Paul Johnson says that tolerance is the key to prosperity. As evidence, he points primarily at Hindus, whose innate religious tolerance has allowed them to prosper in all their endeavours. In parallel, any attempt to stifle this tolerance in whatever garb–socialism, anti-casteism, what-have-you–has resulted in misery.

In economic activities the greatest of virtues is tolerance. All societies flourish mightily when tolerance is the norm, and our age furnishes many examples of this. China began its astounding commercial and industrial takeoff only when Mao Zedong’s odiously intolerant form of communism was scrapped in favor of what might be called totalitarian laissez-faire.

India is another example. It is the nature of the Hindu religion to be tolerant and, in its own curious way, permissive. Under the socialist regime of Jawaharlal Nehru and his family successors the state was intolerant, restrictive and grotesquely bureaucratic. That has largely changed (though much bureaucracy remains), and the natural tolerance of the Hindu mind-set has replaced quasi-Marxist rigidity.

I’m not tired about harping about the ill-effects of Nehruvian Statism. Among other reasons, this man created such a grotesque, and bloated form of bureaucracy that today if we try to downsize/dismantle it, we don’t know where to start. In the Libertarian parlance, I guess this translates to “minimum government, maximum power to individual choice.” The State is not omnipotent; it cannot and should not decide what is good for the individual. After all, society and institutions were created by individuals for individuals, not the other way round. As Emerson says,

Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.

And goes on to say that this has since spawned a culture of conformity. Methinks the most vulgar form of this conformity is forced (militant?) conformity, whose precedent was set in Communist societies. Quoting Emerson again,

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

One of the essences of Hindu philosophy is the freedom it grants to the individual to work out the path to individual salvation: no hard and fast rules, chains, must-dos–at most, it only gives broad guidelines. This is one of the bedrocks of the famed tolerance of Hinduism. As Paul Johnson says,

When left to themselves, Indians (like the Chinese) always prosper as a community. Take the case of Uganda’s Indian population, which was expelled by the horrific dictator Idi Amin and received into the tolerant society of Britain. There are now more millionaires in this group than in any other recent immigrant community in Britain. They are a striking example of how far hard work, strong family bonds and a devotion to education can carry a people who have been stripped of all their worldly assets.

And then he gives instances of nations where intolerance rules: Algeria, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan. Some of these countries were once-rich but now ravaged by strife, and others like Pakistan (and Bangladesh) live in perpetual chaos. Coming to the point I made above about governments/societies placing trust in individual choice–and prospering consequently–Paul says,

The more I study history, the more I deplore the existence of those–be they clerics, bureaucrats or politicians–who think they know what’s best for ordinary people and impose it on them. We have a pungent example of this know-all mentality in the EU. The bureaucrats of Brussels have created yet another brand of intolerance that determines by law everything from the shape of bananas to the number of seats in a bus, from apple growing to house plumbing. As a result the German economy is contracting and the French economy is stagnant. There are now more unemployed people in single-currency EU Europe than there have been at any other time since the worst of the 1930s, and many of them will never work again.

Triumph of individualism eh?