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Welcome to episode eleven of Prout Consciousness, where we will be discussing the first of Prout’s five fundamental principles, which goes: “No individual should be allowed to accumulate any physical wealth without the clear permission or approval of the collective body”. Before we go into it, we should clarify that the whole of the theory of Prout consists of 16 principles, and the five fundamental socio-economic principles are principles number 12 to 16. Interested listeners may find all the principles explained on our web site at proutglobe.org. Now onto the first fundamental socioeconomic principle.

The external world has always been a focus of living beings. It is the one common interest we humans share with all other living beings—the external natural world, the source of our physical sustenance. We humans may have our own special interests in any sphere of life—physical, psychic and spiritual; still, all living beings share that same one trait—everybody from uni-celled bacteria and up require a minimum of physical necessities of life. This common evolutionary background has made us humans instinctively attracted to the external world; we keep rushing towards it, both in time of real need and otherwise by habit and sentiment.

For human beings, minimum physical requirements include food, clothing, housing and medical care. A main consideration of the modern industrialised world is that the limited resources of the external environment is under increasing pressure from hyper-acquisitive humans. There is a rapidly growing understanding that the capitalist instinct of acquisition may not after all be a timeless guarantor of progress and wellbeing for all. Consequently, ideas about regulating private wealth is increasingly being considered for public policy, and arguments for it are aplenty:

• Primary schools across the world teach that the natural environment is limited and therefore its resources should be used with care and not be exploited indiscriminately. Little children everywhere are familiar with limits to growth and the virtues of wise utilisation of ecological potentialities. Among these little children of today are tomorrow’s decision makers at any level of private or public administration and management.
• Equally obvious is the fact that the limited physical wealth cannot be left to indiscriminate accumulation. If left to the whims of people of acquisitive persuasion, too much held by a few will necessarily result in too little available for very many others, which is a precise description of the sorry state of affairs of our world at this moment.
• Growing mistrust of capitalism only adds to it: A global survey by Edelman, published in 2020, found that 3 out of 4 Indians and Thais do not trust capitalism, and that such majorities prevail in other Asian, European, Gulf, African and Latin American states as well. In the United States, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that same year, nearly two-thirds thought the very rich should contribute more to public welfare, something even a majority of Republicans agreed to.

The first fundamental principle of Prout responds distinctly to such concerns, stating: “No individual should be allowed to accumulate any physical wealth without the clear permission or approval of the collective body.” This frank declaration of a fundamental human sentiment is the only of the theory’s five fundamental principles that is restrictive in nature. Principles 2 and 3 draw up vast areas of human and socioeconomic activities, while principles 4 and 5 advise broad flexible policies and the dynamics for their successful execution.

Prout’s strength is the greatness of its field of action, its vast comprehension, coupled with ingenious ability to adjust and vary with changes over time, in places and in persons and communities. Even, we shall discover that the curbing factor laid down by its first fundamental principle is in fact a necessary gateway to never-ending progress for all, and that without this restricting principle  the wellbeing of our planet and everything on it will gradually be lost. 

Why would the consequences of unregulated private accumulation of physical wealth be ruinous to our existence? Prout deals with all of existence—the physical, the psychic and the spiritual. Of these three main spheres, the physical is limited whereas the psychic and spiritual are of unlimited potential. It means that the latter two are endless (although of differing nature, which will be clarified in the following). Since the physical world is limited, everything of it is in short supply. Therefore, our physical environment and all its potentialities should be carefully managed, exactly as they teach in kindergartens, schools and universities all around the world. Nevertheless, some very old school adults continue to behave and act as if there is no end to physical resources. They acquire physical wealth far, far beyond their needs and lay waste precious environmental resources. We should say that their ignorance is sub-childish and pre-immature as it is much below the level even of today’s little school kids. Those backward adults commit those crimes against the living world only due to their insatiable greed. They have yet not learnt how to direct their deeper longings towards a greater goal but remain trapped in most undeveloped understanding of the meaning of life.

The physical world is available to us because of its limitations. If it wasn’t limited, we would be unable to make head and tail of it or distinguish one thing from another. In fact, a boundless world would not be apparent to us, just like boundless existence normally is unavailable to us due to its infinite character although we live in its midst. Prout uses the term “crude” for physical limitations, the physically crude.

