ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has led many of us to relook at some of the very fundamental questions about our being and existence. Infectious diseases are emerging and reemerging in recent years forcing us to rethink what has been the “normal” way of behaving with nature. Moreover, Climate change has already posed as a global crisis threatening humanity on this planet. Now it is high time we enquired about these crises and took decisive actions to save us and the earth as well. We have been considering the neoliberal and technocratic lifestyle as “natural” or “law” and are completely blind about any alternative ways of life in this planet. The “rational” market determines the fate of our environment including our fellow species on this earth, and the result is very much before us. Why then, after more than three decades of deliberations on global warming and emerging infectious diseases, we continue to hold the market as divine and ultimate determinant of everything? Why state acts like a mere spectator and sometimes a party to the ongoing onslaught of nature on massive scale? These are some of the fundamental questions that this article attempts to address. The paper argues that it is in the nature of present political economy to function in this way. The contemporary (political) economy looks nature as something to be subverted. The state often acts on behalf of the capitalistic forces let alone exposing the inadequacies of economy to meet the emerging global crisis. The Homo economicus which defines the political economy today is utterly helpless in realizing our connection with both the biotic and abiotic components of the earth. The neoliberal self is self-centred, dominant, and an all-consuming entity that erroneously considers itself as the basic ingredient of human development. The paper investigates the nature of modern political economy which encourages and creates this self and also attempts to explain why there is a need to transform this self urgently. Lack of recognition of a self which is existentially linked to other species as well as non-living components of this earth is the major source of the present crisis. The individual, competitive, and never-satisfied self needs to be replaced with a self which is committed to inner-working and emancipation in true sense.
