The smaller the domain of your self-concept,the larger the damage you cause to all||Acharya Prashant

Question: How are all the mischief-makers, all the cunning people, able to devise mechanisms that actually ‘work’ in the world? If they do not have any clarity, how are they able to succeed?

Speaker: What do you mean by ‘work in the world’? What do you mean by that?

Somebody is a car manufacturer. First of all, the extraction of raw material, the preparation of steel, itself is something that consumes a lot of energy, generates a lot of pollution, adds to the global warming. Then he comes up with a product that has a questionable, limited, and dubious utility. You see people driving a car which occupies a lot of space, alone. So the SUV may be an eight-seater, but only one person will be travelling in it.

So this is the kind of product that they come up with. And then all kinds of mechanisms are employed to sell this product. A car is projected as something essential to a good life-style. All ways are adopted to sell cars. A lot of marketing, advertising, tempting, is involved.

Would you say, “The whole thing is working”? Working for whom? Would you say, “The whole thing is working”? You go to the market, and the market looks like ‘working’. Working for whom? It is working; it appears so, but for whom? Who is benefiting? Who is benefiting?

What do you mean by ‘working’? You go and you tempt somebody to buy your product, and would you say that your system is working, because your system is able to entice people, to tempt them in, to seduce them in? Is that what you call as ‘working’?