Ego Is Virtuous

Divergent to the popular belief that ego is the reason of your demolition, in metaphysical world ego is the only incentive to transcend from the lower echelon to the higher ones. Why then the global scriptures or seers, be those from Hinduism, Christianism or Islamism sects, potentially deliberate on the annihilation of ego at personal level to achieve the spiritual growth or even salvation? In religious or political ecosystem, the leaders always want the followers. So, from the day of initiation of followers into the system these leaders indoctrinate the belief that ego is an obstacle to the growth of human being. That’s absolutely false and preposterous. The only reason why they spread these canards is to ensure that their followers are subservient to their causes. In these circumstances, a person with ego can think independently and may not think in consonance with the ulterior motives of these leaders. Thus, from many thousands of generations of human settlement in social milieu, these leaders are propagating false values to their followers on cultivation of ego. 

Let me first scientifically deconstruct the theory of continuity in human evolution process before delving into the cultivation of ego theory. As everybody knows the evolution of mankind has taken billions of years in the chronology of genesis of universe, for a lower species to surpass the original genetic construct and move to the category of higher species is mostly sublime and gentle. Normally, this process takes millions of years. What actually prompt the living consciousness to passage from one terrain to another are self-realization and an intemperance of extrapolation. In a specific realm of life, the growth of life is compounded with the awareness of higher self – a state of conscience that unfailingly triggers the quantification of actualization of life – which we colloquially connote “the more, the merrier.” The ego starts from there. When a person with many virtues and few vices vacillates in moral dilemma during a decisive moment of truth, his or her ego plays a cardinal role to bolster the thought that what in a societal dynamism he or she is representing. A person with real ego for his social position and status will think twice before taking a wrong decision. On the contrary, a person sans ego will move on with his or her instinct.

Why crimes of any kind or wrongdoings are happening in this world? Is this happening only because of ignorance or disrespect for law? No, not really. Even the white-collar crimes are carried out by highly brilliant minds – educated and well-off. The reason is these people don’t have conscience or moral ego to fight against a wrong decision. Real ego differentiates a person from the crowd on various attributes such as knowledge, wealth, beauty, righteousness, integrity, honesty and social position. People who actually cultivate these attributes by convincing their ego will always uphold their position and social value system vis-à-vis to those people who don’t have an iota of ethical ego.

Ego is never a deleterious factor either for your spiritual or mundane growth in life. Ego is the preserver of your value system that stimulates you to be superior to other mortals. Ego is your self-esteem. You are nothing without your ego. Your true self is your ego. Cultivate ego in a more subtle way to transform yourself from a lower moral to a higher mortal. In Hindu philosophy, the Sanskrit verse “Aham Brahmāsmīti” translates to “I am of Brahman” or “I am the Infinite Reality”. This actually guides us to transcend from mortal to immortal, finite to infinite and mundane to celestial. This is the ego of being human with virtues, which propels you further up in spiritual cycles to the highest order. Remember when you leave this mundane world your soul is only accompanied by your ego, nothing else.

Blockchain: Thwarting the Possibility of Frauds

Why do frauds crop up in a system? Sounds hackneyed? Maybe, but the provenance of fraud is pretty premeditated and intrinsic in any society. Innately frauds are a symptomatic manifestation of diluted accountability, inefficient compliance system and condescendingly low-slung trust levels in any institution, be it public or private. The recent unfolding of banking frauds only corroborates the fact that the lack of transparency, trust and traceability in banking operations has led to such deafening denigration of integrity. As media reports suggest, a few low-profile authorities in PNB have managed to manipulate the system by resorting to alternate means for allowing free flow of credits to a client who is also a big-time defaulter in debt repayment. And all these happened without the knowledge of the key stakeholders. Though sounds gross and sordid a closed system has always been the epicentre of genesis of frauds.

Now picture this. If the credit disbursement system would have been distributed or decentralized, trust-worthy, transparent and compliance-ready, these frauds perhaps won’t have happened during the life time of a bank. Beyond an idealistic consideration of non-occurrence of frauds, we must converge to an argument that let fraudsters play their dirty tricks in a system, but the system should be robust and dynamic enough to transpire the truth to all the stakeholders associated with the system. Then these frauds could be nipped in the bud without snowballing into massive swindles. In the light of modus operandi of frauds in any system, blockchain technology based solutions could be the de facto measures.

How can blockchain solutions really avert these frauds? Well, before getting down to brass tacks of fraud management, let’s first understand what blockchain technology is. Technically, a blockchain is a decentralized, distributed, digital public ledger that stores records of transactions across many computers so that no record can be transmuted retroactively without the amendment of all subsequent blocks and the complicity of the network. For a layman, a blockchain is a public distributed ledger. It’s a value-exchange protocol authenticated by mass collaboration over a peer-to-peer network of computers and distributed timestamping servers. The central point of blockchain is that it can’t be conned by few authorities having access to the system. Being a distribute ledger, blockchain thrives on the mechanism of consensus, which requires all stakeholders (here globally distributed computers or nodes) to be in collusion. Furthermore, the anonymity of computers throws the toughest task to hackers or bad actors to mutate the veracity of data.

Juxtaposed to a centralized system, which is managed by a select few, a blockchain is distributed and carries the consensus of anonymity. Each block in a blockchain, which registers valid transactions, includes a cryptographic hash of the previous block linking the two in the blockchain. Thus, the current block is linked to the previous block and this iteration is all the way connected to the genesis of original block. In a sense, blockchain is a tautology which always converges to the truth. Even separate blocks maybe produced concurrently, the inherent algorithm of blockchain ensures the highest-scoring version supersedes the others making the originality of data inviolable. The orphan blocks are automatically weeded out from the mainstream ensuring the sanctity of information is kept intact.

While discussing fraud prevention we must not forget the role of blockchain in immutability of information. A piece of information validated by collective consensus of stakeholders can’t be altered. This feature of blockchain prevents counterfeiting of documents. In financial domain where the complexity of transactions is surreptitiously high with multi-stakeholder approval processes, blockchain can enviably reduce the probability of fraud to almost insignificant level.

(This article was originally published by me on LinkedIn Pulse)