Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes on Exploitation

• When one uses another for psychological purposes, then exploitation begins. All exploitation is based on psychological poverty of being. There will be no exploitation of man by man when this poverty of being is understood. Exploitation will not cease through mere legislation. There will be exploitation in different forms - at home, in public - as long as this psychological emptiness exists. You will be content with little, with the necessities of life, when you are inwardly rich.
   
• The psychological exploitation is far more subtle, more mischievous, and destructive; it cannot be done away with through legislation. This exploitation will cease only with the transformation of the individual. This transformation is not of time; it is ever in the present. In this inward revolution you bring about a transformation in the world in which you live, the world of your relationship.
   
• To pursue more than what you need becomes exploitation. You need food, clothes, and shelter, but when they become the means of personal aggrandizement, then exploitation begins. To use another to gain power and position, authority and domination, is exploitation. Exploitation is the problem and not who exploits. The capitalist, the ruler, the zamindar are like you; if you had the chance you would become like them. You would lose your generosity, your love, the moment you climb the ladder of success, of gain.
   
• With acquisition there must ever be exploitation; the craving for acquisition must inevitably bring about exploitation. Acquisition is always psychological. When emphasis is laid on you as an acquiring entity, the individual or the collective, there will be always exploitation. This does not mean that we should not organize for the physical welfare of man, but if the organizer uses the organization as a means of acquisition, then he and the organization will become the means of exploitation.
   
• If you voluntarily and intelligently put aside this craving to possess, then you will create a society not based on compulsion and exploitation.
   
• It is arduous to understand the deeper, psychological significance of exploitation, and without understanding it, to merely substitute one exploiter for another is to continue in strife and misery. Because psychologically, inwardly, you are poor, aching with loneliness, with emptiness, possessions made by the hand or by the mind assume predominating significance. This constant companion, this aching void, must be faced and understood; then exploitation, which is psychological, will cease.
   
• Can we ever live without exploitation? I say we can. There must be exploitation as long as there is the struggle for self-protection; as long as the mind is seeking security, comfort - through family, religion, authority, or tradition - there must be exploitation. And exploitation ceases only when the mind discerns the falseness of security and is no longer ensnared by its own power of creating illusions. If you will experiment with what I say, you will then understand that I am not destroying desire, but that you can live in this world richly, sanely, a life without limitations, without suffering. You can discover this only by experimenting, not by denying, not through resignation, nor by merely imitating. Where intelligence is functioning - and intelligence ceases to function when there is fear and the desire for security - there can be no exploitation.