levels of value-systems, each having its centre in a scale of a vertical series of points. Politics and law are thus conceived of under the aegis of what is called an absolute pattern of principles as well as of behaviour. Any World Law has thus to be formulated with due respect for these relational aspects.

Besides the masterpiece on such a subject by Rousseau, it would be profitable for the modern student of World Law to

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scrutinize in great detail the implications of a unified World Government as revealed in the writings of such great poets as Kalidasa, more especially as such matters are brought into relief successively with reference to the long line of model monarchs in whose praise the immortal epic "Raghuvamsa" itself been conceived. World Law is likely to receive a valuable original impetus when studied on the broad basis of a two-sided or dialectical interaction between the general good and the good of all, especially in India where holy tradition seems already to be in favour of such an approach. Rousseau's name, supplementing such a view from the Western World, would be sure to give it additional confirmation and support, even in the light of the most modern political theories. World Law thus becomes one that is unwritten, as well as being easily given to a common sense of justice in human relations. It is thus in this double perspective that we invite the attention of students to this all-important subject.

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8
CONCLUSION
THE UNITIVE APPROACH
When it is said that wars begin in the minds of men, conversely it is already admitted by even full-fledged politicians that the solution to world problems is of a spiritual order. The doctrine of Dialectical Materialism, which puts necessity and hunger first, follows another line of approach. Both these approaches can be reconciled in a unitive approach to world problems as implied in the present memorandum.

Let us consider the armaments race, which is due to mistrust and fear of other nations. A serious proposal from the World Government is sure to have an almost magical effect in easing the tension of mistrust between nations.

The de-hypnotization of the mentality of mutual suspicion will save every nation, large or small, from the lop-sided provisions at present made in their budgets. Let world opinion merely support the idea of the World Government and a tangible relaxation will be felt at the poles in the personality of nations which breed mistrust; and even a theoretically respected authority can avoid the waste of billions of dollars for the world as a whole.

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VARIOUS INCIDENTAL ITEMS
Let the World Government honour the farmer instead of vexing him with ever more items of taxation; let it start co-operative colonies to ease the tension of competitive life, such as those now working successfully in Israel, known as Kibbutzim, where there is no money exchanged at all; let it start fair-price shops, taking a percentage in the place of a tax, and so effectively eliminating the middleman, the black-marketeer and those who corner the necessities of life and make great and disproportionate profits at the expense of the common man; let it create clubs or pensions for persons obliged to pass their lives in eternal boredom, by means of colonies for the young, the old and the weak, which will give them natural outlets for expression and opportunities for light occupation without competition; let it confer titles or honours on people who render signal service to the needy and thus give them a legitimately-deserved chance to shine in the eyes of their fellow men. Such are some of the miscellaneous ways - too numerous to list completely - by which the World Government can justify its existence while it gathers momentum to be finally effective.

DECENTRALIZATION AND THE CANCELLING OUT OF PROBLEMS
Another method full of possibilities for the World Government is decentralisation, and the method of cancellation of the plus and minus of a given situation. For instance: capital is the cause of the sufferings of labour; large factories are responsible for slums; promiscuous religious charity is responsible for begging - these pairs that are interdependent could be cancelled out one against the other without punishment or reform coming from the centre. The head and the tail aspects can be cancelled-out dialectically without central interference. The World
Government can help in the ordering of such matters, taking into consideration the counterparts involved in each problem.

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NEW STATES
There are many new states which require a new and fresh constitution. They could be guided by the World Government so that their new constitution would be framed in the spirit of World Government itself. This would prevent their disruption when world-mindedness in politics becomes a fully- accomplished fact.

THE NEED FOR SACRIFICE ON THE PART OF WORLD GOVERNMENT SPONSORS.
The sponsors of World Government have ever to keep before their minds that only through sacrifice and renunciation can such a noble idea be ushered into being. Human unity is an idea which is valid in theory at present. For people to adhere to the idea earnestly, they have to be sure that those who stand for it are not themselves lovers of power or grabbers of goods with unholy greed. Such a detachment should not be merely superficial, taking only the outward form of abstinence or even austerity.

Happiness in the contemplation of the self in its absolute sense, alone brings that blissful self-sufficiency which belongs to one who is able to be an exemplar of wisdom. This contented state of happiness is induced by knowledge of the science of the Absolute. A human being attains to his full stature as man when he is happy with himself, and thus in himself represents this high human value. Such an ideal is within the reach of every human being, without distinction of race, religion, nationality, sex, or even station in life. Even the humblest can walk in the way of the Absolute. A bad man who has taken the decision to regulate his life with reference to this final absolute norm of human life becomes by that mere decision equal in spiritual status to the greatest of wise men.

Thus, having referred finally to the fountain-source of wisdom from which one has to drink if one is to become a world citizen in the fullest sense of the term, we hereby commend this memorandum with all its imperfections to the attention of those generous spirits who are favourably disposed to examine it with sympathy and earnest understanding. Let those who are not of this category at least spare the sponsors of the memorandum their disadoption of it and consequent disparagement of its contents. Such is the prayer with which this document goes out to lovers of Wisdom and of Humanity.

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PART II
ONE-WORLD ECONOMICS

INTRODUCTION

Economics deals with wealth as a value in life. Political economics as talked about in our times, whatever it might really be in itself, is confined to such subjects as would tend to make a chancellor of the exchequer act more intelligently than he might have done had he not studied them. The subject of economics has been laughed at by most serious thinkers, and been dubbed a 'dismal science'. It is based on a chronic desire in man to become richer and richer. In this sense economics is not a science at all, but reflects the diseased condition of an individual who thinks of the wealth of nations, or of one nation, from the egocentric standpoint of self-aggrandisement.
The conflict involved in economics is paradoxical: one is to love one's neighbour as oneself, but at the same time Britannia must rule the waves.

