Privileged Minority Research Articles

Not so ‘dumb money’? Constituting professionals and amateurs in the history of finance capitalism

This article examines the historically contentious relationship between the financial market and the public as discussed in academic literature, financial journalism and prescriptive how-to invest handbooks during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although financial markets thrive off active public participation, speculating at stock and commodity exchanges has been a sanctioned ritual reserved for a privileged minority. We argue that the financial establishment’s intent to control market access through financial entry-barriers (such as exchange membership fees and margin requirements) has been part of a bigger story we need to understand: a history of delegitimating uninitiated ‘lay speculators’ through the construction of exclusionary narratives about unfit amateur investors and morally corrupt publics. We conceptualize this process as an ongoing and delicate boundary-making exercise contributing to a market participation discourse that has been characterized by a set of reductive binaries, such as those of insider–outsider, professional–amateur and speculator–gambler. We show, however, that attempts to delineate popular participation in financial markets through these binaries have been complicated by the idea that besides being a force of market instability and collective irrationality, the public was a largely untapped source of liquidity. We argue that today’s discourse on public participation in financial markets resuscitates these simplified narratives and propose a more nuanced view of non-professional market participants being both destabilizers and liquidity-providers.

A School for Humanity: Confronting Division and Trauma Through Lived Values in Burundi

The Burundi American International Academy is an independent school in central Africa. It was established eight years ago expressly to generate potential leaders motivated to build peace, humanity and economic development in an impoverished country beset by political, ethnic, environmental and development challenges. The purpose of this research is to evaluate progress toward achieving the school’s aims to create such leaders through instilling and modelling the values of integrity, excellence, responsibility, passion, compassion and respect .The study used qualitative approaches including semi-structured conversations, observations, video, questionnaires and follow-up interviews to provide data. Data was analysed using Grounded Theory to identify the characteristics of a model intended to deliver sustainable positive change in social processes through education.Significant findings were that the school had developed a strong, united, persuasive and perhaps self-fulfilling narrative about its successes. This narrative shared between teachers, students, governors and parents, included convincing evidence of deep understanding of the relationship between values and action at macro and micro levels. The strong motivation among teachers and other adult participants towards sustaining its aims was reinforced by evidence of frequent values discussions and values-focussed in-service training.Theory arising from grounded research led to discussion on staff training and curriculum coverage. This included suggestions on involving connections to the school’s humanitarian values and philosophy, cross-curricular approaches to Sustainable Development Goals and closer relations between the subject disciplines. Establishing inclusive values within a privileged minority in a divided and impoverished society and balancing charitable attitudes with aspirations to high status, were revealed as significant challenges for the school. While student admission to North American universities may result in losing of some promising future leaders, the school offers a globally transferrable example of how to establish and sustain a values-creating school.

Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the Nineteenth Century by Gabriella Safran (review)

