2010-8-26
For more than forty days since I brought “The Turntable of Civilization” into the world, I have lived through a recurring pattern: one day gripped by something like anxiety, and the next day, words would be born.
After I said NO in one chapter to the media’s appalling treatment of Ichiro Ozawa… the uncertainty arising from the way this happened to coincide with political developments also had a considerable influence.
Because my proposals addressed something as vast as the market…
Because they challenged something that most people believe without question to be absolute…
The scale is too great to translate into concrete measures…
Is that not what every politician thought?
In essence, I think that is right… but how…?
True flashes of insight come only to those who keep examining and thinking without end—that is, who continue their scholarly pursuit.
Waking or sleeping, their work—their mission—is the only thing on their minds.
People whose gaze is directed solely toward finding a solution.
To put it in the extreme, people for whom nothing else exists.
Any scholar of Nobel Prize caliber should understand what I mean without a word.
The most important key comes down to this: overcoming egoism is the most important thing for human beings.
For, in truth, scholars living comfortably on annual incomes of ten million yen or more, and others in comparable circumstances, have never saved a nation or humanity.
Though history offers more examples than one could possibly enumerate of their ruining and destroying nations.
“We cannot keep growing…” in a recent Asahi Shimbun editorial, and, in what passes for an essay by Mr. M in this week’s AERA… “The growth-at-all-costs doctrine has reached its limits”… I feel deeply uneasy about this thing they are all saying in unison…
And, at the same time, about the likelihood that they inhabit a “salon.”
They belong to today’s elite, with annual incomes comfortably exceeding ten million yen.
…Though I had not known that annual salaries at the Asahi Shimbun exceeded ten million yen by the age of thirty.
If Asahi continues like this, it will decline as Japan Airlines has…
Every company that thinks it is enough for its own people alone to be highly paid will decline…
Not just at Asahi, but throughout today’s elite, there are people who joined that great chorus of foolish self-righteousness eighteen years ago and brought about twenty years of tragedy, yet have never once experienced hardship in their own lives.
No solution that will save Japan will emerge from these people.
That is what lies behind the doubts and apprehensions I feel about graduates of the Matsushita Institute of Government and Management.
The aforementioned Mr. M, who is also an employee of S Securities, says some things that are not bad, but he cannot produce a solution.
The mere fact that he compares present-day Japan to seventeenth-century Genoa…
It is impossible.
And yet they say they will appoint him chief economist to the Japanese government.
He is four or five years younger than my generation, but he is not among the very best minds of my generation, and throughout these twenty years of suffering, he has probably experienced none of it… no hardship in making a living, no anguish so great that it threatens to block one’s very path through life, not a single such experience…
There is no way he can produce a solution.
The trials God gives to the truly gifted are not easy ones.
They are beyond imagination.
They are profoundly harsh, like giving Woody Harrelson a murderer for a father.
If these people, like the Buddha, were to abandon their families, status, and honors… to abandon every bit of their incomparably comfortable security, journey through the wilderness, and enter meditation to attain the enlightenment needed to save the nation, they might arrive at a solution.
But as he is now, there is a one hundred percent certainty that no solution will come from him.
People speaking at their level are everywhere…
They entirely lack the perspective that we have a duty to turn “The Turntable of Civilization” onward, probably next to Brazil (South America), and finally to Africa.
Why?
Because they dwell within the egoism of their own comfortable security.
Because they are not true elites.
They fail because they have no desire whatsoever to enable the billions now living in poverty to enter, several hundred years from now, an age of prosperity like ours.
For our children and grandchildren, the environment, greenery, world peace… Everything that comes out of their mouths is self-interest masquerading as concern for others.
The words I would point them toward are those Sartre declared long ago when he stopped writing novels… What can literature do when a billion people are starving?…
If you replace this with, “What can economics do when a billion people are starving?” perhaps you, too, might arrive at the answer.
…Of course, I say all of this in the heartfelt hope that you will splendidly prove my predictions wrong and produce a solution…