5. Prosperity Desire
When grass in one place dries out, animals go to other gazing fields looking for pasture. Early men did so too but later he learned to raise his own grass on that very spot. He did so for better life, better that earlier and better than that of his neighbors. The first was for easier life and the second was a competitive instinct within his species. Not only he desires good and enough consumables but also likes to have those things best of all. While desire of better living is desire of self-development, desire of excellence among its own kinds is desire of prosperity or prosperity desire. While development desire is survival instinct, prosperity is a rat race within a society. Within the bound of allowed (some time called ‘legal’) limits, such competition enthuses a person for self-development. Accumulation of such individual efforts develops society. Human civilization is a total result of all individual human actions. In conclusion we can say that prosperity desire differentiates human beings from other animals and it is the driving force of human activity and civilization. If a man cannot act on prosperity desire, his activities will be limited to animal requirements such as food, water, merry-making and mating.
Man is neither a saint nor an angel. The fruit of his activity he wants to consume or dispose alone and on his own. Even if he cannot consume all what he has acquired, he will be ready to handover only a miniscule part of his gain to other. He would like to save it for his non-hay days. Man cares his own, not animals. He has natural tendency not only of prosperity desire but also of saving or accumulation.
Prosperity gain of a person cannot consumed by him alone, though he tries to do so. He has to share his gain with other fellow members to maintain his prosperity. For example, if a person gains four pairs of shoes when he needs just one pair, he has to loan other three pairs to three other people. They will take those shoes only then, when they are able to pay for it. The former has to help the later to raise prosperity so that they could buy one pair. Production by a person helps to increase his prosperity only if that production is distributed as consumables on his behalf among his fellow members and those fellow members will be able to consume only if they are able to compensate him against that product. Prosperity desire provokes each one to raise his production. Prosperity can be gained only if other fellow members, who apply the same process to raise their prosperities, consume the part of that product. Directly or indirectly, they barter their production or actually their labors or efforts and raise their prosperity. The better producer can have a chance to raise his prosperity more and the less producer, though less, raises his prosperity too. Thus, time value of the whole community or society is raised due to the efforts of community members. Prosperity with respect to the past is raised too and society gets more developed. At the end of one process, starts another one and thus, runs the spiral of civilization up and up and even the idlest one gets a share of civilization.
Development is another name of social uplift and it shows time value increment of society members in particular and that of the society in total. In development, social time value will increase with time but calamities may diminish social time value. Irrespective of social changes, prosperity of a person in that very society may rise or fall or standstill. For examples, haves and haves-not existed in primitive society as they do today and so more or less prosperous by their standard were there and then as they are at present.
6. Prosperity & Equality
‘All are equal to God.’ – says religion but God never treated them equally and in reality no two things, even less two persons, are equal in all respect. A thing can be equal only to that very thing in all respect. That is a reality of nature. As different dimensions in different spaces express un-equality, equality arranged in one space creates un-equality immediately on others. Equality in all respect makes two things, ideas or expressions automatically one. Though absolute equality or equality in all respect can not be maintained, people preached and promised partial equality all the time in history. Religion promised equality in heaven and un-visible reality remained dream to all generation of human beings. Rousseau in 17th century raised voice for equality in politics and later in 19th century Karl Marx preached another principle of financial equality.
Human being is dimensionally unequal in physique. Tall, short, thin, obese, bald, hairy, broad, narrow and others are his visible physique. Fast, slow, steady, clumsy etc are his physical characteristics or physical capabilities. They are nowhere equal to one person to another. There are mental capabilities in form of logic, ideas, thought etc that dictate and control physical action of human beings. If compared, no two persons are equal mentally as well. Even Siamese twins develop different capabilities physically and mentally. Amidst these unequal capabilities, we cannot and should not expect equal output from equal input in them. Thus, we can draw a conclusion that if people act in their full capacities, the outcomes or productions of their action in quantity and quality both are never equal to one another.
More bizarre is consumption pattern. Non-producer like children, sick and old people may need more than adult producers. Investment in children is a saving for their parents or society and that in sick and old adults is liability of their past investment on their children or society. Consumption of adults is too never equal to one another. Thus, we conclude that neither input (consumption) nor output (production) of any two individuals is equal.
There are different options of input and output. The first one is equal input for equal output. Soldiers of one rank in a barrack get equal consumption and they are expected to have equal fighting capacity. So the students of a class in a hostel are expected. Second option is equal input but an unequal output. Children may demand consumption equal to that of adults or even more but they are never asked for equal output. So may be the case among the adults too. The third option is of unequal input and equal output. Two workers of one profession in two places may have different consumption possibility but they produce equal products. Or in a paid party, each individual pays equal amount even if they consume more or less.
The fourth option is unequal input and unequal output. As human beings are not equal, the consumption can never be equal and cannot be equal their production too. ‘They give what they can do and get what they produce’ – says capitalist system. ‘Human being should give what he can and should get what he needs’ is communists and Utopians motto. All of them accept unequal output for unequal input in one or other form. While capitalist system allows the producer to save the positive extra output (output minus input or gain), communist system likes to distribute that extra output among the less fortunate, who have negative extra output, for the sake of just distribution. In other words while capitalism practices individual freedom, communism stresses on community benefit.
With guaranteed minimum requirements of livelihood, every individual in capitalist structure moved towards self-prosperity development and flourished. On the other hand, the protagonist of communist establishment drove hard the hungry enthusiastic mass towards euphoric dream of absolute equality and gained success to provide basic animal requirements of livelihood to all within the system. But hardly had a new generation been matured, the well fed generation could not get more than what they had and they opted negative prosperity desire i.e. to have the same time value for less work to fulfill their prosperity desire. Lack of individual freedom and development of negative prosperity became the root cause of the fall of Soviet Union, the father nation of communist establishment. Snooping the pressure of negative prosperity, China, the biggest communist establishment in world, quickly shifted its position and allowed prosperity desire act positively and prospered very much within a quarter of a century.
20th century was a struggle between haves and haves-not or a struggle between more and less prosperous. It also showed that if not provided basic minimums, mass will revolt against the establishment and if positive prosperity is not allowed to work, negative prosperity desire starts automatically.