Reviewed by: Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the Nineteenth Century by Gabriella Safran Derek Offord Safran, Gabriella. Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the Nineteenth Century. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2022. xii + 288 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $49.95; $32.99 (e-book). Gabriella Safran's wide-ranging and imaginative monograph 'is a book about writers in the mid-nineteenth-century Russian Empire listening attentively to, recording, and repeating the words of people unlike themselves', [End Page 152] often Slav peasants but in some cases neither peasants nor Slavs (p. 1). The writers in question conceived of this listening in various ways: as a means of hastening the abolition of serfdom, or informing readers about the empire's population, or expressing faith in the unity of that population, or preserving an endangered past, or signalling their own virtue, or enriching the Russian literary language with vernacular and dialect forms. They believed that the results of their investigations would be unsatisfactory if they went about their listening in the wrong way. After all, writers might record speech inaccurately if they listened carelessly or unsympathetically, or they might misrepresent the significance of the words they heard if they did not take account of the context in which the words were spoken. Those to whom they listened, for their part, might distrust these representatives of another social stratum and therefore not speak frankly to them. In whatever way it was done, all this 'listening across social lines' (p. 2) indicated curiosity or concern on the part of a privileged minority about their relationship with the largely illiterate and enserfed common people. By raising the possibility that their records of popular speech might be inadequate, writers entered into rivalry with one another, either directly or through their fictional proxies. Fedor Dostoevskii, for example, was sure that he was better than other writers (Nikolai Leskov was a case in point) at listening to lower-class people and using their words. In the competition to win plaudits, writers might gain an advantage by performing as a certain type of listener, adopting one of the dozen or so modes of listening that Safran identifies. At the positive end of the spectrum, there is a 'prophetic' mode (hearing 'a divine message that others cannot') and a choral mode ('matching one's voice to those of a community to which one belongs'). At the negative end, there is a 'suspicious' mode (listening 'to one's enemies and uncovering their plots') and a 'mocking' mode (hearing 'the ridiculous thing one anticipated and getting people to laugh', p. 21). Safran explores the subject of listening to and recording popular voices by examining many writers and writings of several kinds. She begins with a chapter in which Russia in the age of Nicholas I (1825–55) is characterized by its detractors — especially Petr Chaadaev and the Marquis de Custine — as shamefully silent. In chapter two she considers another foreign traveller, the Prussian aristocrat Baron von Haxthausen, who was used by the Slavophiles to reinterpret the apparent silence that Chaadaev and Custine had observed. Although he was plainly an outsider, Haxthausen allowed himself to become a 'choral' listener who shared the feeling of the Slavophiles that the Russian people lived in a harmonious community, abjuring individual ambition. In chapter three Safran finds an example of 'omnivorous listening'. (The term seems infelicitous, referring as it does to different sensory perceptions.) [End Page 153] Vladimir Dal´, the child of German-speaking parents, tries to define himself as an exemplary listener by collecting prodigious quantities of data on the Russian vernacular which he published in the 1860s in his Proverbs of the Russian People and his still-respected four-volume Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great-Russian Language. In chapter four Safran turns to Dmitrii Grigorovich, who, in the popular stories on rural life he published in the 1840s, also attempted to establish credentials as a recorder of peasant language. In chapter five she discusses Ivan Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter and in chapter six the collection of heroic poems (byliny) that Pavel Rybnikov recorded in Olonetsk province. In chapter seven we find Dostoevskii harvesting vocabulary from the...

Introduction: Academic Capitalism and the Crisis of the Professoriate

In history, as in all disciplines, scholarship has over the past several decades been shaped increasingly by the emergence of what has been called "academic capitalism," which has reshaped universities in accordance with market logic and market priorities. This order is characterized most vividly by the emergence of a system of stark and increasing inequality between a relatively privileged minority of institutions and professors, themselves internally differentiated and besieged, and a growing mass that lacks the security and resources to engage in scholarship. The advent of academic capitalism and the consequent bifurcation and stratification of the professoriate and the deterioration of its power and conditions of work inevitably have a profound impact on who enters the profession, on who will teach and write history and, ultimately, on what and whose histories will be studied. For the first time in many decades historians may need to justify to both our students and the broader public not only our right and responsibility to determine what constitutes historical knowledge but also the very existence of our discipline as something other than the inculcation of patriotic and cultural values. In addItion, the logic of academic capitalism, with its expanding segmentation of faculty work and its stress on measuring, assessment, and quantification, has pushed everyone to be more competitive and focused on productivity. These developments pose a major threat not only to the academic freedom of individual scholars but to scholarship itself.