Between such rival positions, economics textbooks range in endless variety, wherein so-called wise people indulge themselves in notions such as those of supply and demand, production and distribution, or communication, transport and exchange. The token-value of a coin should not be mixed up with its precious metallic content, and an unintelligent change in the proportion of silver added to minted coins in a state can make all the coins

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disappear from the country in the twinkling of an eye. Such are some of the dangers that economics textbooks warn the Chancellor of the Exchequer about.

The spiralling of prices, increases of rent-value, pressures of population, the efficacy of tariff walls - unjust and immoral in themselves, in which crag-barons rob bag-barons, as Ruskin would put it - give us an endless variety of textbook subjects as taught in colleges and universities of the present-day all over the world. One hears of a possible explosion of population, and the control of displaced persons to keep them from seeking livelihoods beyond national frontiers. Liberty is flaunted at every step of what passes for good economics.        
                             
VAGUE THEORIES AND QUESTIONABLE PRACTICES
Subjects like inflation are as vague in the minds of economists as in the most ancient days, when economics was not taught in schools as a science, as it is at present. We are told that it is good to have a high standard of life in a country, while at the same time there are economic experts who ascribe the spiralling of prices to too much planning. Quantities of edible products are known to be buried, burned or thrown into the sea so that the height of prices could be maintained, without respect for the hunger of people who might be starving.

Every market-woman knows that supply and demand have to balance each other, but the relation between production and exchange is still a mysterious factor. One hears of countries like England going off the gold standard at a given moment - when it is their turn to pay their debts - while they themselves respected it at the time that the standard was favourable to them. Whether this is honest dealing has been questioned by eminent authorities, irrespective of the side they took in economics.

There is recognition of such factors as sterile and fecund wealth; as also of the possibility of  'creating credit' to help nations in special kinds of economic distress, who could be allowed time to recover by long-term credit adjustments arranged by financial magnates who meet in secret to have questionable dealings.

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A bank can function with only one-tenth of its capital inside its coffers and carry on ten times the volume of business without anyone knowing whether the assets are really in the vault or not. It is the "Big Ten" - whether in Wall Street, Lombard Street, La Bourse, or in Bonn or Tokyo - who decide the fate of other people's money without their consent, and without telling them what they are doing in their names.

Insurance companies gain enormous profit by maintaining account-books in big buildings like the Empire State Building. Their article of trade is the natural fear or anxiety among the generality of their clients whom they exploit on the basis of their gullibility, promising security from fire or fear, etc. 'World Banks' seem to lend money to help borrowers, while actually being primarily interested in promoting their own exports. The dumping of condemned goods from 'advanced' to 'backward' countries contains a snag to which only now are people like Chavan (the then Finance Minister of India, ED) opening their eyes. 'Hard' and 'soft' currencies are differentiated without justice in respect of the membership fees of so-called World Banks. Scarcity economics has created an impasse which has climaxed into what is now understood as a joke under the name of Parkinsonianism. "Maintain the price line"; "don't let the dollar wobble"; "keep the pound steady" - these are slogans referring to economic malaises which come to evidence in various countries, the remedies for which are equally vague and have to be guessed at from the graphs of such bodies as the Chase Manhattan Bank, whose experts know everything.

The 'iron law of necessity' regulates the relationship between labour and capital, but there is a more complicated surplus-value theory which has come into the picture of economics and for the clarification of which one has to read Engels' "Anti-Dühring", where he discovers the subtle relationship between production and exchange - more difficult to understand than the graphs of infinitesimal calculus - where parameters cut curves marking ups and downs in the economic progress or regression of a given country.

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Lastly, nobody speaks of a World Economics at all. There is no textbook of World Economics, though economics as a science - if it really is a science - should necessarily be most directly concerned with the happiness of humanity as a whole. Instead, economists visualize a world consisting of differently-coloured Hitlerish patches of territory, from within which each man is thinking hard economically so as to defeat his neighbour. Such is this dismal or sombre science, which is not a science at all.

STATISTICS AND SCARCITY ECONOMICS
The greatest prop of this science is statistics, about which Mark Twain said that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. Statistics can prove anything, and one can easily rob a neighbouring country by using high finance based on false statistics. Statistics about population are the worst of all. They say that God protects his creation, but there are at present international agencies which kill human progeny before they are even born. All textbooks declare that the Malthusian theory of population is an exploded one, but castration of men and women based on the most garish of inducements rudely violates and circumvents the law of the individual, in a manner that could only be described in mild terms as questionable.

Opulence and abundance are not distinguished sufficiently clearly. Creating scarcity can raise the standard of life; but living in plenty is said to be a backward condition, only because such backward countries do not buy transistor radios or refrigerators, and because the women take care of their wealth by keeping some gold ornaments in their boxes. Why they are wrong is not clear to any intelligent man.

Combines and monopolies are a menace to those who have no shares in such concerns, and at whose expense they become rich. A 'limited liability company', which is respected in the eyes of the law, amounts to pooling the funds of several capitalists so that the power of the bag could weigh more heavily on the poor people who are not able to pool their resources in the same way. Ruskin stated this truth most pithily in his "Crown of Wild Olives", when he said, "bags and crags have the same effect on rags."

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The same applies to politics when economic blocs are formed between countries, and 'common markets' instituted so that their bargaining power against others could be strengthened. Paper money is not always supported by tangible wealth within the vaults of big banks. Even world currencies are being floated by big companies, cutting across the currencies of nations in circulation - the moral justification of which is still to be clarified. Indefinite credit can be created by financial experts meeting together now and then, giving them enormous power over the inarticulate masses who are always the sufferers at the hands of the more clever ones in the world. Paper currency cannot be eaten instead of rice or wheat, and its value has to reflect those aspects of wealth which are not just paper but which touch human well-being more directly and actually. The great discrepancy between the two spells grave disasters underneath the visible level - no power is trying to balance them, and no textbook tells us how to make the correspondence between them more compatible, just, or even barely honest.

