The Dilemma of Existence: Is There a Question?

The first problem of existence is not the answer but the question. The correct understanding of the question means getting to know why the historically-given answers have proved to be inadequate or false and have pushed civilization either towards catastrophic dead ends or towards long detours into nothingness and nihilism. Mankind has not reached the stage where a civilization can be founded on the answer. We are still grappling with the question. We are yet to identify the question. The possibility exists that the question does not exist, and that mankind must always grope in the unquestionable and unanswerable universe.

Be the Unbeliever and not the True Believer

“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe in his story The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether. 

This is a good advise from Poe. The people that I despise most are those who believe in everything they hear and everything that they see. You should, as Poe notes in his story, “learn to judge for yourself of what is going on in the world, without trusting to the gossip of others.”

The Ephemerality of Capitalism

Capitalism is the father of socialism. Liberty is the mother of tyranny. This is because capitalism and liberty give rise to a human material which despises the moral norms of a capitalist free society and is instinctively drawn towards socialism and tyranny. It is impossible for mankind to create a capitalist free society which can last for more than a generation—the moment the next generation takes over, the dismantling of the old ways begins.

The Birth of the Woke Mouse

Mr. Capitalism had tremendous potential. Miss Modern Philosophy had tremendous destiny. Their marriage in the nineteenth century was blessed by the Gods and celebrated by the mortals. In the twenty-first century the couple produced their first child: a woke mouse.

Nightmares and Dreams

Those who fight nightmare monsters during the day must vanquish them to enjoy pleasant dreams at night.

America: The Coffin of Capitalism

What is America now if not the coffin and grave of capitalism? The Americans have killed capitalism and buried it in a secret unmarked grave, where posterity will never find it. With this achievement, they have sealed the fate of Western civilization. America has done a service to humanity by killing capitalism and freeing us from the tyrannical control of the West. In the future, historians will write that the killing of capitalism was not America’s ultimate achievement—the killing of Western civilization was.

On Aristotle’s Influence in Europe

The notion that Thomas Aquinas reintroduced Aristotle to Europe in the thirteenth century is a myth created by some nineteenth and twentieth century historians and philosophers. Aristotle never vanished from Europe. Several scholars in the Roman Empire and in the post-Roman era studied and extensively commented on Aristotle. Aquinas could not read Greek, and the Aristotelian texts that he studied were the Latin translations done by William of Moerbeke. Aquinas can be credited with introducing a Thomistic version of Aristotle to Europe—but several other versions of Aristotle were available before him. In the Preface to his book The Republic of Plato, Allan Bloom writes, “William of Moerbeke's Latin translations of Aristotle… are so faithful to Aristotle's text that they are authorities for the correction of the Greek manuscripts, and they enabled Thomas Aquinas to become a supreme interpreter of Aristotle without knowing Greek.”

The Paradox of Liberty, Prosperity, and Happiness

The charlatans woo the masses by promising liberty, prosperity, and happiness. 

Madame Roland, a supporter of the French Revolution, who was sentenced for execution because she was a member of the Girondist faction, reportedly said while she was being led to the guillotine: “O Liberty, how many crimes are committed in thy name!” The French Revolution failed to bring liberty, and prosperity and happiness because such things cannot be achieved through philosophical and political movements.

In a free society, there will be hundreds of ways of looking at liberty, prosperity, and happiness. True liberty means controversy about not just the nature and scope of liberty but also of prosperity and happiness. If you encounter certainty about these ideas in any movement, then that movement is not free. It is totalitarian. It is being led by people of fixed minds who want to impose their worldview on all.

The Desert Grows

"The desert grows: woe to him who harbors deserts!” ~ Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Nietzsche is lamenting the rise of deserts in the minds of men. He is saying that the moralists and idealists have accepted false ideologies, and the characterless and rationalists have turned towards nihilism. He is proclaiming that an apocalypse is imminent because there is no one left who possess the will to save civilization from disintegration.

The Desire to be God

The ultimate desire of the theistic mind is to be close to his conception of God. For the atheistic mind, the ultimate desire is to be God. 

There is a contradiction in the mind of both, the theist and the atheist. Both are lusting for something that is unknowable and unachievable. But the desire of the atheist is more dangerous, because he wants to be the God, the secular, earthly, living God. What will a man not do when his aim is to be the God of all humans! 