Screening Bodies

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to violently underscore the pre-eminence and precariousness of corporeality, the audiences’ bodily engagement with the screens on which they watch cinema is apt to undergo a range of shifts. When India implemented one of the strictest shutdowns in the world to control the spread of COVID-19, a population renowned for its fervent film fanbase, was forced away from film theatres. A privileged minority, however, was able to continue their pursuit of cinema by turning to the screens within their possession. This study engages with Indian women who have access to digital screens to watch Indian films. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with over forty women from predominantly urban India over the course of three months, this study observes how these reconfigurations primarily proceed along three axes: shifts in the linguistic and ideological rubric where the body’s investment in the digital screen becomes emplaced, the emergence of new constellations of women’s communities centered around cinema, the increased introspection among women about the genre of cinema watched on digital screens, and the subsequent impact on their gendered identity.

What is democratic backsliding?

What is democratic backsliding?

Humiliated Consciousness in Ronnie Govender’s The Lahnee’s Pleasure and Ben Okri’s In Arcadia

Ronnie Govender entitled both his major play (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1977) and his later novel (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2008) The Lahnee’s Pleasure, articulating that life was, and still is, a pleasure ground for a privileged minority in South Africa. Over a period of three decades, spanning both the periods before and after apartheid, his assessment of political conditions in the country of his birth remains as valid. Lao, in Ben Okri’s In Arcadia, reveals how much of life in Europe today remains a “fairground for the favoured” (London: Head of Zeus, 2014, 108) and how little pampered and privileged people such as Jim, the director of the film project in this novel, see or comprehend of what is so often a secret ordeal for a person of colour. Okri writes of conditions and perceptions in contemporary Britain, while Govender writes of South Africa up to the present time; yet despite the many differences in their social contexts, their delineation of conditions that surround a person of colour living in British or South African society shows that interracial equality and brotherhood are still distant ideals in both countries. Both writers, however, do hold out a measured degree of hope in their depiction of Wordsworthian figures of humble labour: Mothie in Govender’s novel and the train driver in Okri’s.

Human rights in a democratic society

The basic law of our state, which has constitutionally declared itself to be legal and democratic, contains a provision according to which a person is recognized as the highest social value. In view of this, the article characterizes the understanding and content of human rights in a democratic development. It is noted that democratic values are based on human rights and freedoms, which are an integral part of law and legislation. The law must be legal. It is not so if it contradicts fundamental human rights: it does not reflect natural and legal principles; does not comply with generally accepted international legal principles and norms on human and civil rights, etc.These aspects characterize the content of human rights in a democracy. It is emphasized that democracy is first of all a system of carefully prepared and strictly observed laws that regulate all spheres of life of the state, guarantee the rights and responsibilities of citizens. Therefore, the development and strengthening of a democratic, social, legal state is impossible without the establishment of human rights and freedoms. The existence of human rights and freedoms and their guarantee are a kind of external method of limiting power, which always seeks to self-expand and strengthen its presence in all spheres of human life. Under the normal interaction of power and law, which is quite natural in a democratic society and state system, thereis their mutual enrichment. It is then that the provisions and formulas on the «rule of law», «rule of law», «rule of law» acquire real significance. A political regime will be democratic only if it represents the interests of the general population. The political elite must rule in the interests of the majority of society, not for the benefit of the privileged minority. Democracy is based on the value of every human being, so it strives to create civilized living conditions for all citizens. In conclusion, the thesis is emphasized that human rights are a universal category that originates from the very nature of man and his ability to enjoy the basic, most important benefits and conditions of safe, free existence of the individual in society. Keywords: power, democracy, democratic values, law, rule of law, human rights and freedoms.