All economists cry themselves hoarse against unemployment. The present writer is unemployed, but has never been sorry for it all his life. Economists sometimes create problems which really do not exist, or at best exist only in their imagination, propped up by that master lie called statistics.

LAISSEZ-FAIRE
In short, what we wish to point out is that whatever measure an economic authority might consider applying to a situation in a country, whether advanced or backward, mercantilist or agriculturalist, in an opulencist or abundancist context; whether standards there are high or low; where demand and supply are not balanced, and where inequality is the prevailing given datum in whatever branch of economics - it would be better to leave affairs well alone to let them find a natural balance between the rival prevailing forces. 'Do not control population, lest the balance of nature should be disturbed'. This is a dictum which has been proved with rabbits in Australia.

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The lopping of a tree makes that part of the tree proliferate all the more. Shaving too often only increases the growth of beard. Such subtle factors have all to be taken into consideration before a complete theory of economics could be developed, more especially, as we have said, in respect of the one world of tomorrow.

The laissez-faire policy of Bentham must have been suggested by such a line of thought; but who takes it seriously? Planning, on the other hand, and even over-planning, is the order of the day, in spite of such ideas as Parkinsonianism becoming equally credible side by side with it. One might ask, what is the remedy? The answer is simple, but will surely not receive the approbation of professional economists, because it would imply indirectly that they should put themselves out of commission.

AN ABSOLUTIST APPROACH REQUIRED
Relativistic theories of economic happiness must give place to an economics based on norms and constants derived from an absolutist standpoint. Slogans like "Liberty, Equality Fraternity", "The greatest good of the greatest number", "laissez-faire", "equality of opportunity for all" and all the varieties of socialistic dicta such as "dictatorship of the proletariat", "classless society", etc., have all of them the needle pointing in the same direction - towards the need for a normalized form of economic theory based on first principles, rather than one which serves as a basis for further fanning into flames rivalries that lurk within the relativistic set-up, however good they might be by utilitarian standards. Lukewarm economics favours the fecund proliferation of injustices which keep creeping up from its hotbed. Such an economics can create more problems than it can solve.

VOICES IN THE WILDERNESS
We have to turn away from formulating further economic theories in which relativism is allowed to vitiate our approach, even at its very inception. There are no textbooks at present which seem to fulfil this requirement, except in the voices of

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protest against modern economics raised by such lovers of humanity as Plato, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Ruskin, Carlyle, Quesnay, Compte, St. Simon, Gandhi, Thoreau, Emerson and others. These voices are hardly audible above the clamour contained in other literature, and they are put into the shade by not being taken sufficiently seriously. We have, therefore, to turn our eyes elsewhere for any consolation in such an important question which intimately touches the happiness of humanity.

If we look over the utopian pictures that have been painted in various books describing a perfect state of economy prevailing in any country - which stand self-condemned by the very meaning of the term 'Utopia' as applied to them - we have only a very thin and negligible quantity of literature left which could be said to describe a normal viewpoint. It is that part of economic theory which stems out of the totality of values in the world that can relate the subject correctly to that very zone of general happiness from which alone an axiologically-based subject could derive its origin.There are starting postulates and premises for every precise science.

Literature often tries to portray perfect conditions to serve as a model or basis for further discussions on the subject. It was because such a model was needed that Gandhi often alluded to "Ramarajya" (the rule of Rama, or God) for expressing his own special ideas. One could substitute this term with another equally good, which we could call "Dharmarajya" (the rule of Dharma), which would however have a Buddhistic flavour of Asoka's time. Constantine's empire and the days of Akbar and of Asoka have left impressions recorded in literature, with economic theories directly or indirectly stated in them. Mahabali and Dilipa were also just rulers in whom absolutist standards of ethics, economics and aesthetics were supposed to have prevailed. Their stories continue to inspire generations of humanity, even to the present day. Although in their approach to value-judgements, economics is treated together with other subjects as being only one among many of them, it is not impossible to derive the purest of guiding principles from such writings. There is the whole of Kalidasa's "Raghuvamsa", which affords us ample ground for searching for normative

50                             
guidelines in formulating a new theory of economics in the absence of any at present, as we have said, which could be called normalized at all.

CANDIDE
Before recommending that we should turn our eyes to the wisdom of the 'Golden Period' of Indian history for gleaning guidelines on this subject, which might itself be said to be a product of Western civilization, we have to establish sufficiently clearly that economics in the West has proved itself to be a complete failure so far. It might be suspected that such a sweeping statement could be due to some old-fashioned mode of thinking not at all acceptable to the ways of the Age of Enlightenment, of which men of the twentieth century are unquestionably proud. How could backward countries even think of criticising advanced countries to say that they are wrong?

In such a predicament, one has the unstinting support of a writer and thinker of unquestionable status, who could himself be said to be one of the representatives and forerunners of what we call the Age of Enlightenment. Between him and Rousseau, we have two great names in the history of modern thought who could be said to be the harbingers of modernism itself, leaving behind the mentality belonging to the so-called Middle Ages. One has only to mention "Candide" to modern enthusiasts of Western economy with their contempt for anything old or oriental to see how the very name itself succeeds in turning the tables against their stand. "Have you read 'Candide'?" is all that needs to be said to see the retroactive effect on the face of an enthusiast of the economics of the West. Opulencist economics, mercantilism, the 'Gold Rush', the South Sea bubble that burst, and the adventurous search for Eldorado or the Golden Fleece are all satirised in this classic by Voltaire.
 
