The fountainhead of civilization: Why collectivism sustains culture

Collectivism is the fountainhead of culture and civilization. The greater the refinement of a society, the deeper and more intricate are the institutions by which it binds its people together. Civilization, in essence, is not the triumph of the solitary mind, but of the collective spirit.

Primitive societies, though tethered by blood ties, remained simplistic in their structure and marginal in their collectivism. In the long dusk of prehistory, man wandered in fragile bands, compelled into unity by hunger and danger. Yet within this necessity lay the seed of destiny: the realization that survival—and meaning itself—was magnified by togetherness. 

“To be human,” as one might say, “was never to be alone, but to be in communion.”

It was not the spear or the wheel that first drew mankind into higher forms of unity, but belief. Between twenty-five and fifteen millennia ago, religion provided the first great architecture of collectivism. In the name of unseen gods, strangers ceased to be strangers; they became tribes, peoples, nations. Religion was mankind’s earliest empire of the spirit, welding millions into a rhythm of ritual, sacrifice, and duty. From its altars arose cities, philosophies, and empires.

History’s verdict is clear: those who collectivised most completely endured and expanded. The Islamic movements of the Middle Ages conquered and converted vast territories not merely through the sword, but through unity—one monarch, one law, one faith. 

Western imperialists, too, marched across continents with the same formula: one king, one church, one creed. Their solidarity was not merely political; it was metaphysical, an existential bond that allowed them to impose their will upon the disunited.

Hindu civilization, by contrast, though spiritually profound, was fractured into many gods and many kings. The absence of a single unifying banner meant that its extraordinary depth of spiritual wisdom and economic strength could not shield it from conquest. Political and cultural fragmentation became vulnerability; diversity without cohesion invited domination. The disunited were destined to be ruled by the united.

In our own age of secularism, the pattern continues in new attire. The Western powers—led above all by the United States—no longer rally beneath throne and altar, but beneath the banners of capitalism and socialism, those twin ideologies of modern collectivism. 

Capitalism binds through consumption, socialism through redistribution, and both through the mythology of progress. They wear the mask of freedom even as they function as instruments of political and cultural unification. Markets and material equality are the new creeds; credit cards and ballots the new sacraments.

These are not merely economic theories or philosophical fashions. They are the West’s chosen methods of sustaining unity within and projecting power abroad. By gathering their populations under these secular banners, they preserve the architecture of domination and extend influence over the wider world. 

The empires of faith have given way to the empires of capital, but the principle remains unchanged: civilization is the triumph of the collective over the solitary, and the fate of nations is written not by their isolated geniuses but by their capacity to march together beneath a common banner.

Arrow and the wheel: Two visions of history and time

It is fashionable to say that history repeats itself. But if history were truly repetitive, then the future would be a mere echo of the past—predictable, inevitable, and tame. The truth is otherwise. The future is never repetition; it is surprise.

Every epoch has been singular, carved by its own struggles and revelations. The Greeks did not anticipate the collapse of their polis-world, the Romans did not foresee the twilight of empire, nor did Europe imagine the shattering violence of the Great War. If the wisest thinkers of their time could not predict their own century, why should we imagine we can divine ours?

We live amid archives, statistics, and histories more abundant than any previous age. Yet all this memory does not give us foresight. Our present itself eludes us: what we call “breaking news” often decays into tomorrow’s irrelevance. When we cannot even judge the weight of today’s events, how can we presume to chart the destinies of 2030, 2040, or 2050? Here the contrast between civilizational views of time becomes instructive. 

The Western imagination tends to think of history as a linear march: past leading to present, present to future. It is an arrow pointing forward. The Hindu imagination, however, is not enslaved to such linearity. 

In the philosophy of the yugas, time unfolds in vast cycles—Satya, Treta, Dvapara, Kali—endlessly repeating in cosmic rhythm. But even this vision does not yield prediction. For the cycles described in the Puranas are not chronicles of history but revelations of the eternal. They teach us not what tomorrow will be, but what the nature of time itself is.

History, then, is a Western device—a way of situating man within the river of time. Useful, yes, but limited. The Hindu vision dissolves the very categories of “past,” “present,” and “future” into a single continuum, reminding us that what truly matters is not chronology but meaning. “History tells us what happened,” one might say, “but the Puranas tell us why it matters in the cosmic order.”

From either perspective—linear or cyclical—the result is the same: the future refuses capture. The arrow misses, and the wheel turns beyond our comprehension. What is certain is not the repetition of events but the recurrence of human astonishment.

The only wisdom left is humility. The future is not a shadow of the past, nor the fulfillment of our predictions. It is a realm perpetually unimagined. As Heraclitus once reminded us, we never step into the same river twice. And as the Hindu seers intuited, the river itself is eternal, flowing through yugas without beginning or end.

