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We cannot go on living in a fantasy world

July 29, 2004 By Uncategorized One Comment

Aung San Suu Kyiback in 1999:

“We cannot drift along in any imaginary world. There will have to be great sacrifices, tremendous hard work and effort . We will have to wrestle with all our might to catch up with those countries that are ahead of us. Look at the two countries that lost the war – Germany and Japan. How they suffered and sacrificed the war. We have read about the hardship they went through. Because they made those sacrifices, they are the two leading countries in the world today. Similarly we will have to go through the same process. If you can suffer, you can gain. What is valuable can not be obtained without effort. Don’t depend on assistance (without strings attached) from here to there. There is no such thing as ‘without strings attached’. Strings get attached automatically. We, believers in Buddhism, know well all about this. Every circumstance has a reason and an effect and one’s deed predetermines one’s future.

Don’t take everything that you can get or everything that is given to you. Benefit will only be derived if you use everything you get honestly. Our country will suffer if we spend easily what is easily got. The giving will not continue.”

This is a very explicit acknowledgement of the bonds that gifts produce, and why RECEIVING is not always the best thing to do. Freedom comes from the ability to give, not the ability to receive.

At the end of chapter five in “The Gift” Hyde warns against this in using the example of a university unwilling to receive a donation from a dictator. To receive is to establish the bond, to attach strings. In Chapter six of “The Gift,” called “The Gift Community” Hyde buries a gem of a quote in a note to a discussion on the polarity of the individual and the community:

A gift economy allows its own form of individualism: to be able to say “I gave that.”…Individualism in a gift economy inheres the right to decide when and how to give the gift. The individual controls the flow of property away from him (rather than toward him, a different individualism).”