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THE NORMATIVE FRAME OF REFERENCE IN KALIDASA
Indian scholars did not compartmentalize disciplines unnecessarily. Thus, valuable theories of ethics, aesthetics and economics find unitive treatment in the vast body of classical Sanskrit literature - particularly in the works of Kalidasa, the uncrowned king among poets of the Indian soil. Vikramaditya's empire must, as scholars think, have been a model of economic success. The theories which contributed to such a success must have influenced Kalidasa's own theories. There are many precious passages from which the groundwork of economic theorisation itself could be collected. Even the verses of the "Kumarasambhava", when carefully examined, reveal their own economic theory, studied at a point where all human values stem out of the context of the atman or self. Man is the measure of all things, and the proper study of mankind is man. One must first know oneself, and be true to oneself, and one cannot then be wrong. The normative reference for wisdom was seen to be located and rooted in self-knowledge, and was fully, schematically and structurally analyzed by the Upanishadic seers, conforming to a fully scientific and sound methodology, epistemology and axiology. It is true that Sanskrit literature is clothed in the cryptic ideograms and favourite clichés of its own peculiar "lingua mystica". This does not detract, however, from the fundamental postulates and sound starting premises of the economics envisaged therein. It has to be treated as a study in itself, before its contributions could be analyzed and enumerated so as to reveal their great value in acting as a corrective to modern economic theorisation.

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10
GOLD IN WISDOM'S LANGUAGE
Gold is the God of the world of finance. It occupies a central position among things that men, and women more especially, wish to possess and keep. The value of all other things is determined mostly with gold as the norm or standard. Although it is a thing, when related to man it has more of a perceptual status than that of a mere outside object. Its utility is often a theoretical and negligible factor. It is by the intimacy that gold is able to establish with human beings in a personal sense that it gets its value. It thus reflects a state of mind of which the businessman knows how to take advantage. If we should toss a gold dollar and handle it we are struck by its weight and its sound quality, revealing its superlative materiality. In addition, it has a dull gleam resembling the subdued brilliance of some of the distinct stars. Of the earth most earthy, it has yet about it something celestial. Its radiance embellishes the glory of the sceptre or the crown of kings, and the spires of temple towers shine with its lustre. It is thus more than a mere piece of inert matter, and this must be the reason why the "Tarka Sastra" (the Indian science of categories, relations of things, analogies, etc.) brings it under the category of "tejas" (fire, light) rather than under that of earth. It is thus lifted hypostatically and glorified

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in the philosophical thought of India. Its mysterious role in human affairs, dating from antiquity to the present-day, seems only to justify this status.

IN MATTER-OF-FACT LANGUAGE
When gold is yet in its raw or natural setting in the womb of the earth, it is hardly more than a virtuality or a potentiality. Once brought to the surface after good luck in prospecting, speculative investment and many man-hours of labour, it might be made into ornaments or plates to stagnate in the form of treasures or relics. Its main role is to pamper vanity. Through gold the newly rich and more ancient nobles get the ostentatious satisfaction of shining in contrast to the ragged poor around them. These 'bag-barons', as Ruskin would call them, like the 'crag-barons', as the same writer nicknames them - who were not other than highway robbers hiding in places of vantage against unwary travellers - had the same effect on 'rags', who were the poor. Thus he developed the famous aphorism: "Bags and crags have the same effect on rags".

When gold does circulate from hand to hand, it happens more often secretly, sluggishly, or slyly avoiding the public gaze. It takes the form of a gratification, a personal consideration or a mark of favour. Even at times of inflation, which is a form of modern economic malaise, gold's value is not affected much, and gold is not scattered about in the same way as paper currency. There is a steady dignity in its 'buoyancy' or 'shyness' in the money market.

THE DRAGON OF FINANCE
When once outside the personal or domestic context, gold has an elusive way of hiding in safes or vaults. In national capitals like Moscow, Paris, London or Washington, the gold exists more by supposition in the form of credit, which can be abstract or concrete or both. Even there it is an elusive presence. Mutually protected against rival officers, who may themselves represent business or government interests or both, it has a way, as has been

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reported recently, of being just 'found missing'. Later, when nobody is the wiser, book adjustments can set matters right, and neither business nor government are visibly worse off for it. Regeneration and recovery apply to money as well as to life or health. Whether the actual gold is in a mine or buried somewhere by a miser, or still in the forty acres of London's Banking District - it makes no perceptual difference to the actual individual human, whose meal reaches his mouth by the resultant interaction of multifarious life-factors and circumstances both man-made and natural.

Credit can be created at the head-end of the dragon of finance while the debit is a virtuality residing at the dragon's tail where gold-prospecting might be in progress. Irrespective of the amount of gold, and in spite of more and more being dug up, human life in its most vitally necessary aspects goes flowing on the same as ever. Gold makes itself evident through the newspapers now and then as a customs' haul, as a contraband article in the most unforeseen places, or as a treasure-trove unearthed thousands of miles away from its origin thousands of years later - making men ashamed or proud under varying circumstances. Gold-infatuation also comes now and then into evidence in human affairs as a fecund cause of culpable homicide.

