People who are stupid, unscrupulous, or hypocritical, think that others are just the same. And — this is the real pity — they treat them as if they were.
An enduring legacy of Balamuralikrishna is the wider accessibility of classical kirtanas to the public. Many of his contemporaries tend to treat classical and popular music as watertight compartments.
There are those who strive to stamp with disrepute
The luscious food, because it feeds the brute;
In tropes of high-strain'd wit, while gaudy prigs
Compare thy nursling man to pamper'd pigs;
With sovereign scorn I treat the vulgar jest,
Nor fear to share thy bounties with the beast.
We consider a prisoner unfortunate. He is unfortunate in two ways — because he has done something wrong and because he is deprived of his liberty. Therefore we should treat him kindly, because of his misfortune, for otherwise he would become hard and bitter and would not be sorry he had done wrong. Ozma thinks that one who has committed a fault did so because he was not strong and brave;
therefore she puts him in prison to make him strong and brave. When that is accomplished he is no longer a prisoner, but a good and loyal citizen and everyone is glad that he is now strong enough to resist doing wrong. You see, it is kindness that makes one strong and brave; and so we are kind to our prisoners.
Structure is a primary element of experience and not something that is added by the mind. In this respect, it can be said that the techniques of understanding call for a drastic revision of the usual modes of thought that treat being and understanding as independent or at least as separable from one another.
The encounter with bureaucracy takes place in a mode of explicit abstraction. … This fact gives rise to a contradiction. The individual expects to be treated justly.” As we have seen, there is considerable moral investment in this expectation. The expected just” treatment, however, is possible only if the bureaucracy operates abstractly, and that means it will treat the individual as a
number.” Thus the very justice” of this treatment entails a depersonalization of each individual case. At least potentially, this constitutes a threat to the individual’s self-esteem and, in the extreme case, to his subjective identity. The degree to which this threat is actually felt will depend on extrinsic factors, such as the influence of culture critics who decry the alienating”
effects of bureaucratic organization. One may safely generalize here that the threat will be felt in direct proportion to the development of individualistic and personalistic values in the consciousness of the individual. Where such values are highly developed, it is likely that the intrinsic abstraction of bureaucracy will be felt as an acute irritation at best or an intolerable oppression at
worst. In such cases the duties” of the bureaucrat collide directly with the rights” of the client—not, of course, those rights” that are bureaucratically defined and find their correlates in the duties” of the bureaucrat, but rather those rights” that derive from extrabureaucratic values of personal autonomy, dignity and worth. The individual whose allegiance is given to such values
is almost certainly going to resent being treated as a number.”
But to manipulate men, to propel them towards goals which you — the social reformer — see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.