Financial Times

We have earned the right to be led by Mahinda
By Nous
The recent opinion poll conducted by The Sunday Times FT appears to suggest that there is overwhelming support within the Colombo business community for the free market form of economic organisation widely believed to be central to Ranil Wickremesinghe’s worldview.

It would seem natural for entrepreneurs to value freedom, at least the freedom that allows the exercise of entrepreneurship – but unusual for our businessmen. It might therefore be pertinent to ask, what is truly in their mind when they are rallying around Ranil.

Are they rallying around the flag of freedom, after years of being hamstrung by regulations, high taxes, and cronyism? Are we witnessing businesses waking up to the virtue of less government - because they now have the guts to face freedom alone, after gradually building confidence in human skills and intelligence to risk failure and explore new ways of creating wealth?
Or, are we misreading the enthusiasm for Ranil? Perhaps it is nothing more than a cry for more state intervention, a bigger role for the state as a pathfinder, enabler, facilitator, protector and patron of businesses.

In a word, is there a genuine gulf between the economic model that our businessmen are calling for and the “nanny-state” that their less enterprising and more insular fellow citizens are demanding?

Frankly, it is difficult to contend that our business community is animated by a robust faith in the power of freedom and limits of government. If what businesses intend, when rallying around Ranil, is not the free market model but the Pinochet-style model, then their worldview is no different from the worldview of those who are rallying around Mahinda insisting on the Hugo Chávez model of “21-centuary socialism.” They are the two sides of the same statist coin.

However, let us not just insinuate their worldview. Instead, let us call businessmen to the bar of reflection to signify the attitude underlying their thought and action.

For example, would it signify a mindfulness of the lesson that without liberty and the rule of law societies ultimately have no hope of either material or rational progress? (Perhaps, the lesson learnt is that liberty is a tool of imperialism!)

Anyhow, what about the idea of progress itself - is it deeply ingrained in the mind of the business community? Many of us have a compelling need to think constantly about material progress. But how widespread is the awareness that the idea of progress is another name for love of perfection?

For some, it might not matter, whether we are ultimately moved to create value either by love of perfection or by an inordinate desire for flesh and blood, as long as the effort is crowned with success.

Surely, the mere passion for flesh and blood cannot be compelling men to constantly reach beyond themselves and build technological marvels, reliable scientific theories, and civilisations of great elegance, gaiety, material well-being, and naturalistic thinking.

The passion for progress or perfection is the fountainhead of civilisation and points to a lively consciousness of the dignity of being a man. Yet, what has such awareness to do with the form of the economic organisation we might support?

Well, this much is obvious, if you believe that man is unworthy and his mind is impotent to make him act intelligently, you would not want him to have too much freedom to act on his own initiative.

Indeed those of us who feel powerless to act intelligently and often fail miserably to hit the mark when stirred by greed, envy or carnality are apt to find freedom a menace, and desire, which although is the immediate spring of action in living organism, the root of all human misery.

The point, which has perhaps been needlessly elaborated here, is plainly this.
Freedom and progress become pressing necessities for those who have the awareness of the dignity of being a man.

Without it, one might even be a successful capitalist or an accomplished professional, but those accomplishments and successes would be grounded on cynicism rather than on a faith that justifies – the faith in the power of freedom made wholesome by the rule of law and in the perfectibility of man.
It is easy to be dismissive of the role such an underlying attitude plays in thought and action, when we are forced to witness psychopathic terrorists successfully managing banks and techno-savvy businesses, or when growth rates of India and China are cited.

However, before we dismiss it altogether, it is well to remember that anyone who has the wit could cherry pick achievements of modernity, from technology to services of professional schools, without ever having to be acquainted with the source of modernity – the naturalism of Greek thought. Nevertheless, for China and India to sustain their modernisation, they might need to assimilate that naturalism.

Let that be as one will have it. The main contention here is this: where the awareness of the sense of human dignity and human greatness is lacking, where human freedom is not felt to be a pressing necessity, where free societies are not deemed morally superior or worth defending with sheer force against foreign enemies, there could only be manufactured moral indignation at statism.

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