Cause Effect Paradigm 006

Inevitability of Faith-induced Policy

G: In the previous session you seemed to suggest that most national or State policies, whether social, economic or political, are inevitably based on an intermingling of Cause-Effect Paradigm, Cause-Effect Obsession Syndrome and Cause-Effect Inverses.
S: Yes. Each of these processes contribute to the making and implementation of policies that can be said to based entirely on scientifically proved Truth or knowledge but reflect an element of blind faith.
G: Can you give some more examples?
S: Consider first the case of equal opportunities of employment. Employment opportunities are largely location specific. All citizens of equal merit can only be available to compete for a location-specific job if these citizens are by chance also located at the same location. We pursue this policy on the blind faith that no discrimination is possible if we have equal opportunity employer. The concept of equality is so vague and we practice equality on the blind faith that concept of equality is so concrete and unambiguous.
G: What about reservation or quota policies in respect of education and employment in India?
S: We have a blind faith that past inequality among people who are long dead can be corrected by reservation or quota based inequality among children and youth of today. The State or the ruling class or the political elite does not have a solution for educating all children and offering employment to all young persons. This lack of competence, expertise leads to a blind faith that reservation is a solution when in fact it generates a new problem. If there are 40 jobs available for 100 persons, how you choose the 40 does not solve the problem of inadequacy of jobs nor does it solve the problem of equality. But almost all persons have a faith that reservation is a solution at least in the short-run.
G: How can the force Cause-Effect Inverse affect the future of this issue?
S: I do not know what lies in the future. Let me illustrate by narrating a story. A learned and rich person of age around 65 in one of his daily siestas met God to express his anxiety about the violence and division of people over the Reservation issue. God told him not to worry because he has taken steps to alter His Rebirth policy so that the persons whom he wants to get education and jobs in future are born in different proportion than in the past to match with the reservation percentages. Thus, the general category persons will be reborn in much higher percentages in reserved category homes now. Similarly, reserved category persons on death will have a higher probability of getting rebirth in general category families.
G: In other words, the rebirth policy is adjusted by God to remove one to one correspondence between disadvantage and reserved category birth.
S: Yes. But let me complete the story. The learned person thereafter asked God about his father in the next birth. God told him that he will be born in a reserved category poor family and his father is child X, aged 8, living in a village from where the nearest school is about 35 miles away. The person went to the village, talked to the family of this child and arranged to admit the child into a good residential school 150 miles away with all expenses borne by a trust funded adequately with his money solely for the benefit of the child. The man wanted to ensure that in the next birth he has an educated father.
G: I understand you are ridiculing the whole debate over reservation based on birth.
S: Only such Inverses of Cause-Effect Paradigm will one day hopefully help future citizens of India to realize that it is so shameful to enjoy reservation benefits based on birth.
G: What about the issue of acquiring agricultural land for new industrial units and new towns?
S: It is amazing that people debate about this. The simple scientific truth is that each piece of land should be put to the best possible use. There are scientific, numerical methods to find out the social values generated by a piece of land when used for different purposes. The opportunity cost of land is its price. All these can be computed. But no one will try to work out these numbers and come to a consensus estimate of the values. Those who want a particular land to be transferred from agriculture to industry will say that it is the best for the transferor, the transferee and the society or the economy. They will provide all kinds of arguments that are only a reflection of their faith. Those who are against transfer of highly fertile, triple crop agricultural land to industrial use will also have no education on how to compute values on scientific basis. Their arguments are also qualitative and based on their blind faith that good agricultural land should not be transferred to industrial use.
G: You mean to say that the debate over the issue itself is less based on scientific knowledge or truth but more on blind faith on their competence and capability to solve a highly technical issue of allocation of resources among various uses, despite the fact of their complete ignorance about the subject matter.
S: You are absolutely right. Two sets of ignorant and incapable or mischievous persons are trying to solve a problem based on what they like to believe in.
G: I thought ignorance is bliss.
S: Yes. But if the ignorant believes that he or she is learned, well informed, competent and capable, it can only cause damage and confusion.
G: But I thought the strength of democracy lies in debates among people who will naturally have differences in opinion.
S: And, also have differences in capability to debate, differences in level of knowledge and differences in their beliefs.
G: That is what democracy is all about.
S: Sure. But that democracy is not necessarily the produces social decisions that are based on scientifically established truth. Democracy or socialism does not guarantee knowledge of truth. Science may not believe in the existence of God who needs to be worshiped but the majority of the world population believes in the existence of and worships God. God wins democratically.
G: That is why Indian democracy is secular.
S: Secular is in the sense that people who believe in God of one type or another and those who do not believe in God have equal rights and opportunities. So, we have a democracy of religions with equal weights irrespective of the percentage of population belonging to various religions. A social or national policy formulated without any scientific basis.
