COMPASSIONATE SOCIETY

Compassionate Society



Compassionate Society

Introduction

In the eyes of Friedrich Hayek, the vision a compassionate society is very strong. He will respond as the following: Our international humanity is not a very compassionate humanity today. We are rather fond of describing ourselves as one world, one planet, one humanity, and one global society. But the blunt reality is that we are at least two worlds, two satellites, two humanities, two global societies - one embarrassingly rich and the other despairingly poor, and the expanse between these two worlds is broadening, not narrowing.

Can we actually call it a compassionate humanity when the most wealthy one-fifth of the world consumes 80 per hundred of the natural assets of this planet and instructions an earnings 78 times higher than the poorest one-fifth of the world? Can we really call it a compassionate humanity when there is so much trashed nourishment on the table of the world's wealthy at a time when 800 million persons go famished every evening and 160 million young kids are severely malnourished? Can we really call it a compassionate humanity when 1.3 billion persons do not have get access to to even a simple necessity like protected drinking water, when about one billion adults grope around in the darkness of illiteracy, and when 1.3 billion persons survive in absolute scarcity on less than one dollar a day?

It is absolutely not a compassionate society when 1.34 million children in South Asia alone wok for over hours a day in inhuman conditions for a salary of only eight cents a day and when they misplace their very childhoods to feed the greed for higher earnings by their indifferent employers, some of them the most mighty multinationals of our world.

It is absolutely not a compassionate society when over one half of humanity - the women of this world - are economically marginalized and democratically disregarded, when their $11 trillion assistance to household undertakings is easily disregarded in nationwide income anecdotes and when they order 50 percent of the vote but are less than 15 per hundred of the parliaments of the world.

What kind of a compassionate society is it where modern jet fighters are parked on the runways while homeless people are parked on city pavements; where many desperately poor nations spend more on arms than on the education and health of their people; where the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council sell 86 percent of the total arms to poor nations, often giving handsome subsidies to their own arms exporters?

Whead covering kind of a compassionate society is it where millions of land mines are strewn all over the world, waiting for their unsuspecting victims; where it takes only three dollars to vegetation a mine but over a thousand to remove it, and where the worldwide treaty to ban land mines is prepared but the US refuses to signal it?

What kind of a compassionate society is it where we all recognize that nuclear weapon should ...