18.32 – When the conscience is dumbed and numbed and dumped…

A security provider who has protected us for millennia from has now been branded as outdated and unneeded; its very right to existence is being questioned.

That beleaguered battler is, of course, our conscience, the voice within who cautions us when we do wrong and commends us when we do right.

When we blatantly displayed sexual obscenity on TV, our conscience protested. We hit it on the mouth with a rock on which was emblazoned “the right to enjoy beauty.” The impact made the conscience dumb. That our “right” started erasing the difference between human society and animal society didn’t matter; the right was what mattered.

When we piled up tons of explicit content on the internet, our mute conscience expressed shock with its eyes. Not tolerating its audacity, we gave it an injection on which was embedded “the right to sexual freedom.” The jab left it numb. That our “right” led to the skyrocketing of horrendous sexual abuses like rape, incest and pedophilia didn’t matter; the right was what mattered.

When we legalized the murder of the child by the mother, our conscience, though dumb and numb, still shuddered. Not wanting to see even its face, we threw it out of the door using a bouncer whose T-shirt roared “the right to moral relativism.”  That our “right” to choose which morality, if any, to follow bred psychopaths whose “morality” told them that nothing was wrong in massacring innocent people didn’t matter; the right was what mattered.

The Bhagavad-gita indirectly predicts our getting the rights wrong when it states (18.32) that intelligence in the mode of ignorance perceives everything topsy-turvy (sarvarthan viparitams ca).

Does our dumbed, numbed and dumped conscience have any chance of survival?

Only if we dare to ask ourselves a hard question: without it do we have any chance of survival?