The influence of job accessibility on local residential segregation of ethnic minorities: A study of Hong Kong

AbstractPrevious research has shown that spatial mismatch between residential location and employment opportunities acts as a key influencing factor in employment outcomes for ethnic minorities living in segregated neighbourhoods. However, the effect of job accessibility on residential choice and segregation of ethnic minorities and its relevance to spatial mismatch across different minority groups has not been fully captured, especially in high‐density, transit‐oriented cities. This study seeks to address these knowledge gaps by investigating the residential segregation of ethnic minorities in relation to job accessibility in Hong Kong. Using a suite of statistical analyses, spatial patterns of residential segregation were found to relate to disparities in the socio‐economic status of different minority groups. Furthermore, modelling results suggest a significant trade‐off between neighbourhood quality and job accessibility particularly for the retail and service industries of South/Southeast Asian groups. By contrast, more privileged minority groups, such as White and Japanese communities, were found to cluster predominantly in higher income neighbourhoods with improved amenities rather than living closer to employment opportunities. These insights contribute to a more nuanced understanding of spatial mismatch across different ethnic minority groups, with which we have proposed policy recommendations with a view towards improving job accessibility, particularly for lower income minority groups and have identified avenues for future research.

Mankind at a Crossroads

The focus of this article is an examination of the impact that sentience of AI systems would have on mankind. Although the notion of sentience for AI systems is subject to controversy, we believe that its plausibility confers a sense of urgency to the kind of exercise developed here. For completeness, the article distinguishes the near-future and longer-term impacts of artificial intelligence. While the short-term impact is deemed to be mostly positive, the outlook for longer-term impact is considered to be negative under a variety of scenarios, including the adoption of man-machine symbiosis tools. The main reason for the negative outlook in the latter case is the heterogeneity of the world. This implies that only a privileged minority would benefit from symbiosis, an outcome that makes likely a world dominated by a minority of “superhumans.” These conclusions should not be taken lightly, and this article endeavors to raise the attention of scientists and policymakers. In this connection, the paper offers suggestions as to policy measures which could avert this disastrous outlook.

Dignidade humana e combate ao racismo ambiental: acordo regional de Escazú e Programa E-Carroceiros, em Fortaleza, Ceará

Por meio deste artigo, propõe-se a análise do surgimento do racismo ambiental na sociedade de riscos globais, como impacto negativo da globalização, nos países periféricos. Destaca-se a busca pelo aumento da qualidade de vida por parte de uma minoria privilegiada, em detrimento do bem-estar de pessoas e grupos em estado de vulnerabilidade. No contexto da América Latina e do Caribe, são relatados os avanços obtidos em sede de direitos humanos com o Acordo de Escazú, em prol da efetivação da justiça ambiental e da democratização das relações ambientais, sob o enfoque das capacidades de Amartya Sen e Martha Nussbaum. Já na esfera local, é abordado o Programa E-carroceiros, como modelo de integração entre Estado, tecnologia social, iniciativa privada e terceiro setor em Fortaleza, Ceará, e questiona-se a capacidade do programa em promover a igualdade de dignidade e a inclusão social. Nesse viés, conclui-se que a iniciativa favorece a inclusão social dos carroceiros, porém não indica a efetiva igualdade de dignidade, em virtude da natureza da atividade realizada. Trata-se de pesquisa qualitativa, pura, bibliográfica, doutrinária, legislativa e documental.

Teoría y práctica de la medicina visigoda. Del enciclopedismo de Isidoro a la enfermería monástica

Cuando leemos la obra enciclopédica de Isidoro de Sevilla da la sensación de que la medicina clásica había llegado al mundo visigodo plena de racionalidad, como un conocimiento erudito y bien asentado. Sin embargo, cuando se buscan las evi­dencias de la práctica médica esta resulta más difícil de atestiguar. El médico se presenta como una figura excepcional y sus cui­dados dirigidos a una minoría privilegiada. Cuando Isidoro enfrenta la enfermedad en su obra monástica parece claro que la salud del monje es objeto de su preocupación, pero enseguida apreciamos que su propio concepto de la enfermedad y sus causas ha tomado otros derroteros. La enfermedad ya no es solo una alteración del equilibrio del cuerpo, la enfermedad puede convertirse en una prueba de la desaprobación de Dios. Dentro de las opciones curativas propuestas por Isidoro en sus Etimologías: la dieta, el uso de medicamentos y la cirugía, solo la primera parece aplicarse en el contexto monástico. Esta opción, que es común al resto de la literatura ascética y de las reglas del entorno, deviene tanto en un vehículo de prevención de enfermedades, como en un objeto de disciplina moral y de control de la voluntad de los monjes.