To live wisely, therefore, is not to claim foresight, but to remain open to surprise. For history does not repeat—it creates. And the future, when it comes, will be unlike anything we can imagine.

History Is a harsher interviewer: Trump’s rhetoric, Putin’s war, and India’s insult

I watched Hannity’s interview with President Trump and was struck less by what was asked than by what was carefully avoided. 

Hannity, instead of probing Trump on the substance of his summit with President Putin, assumed the part of a court flatterer—hailing him as a peacemaker in five conflicts while squandering the remainder of the airtime on ritual grievances about the ‘Russia hoax,’ stock tirades against NATO’s economic burdens, and perfunctory denunciations of Biden’s incompetence.

Trump, ever the alpha narcissist, thrives on this. He loves to be admired, he loves to speak of himself in superlatives, and he longs to be seen as the indispensable man who could deliver peace where others fail. Yet the truth peeks out between the lines. His body language during the joint press conference and the interview betrayed more discomfort than triumph. 

A man who claims victory too loudly often does so to mask defeat.

Putin, for his part, played his hand shrewdly. “When President Trump says if he was the president back then, there would be no war... it would indeed be so. I can confirm that,” he said. The compliment was perfunctory—a gesture of politeness, not conviction. The structural causes of the Ukraine war—NATO’s steady eastward march and Russia’s refusal to accept it—would have produced conflict no matter who sat in the Oval Office. To imagine that Trump alone could have forestalled it is to mistake theatre for geopolitics.

Trump’s claim to be a global peacemaker collapses before the hard realities of great-power politics. He may exert influence over the minor quarrels of Armenia and Azerbaijan, or even Thailand and Cambodia. But with Putin, he is powerless. Russia does not yield to charm, and history does not bend to bravado.

Worse, Trump has shown a tendency to belittle India, a nation he should treat as a partner. In one of his social media pronouncements, he framed Putin’s flattery in terms that seemed to place India in a subordinate role. This is shortsighted at best, insulting at worst. 

India today is the world’s fourth-largest economy, projected to become the third by 2028. It is not merely a market but the only functioning constitutional democracy of scale in South Asia—a fact any American president must respect if he claims to speak the language of freedom.

As for Ukraine, no leader in Kyiv can accept the partition of their territory as the price of peace. Trump will not be able to impose Putin’s terms. That leaves him grasping for alternatives. 

The danger is that, frustrated abroad, he may lash out elsewhere—perhaps by reviving tariffs on India, which he perceives as a softer target. China, too deeply entangled with Russia and too formidable in economic weight, would be spared his ire. India, by contrast, risks being punished for the very fact that it is a democracy, vulnerable to the volatility of a man who mistakes intimidation for statecraft.

History teaches that hubris often precedes humiliation. A self-proclaimed peacemaker who cannot command peace risks becoming instead a warmonger’s useful foil. The world expects sobriety, not self-congratulation, from the leader of a superpower. 

And if Trump cannot distinguish between applause in a TV studio and power on the world stage, he will soon learn that history is a harsher interviewer than Sean Hannity.

The end of entitlement: Europe’s problems are not the world’s problems

Dresden after World War II bombing

“Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.” These were the words of External Affairs Minister, Dr. S. Jaishankar, speaking at a global security forum in Slovakia.

The statement lays bare an enduring flaw in the worldview of many European powers—a belief that their own disputes and crises are of universal importance, while the struggles of other nations are peripheral, if not irrelevant. 

This Eurocentric ideology has shaped both history and narrative. It is precisely this mindset that allowed Europe to label the two major wars of the 20th century—World War I and World War II—as “World Wars.” In truth, these were largely European civil wars, born out of rivalries within the continent’s imperial order. The rest of the world had little to do with their origins, but was nonetheless dragged into the conflicts, often at great human and economic cost.

Historically, Europe’s dominance over vast parts of Asia lasted scarcely 100 to 150 years, from the early 19th century until the mid-20th century—a mere blink in the timeline of civilizations that stretches back tens of thousands of years and will extend indefinitely into the future. Yet because this dominance is so recent, the political and intellectual classes in some of the former colonial powers continue to behave as though global leadership is their permanent right, and that others must rally to resolve their crises.

This attitude has bred an unspoken expectation: that non-Western nations should make costly sacrifices for European causes, while Europe is free to ignore, or even exacerbate, the crises of others. Many of these global problems—whether in Africa, Asia, or Latin America—are in fact the result of European interventions, colonial extractions, and political manipulations.

But history is moving on. The brief era of Western dominance is reaching its epilogue. The global order is now irreversibly multipolar, with nations determined to chart independent courses based on their own strategic, economic, and cultural imperatives.