The socioeconomic truth about this crude physical world of ours is that even though the natural environment can provide for everybody’s needs it cannot cater to even a single person’s greed. Greed is something psychic. A precise definition of greed would be “Unlimited subjective psychic energy misapplied on limited objective physicality”. Our personal self, our sense of being someone in the mundane world, is always skipping from one object to another, and whenever it gets stuck in some physical objectivity and feel it cannot get enough of it we call it greed. Being of such endless potentiality, greed is more than capable of turning anything of our existence in any direction of impulsive interest. This is how the instinct of wealth accumulation has turned investors away from trading of goods and services that serve the genuine needs of real people and instead have them play in surreal casinos by, of and for pseudo-capitalist exploiters. Prout deems them to be pseudo-capitalist who concern themselves with the extrapolation of economic exploitation in spheres far removed from constructive and productive employment of capital. To the pseudo-capitalist, it is all a race for profits in increasingly unnatural ways that have less to do with the production and trade of genuine goods and services and all the more to do with weird financial acrobatics. Their unbounded decadence indicates that regulation of wealth must be implemented by moral administration and not simply by civilised appeals that do little to change the ways of those blinded and indeed deafened by greed.

Now, capitalism wasn’t always quite the disastrous global monster it is today. Centuries ago, western world industrialists enjoyed the idea of doing the world a service by building mechanised factories and posing as paternal heads of large extended families consisting of themself and their privileged near and dear ones, their relatively well-off managers and their middle-class families, and the hordes of poor labourers and their seriously deprived kith and kin. Today, there is not even a shade of paternal sentiment left in the pseudo-capitalists madman financial stunts and polished fraud. A rough estimate from the last decade totals the value of assets of the global derivatives market—a main pseudo-capitalist casino gambling table—at more than 10 times that of the total world gross domestic product. Like most things of the current global economy, this estimate, too, is hotly debated by people strongly in favour of and equally strongly against such speculative trading.

Now is it productive and healthy for a few to accumulate so much wealth so that the many, many others are seriously deprived? What does it actually do to you if you take someone’s mundane existence and future away from them? Research of recent decades indicates that as people become more affluent, their sense of compassion toward others declines:

• Psychologists at the University of California found that the poor and relatively poor were inclined to give away to charity 44 percent more than the rich of the disposable means invested with them in a laboratory experiment.
• An inquiry into behavioural economics, at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, showed that people categorised as more wealthy “tended to be less altruistic and generous in their daily and working life equally.”
• A review of a number of such studies, carried out at Stanford University, found that poor people are more trustworthy, more generous, and more compassionate than richer ones.
• A comparison of 12 separate studies on empathy, social behaviour and compassion all indicated that the perceptions of well-off and rich trigger a focus away from social context toward the self, which in plain words means that the richer one gets the more selfish one becomes.

The reduced sense of compassion and increased selfishness of a majority of the rich may be what drives them to continue to help themselves to increasingly larger parts of the limited collective physical wealth of humanity. Therefore, Prout finds no alternative but to limit the activities of endless greed in a limited physical world and instead direct that persistent life thirst towards subtler and sublime exploits where it can unfold its endless nature without depriving others but rather engage in reciprocal progress.

Does a world rid of capitalism mean a world devoid of capitalists? Not only would that be impossible but also unnatural as the capitalist mindset is part of human nature. Prout does not accommodate capitalism, in the same way it does not entertain proletarianism, militarism and intellectualism. To Prout, there is little value in desire for desire’s sake, discipline for discipline’s sake, art for art’s sake, business for business’ sake and even development for development’s sake. Prout holds that the capitalist mindset like any natural human tendency is integral to progress if expressed in the service of greater human good.