The philosopher of post-Bolshevik leftism, Jean-Paul Sartre, himself an outspoken atheist, understood the atheistic mind. Towards the end of his book Being and Time, he writes, “man is a being who wants to be God.”

Marquis de Sade’s French Revolution

The name Marquis de Sade brings the word “sadism” to mind. A powerful intellectual and a firebrand social activist, he played a pivotal role in the French Revolution. In his essay “Operation Parricide: Sade, Robespierre, and The French Revolution,” Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn gives an account of Sade’s leftwing political legacy. Here’s an except:  

“In his [Marquis de Sade’s] endless pornographic and extremely boring writings, there are long philosophical and political passages in which he reveals himself as a rabid, leftwing, materialist atheist. He was primarily responsible for the storming of the Bastille because at the request of his mother-in-law he was—thanks to a lettre de cachet—held prisoner in the Bastille along with seven counterfeiters, cardsharps, fools, and people in debt. From the Bastille, Sade incited the people of the quartier through his makeshift megaphone into coming to their assistance and liberating them. De Launay, the governor of the Bastille, was helpless. He didn't dare put the prisoner in a straitjacket (or in a dungeon) but instead asked the king to deliver him from this prisoner. As a result Sade was transferred on July 4, 1789 to the hospital for the criminally insane at Charenton and released in 1791. He then became chairman of the revolutionary Section des Piques in which "Citizen Sade" was active as a radical Jacobin until he quarreled with Robespierre and was once again committed to the hospital for the criminally insane. Sade, along with the masochistic neurotic Rousseau, who wrote pedagogic novels and committed his children to orphanages, is the true renewer of democracy in our time and naturally also a hero of our left-wing intellectuals.” 

Much of the killings, Kuehnelt-Leddihn notes, happened in a sadistic fashion. “Even in Arras… the decapitated corpses of men and women were undressed and then bound together in obscene poses as batteries nationales maniacs out of Sade's 120 Nights of Sodom… Quite naturally the main victims of these male-perpetrated atrocities were women (as well as their children, often murdered before their eyes.) The sadistic misogyny of the Revolution reached unbelievable proportions.”

Kuehnelt-Leddihn ends his essay with these lines: “In the French Revolution the scum of France succumbed to blood lust and opened the door to evil. In our day of electronic stultification, it's a sure bet that now, 200 hundred years later, this monstrosity will be the focus of orgiastic celebrations. The average man always clings despairingly to cliches. If one takes them away from him, he has to do his own research, his own thinking and deciding and has to begin anew. One can't really expect this sort of elitist behavior from such poor folks. Those whom the gods would destroy, they first rob of their reason.”

The False Concept of Freedom of the Press

Freedom of the press is a false concept because it confers on one sector of the economy, the media industry, a kind of freedom that is not available to other sectors of the economy. The media industry is just another sector of the economy—why should it enjoy a freedom that society does not confer to other sectors of the economy?

We don’t talk about the freedom of the steel industry, of the travel, of the hospitality industry. I have never seen the press fighting for the rights of the small businesses and the independent professionals. The journalists want freedom for themselves while they become complicit in pushing the rest of society into slavery. These media companies are owned by some of the most corrupt businessmen, who are close to the political establishment.

Freedom of press means freedom for the corrupt businessmen—it is a license to loot and lie, and cause damage to the nation by spreading propaganda, disinformation, and fear.

David And Goliath

There is the ancient saying: “For every Goliath there is a stone.” Do the Goliaths (the elites) of our time realize that, like the tyrants of the past, they are committing too many excesses; that in their lust for power, glory, and wealth, they have gone too far and imposed too many restrictions on life; that they have obliterated an entire way of life and taken civilization to its breaking point; that now they must deal with the Davids armed with slingshots and stones who are coming for them? The big and powerful Goliaths are no match for the Davids—this is the lesson of history.

Who Will Stop the Little Barbarians?

“Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.” ~ Thomas Sowell in his 1987 book A Conflict of Visions. 

The little barbarians came of age decades ago and they are clueless about the workings of civilization. They have cornered key positions in the government, corporations, media, and the institutions of arts and entertainment. They have developed an exaggerated sense of their own importance. They have procreated another gang of little barbarians. Now there is no one left to stop these barbarians from causing mindless destruction.

