What is Profit?
As CAs and business managers we all know that the accounting definition of Profit is “the excess of revenue earned over expenditure incurred to earn it”.
What is human endeavour ? In plain terms, it is nothing but the expending of effort.
What is the purpose of the expenditure of human effort? In every sphere of human endeavour or activity, the purpose of expending effort is to realise Profit. No human being will ever exert effort purposelessly. If there is no gain to be earned from the expenditure of effort why should any man willingly undergo pain?
For all living being in the universe — the sun, the rivers, birds or animals — it is Nature that defines or dictates the purpose to which they will go on to expend effort in life. None of them acts really out of pure self-will …
The big exception however is the human being. What drives Homo sapiens in life is Self-Will fuelled by desire for Profit …. that which is the excess of income over expenditure.
If you think about it deeply, there is nothing all that immoral or evil about human beings wanting to lead purposeful lives. The real problem however is that Profit becomes — inevitably and permanently — a moving goal or target in life. The idea of Profit becomes an ideal in itself. And that is when it becomes highly addictive. The pursuit of Profit —
which by definition is the “return on effort exceeding the pain of effort” — becomes the be-all and end-all of life .
In the end, when Man finds himself unable to get himself to say about Profit that “enough is enough” …that’s exactly when the toxic Wheel of Karma begins to turn … and that precisely is what the lady in the video-clip goes on to describe as “Human Selfishness”.
Selfishness begets even more Selfishness until it turns viral and vicious and it snowballs and it goes on to become inevitably, a pandemic of human evil. The pandemic in time mutates itself into a hundred different variants all afflicting the human condition in a hundred different ways.
Sudarshan Madabushi