THE NORMATIVE PRINCIPLE OF POSSESSION
We read in "Don Bell Reports" the following interesting commentary:

"Throughout the Babylonian Empire, temples were built to worship false gods. Within the temples were strong-rooms presided over by priests (later to be called bankers). The priests exhorted the people to bring their gold and other precious items to the strong-rooms for safekeeping. Customers were handed little clay tablets as receipts (paper not yet being invented). The people paid interest to the priests (20%) for guarding their gold. And since it was inconvenient 'to go to the bank' for every transaction involving the use of gold, clay tablets began circulating

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as a 'medium of exchange'. The clay tablets were backed by gold supposedly deposited in the local Fort Knox. So nobody questioned the use of clay tablets instead of gold. But the priests of the strong-room made a startling and history-shaking discovery. People seldom called for their stored gold. Less than ten per cent of the gold was ever called for in a single day. Therefore, clay tablets representing ten times the amount of the gold on hand could be issued, and no one but the bankers themselves would ever be the wiser. The banker could loan out ten times the value of the actual deposits and remain solvent. So instead of making twenty cents on each dollar in hand he could issue credit money and make ten times twenty cents on each dollar in hand - or make two dollars profit for each dollar actually deposited in the bank."(1)

Gold thus enters into human life as finance. The possessive instinct of human beings and the advantage of one dealing with the possessions of many by proxy, as it were, in a thing like gold, is at the basis of this kind of financial relationship which works to the mutual advantage of both borrower and lender. 'Interest' and 'discount', which vary only in the time of actual use of value, makes for the thriving of banks. The modern bank rate may be more just and better founded, but the reference of finance to gold and the constant chance of ten per cent in favour of the banker are features that have not changed and cannot. The 'inverted pyramid' of the credit system thus becomes erected, with which the common man who cashes a cheque or buys a meal is unconcerned, or which he ignores.

WORLD CREDIT SYSTEM'S NEED OF A GOLDEN RULE
Nimrod, who founded the city of Babel at the dawn of history, is said to have started to use gold as a norm in state affairs. Nebuchadnezzar, fifteen hundred years later, established the gold standard publicly. Although Britain went off the gold

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standard as early as 1931, it holds on to gold as tenaciously as in days of antiquity, for the sake of regulating its international commitments through the Bank of International Settlements at Basle, Switzerland, or the 'World Bank'. The Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank of America or of the Bank of England are the architects of what is called 'sound finance' for their respective areas, or for world finance generally, which might be in the interests both of governments and of business at once.
   
There are lurking contradictions at the core of financial policies which are of a secret dialectical order wherever the interests of one comes into relation with the interests of the many - whether at the social, national or international level. The laws which might hold good in regulating the 'Credit of Nations' will not hold good the same way in dealing with 'One-World Economies', which transcends national interests. Private or limited liability-finance is thus different from public unlimited liability-finance, which makes all the difference to the justice or validity of the transactions. Without any unitive wisdom-principle being consciously introduced here, chaos in world credit is bound to prevail. A golden rule based on the virtues of integrity, trustworthiness, parsimony in the interests of one and all, and the just use of the power of credit, is involved here - a rule which has still to be properly formulated.

SPIRITUALITY AND GOLD-VALUE
Saints or spiritually-inclined men have generally despised gold (with wine and women) as filthy lucre. The worship of false gods or Mammon is also associated with the worship of the golden calf in Mediterranean religious history. Even a coin placed under the bed of Sri Ramakrishna of Bengal is said to have shocked him in a strange way; and it is written of him also, maybe rather imaginatively, that he used to throw lumps of gold and mud into the river Ganges to prove to himself and others the truth of the dictum, otherwise familiar to many Indians, that the man of wisdom considers a lump of clay, a pebble and a piece of gold with the same equanimity of mental attitude (Gita, VI.8). A saint generally

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wishes to live outside the world of high finance. The plain living and the parsimonious economical virtue that they generally cultivate for the emulation of their immediate followers, makes them consciously or instinctively recognize the truth of the saying of the American philosopher Thoreau, "superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul." (Walden, Conclusion)

The Guru Narayana was once offered some natural flowers with a few gold ones thrown among them, by way of a pious birthday offering by a rich devotee who thought of surprising him and pleasing him by such a gift. The Guru picked a flower made of gold and, smelling it, remarked disappointedly that it had no scent. This was a gentle way of teaching the difference between the real value represented by a fresh blossom and the false value implied in the gold of the rich man. On another occasion, on the contrary, the Guru was known to have himself presented a gold coin to a disciple who was starting on a long voyage. He had questioned the same disciple already about his attitude to money and, on his telling the Guru that it was superfluity for a spiritual person, had remarked also that it was natural for one to keep money and use it, if only for purchasing a railway ticket.

Pastoral communities that might survive in mountain seclusion - as in Nagaland, where salt still takes the place of gold - may be supposed to live in a more or less self-sufficient economy of their own, in which currency in our sense may not hold good. Money, like everything else, is right in its proper place, when used with proper human intelligence or wisdom. Economists like Adam Smith have also voted on the side of saints when they wrote such words as these:

"A rich country, in the same manner as a rich man, is supposed to be abounding in money; and to heap up gold and silver in any country is supposed to be the readiest way to enrich it …Among the Tartars as among all other nations of shepherds who are generally ignorant of the use of money, cattle are the instruments of commerce and the measure of value. Wealth therefore according to them consisted of cattle, as

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according to the Spaniards it consisted of gold and silver. Of the two, the Tartar notion was the nearest to the truth." (2)

WISDOM FROM MYTH AND FABLE
Much wisdom about gold is enshrined in mythology, fables and parables. The gold disc that is said to hide the face of truth is mentioned in the Isa Upanishad. It refers to the false relativistic value which can hinder the vision of the absolute value behind it. The Hiranya-Garbha (gold-germ), which represents the supreme value of the Vedic hedonistic context, is the ontological and hierophantic counterpart of the disc of gold hypostatically referred to above. Between them they may be said to touch the two poles of value in the world of gold.
The golden ladder of Jacob's dream in the Bible (Gen. 28. 12), which touches heaven and earth and where angels with wings, who are supposed to be wiser and holier than ordinary men, go up and down, refers to the same two aspects of values, as in the Gita (XV. 2) where branches of the great fig tree turn upwards and also downwards.