The Fate of the Utopia’s Supporters

In a utopia there is no place for those who know the secrets of its creation. 

When the Jacobins took control of France, in the eighteenth century, their first target for executions were their own supporters, the ones who knew the secrets of the Jacobin project for creating a heaven on earth and could at some point of time reveal the truth to the political rivals of Jacobinism. Something similar happened in the twentieth century, when the Bolsheviks became the masters of Russia. The Bolsheviks have prosecuted and executed more communists than the leaders of any capitalist country.

A new utopia project is now underway in the Western countries: this is the digital utopia. The supporters of the digital utopia do not realize that they will be the first to face the guillotine or banishment to a concentration camp when the utopians attain total power.

Socialism: The Tower of Babel Without God

Dostoevsky understood the connection between atheism and socialism. In his book The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1879, decades before the Bolshevik experiment was executed in Russia by Lenin and Trotsky, Dostoevsky wrote: 

“If he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism today, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.” 

In this excerpt, which occurs in Chapter 5, “Elders,” Dostoevsky is reflecting on the reasons which might have inspired the youngest of the Karamazov brothers, Alyosha Karamazov, to become a monk and not a socialist. Dostoevsky was a man of wisdom—in his books, he has given a magnificent description of the human condition.

The “Science” of Leftist Political Warfare

You can’t win if you fight science. After the Second World War, the intellectuals belonging to the Frankfurt school and other post-Bolshevik leftist groups developed the strategy of using Freudian psychoanalysis, which they touted as infallible science, to disarm their political opponents. 

They created the image of a normal personality-type which was of a prototypical leftist—and they started using words like “deranged,” “racist,” “infantile,” “fascist,” “neurotic,” “nazi,” and “warmonger” to denounce those whose opinions did not fit the leftist personality-type. You had to be a leftist to be regarded as normal—if you were an independent thinker, then you faced the risk of being branded as abnormal. Since this branding was being done in the name of science, it was incontestable. 

In the twenty-first century, this supposedly Freudian but essentially leftist method of analyzing and depicting personality-types has become the widely accepted norm in the intellectual establishment.

The Wisdom of Dostoevsky

The notion that man is born free, that total freedom is his natural state, and that all men want to be free was developed in the Age of Enlightenment by French philosophers. But most people, who are not enlightened philosophers, do not take freedom as their natural state. They are not obsessed with being free. 

In Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, the character Ivan Karamazov says: “I tell you, man has no preoccupation more nagging than to find the person to whom that unhappy creature may surrender the gift of freedom with which he is born. But only he can take mastery of people's freedom who is able to set their consciences at rest.”

Dostoevsky was not an idealist like the French philosophers in the Age of Enlightenment. He was a practical man, a man of wisdom.

The Paradox of Humankind

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in machines, there is rise of Artificial Idiocy (AI) in intellectuals, politicians, and journalists. This is the paradox of humankind.

The Future is a Leftist Utopia

I can see the future: it is a leftist utopia. The left never stopped learning—it learned from the failures of the Jacobin revolution of the eighteenth century, the Russian Bolshevik revolution of the twentieth century, and several other revolutions. Their political movement kept evolving. From the guillotine-toting Jacobins, they evolved into the gun-toting Bolshevik revolutionaries, and now they have evolved into an even more magnificent beast: the suave and erudite liberal who conspires in black suit and black tie to devastate his enemies, who uses culture to control politics and politics to control culture, who is equally at home in corporate boardrooms as he is in war councils. The left never gave up its fanatical faith, not when the Jacobins were decimated, not when the Bolsheviks were thrown out of power in a counterrevolution. Now they are on the cusp of attaining what they always wanted: total political control of all the major nations.

Personal Maxim and Kantian Universal Practical Law

Immanuel Kant explains the relationship between a personal maxim and a universal practical law (in his Critique of Practical Reason) : “I have, for example, made it my maxim to increase my wealth by every safe means. Now I have a deposit in my hands, the owner of which has died and left no record of it. This is, naturally, a case for my maxim. Now I want only to know whether that maxim could also hold as a universal practical law. I therefore apply the maxim to the present case and ask whether it could indeed take the form of a law, and consequently whether I could through my maxim at the same time give such a law as this: that everyone may deny a deposit which no one can prove has been made. I at once become aware that such a principle, as a law, would annihilate itself since it would bring it about that there would be no deposits at all.”