ЕВРИСТИЧНИЙ ПОТЕНЦІАЛ КОНЦЕПТУ «ГЛИБИННА ДЕРЖАВА» В ПОЛІТОЛОГІЧНІЙ АНАЛІТИЦІ

Стаття присвячена розгляду концепту «глибинна держава», який на протязі останніх років активно впроваджується в площину політичного аналізу. Розглянуто основні підходи до визначення сутності глибинної держави в американській та вітчизняній політичній аналітиці, а також проблему наукової новизни даного терміну та аналітичної концепції, побудованої на його базі. Показано, що в рамках економічної системи, яка орієнтована на отримання індивідуального прибутку, внаслідок монополізації відбувається системна переорієнтація механізму держави від виконання загальносоціальних функцій на закріплення тіньових інститутів, які націлені на забезпечення привілейованого доступу до влади і джерел ресурсного забезпечення для обмеженого кола ресурсозабезпечених груп. Це супроводжується відсіканням від доступу до інституційного впливу на прийняття владних рішень для основної маси громадян

From Privilege to Prevalence: Contextual Effects of Women's Schooling on African Marital Timing.

In Africa and elsewhere, educated women tend to marry later than their less-educated peers. Beyond being an attribute of individual women, education is also an aggregate phenomenon: the social meaning of a woman's educational attainment depends on the educational attainments of her age-mates. Using data from 30 countries and 246 birth cohorts across sub-Saharan Africa, we investigate the impact of educational context (the percentage of women in a country cohort who ever attended school) on the relationship between a woman's educational attainment and her marital timing. In contexts where access to education is prevalent, the marital timing of uneducated and highly educated women is more similar than in contexts where attending school is limited to a privileged minority. This across-country convergence is driven by uneducated women marrying later in high-education contexts, especially through lower rates of very early marriages. However, within countries over time, the marital ages of women from different educational groups tend to diverge as educational access expands. This within-country divergence is most often driven by later marriage among highly educated women, although divergence in some countries is driven by earlier marriage among women who never attended school.

Ancient Roman Thinkers About Politics, Power, the State

The article focuses on the main distinctive features of ancient Roman political thought. The General Characteristics of the Political Life of Ancient Rome are cited. Views of Ancient Roman Thinkers on Political Foundations and Relations in a Human Society are considered. The history of ancient Roman political thought covers the whole millennium and in its evolution reflects significant changes in socio-economic and political-legal life. The history of Ancient Rome is divided into three periods: the royal period (754-510 BC), the republican (509-28 BC), the imperial (27 BC - 476 AD). In the conditions of a slave society, where slaves were not independent subjects of political life and remained only objects of another's property, the struggle for political power unfolded in the middle of the privileged minority. Ancient Roman political thought concerned power, the state and politics as a whole. Their contribution to the development of political thought was decisive for the evolution of political thought in a later period, namely in the Middle Ages. Recognition of the leading role of ancient political thought in the formation of the basic historical foundations of ancient statehood is a priority for our study. Ancient Roman authors played, indeed, a significant and out-standing role in the formation and development of modern political thought.

Prácticas Conmemorativas Urbanas e Igualdad de Género: El Caso de la Antroponimia Urbana de Santiago de Compostela

For centuries, decision-making procedures in commemorative urban practices have established a methodology of recognition relying on an androcentric process which has implied closing and exclusion mechanisms. Structures of economic and cultural dominating power favoured the particular interests of a privileged minority, penalizing, limiting and constraining the inclusion and visibility of a wide and plural range of human beings, mainly women. This bias was historically questioned by feminist theory and gender mainstreaming policies, which focuses on how different gender gap affects women to improve justice, progress and dignity standard of all people in different territories. Through the study of Santiago de Compostela’s urban toponymy, we will discuss how differences between social groups still persist, discussing, if applicable, how to produce effective changes that potentially resolve inequality situations. Other forms of imagination and resistance can emerge at a symbolic level, also, in the way of the streets of our cities are named.