The language of myth is not meant to be realistic or logical. Myths are to be understood with the help of intuitive imagination which can enter into the spirit of the situation, something which even the shrewdest of financiers are not usually capable of doing in any thoroughgoing sense. In the Indian legend, Prahlada suffered because he would not worship Hiranya (gold personified). There is also the famous fable of king Midas, the object of which is to bring out the difference between gold to be possessed as a thing and the gold that is a mere symbol of possession. The boon of the golden touch became a curse because of the "adhyasa" or false attribution of reality to the wrong aspect of gold in the mind of the king. Normal human relations with his own daughter were thereby frustrated. It is the distinction between the real fatted calf and the golden calf set up for worship which annoyed Moses.

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This confusion between the perceptual and the actual object is a fecund cause of error, by which even very worldly-wise financiers can make grave mistakes in calculations which concern the everyday happiness of millions of human beings who come under their money-power. False and true credits are hard to distinguish except through the highest kind of dialectical wisdom.

Even such wisdom is not for its own sake, but for the real happiness of mankind, which is the resultant of the correct dialectical treatment of human values which refer to the good of all and the general good at once.

THE TWO WORLDS OF GOLD
The Midas-mystery of gold is what economists recognize as Gresham's Law, by which it becomes important to balance the exchange- and utility-values of coins put into the open market. The slightest tilt in favour of the utility side of value in a coin can make it disappear from view altogether into the unknown domain of financial virtuality. Thus possessions can belong to two mutually exclusive worlds of value which, when wrongly handled, can spell double gain or double loss to the persons concerned. When carefully studied between the lines, the parables of the Bible reveal this subtle reciprocity between the two worlds, placed between which the 'certain rich man' of the various parables touching gold or coin teaches this wisdom in the name of Christ. Whether dealing with the wages for the workers of the rich man's vineyard; with the good and faithful servant who used gold rightly; or with the prodigal son who was dead to one world of economics in favour of another, and was found again by a parsimonious father who fêted his return to the first world of economics; or with the rich man who was the rival of Lazarus who suffered in the 'other world', while the latter suffered only in the world here - we have rare dialectical wisdom-secrets involving property values recorded for human guidance. To this day however, humanity remains deaf to such wisdom-teaching.

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LACK OF WISDOM ABOUT GOLD IN ECONOMIC STATISTICS
Modern economic investigation has fallen back on the normative method of statistical studies in arriving at laws, rules and controls to be applied to gold and economic policies. Here, however, the great drawback is that economics has not yet been brought properly under a normative science. The picture of a wealthy or prosperous state or individual, which should be the norm in economic thought, has not been clearly stated. The two worlds of wealth and gold - one of which aims at abundance, while the other has mere opulence as its ideal - have not been treated with any correct methodology. While parables and fables guided older generations in these matters, modern man relies on statistics which have no better status in reliability.

That statistics prove nothing, and that if they do prove anything at all, could prove either the 'pro' or 'con' side of a proposition indifferently, has become a modern joke. F.H. Le Guardia, as early as 1933 observed: "Statistics are like alienists - they will testify for either side". (Liberty, May 1933). Then there is the famous pleasantry about statistics attributed to Disraeli by Mark Twain, which says. "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics". Even if these sweeping statements are not to be taken seriously, we have in the official publication of the Chase Manhattan Bank of New York, perhaps one of the biggest financial houses of America, the following on "Economic Statistics" with the subtitle "Economic Pulse-Takers Need Better Information":

"Mark Twain, having listened to widely varying estimates of the length of the Mississippi River, once marvelled "at the fascination of a science where one gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of fact"

... only a quarter of a century ago, the same could be said of economics. The subject dealt heavily in abstraction and was short on actual facts against which to check the theories.

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Economists often disagreed because they had no accurate measurements.

"Economists have devised new and better methods for measuring the trends of our economy. As a result the Federal Government today spends about $40 million a year on compiling economic statistics. (3)"

It is not clear to the layman of common sense who scrutinises the above paragraphs, whether facts or statistics are given primacy to prove what is vaguely referred to as "trends of our economy". Textbooks on economics openly declare that there is no agreed explanation as to the cause of fluctuations, and that five theories have been put forward up to 1940, namely:
(1) the Over-Production Theory,
(2) the Under-Consumption Theory,
(3) the Monetary Theory,
(4) the Psychological Theory, and
(5) the Climatic Theory (4)
                                                                
Whether more statistics will tend to prove the validity of any one of these theories, or help to make more theories instead, is not certain. The same statistics may be used to prove the sides of both the parties concerned in a controversy.

The proper use of statistics in such matters is itself to be questioned, because many generalisations based on statistics, like those of Malthus, have signally failed. Thus proof, the fact which is to be proved and the theory on which actual data are to be collected and interpreted, leave room for so much vagueness and conjecture that the common man stands confused in regard to the correct way of applying economy to his own personal life. Men have to be clear first about what they want before theorising or proving.                       

THE BEST USE OF GOLD                                  
The fraction of gold implied in a penny is a principle that we recognize through dialectical reasoning, as when we say that the value of the gold dollar inheres in the cent and vice-versa.
The unit copper coin of any country, like the bad penny that turns up again and again in everyday human affairs, has only a negligible practical value in human terms.

