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| Sunday, 15 August 2004 |
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Mysterious ailment that slows Sri Lanka down by Wendell W. Solomons I was seated at a desk opposite a friend. He has worked for several decades in Colombo in the business sector and I asked him, "When did local companies find they needed security men?" My friend paused to think and ventured, "About twenty years ago?" I then found a 'Lanka Monthly Digest' interview of Lankan business leader Mahendra Amarasuriya. The journal quotes him as follows - "There has been a general deterioration in all standards in the country, including the standards of ethics and professionalism amongst all sectors, including the business sector. This is the result of the steady deterioration over the last 20 to 30 years..." More, Sri Lanka's President Chandrika Kumaratunga herself was front-paged by the 'Daily News' of June 11, 2004. She observed "There has been a transformation of people's attitudes, their concepts, behaviour and the way of looking at the world in the last few decades. I feel these attitudes were incompatible with [the needs] of Sri Lankan society." 10-year attempt to muster intellectual resources Neighbouring India forged ahead by finding attitudes compatible with its needs. It was large enough to implement Swadeshi - the development of a nation's own productive resources. Sri Lanka too embarked on this policy but like many other small countries it was intellectually battered by powerful foreign Think Tanks. Their messaging was reinforced by network TV. Economic surgery was performed according to the instructions of central planning officers located across oceans in Washington DC. Britain once adopted a particular attitude to penetrate other countries. Britain's Henry VIII had suddenly made his country a safe haven for Southern European capital that accumulated over the centuries in oriental trade. After the assets brought in by Venetian and other financial middle-man of the silk and spice trade were well settled and organised, the crafty Lord Shelburne spoke for the Think Tanks of his day in the House of Lords on Jan. 27, 1783 - "Situated as we are between the old world and the new, and between southern and northern Europe, all we ought to covet on Earth is free trade ... With more industry, with more capital, with more enterprise than any trading nation on Earth, it ought to be our constant cry: Let every market be open." Lord Shelburne was proclaiming the myth of Free Trade, a playing field that favours a country with freely deployable capital. Turning to modern times, Sri Lanka's President noticed that she lacks resource people to help tackle games of large scope. The "Sunday Observer" in Colombo captioned the President on Feb. 15th, 2004 - President to set up a 'Think Tank'. This is a valiant striving of the President's. Previously in 1994, the President had made an attempt to set up a 'Core-Group of Resource Persons' but her venture, and consequently the country's development, were sacrificed by executives seated in her own Secretariat. Why? Gearing up behaviour change Close to most leaders in the island sit professionals whose attitudes have been altered by another gearing up of behaviour change beyond that announced by Lord Shelburne in 1783. The three independent attempts at periodisation of change in Sri Lanka of 20-30 years (above) coincide with the period of all-hell-turned-loose opportunism set in place in 1977 under Milton Friedman's euphemistic slogan "Free to Choose." In his autobiography (visible on the Net,) Milton Friedman says, "Initially, I specialised in mathematics..." Besides this admission, it can be said from his work that his exposure to the Humanities has been brief in contrast, say, to Paul J. Samuelson or J. K. Galbraith (for both men a classical authority was Adam Smith, a professor of moral theology.) Becoming a salesman for international bankers, Milton Friedman could accept society as a game of bodies, which like billiard balls may be bumped off each other and into pockets of giant banks. His flawed knowledge of the Humanities made him a willing tool of the cult of selfishness that Alice Rosenbaum (assumed name Ayn Rand) had developed to favour the banks. Rosenbaum's chosen cult of conceit and self-idolatry falls outside world religion and culture. We could take, for instance, The Jewish Virtual Library on the Net: "Certainly her declaration that selfishness is a virtue and altruism a vice is contrary to traditional Jewish values - yet her exaltation of personal ambition is not so different from that of many Russian Jewish immigrants of her generation..." "...At the time of her death, on March 6, 1982 ... Several hundred mourners waited in the cold to enter the Manhattan funeral home where her body was laid out, alongside a six-foot floral dollar sign, the following day. The graveside service in Valhalla, New York, consisted only of a reading of Kipling's poem 'If'..." A follower of Alice Rosenbaum's wrote in a 1986 book that she often said, "It is not I who will die, it is the world that will end." The spell of terminal, opportunist complacency cast by Alice Rosenbaum on many a Sri Lankan professional - in contrast to nearby India - might be summarised today as: "Sri Lanka will die, not I." That accounts for the hard search of Sri Lanka's President, begun in 1994 with "Peace and Prosperity." Response invited by author at - [email protected] |
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