Earth’s Song of Misery and Famine

In 1618, Johannes Kepler published his last major work, the Harmonice Mundi (The Harmony of the World). The poverty, prosecution, and ostracism that he had experienced in his lifetime had left him bitter and pessimistic. He had become convinced that the earth was a celestial ball of everlasting misfortune. In a footnote to the Harmonice Mundi, he wrote: "The Earth sings Mi-Fa-Mi, so we can gather even from this that Misery and Famine reign on our habitat.” 

Kepler made this comment not just because of the sense of doom and gloom which was pervading his mind during the final years of his life—he actually believed that the speed at which the planets move through space was proportional to certain notes of the Latinate musical scale popular in his day: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. He surmised that the sound of a planet corresponded to the character of life that it supported, and that the earth’s notes were mi-fa-mi.

Philosophy and Religion

Philosophy without religion leads to utopianism, atheism, and nihilism. Religion without philosophy leads to tribalism, cultism, and religious fundamentalism. History tells us that the most effective philosophies and religions are those in which philosophical thought and religious speculation have marched shoulder to shoulder.

The Dualism of Samkhya and Yoga

The Samkhya and Yoga systems are dualistic since they preach that the universe is created when there is a disturbance in the equilibrium due to the coming together of Purusha (intelligence principle) and Prakriti (material principle). There is a multiplicity of Purushas. All material and living things in the universe are a result of the conjunction between certain kinds of Purushas and Prakriti. In living entities, Purusha has been translated as the approximate equivalent of what is known as the “soul” in the western tradition, but it’s not exactly the soul because it also represents a complete relationship between the body and the soul. In the case of man, along with being the eternal life-force, the Purusha is a man’s ego, intelligence, and consciousness.

The Two Worlds: Of the Poor and the Prosperous

In poor countries where starvation and disease is common, when two people who are acquainted with each other meet on the street, they usually ask, “Are you feeling healthy? Did you have enough food?” In prosperous countries where people are complacent and expect to live forever, when two people who are acquainted with each other meet on the street, they usually ask, “Are you feeling healthy? Did you get vaccinated?”

The Union Between Progress and Destruction

Progress and destruction always march hand in hand. Progress in one area always entails destruction in another area. The bond between barbarism and civilization, repression and liberty, traditions and innovation, cruelty and compassion, faith and reason is forged by the primal forces of nature. This bond cannot be broken through human efforts. 

In the Age of Enlightenment the French philosophers dreamed about creating a perfect society, which is founded on civilization, liberty, innovation, compassion, and reason, and is free from the pitfalls of barbarism, repression, traditions, cruelty, and faith. But the Enlightenment project was a failure—it ended with the bloodbath of the French Revolution.

The Politics of Unmensch and Übermensch

What kind of men prove to be great leaders? This question can be best answered through Nietzsche’s terminology: The great leaders are a synthesis of the Unmensch (the brute) and Übermensch (the overman). History tells us that the great leaders have the mind of the overman and the heart of the brute.

The Problem of Egalitarianism and Individualism

When egalitarianism and individualism get radicalized, there is a decline in moral, intellectual, and political standards, and then the nation’s march into a tyrannical and hedonistic dystopia cannot be stopped. Robert H. Bork writes in his classic 1996 book Slouching Towards Gomorrah: “In their final stages, radical egalitarianism becomes tyranny and radical individualism descends into hedonism. Those translate into a modern version of bread and circuses. Government grows larger and more intrusive in order to direct the distribution of goods and services in an ever more equal fashion while people are coarsened and diverted, led to believe that their freedoms are increasing, by a great variety of entertainments featuring violence and sex.”

The Western Conception of Concentration Camps

The idea of concentration camps was first conceived in Europe in the eighteenth century, the so-called Age of Enlightenment, as a tool for indoctrinating the masses. The Enlightenment philosophers and politicians believed that by preaching right kind of philosophy and by applying sufficient amount of coercion, people could be transformed into better human beings who are motivated by reason, science, and logic, and who will not be swayed by the forces of religion, tradition, and monarchism. They thought that people could be herded into large correction facilities where they would be kept for as long as it would take to reeducate them for their own good. 