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Gold thus enters human life more as a figure of speech than as an actuality and, when it does enter mentally in this manner, it has two distinct aspects. One of these is usually that of Mammon, and the other that of God's kingdom. The gold of the nib of a fountain pen or in its cap is valuable only to the extent that something sensible is written with it. Again, we are called upon to distinguish likewise between what is to be rendered as a tribute to Caesar and what is due to God. The worship of the golden calf also refers to some wrong attitude to gold which ancient writings have condemned. Gold, representing true or false value, has entered into wisdom-literature in various ways and forms of rhetoric. Eternal values are compared to the phoenix, which burns itself at the altar to be reborn at once with its golden plumes. The fatted calf may be contrasted with the golden calf, which latter is associated with Mammon- worship which is the same as what Washington Irving called "the almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion".
High finance is known to be a gamble in which the loss of both cash and credit makes speculators jump out of the skyscraper window. To see through the contradictions involved requires high common sense or rare wisdom. The virtue of the Golden Mean recommended by King Cleobulos of Rhodes and developed later by Aristotle really implies a man with gold or goodness in his heart. Economists recommend frugality of a certain kind, which can be tilted in favour of stinginess on the one side or prodigality on the other.

A golden rule or line may be imagined also to separate the world of abundance from the world of opulence. The most important matter for one to make up his mind about is whether he wants one or the other of these, because as a rule they are mutually exclusive by their very nature. Rousseau, in his famous essay "On the Government of Poland", presents two types of states to choose from. One he describes with the following epithets: "noisy, brilliant, redoubtable, influential over other nations"; and the other he describes as "free, peaceful, wise, fearless of anyone, self-sufficient and happy". Then he gives us the unequivocal warning against trying to combine the two in any single state.

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He writes,

"Above all do not try to combine these two projects: they are too contradictory; and wanting to be related to both by a composite way of progression is to want to miss both."(5)

GOLD AND GOODNESS INTERCHANGEABLE
Between the language of myth, fable or parable and the graphs or pictorial representations of economic trends or situations found in modern magazines or books, whereby the common man is called upon to wade his way through such concepts as 'surplus-value', 'the trade cycle', 'economic equilibrium', 'sound finance', 'stable exchange', 'conditions in the foreign market', 'currency restrictions', 'the creation of credit', and 'the inverted pyramid of credit', in order to live his life in the light of common sense or wisdom, a more direct and simple way has to be found at the present stage of man's education or progress.

Of the three schools in economic theory, distinguished as the classical, the neo-classical and the dialectical, the last-mentioned has at present succeeded in catching the imagination of the masses in many countries. Meanwhile great controversy and polemics rage on such questions as the theory of rent-value, interest, capital, and even on the initial definition of wealth. National wealth and international wealth have not yet been clearly distinguished. Every university professor who writes a textbook on this highly abstract subject starts with a different intellectual formation, nurtured on academic soils, which differ widely from country to country, and as between the Old World and the New. Each develops a set of anecdotes or examples in his mind for the use of teaching and, as between Adam Smith, Karl Marx or Marshall, the variety of rival theorisation is so great that one has to cry halt and begin to think for oneself with the help of common sense and general information.

The first dictum we can arrive at immediately is that economics is for man and not man for economics. If it yields general satisfaction and works in experience, it must be acceptable, and if it reaches out vainly from one theory to another, it has to be discarded.

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As a science it is not an 'experimental' one - no experiments are needed here, as common experience contains the elements of experiment. If it is to be treated as a 'normative' science rather than as an experimental one, the norm of human happiness has first to be fixed in terms of economics. As neither of these seems to be the case at present, we make bold to adopt a method where intuitive imagination is brought in to help us to see more clearly what economists are talking about.

A SIMPLE ECONOMIC SITUATION
Here the time-honoured wisdom-language is being admitted by the front door only to save us from the confusion of tongues in which we find ourselves at present. It will be seen that this unitive way of approach is the same as what has been called the dialectical approach: not in the limited sense of post-Hegelian dialectics, but rather in the sense of what is known as perennial wisdom the world over. It has ever had an apodictic quality which humanity has always recognized, whether in the Chinese, Indian or pre-Socratic context. With gold as a symbol of wealth and as a central notion of value, we shall now try to focus our attention on a simplified economic situation in order to see the subtle aspects which have contributed to make gold a mystery. A simple question may be asked by the layman as to why gold should not be left in mines if it is only brought out to be reserved in the banking areas of the great capitals, buried again in vaults as an elusive presence. Could not hoarded gold elsewhere be treated as at least equally respectable and justified?

Let us then enter intuitively and freely into a simple economic situation which will serve as a pattern for the understanding of other value-factors involved in economics, both in its static and dynamic aspects. Closed and open economic situations may also be distinguished with the help of this simplified pattern of everyday life in our minds.

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An absent-minded professor of economics goes for a walk in the countryside and comes to a crossing of roads fringing on a forest reserve, where a monkey happens to live. On the diagonally opposite corner of the crossroads is a vendor of bananas and peanuts exposing his wares for sale. The professor, being a frugal and kind-hearted man, living alone and apart from the busy world of getting and spending, just happens to have an old coin of small change in his pocket. Seeing the monkey eyeing the nuts hungrily, he wishes to make the best of the situation by offering his coin to the vendor to induce him to give a handful of nuts to the hungry monkey.

Before accepting it, the vendor examines the coin. He hesitates at first because that coinage was one officially withdrawn from circulation but, having been minted when gold reserves covered credit better; it thus has a price-value which is to his advantage, in spite of its low exchange-value and null face-value. He therefore gives the nuts to the monkey, and the professor returns to his room as a satisfied representative of the human race.
The various aspects of gold-value involved here can be schematically represented in the diagram on p. 67.