G: Based on scientific knowledge, the State has no scope of taking cognizance of differences in religious background among citizens at all. No one should be asked to officially register his religion in any document including census enumeration or school admission forms. No law should cater to any specific religion because religious categorization has no scientific basis. You seem to suggest that decisions of democratically elected Governments are not necessarily consistent with available scientific knowledge.
S: Yes. Otherwise, how do you explain the ban on Pepsi and Coke imposed by the Govt. of Kerala, or the purchase and use of blood transfusion kits that have crossed their expiry periods in govt. hospitals, or the ban on English teaching in primary schools for two decades.
G: In each of these cases, science or relevant scientific knowledge has been ignored. Coke and Pepsi are foreign companies. Foreign companies want to harm Indians. The proof of this has been provided by a NGO. NGOS are good people. We must believe whatever they say as scientific truth. Therefore, ban Coke and Pepsi: a simple example of Cause-Effect Obsession Syndrome.
S: In the case of expired blood transfusion test kits, the assumption is that whatever the Govt. and its employees do is perfectly in order. Just like ‘The King can do wrong’, the Cause-Effect Syndrome operative here is that State mechanism can never be less than efficient, when the empirical truth is State mechanisms are generally most vulnerable to inefficiency and failure. While market inefficiencies and failures are almost always detectable before much damage is caused and therefore corrective steps initiated promptly, State mechanism failures take time to surface.
G: In the case of teaching of English at lower classes in schools, what was the Cause-Effect Obsession Syndrome?
S: Here, the assumption for a long period was that knowledge of English only creates advantage to urban children with relatively better financial background and discriminates against the children from poor, uneducated rural homes. It was also assumed that knowledge of English was not relevant to Indians in general. Not all intellectuals have the vision to anticipate the likely technological progress in the area of computer, internet, telecommunications and television and their impact on the lives of even poor people in rural areas. So, some politicians blinded by Marxist ideas and anti-West inferiority complex, identified ban English from primary school education as a very popular education policy to attract electoral support,
G: This policy would have been sold on some notion of equality promotion: remove the advantages of a smaller section of the children who would learn English with greater ease because of their urban, educated and relatively higher income family background.
S: You are right. This policy and the assumptions underlying them had no scientific basis but was politically a winning strategy. But such a policy of the State was bound to produce adverse results on the future of the children. Only when the adverse results of the policy became so clearly evident, the policy had to be changed again to remain popular.
G: For long, the communists guided the employees to strike work and create violence to stop computerization of office work. Again it was a politically convenient strategy: the country’s progress may be hindered but the policy would be popular among the more active urban blue-collar middle class whose employment and comfortable life would get protected. It is ironical that the same communist rulers changed their minds to usher in information technology zones/ parks as high priority projects that would get preference in land allotment and acquisitions and other State support.
S: You are right. Now that a significant number of young people are employed in vibrant IT and related industries, the communists are back again to plant trade unionism in this sector where the growth of employment has been and will continue to be huge and far greater than the growth of employment in traditional industries. This huge potential of business of trade unionism would naturally attract politicians to increase their bases among the new generation electorate. This is the emerging situation.
G: Don’t you think that this is unfortunate?
S: What is happening at any time is the result of the operation of the natural forces and therefore in accordance with the Stochastic Destiny Principle. We do not have to worry. Just as foreign capital flows to exploit higher returns in emerging markets, domestic political business houses called parties are attracted by high return political opportunities. But success of any business depends on how the costs rise: the costs of knowledge workers and PC screen/ telephone-based operators in the IT, ITES and BPO sectors are very high relative to other industries. Moreover, these industries depend, not on local demand, but on foreign demand and both the demand and the employees can shift to many other locations in the world. So, it all depends on how, in response to trade union and political movement to foster Cause-Effect Obsession Syndrome, the forces of the Cause-Effect Paradigm and Cause-Effect Inverses react.
G: Don’t you think that after the economic reforms started in 1991 and the trend rate of economic growth substantially increased the State policies in India are now more consistent with scientific knowledge.
S: I don’t think so. In some areas this may be true, while in many other areas policy making is far distant from scientific knowledge or truth. And, this is consistent with the Natural laws. In the ultimate sense, however, nothing is unscientific. That societies will always be guided only partly by scientific knowledge, partly by the lack of scientific knowledge and partly by deliberate avoidance of scientific knowledge, seems to be a scientific truth.
G: It seems paradoxical that human civilization has progressed based on the advancement of scientific knowledge and application of such knowledge and yet societies will continue to pursue policies that are not consistent with scientific knowledge and technology based on that knowledge.
S: It is really not paradoxical. At any point of time, available scientific knowledge and technology are only a small part of the scientific knowledge required for all sorts of societal or national or even international policy- making. So, policies and decisions are always to be taken under conditions of imperfect or inadequate knowledge of the Universe or the Creation. It is this inadequacy knowledge of Truth or the entire set of Truths that the Universe or the Creation sustains itself. The more we come to know of things, the more we come to know of things that we do not know.
G: You are again becoming too abstract to follow and remain relevant to current societal issues. Let us end the session here.