This article was originally published at Mises Canada on 21 June 2013. The original link is no longer available, so I am reproducing the article here for archival purposes.

For the last few days, the story of Komal Ganatra has been making headlines in India. Her father, now retired, earned his living as a schoolteacher. Five years ago, she was married off, in an arranged marriage, to an Indian immigrant living in New Zealand. The man threw her out a mere two weeks later, allegedly because her parents could not arrange a dowry.

Such women grow up in a strange, Orwellian system, divorced from real life. Their parents do not allow them to go out into the world and test reality for themselves. They receive no real feedback from life. They fail to develop discernment. They fail to understand causality.

Instead, they must rely on rules handed down by their parents, who are themselves utterly unwise. But rules made by others cannot replace reason, experience, and judgment. To fix these rules in people’s minds, they must also be taught about heaven and hell, purity and pollution, sin and duty, and all the superstitions that go along with such a worldview. In such a mind, there is little room left for reason, evidence, or the ability to connect cause and effect.

In the absence of wisdom earned from living a real life, pseudo-rules become the framework through which such people interpret existence.

Of course, such parents never had wisdom either. Had they possessed it, they would never have entertained the proposal of a stranger they did not know. Were Komal rational, she would have declined to marry unless she had courted him, or at least learned about his character through someone she could trust. Although it is easy to feel sympathy for her, one must ask what her real motivations were in marrying a man with whom she had no genuine human connection. Could part of the attraction have been material—a route to New Zealand and a seemingly better life?

Why did her parents never learn some basic principles of life, despite having gone out into the world to earn a living? Because they had likely gone through the same indoctrination they imposed on her. By the time they entered adult life, their understanding of the world—filtered through superstition and a social rulebook—had already been fixed in their minds. Even if society no longer applied direct pressure on them, they had learned to filter everything through the conditioning they had absorbed. What did not fit was ignored.

Moreover, her father was a teacher. The way schooling works in India, teachers receive very little real-world feedback. Government schools isolate them from reality. Critical thinking, reflection, and questioning are seriously discouraged. A teacher who has never learned to think rationally becomes a carrier of the same irrationality in the next generation.

I have deep sympathy for such women. At first, one could blame the parents. But I have deep sympathy for the parents too. I would give them a hug if I had the chance. My eyes swell when I hear about such people and the pain that so many ignorant, innocent, and gullible people go through. So much of our pain is useless.

But then I have even deeper sympathy for the children her father taught. Did they not absorb the same irrational thinking pattern? In the end, it is all a muddled, vicious cycle. The victim in one story easily becomes the carrier of the same virus in the next—or a spineless tyrant, or an irrational busybody, or a bureaucrat with power over other people’s lives.

I can never shake off the feeling that tyrant and victim often exist as two sides of the same coin. The gullible are often those who would become perpetrators if only they were clever enough.

So what has Komal been doing for the five years since she was thrown out by her husband? Instead of going out into the world to learn how it works, she decided to study for a job in government “to help improve India.” She attempted the UPSC, the extremely “difficult” examination based on rote learning that decides who will become the top bureaucrats in India. After five years of hard work, she has now cleared it. She will become one of the chosen few who run the country.

Komal, still wearing the mangalsutra—the religious symbol of her marriage—now wants to trace her husband and initiate legal action against him. Why now? Why should she still be “married” when she has known for five years that she was fooled? She has still not understood that she was foolish. And she remains so.

My sympathy for her has now gone down the toilet. She has not learned wisdom. She has no experience of life except success in an examination system, however difficult that system might be. She is as gullible as she ever was. But now she will shovel her gullibility down other people’s throats as one of the officers of the Indian state.

The vicious cycle continues.