Principi medijskog uticaja

The concept of media influence involves use of certain types of communication in order to change the habits, behavior or beliefs of the people we are addressing. The development of new technologies and the mass media is much faster than the development of our ability to process the immense amount of information we encounter. Due to our cognitive constraints, the consequence of such accelerated development of the media is that we are less engaged in analyzing the given situation as a whole. The world we live in has become much more complex while our reactions are considerably simpler. The media are the ideal means to achieve the desired impact in such circumstances, and the basic tactic is very simple - it suffices to offer a carefully selected and limited quantity of information. In the modern age, for most people, only that which was published in the media happened (or that which is mediated by the language of the media). The semantic function of the media space has enabled a simple and effective implementation of many media influence techniques. The basic principles of influence help us make a quick decision in given circumstances, without much effort and with the expectation that such a decision will be right for us. Therefore, media influence is a necessary condition for social communication between social elites and citizens, in order to preserve social order and its stability. On the other hand, media influence is constantly misused in order to preserve social power and gain of the privileged minority which has access to the media. Therefore, understanding of the principles of media influence and the way in which they operate is a very important aspect of media literacy and life in contemporary society.

Selective synaptic connections in the retinal pathway for night vision.

The mammalian retina encodes visual information in dim light using rod photoreceptors and a specialized circuit: rods→rod bipolar cells→AII amacrine cell. The AII amacrine cell uses sign-conserving electrical synapses to modulate ON cone bipolar cell terminals and sign-inverting chemical (glycinergic) synapses to modulate OFF cone cell bipolar terminals; these ON and OFF cone bipolar terminals then drive the output neurons, retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), following light increments and decrements, respectively. The AII amacrine cell also makes direct glycinergic synapses with certain RGCs, but it is not well established how many types receive this direct AII input. Here, we investigated functional AII amacrine→RGC synaptic connections in the retina of the guinea pig (Cavia porcellus) by recording inhibitory currents from RGCs in the presence of ionotropic glutamate receptor (iGluR) antagonists. This condition isolates a specific pathway through the AII amacrine cell that does not require iGluRs: cone→ON cone bipolar cell→AII amacrine cell→RGC. These recordings show that AII amacrine cells make direct synapses with OFF Alpha, OFF Delta and a smaller OFF transient RGC type that co-stratifies with OFF Alpha cells. However, AII amacrine cells avoid making synapses with numerous RGC types that co-stratify with the connected RGCs. Selective AII connections ensure that a privileged minority of RGC types receives direct input from the night-vision pathway, independent from OFF bipolar cell activity. Furthermore, these results illustrate the specificity of retinal connections, which cannot be predicted solely by co-stratification of dendrites and axons within the inner plexiform layer.

Desarrollo y Territorio. Una visión desde los procesos de sojización del Cono Sur de América Latina

En este artículo realizamos un análisis crítico sobre la relación entre desarrollo y territorio a partir del avance de la sojización en el Cono Sur latinoamericano. El trabajo se inicia con una periodización e interpretación respecto a las etapas en que la cuestión del desarrollo y el territorio se constituyó en política de estado. En este análisis se considera que la cuestión del desarrollo y del territorio y su presencia recurrente en la política pública tiene que ver con la construcción de hegemonía a través de la producción de un discurso, explicitado por medio de propuestas, opciones, acciones, e instrumentos dirigidos a enfrentar el problema social del desarrollo desigual (sea en relación a lo espacial, económico, social e incluso institucional). Desde esta interpretación se analiza la expansión de los commodities y la consolidación de un modelo de acumulación cada vez más concentrado y regresivo, que se traduce en una mayor y creciente desigualdad. Se trata de una concentración económica que beneficia a una minoría privilegiada mientras se avasallan los derechos de los sectores más desprotegidos y precarizados del ámbito rural y urbano. El trabajo pone en cuestión al contexto cultural hegemónico que logra que las actuales consecuencias de la producción del territorio y de valorización del capital (ligadas al extractivismo y a la reprimarización de las economías sudamericanas) se tornen lejanas e incomprensibles para la gran mayoría de la población, que desconoce, minimiza o desestima la profundización de la desigualdad y la marginación social, las consecuencias ambientales, políticas, económicas, sociales e institucionales –presentes y futuras– del avance de los commodities, la persecución, la opresión y la discriminación de los numerosos actores.