This first fundamental principle of Prout, the regulation of private wealth, may be likened to the guard-rail gardeners put up around tender plants. Prout’s protective fencing will keep predacious instincts in check and allow all to participate fairly in the socio-economy while they keep progressing in all spheres of life. Here it may be asked, why curb such a significant industrial force such as the capitalist? Has not socialism proved the inefficiency of disallowing people from owning as much as they want? Yes, socialism, and indeed communism, is a backlash and not a constructive initiative. A motivation of an even higher order than that of capitalism may not lie in simple reaction to it. Instead of reacting to capitalism’s insatiable hunger for more and more capital, Prout appeals to the creative, productive, cooperative force inherent in all living beings. By stimulating everybody in all ways to leap forward and participate in humanity’s concerted effort for economic, social, cultural and spiritual liberation, Prout ensures the unfoldment of genuine humanity through expansion, flow, service and attainment in all spheres of life.

It may also be asked whether such a drastic measure as curbing wealth accumulation really is needed. Can greed not be mended in other ways so that markets may be left to their natural devices and evolve on their own? Prout’s answer to that is twofold. First, a majority of people around the world today suffer because of lack of real progress in their lives. How can we ask them to wait until capitalists are reformed and no more feel the urge to exploit others economically? And in continuation of that, the value of wealth is measured in terms of its capacity to purchase commodities and thereby generate welfare. Therefore, commercial value of goods and services cannot be the yardstick of wealth, but the system of capitalism is based on commercial value and not consumer value. Prout holds that the purchasing capacity of wealth is the real value of wealth, which can be realised in a consumption-oriented economy only and not in a profit-driven one. In a profit-oriented system, holders of wealth may or may not put their wealth to productive use, may or may not circulate their money. If markets do not appeal to them, they will not spend but wait for promises of proper returns to reveal themselves. In a consumption-oriented system, wealth will constantly circulate and continue to make itself useful for all. The difference between proutist and capitalist markets lies in the consumption-motivation of the former and the profit-motivation of the latter. Physical wealth and rational profit-taking should serve the genuine needs of living beings. Profits should be set aside and employed for further development of public welfare and not stashed away as private property. Profits should be rational and not only for profit’s sake.

Even if greed would not be a dominating factor, capitalism would still tend to commercialise everything. The ism in “capitalism” signifies capital for the sake of capital; everything and everyone gets commercialised so that capitalists can capitalise on it. Viewed in this perspective, the theory of alienation suggested by Karl Marx takes on enormous existential proportions when extended to the psychic and the spiritual, such as when education and training, meditation and yoga are taught only for money. Subjecting the subtle and sublime to greedy commercialisation makes all of existence absurd, and is a mockery of what it is to be human.

At the time of recording this episode, it is estimated that:

• Half of the world’s net wealth belongs to the top 1%, while the top 10% hold 85%.
• In 2016, Oxfam reported that the world’s richest 62 people were as wealthy as half of the world population.
• The following year, that number had shrunk to 8 super-rich men being as rich as half of the world population. During that year, the super-rich accumulated 82% of the wealth created the year before while the poorest half of the world got … nothing.

Obviously, so much of wealth in the hands of a few super-greedy makes the job of public policymakers impossible. Faced with the staggering economic powers of the super-greedy tiny minority, wellbeing and progress have remained but a vanishing dream for the 99%. Therefore, as an alternative to purely political democracy, Prout proposes economic democracy, discussed in episode 2 of this series.

Is taxation a way to regulate wealth accumulation? Welfare-oriented socio-democracies appear to prefer taxation of ordinary citizens before attempting to tax the rich. Moreover, as soon as the rich tires of public taxes, they tend to move to tax-free havens from where they continue with their economic exploitation in the same countries they have fled from. Most probably there are several reasons for this lopsided state of affairs. Primarily, public authorities may have accepted that capitalism is the main financier of their welfare system. Capitalism is definitely a big employer and it is through taxation of capitalism’s employees and customers, that is, the citizens, that socio-democratic authorities are able to milk capitalism, in an indirect way, so to speak. 

One idea of liberal capitalism is to allow everybody to earn as much as they like and society will profit from it in terms of taxes. In reality, the opulently wealthy have a much greater capacity to evade taxation than ordinary salary takers. Whereas the rich have the means to manipulate and altogether escape taxation, the salaried masses are stuck with whatever policymakers decide. Taxing the poor and middle classes is an easy and most rewarding pursuit whereas the rich remain out of range for tax officers. Consequently, tax authorities do not really concern themselves with the rich other than at such times when particular incidents of fraud or other grave misconduct on part of some wealthy person or company surfaced in the commercial media and generated some degree of  public uproar and angry sentiments then and there, which made it impossible for the authorities to keep looking away at the time. For the rest, most of the taxes come from ordinary people’s income and consumption, not from the rich. 

