Rut Van Dinkle must wake up!
Nihal Amin

Yawn! Most people would not like to meet Rut Van Dinkle as it implies a state of change. Everybody hates being woken from the slumber especially when we have to change. Change is what many want but at the same time fear; while there are those who want change but cannot accept it. The acceptance of change is the current crisis facing the world while boredom, its trusted ally, smiling in its face and backstabbing it simultaneously, continues to eat into our lives. As amazing as it may be, we still prefer to waste our time with activities that we believe will eventually give us what we want in life. Want is the driving force that fulfils our ambition; ambition is what we need; need is a must and currently, so is force. That need forces us to accept competition and standards to the extent that we term the two as the spirit behind the workforce.

What is the workforce today? Does it comprise people over-stuffed with knowledge and packaged in an institute, to be thrown into the daily rut? Or is it Mister Jargon doing the stock market? Or better still, suave individuals consulting their way into companies only to remind them of what they learnt in the back pages. Maybe it is just an NGO that is trying to get you to learn. Learning. What about it? Is learning today all about sitting on the sofa in our affluent drawing rooms and seeing the future on the idiot box, wondering when we will be able to buy our own pots of gold?

We are taught that money peaks the list of needs and all the rest is by the way. Caught up in our hoarding activities, we turn blind to life around us and even if we see, we are not willing to change it because that would mean time away from the hoarding and the moneymaking and the all-time favourite notion of fame. Thus life is reduced to one big free-rider momentum with beliefs that are built on illusions while the triumvirate of God, Values and Morality rule the Land of Was. The illusions centred on such attitudes are what I am referring to. I can already read your thoughts as you tell yourself here is another joker who has a point of view. I agree. I may be the joker but are you not tired of being the thief?

Some people refer to the above illusions as the Rut because today we easily mistake the rut as learning. Astonishing how we can rut the rat but cannot ret the rut! Meaning to say that we can accept it but not clean it. What is the rut? As familiar as we are with it and as much as we detest it, killing it starts with questioning it. Are we? And if we question then have we understood the answer? And if the reply is that nothing can be done, then my point is proved - of us being in the daily rut that carries on with daily activities of hoarding and accumulation of material pleasures without understanding the latent truth of all progress that lies about us. And what is more – we become the rut.

Assume that learning is not a rut but something that must take place constantly throughout our natural lives if not even after…

Assume that competition is not about reaching world-defined standards but each day trying to improve ourselves by learning something new, which has a positive effect on not only us but also all those who come into contact with us.

Imagine learning being the currency that buys the need.

Utopian as it is, we prefer to prostitute and debase learning by terming it as information, which we then use for more acquisition and collection – hoarding. In doing so, we ruin the cause of many who have awoken from the rut and are not only trying to survive but also are trying to ensure a better life for others around them.

Speaking in corporate terms, it is not about finding the “best” solution; the key is finding that solution which not only makes your activity easy and efficient but also makes the entire team perform more efficiently as a result of your solution to the problem. And what's more, different problems have different solutions at different times and by different people!

How simple is that? Not rocket science for sure. Yet we refuse to apply it to our life, of which an important part is charity, sacrifice and learning and contribution to the promotion of the same for all. Instead we blabber away during that meeting on the 24 th floor of the Park Hotel, which could mean millions of greenbacks in the account.

The pots of gold will measure our success because if we have money, we have the power to change. But then do we want to change? Or better still, have we ever known to want positive change acquired through constructive learning? Or in our contemporary world, is hoarding considered normal, while trying to make a difference in someone's life in addition to our busy corporate, mundane life is considered blasé or more rightly put - why should I bother?

The daily rut is that stagnant newspaper that we read every day that tells us exactly how to make our lives easier. It will never tell us how to affect another's life positively. Nor that affecting another positively will improve the entire community. Nor will it tell us that a chain is as strong as its weakest link. It will have articles on “how to avoid having to spend excess time in activities that may not directly benefit us” and term it as efficiency. It might even sometimes allude to questionnaires on which is the better deal or where we can get the 50% discount and other superficial things. It will not allow us to question whether that is useful or not to our being and existence.

The reflections are left to us. Existence must require and question the meaning and change must be accepted or we refute Hegel and the Dialectical theory, which forms the basis of transformation and periods in our lives and the world.

This new learning that comes from acting upon already existing knowledge helps us move ahead in life or perhaps achieve more as some would say. But we keep that knowledge to ourselves because after all we live in the illusion that individual progress determines the progress of the group while it should be the other way round as John Nash has clearly proved. In doing so, he woke up and demanded the change that today is helping China, our leftist favourite, stream ahead in terms of growth only to be caught eventually in the rut itself.

But wait!

What if it learns and continues to affect society in a positive way thereby finally bringing Karl Marx's dream of Communism to its destination? Adam Smith spoke about the Rational person. Ayn Rand was referring to the same battle in Anthem. How many do you know in existence? But then of course, our rut is our rationality.

I am the same rut as you, yet in saying so I try to ret. Can you?

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