All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the societal conditioning that prioritizes personal gain and security, highlighting an underlying system of exploitation.
Jiddu Krishnamurti's quote reflects on how social and educational systems train individuals to prioritize personal success and security often at the expense of others. He suggests that this conditioning is veiled with polite language, yet fundamentally stems from a system that exploits human relationships and fosters a sense of fear regarding loss or insecurity, urging a deeper understanding of the societal structures that shape our motivations.
In practice
In a speech on systemic injustice, this quote can serve to illustrate how societal structures influence personal behavior.
The following of authority is the denial of intelligence. [It] may help us temporarily to cover up our difficulties and problems; but to avoid a problem is only to intensify it, and in the process, self-knowledge and freedom are abandoned.
In seeking comfort, we generally find a quiet corner in life where there is a minimum of conflict, and then we are afraid to step out of that seclusion.
If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.
If you have this extraordinary thing going in your life, then it is everything; then you become the teacher, the disciple, the neighbour, the beauty of the cloud - you are all that, and that is love.
Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life - perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it.
Without knowing myself, I have no real basis for thinking.
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?
He who cannot command himself should obey. And many can command themselves, but much is still lacking before they can obey themselves.
The true test of one's commitment to liberty and private property rights doesn't come when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we agree. The true test comes when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we disagree.
You must make your choice: either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
The white man is not inherently evil, but America's racist society influences him to act evilly. The society has produced and nourishes a psychology which brings out the lowest, most base part of human beings.
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