From the first Madras 1980 talk. Krishnamurti locates corruption not in conduct or institutions but in the psyche's structural self-centeredness, and asks whether love can exist where selfishness is rationalized as necessity.
Transcript
Is love to be cultivated? As you cultivate a plant or cultivate knowledge, is it to be cultivated? Or does it only exist without any sense of the activity of thought, when there is no self, when there is utter denial of selfishness. So is that the reason why human beings throughout the world, we are becoming more and more selfish, more and more self-centred, more and more this sense of individual achievement, individual salvation? When that is emphasised selfishness becomes all important, rationalised, intellectually accepting the necessity of it, and unconsciously, deeply, never being free from it. Is that the reason why human beings have become what we are? So what is your responsibility? How can we salvage this country? Can there be a group of people who are absolutely incorruptible? Corruption is not merely at the superficial level – passing money under the table. That's a very small affair. But corruption is much more deep, because corruption is in the mind. Corruption is the exercise of thought for its own benefit. Corruption is when there is contradiction in the very psyche. When there is conflict and that conflict is continued for any length of time, it brings corruption. When thought is attached to a particular idea, experience, to a particular nation, to a particular belief, dogma, such attachment must inevitably breed corruption. And why is it that we have no sense of integrity? The word 'integrity' means being whole, integral. And when we observe, we are broken up human beings, fragmented. Violent and yet trying to seek peace, greedy, and having its opposite, so we are always in conflict. That is corruption. That indicates the lack of integrity, dishonesty. So what shall we, as human beings – seeing perhaps the basic cause of our degeneration – from there, what shall we do? You understand my question? It is this: having found a cause, or many causes – many causes being this utter disregard for another, the total concern with oneself, which identifies itself with the nation, with the family, with the gods you believe in. It is all the movement of the egotistic action. And that may be one of the causes of this present misery. Realising that, what is our action? Not only as a human being living in this part of the world, but every human being is representative of all other human beings. I do not know if you have gone into that. Your brain is not your brain. That brain has evolved through time, millions and millions of years, and when you regard it as your particular brain, you have reduced this enormous capacity of its energy to a very small point. And when you regard yourself as an individual, free to choose, free to do what he likes, are you actually an individual? Or are you the result of your culture, of your tradition, of your superstition, of all the books that you have read or not read? Are you actually a total, integrated human being – undivided, indivisible, not broken up? It is only such a person is an individual. So having listened to all this, what's your action? How are you, living in this country, going to salvage this country? Or are you allowing, going to let this country go to pieces? It is breaking up, as individuals, as human beings are breaking up.