According to Oxfam, quote “Billionaires in the U.S. pay a smaller tax rate than most teachers and retail workers. Thanks to a tax code that favours income from wealth over income from work—and a slew of tax-avoidance strategies—the richest among us end up paying a smaller percentage of their income to the federal government than most working families.” quote ended. No wonder the rich get richer and the poor poorer. It should be mentioned here that more than half of the tax income in the UK comes from the taxed wealth of the top ten percent earners, but they are paying less proportional to their economic status than the middle classes whereas the poor hardly get by at all.

Prout provides resolute measures for securing both public income and the progress of all:

• Wealth caps in the form of ceiling on bank balances and other forms of suitable regulation of capital will be constitutionalised.
• Even, in the interest of all Prout abolish income tax altogether and places taxation mainly on production and on the sales of non-essential goods and services. When discussing taxation in 1979, Prout’s propounder, Shrii Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, commented: “In India today, if income tax is abolished and excise duty on excisable commodities is increased by only ten percent, there will be no loss of government revenue. When there is no income tax, nobody will try to accumulate black money. All money will be white money. As a result there will be economic solidarity, an increase in trade and commerce, more investment, more employment and an improvement in the position of foreign exchange.” quote ended.
• Ceiling on landed property is not a priority under Prout as it is best subjected to the gradual development of cooperative enterprise. In the early days of communism, Eastern-European countries, with the notable exception of Poland, adopted forced collective farming as a policy to transform traditional agriculture and to quash the economic power of wealthy farmers. As a result, millions starved to death in Soviet Russia and Ukraine and elsewhere. According to the reputable political writer and Russian-expert Hedrick Smith, an early 1970s Moscow dispatch reported that a quarter of the total value of Soviet agricultural produce was being produced by private farmers on 1% of the arable land, saying in effect that the private farms were 40 times more efficient than the collectivised ones. Prout supports a gradual onset of cooperative spirit among farmers and in society at large, and not imposed collectivisation.

Last but not least, who will decide on limits to accumulation? Like any other theory of socioeconomics, Prout is tangent to politics. Its first principle mentions that a collective body shall determine the limits of private wealth. Collective body is Prout’s term for elected representatives at any level of governance as well as experts and luminaries selected for their particular competences in fields of social importance. (Prout’s ideas on leadership is discussed in episode 7 in the series.) Further, this first fundamental principle mentions that permissions, drawn up in laws and regulations, and approvals, in case of applications, should be clear-cut. That is, they should be rationally based, produced by established norms and procedures, and they should be properly communicated.

How will Prout adjust collective spirit with individual right? There can be harmonious adjustment between individual right and collective spirit if people:

1) take a rational approach to following the spirit of the Principle of Social Equality in individual and collective life;
2) cultivate spirituality in practice;
3) are being properly educated about the limitations of the physical world, because it is finite;
4) are equally enlightened about the unrestricted freedom offered in the spiritual and psychic worlds, and
5) take to the synthetic path of a psycho-spiritual approach to life in general, which excludes racism, sexism, casteism and all other forms of socioeconomic ostracism and discrimination. 

We conclude this episode with some further observations by Shrii Sarkar. When commenting on the first principle of Prout in 1961, he stated:

“The universe is the common property of all. All people have usufructuary rights, that is, the right of enjoyment, but no one has the right to misuse this common property. Those who gather much wealth and hoard it directly curtail the happiness and convenience of others in society. Their behaviour is flagrantly anti-social. Therefore no one should be allowed to hoard wealth without the permission of society.

“A person accumulating physical wealth without the permission of the collective body is certainly going against the interests of the collective body. This principle states that individual liberty should not go against the interests of the collective body. This may involve certain restrictions on individual liberty, but since the minimum requirements of life and special amenities will be guaranteed, this should not cause any difficulties to the people.”

In this episode of Prout Consciousness we have examined Prout’s principle of regulating accumulation of private wealth, and so this is all for now; thank you and goodbye.