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.
You are an educated man. You know there are no such things as demons." Bast smiled a terrible smile. "There is only my kind." Bast leaned closer still, Chronicler smelled flowers on his breath. "You are not wise enough to fear me as I should be feared. You do not know the first note of the music that moves me.
The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery.
I'll tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past.
With the passage of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the color of our blood and the salt of our tears.
Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.
I know not why any one but a school boy in his declamation would whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they were rich, grew corrupt; and in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves and of one another.
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