2010-11-15
For everyone, for people of every country, this is the only life we have, so why can we not live in wisdom?
I would think that the mass media make such a commotion, day after day, because wisdom is so rarely realized, and yet the people who belong to the establishment, each and every one of them, must be happy in their individual lives.
I think there is some great mistake, some great lie, between these things.
Even a monkey can get into the University of Tokyo, or, if I were its private tutor, I would make it possible for it to get in…
This was something I had often said to the people around me.
Even a monkey can become a University of Tokyo student, but a monkey is an animal, so… its own egoism… it can possess only the egoism of surviving, the egoism of wanting to leave behind only its own offspring, the egoism of wanting to become the boss…
“A fragment of the world spirit”—it cannot think of itself, too, as ultimately being dust in the universe, and so on.…
Though perhaps it does think such things.
What is, in essence, petty egoism… is reported and broadcast as though it were something plausible, with nothing seen with one’s own eyes, nothing confirmed… nothing verified… there is self-serving acquiescence masquerading as concern for others, and here a great lie arises.
Is that not the reality of the world?
That is why things do not move through wisdom… are human beings not continually repeating the folly of allowing wisdom to work only when they have reached the very brink?
That is precisely why I think that what matters most to human beings is not the economy, but, in truth, perhaps art.
You ask whether there is art in Japan… what appears through television is merely economics = commercialism.
As for anything else, apart from the great individuals I have repeatedly pointed out, it is merely a mirage….
Why?
Because there can be no such thing as art that does not correct the fundamental sickness that exists there…
However many fine words one may string together, that, too, is economics = business.