CONCLUSION
Here the abstract, regulating, economic norm or principle of gold-value is the central notion to be kept in mind. We can readily distinguish four aspects of gold-value, which meet at the central point where values change over or interact in a subtle dialectical manner. The vertical axis represents transactions where time is the primary consideration. Interest and discount rates, which are always balanced in any country, operate along this vertical axis. The horizontal axis would represent actual exchange as between price and commodity. These take place in the present but have the two sides of actuality or virtuality involved. The price-value of a banana is virtual, while the banana, as an actual product of labour, is an actuality which is more specific and presents a more contingent verity. Need is hidden in the man, like hunger in the monkey, and is a virtual instinctive disposition from which man suffers in the

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STRUCTURE P. 67

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present or the eternal present. The price we pay for getting rid of hunger, which itself is a necessary suffering, is negative as compared with the positive pleasure which money or gold might command. Thus price-value meets commodity-value from opposite sides in this situation. The horizontal world of events, things, movements or activities has to be distinguished from paper transactions through bankers, which belong to a world of tokens or symbols. Here again, credit and debit, interest and discount interact to make business thrive. The banker has to be trustworthy and stable. The bank manager has to be parsimonious and have certain virtues, such as not being too easily carried away by outside events. He has to be just and keep to the golden mean of value without being involved in false lending or borrowing. He must have credit vis-à-vis other bankers, and clearing houses must honour his cheques, and to that end his accounting and bookkeeping must be on sound lines. Above all he must have an address, in his official capacity at least. The gold reserve somewhere in a vault is the nominal or actual credit for all bankers in a given area. This thin golden line of credit-value may be said to go past human affairs as a vital line of life in which the kind man has to play his role in the name of the happiness of humanity as a whole.

Reputation, goodwill, kindness, integrity, stability and sound credit are all involved here. They are qualities whose fund man must increase by all means for his happiness. It is thus important for man to have a heart of gold. To revert to our example: we have to remember above all that there are distinct sectors which represent economic compartments or worlds which cannot interact directly. There is no use in having the monkey borrow the bad penny from the professor. The vendor has behind him the plantation and the labourers, while the monkey has behind it at best living regions of fruits and leaves. The mercantile nation and he pastoral nation cannot thus be correctly related except through a very wise arrangement of economic interdependence. And finally, it is important to see how money must circulate if it is to serve life at all. Hoarded gold might increase the wages of mining labour, as Professor Jevons

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says, but it would not be playing its legitimate role in human affairs, because as we have said, money is meant for man and not man for money. Similarly, the burning of food-products for the sake of better prices, as we hear of sometimes, is an absurdity of wrong economics.  The contrast between opulence and abundance is also a matter for the imagination of man to visualize as belonging to one or other of the sectors represented in our diagram. As Rousseau points out, it would be unfair to ask a poor hard-working peasant to pay his tribute of tax or rent to the moneylender or to the government in the form of money, which does not belong to his economic sector or world at all. The farmer belongs to the world of abundant actual produce, while the moneylender belongs to the opposite world where wealth is merely a symbolic token. Increase of tokens may not agree with the produce in hand, and might produce economic crises which experts are still explaining. Caesar's domain and that of God should not be mixed up.

NOTES

1.  "Dan Bell Reports" (Florida, USA, Aug. 10, 1956).

2.   P. 324, "The Wealth of Nations".

3.  Manhattan Bank of New York, Official Reports, No. 10 of 1956.

4.  Cf. pp. 276-82, Silverman: "The Substance of Economics", London.

5.  Translated from "Le Contrat Social", p. 384, Edition Garnier, Paris.

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TOWARDS A ONE-WORLD ECONOMICS
Economics is a modern substitute for religion. While religion holds out promises for the hereafter, economics refers to the betterment of life here. Both can have questionable enthusiasts as leaders or blind believers in outmoded ideologies. The mass-mind can be swayed in the name of the one or the other into holding exaggerated or distorted notions against the general good and the good of all. Economic creeds can be as fanatical as religious ones, and claim as great a toll of human life in times of trouble. Both can join hands with politics and work havoc among peaceful inhabitants. Whether it is doomsday or perfect equality of opportunity, at times simplified pictures of felicity or suffering hold the imagination of either ideologist to fill him with much misplaced fervour. Between the ends and means visualized in either of these groups of believers who insist on having nothing to do with each other, the visible common event that takes place is that somehow what is in one man's pocket is transferred into another's without the usual commodities being exchanged. One who writes a book on the best method to abolish poverty best proves his case by himself becoming rich at the expense of his admirers.

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In the name of being saved from sin or suffering, the same phenomenon can be seen in the camp of orthodox religion. While the transfer is taking place there might intervene much vague talk which lacks the apodictic precision that distinguishes either science or common sense. Both religion and economics thrive in the twilight atmosphere of a pseudo-science. Vain verbosity prevails in the name of both at present.

THE NATURE OF ECONOMICS
Economics is common sense claiming to be science. It involves Value-Wisdom. It deals with wealth and aims at welfare, starting from scarcity, poverty or want as its basic assumption. This assumption is not unlike the assumption of sin or suffering in the catechisms of religions. Scarcity of good or goods is to be overcome by dealings or arrangements involving long-term or short-term measures, from simple ones, as when ants store grain against winter, to international monetary adjustments.

It calls for certain types of virtues such as parsimony, abstention or shrewdness for intelligent getting and spending, which should not err on the side of being either penny-wise or pound-foolish. It is in the midst of a modern state that economic wisdom sits with grace, and the sum-total of its contrivances, whether conducive to wealth, welfare or both, is vaguely called 'good economics'. Success or failure is not measurable except by measuring-rods whose validity is itself questionable. Raising standards of living need not tally with the degree of satisfaction of a people. Between maximum, minimum and optimum standards, calculations can vary or go wrong. From the family budget to the national one, the special sagacity or wisdom called for in the heads of families or states is a very elusive one based on varied schools of theorisation. It has now become common to read strong and impassioned condemnation of one school of economics by another rival school. Respectable writers of one group are humbugs for others and vice-versa, making economists themselves wonder if the claim of a scientific status for their subject is not mere wishful thinking. Universal elements in economics are sadly lacking at present.

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THE PREVAILING FRAGMENTARY, CLOSED OR STATIC APPROACH
Adam Smith's