The first Concentration Camp in modern history was established in Paris by the Jacobins during the French Revolution which began in 1789. After taking control of Paris, the Jacobins locked the city, banned all religious and traditional gatherings, and they made arrangements for the masses to be indoctrinated in their way of thinking. To coerce the masses to accept the Jacobin ideas, they started having public executions. Guillotines were erected in major streets—the idea was that when people see the heads of the enemies of the revolution being chopped, they would surrender their heart and mind to the Jacobin movement. This strategy had unexpected consequences—the Jacobin regime was overthrown in 1799, and Napoleon took over in 1804. 

The second large-scale use of concentration camps happened in the Soviet Union when the Bolsheviks, the inheritors of the Jacobin legacy, came to power. The Bolsheviks were inspired by the Western ideology of communism and they believed that human beings can be coerced to give up their religious and traditional beliefs and become communists. During the time of Stalin, the Gulags (the Russian name for concentration camps) were used to torture and indoctrinate the potential enemies of the state and make counterrevolution impossible by spreading terror in rest of the population. Millions perished in these Gulags. But a sufficient number of people could not be transformed through the Gulags and the Soviet Union fell in 1991.

In the USA and Western Europe, the decline in civil liberties has been massive in the last fifteen years. These nations are now as totalitarian as China, but they continue to fondly believe that they are democratic and free. In the next five years their fake notion of being democratic and free will shatter under the weight of the contradictions in their political system, and then these nations will start herding the politically undesirable section of their population into concentration camps. The lockdowns, which have been a regular feature since last year, are experiments to prepare people for a new way of life. Most people have accepted the lockdowns as the new normal. They will accept the concentration camps as another new normal.

The Civilization and The Nation

What is more critical: the civilization or the nation? The nation is made by the civilizational forces, and the civilizational forces are made by the nation. This means that both—the civilization and its nation—have a symbiotic relationship. The civilization is an abstract and timeless idea which is the fountainhead of the culture which drives the nation, whereas the nation is a concrete reality which exists at a particular time and in a particular space. If the nation suffers a decline, it can be mended, but once the idea of civilization breaks down, it cannot be mended—thus, the civilization is like a paradise, which once lost cannot be regained.

The Pitfalls of Liberty

Liberty can open the right doors but it can open some wrong doors too. Once liberty arrives in a society, it does not confine itself to cutting the bonds of politics; it also cuts the bonds in the areas of morality and culture. 

When the bonds of morality are cut, there is the prospect of amoralism and libertinism; when the bonds of culture are cut, there is the prospect of utopianism and nihilism. A man who is free of political, moral, and cultural bonds is left to face the world on his own. This is not something that most men can manage, and many succumb to the feelings of nothingness, powerlessness, alienation, and anxiety. Many give up on morality and culture and there is a rise in drug abuse, libertinism, and violence. 

Thus, liberty can lead to the masses becoming degenerate, the politicians becoming corrupt, the businessmen becoming totalitarian, and the intellectuals becoming messianic. With the fall in the intellectual, political, and moral standards, society becomes an easy prey to utopian movements which promise to create a new paradise—and this can lead to the decline and fall of the nation.

The Myth of Robinson Crusoe’s Individualism

The individualists demand freedom from religion, clan, culture, moral norms, and politics. They preach that man is like Robinson Crusoe, and that he must live on a metaphorical deserted island where he is free from all collectives. Such views are a sign of their mental backwardness. 

Robison Crusoe, the protagonist in Daniel Defoe’s book, is a brave man who gets trapped in a deserted island. He does all that he can to preserve his sanity, meet the needs of his body, and survive. In normal circumstances, Man is not expected to live like Crusoe. Joy comes to man’s life through the people among whom he lives: relatives, friends, customers, associates, employees, employers, and neighbors. 

Man qua man is a political and social creature. We form bonds with others to find a sense of security and belonging. The one thing we truly dread is loneliness.

The individualist is certainly not a brave and rational man like Crusoe. He is naive, socially ineffective, and alienated. If these individualists end up on a deserted island, they will not last for a week—they will undergo mental disintegration due to loneliness and they will eventually starve to death. Individualism is not a virtue; it is a vice.