Dr. Ashok Bapna
Spiritual Foundation for Developing a New Model of Economic System
Kamla Jain
Putting forth her views on developmental economics, Ms. Kamla Jain said that craze for newness is the order of the day. This is a society where the needs of the consumers are manufactured by the producers and advertisement further aggravates the craze for consumption. The formula of goods being equal to happiness and happiness being equal to goods is being extended to the next phase that goods really lead us more towards tension and psychological problems.
She aptly pointed out it needs a lot of zeal and understanding to say that the accepted concepts of economics are dogmas in a situation where individual needs and necessities are transformed into advantages. The rationale of production is the urgency of consumer needs, which have to be aroused at all costs. Our needs are manufactured by the producers, the more we change, the more models of things change, the more the desire to possess becomes evident. More production means more nurturing of created wants. Aesthetics seems to have shifted its goal of ‘beauty' to the goal of ‘new and different'. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever' has become obsolete and has been brutally replaced by ‘a thing which is new is just a joy for the moment'. Fashion is a form of ugliness that we have to change every six months.
Economics of wastage, in fact, is the outcome of present day consumerism, present day so called economic development. Insane values are being nurtured in the euphemism of growth, development, advancement and modernity. Wrong notions of economics have been supplied to regulate the ethically questionable notion of self-interest. It is Bentham's principle of pleasure that is prevalent today.
Leonartho Beline
Leonartho Beline from Italy expressed his views on peace by saying that the cause of war is the clash of interest between groups mostly on economic grounds. War does not arise from a conceptual conflict but from material interest. Peace must not be considered as an aim anymore, but as a fundamental means in order to achieve sustainable development.
Tens of millions of people demonstrating for peace can influence public opinion provided that the mass media present it correctly, but they cannot prevent war. A political action, an action expressing political power and sovereignty can alone establish peace. UN is inadequate. A government of a universe, representative and directly elected by the inhabitants of the planet is a judicious alternative. A government without states, representing the will of the people, not of the states is desperately needed because it has been observed since times immemorial that it's the states that want to wage a war and never the people who opt for it.