BASES PSÍQUICAS DE LA EXPLOTACIÓN DE LOS DALITS EN LA INDIA

The term dalit means downtrodden and trampled. In fact the dalits in India, the lowest of the lower castes and the poorest of the poor, are being trampled (socially, politically and economically) by the rich, especially those belonging to the upper castes. Roughly the dalits comprise about 16.6 per cent of India’s population. But their share of ownership of land and property, and access to education and employment and basic social amenities is miserably low. The worst inhuman practice against them is the practice of untouchability. This is associated with various kinds of atrocities perpetrated on them by the rich belonging to the upper castes. All these social exploitation have been associated with economic exploitation and slavery. In general, the root of the malady may be traced back to Manusmriti (M.S.). M.S. ascribed a legal, ethical and religious justification to the existing system of exploitation of the people belonging to the lower castes. M.S. delineated how plethora of new sub-castes was generated through inter-caste marriages and thus the forefathers of the modern dalits emerged. Descendants of the barbarian tribes (Mlechchas) subjugated by the Aryans swelled their ranks. The basic objective of this article is to get down to the depth of human psychosis that gives rise to the exploitative and discriminatory socio-economic practices related to the dalits and other lower castes. In this connection we are going to highlight the primordial psychosis of the intelligent and privileged minority belonging to the upper castes to give birth to and perpetuate discrimination against and inhuman exploitation of the majority belonging to the lower castes. The psychosis is deeply rooted in basic human modes as analyzed and elaborated in the Samkhya Philosophy of ancient India. According to Samkhya Philosophy, human consciousness is a part of material manifestation of Nature, and it is the combination of three modes viz. Sattwa, Rajas and Tamas, endowed by Nature. All these basic modes combine in different degrees to assign different characteristics to different individuals. If isolated in the abstract, unmixed Sattwa pertains to goodness and virtue, Rajas to passion and insatiable desire and Tamas to darkness of mind, obsession and inertia. All our mental and intellectual faculties originate from these three basic modes. Accordingly all individuals may be classified broadly into three major categories, viz. Sattwic, Rajasic and Tamsic. The people in the upper strata of the society are in the Rajasic state and the dalits are forced to be at the lowest echelon of the Tamasic state through poverty, illiteracy, social customs, religious beliefs, and legal measures by the state machinery which is being controlled by the Rajasic minority. This process of de-humanization of the dalits started long ago to fulfill the greed and power mongering of the Rajasic upper strata as is evident from the prescriptions of the Manusmriti. The only way out of this malady is to raise the dalits and the other exploited castes like the Shudras from the state of Tamas to the state of Rajas and later on to Sattwa through rapid industrialization with modern technologies, removal of illiteracy and abject poverty of the exploited majority and spread of scientific education and scientific world outlook to eradicate all Tamasic modes like superstitions, obsessions with religious rites, distinctions of and discrimination against the population on the basis of caste, creed, mother tongue, religious practices etc., and blind devotion of common people to religious gurus and priests, celebrities and political parties and political leaders. To this end it is necessary to inculcate ethics and Sattwic values among the exploiting minority, the politicians and political parties and the mass media.