Pankaj Mishra — An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World

Mishra, Pankaj. An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. New York: Farrar Stauss and Giroux, 2004.

There seemed something very grand about the concept of freedom, about the individual's liberation from the constraints of traditional society, and his frely chosen right to movement, occupation, speech, religious belief and property. It was why an Indian of my background could not easily challenge the idea that the modern nation state, absolute and impersonal, could be the liberator of the new individual from his old chains.
Indeed, to look at the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe was mainly to admire intellectuals like Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and Marx who had upheld the potential of the human being to master circumstances instead of being a slave to them [...]

but

Marx had ideological reasons to fear what endlessly renewed needs of the individual might lead to. He thought that "modern bourgeois society, a society that has conjured up such mighty means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who can no longer control the powers of the underworld that he has called up by his spells".
But even Adam Smith, the proponent of free trade, had wondered early in his life if power and wealth, "those great objects of human desire", can make one immune to "anxiety, fear, sorrow, diseases, danger and death". He considered the idea that happiness could be secured through desiring more things than one needs a deception and had eventually concluded that it is "well that nature imposes on us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind."
[...]

Smith's influential vision of human growth and competition, which had been transformed into the ideology of imperial conquest, and which still drives much of international politics, had not gone uncontested in Europe. Its greatest critic was Rousseau, who I knew only as the intellectual father of the totalitarian state. He had despaired of the lack of virtue in a society built upon unfettered pursuit of desire. For him the state was necessary precisely to regulate this emerging society of commerce and money, of envy and inequality, in which he thought individuals would be hostile strangers to each other.

pp.322-224

Trapped in its subjectivity, the self recognized each image of the world as something to be made use of or exploited. This is how it entered into a purely instrumental relationship with nature as well as with other human beings, whose subjectivity it did not acknowledge. In pursuit of its desires, it reduced everything in the world to the level of "things", which were either an aid or a hindrance to the fulfilment of desire. The occasional fulfilment of desire strengthened the belief that one was a self, distinct from others; and such a belief fixed one further into the grid of such emotions as greed, hatred and anger.
The Buddha tried to reverse this process by advocating a form of mental vigilance that undermined the individual's sense of a distinctive unchanging self with its own particular desires. To observe even temporarily the incessant play of desire and activity in the mind was to see how the self was a process rather than an unchanging substance; how it had no single identity across time; and when assumed to be unchanging could only cause suffering and frustration.

p.332