For India, this means safeguarding its resources and decision-making autonomy. Any assistance to Europe—or, for that matter, to the United States—must be grounded in mutual benefit, not inherited obligation. Partnership must replace presumption, and reciprocity must replace entitlement. In the multipolar century, respect will be earned through balance, not demanded through outdated hierarchies.

When the dollar crumbles: The coming mega-debtquake

The United States now staggers under a federal debt exceeding $37 trillion—yet President Trump speaks as though Washington’s coffers are financing the rest of the world. 

Factor in the liabilities of state governments, public institutions, and household debts, and the figure for US debt swells to a staggering $100 trillion—an amount nearly equal to the total annual output of the entire planet.

The gravest threat to global stability today is not the bombast of religious fundamentalists in the Middle East, but the relentless expansion of American debt. A civilization can survive fanaticism; it cannot survive the implosion of its currency. How far can this edifice of paper promises stretch—$150 trillion, $200 trillion—before the dollar’s architecture of confidence crumbles?

It is an illusion to think that such a house of cards will stand forever. When it falls, the collapse will not merely be an American tragedy; it will be an economic extinction event. Western Europe will reel, Asia will stagger, and any nation tethered to the dollar’s mast will be dragged into the depths.

For India, the lesson is plain: diversify trade, dilute dollar dependency, and build buffers. Ironically, the tariffs Washington has so generously imposed may become the very medicine that reduces our exposure. In global finance, as in life, sometimes the insult is the cure.

Democracy came later: The violent birth of Western supremacy

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

This line from Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order strikes like a hammer on the glass pane of modern illusions. It forces us to confront a truth that contemporary discourse, in its comfort and self-congratulation, often prefers to ignore.

History, stripped of its moral varnish, is a record not of the triumph of noble ideals but of the calculated, ruthless application of force. From the Akkadian Empire to the Mongol Khanates, from the Ottomans to the British Raj, between fifty and seventy major empires have risen and ruled vast swathes of the earth. Each was forged not in the quiet deliberations of a senate, nor in the tranquil exchanges of commerce, but in the roar of cavalry, the crack of muskets, and the smoke of burning cities. These were polities built by warlike peoples—nations or tribes that possessed not merely the will to conquer, but the organizational genius to turn violence into a disciplined instrument of statecraft.

In our own age, intoxicated by the rhetoric of progressivism, libertarianism, postmodernism, and the newer “woke” ideologies, this reality has receded from public memory. The story now told is that the West ascended because it was more democratic, more committed to free trade, more imbued with universal values. This is a pleasant myth, but a myth nonetheless.

The historical record is unambiguous: when the West was at the height of its imperial expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries, its nations were neither fully democratic nor committed to open markets in any modern sense. Their internal political systems were often oligarchic, their trade policies protectionist, and their diplomacy underwritten by the threat of naval cannon and expeditionary armies. Democracy and free trade became prominent Western virtues only in the 20th century—ironically, during the very century when Western hegemony began to wane.

Huntington’s observation is therefore less a provocation than a reminder: civilizations rise to dominance not by moral persuasion but by their capacity to project power, and to do so with relentless organization. The superiority that matters in the great contests of history is not that of ideals in abstraction, but of the machinery—political, economic, and military—that can transform violence from chaos into conquest.

We may comfort ourselves with the thought that the modern world has outgrown this ancient truth. But the chronicles of empire suggest otherwise. Beneath the thin ice of our contemporary ideals, the dark waters of organized force still move, as cold and irresistible as ever.

Orwell’s slogans, Asimov’s predictions, and America’s imperial present

It is often said that George Orwell’s aphorism from 1984—“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”—was a mirror held up to the totalitarian Soviet Union. Yet history, with its taste for irony, has turned the mirror around. 

In the decades since the USSR’s collapse, it is the United States that has come to resemble an Orwellian empire—waging wars in the name of peace, orchestrating coups and “color revolutions” to install compliant dictators in the name of freedom, and manufacturing ignorance as if it were the highest civic virtue.

In the Western world, Washington can tolerate democracy, for there it is contained within familiar cultural and ideological boundaries. But in the non-Western world, democracy is tolerated only if it bends to the American will. It is an uncomfortable truth that the U.S. establishment has often looked askance at India precisely because it is a democracy—one that insists on making its own choices. 

By contrast, it has long embraced Pakistan, a theocratic-militaristic state where democracy is an occasional visitor, swiftly ushered out by generals and clerics. American policy has often ensured that Pakistan’s fragile shoots of popular governance are uprooted before they can take hold, leaving the army and the mullahs in unchallenged command.

The contradictions deepen in the realm of trade and sanctions. Under the banner of the Russia–Ukraine conflict, President Donald Trump’s administration has imposed tariffs on India, even as other major economies—China, Japan, and the European Union—continue to import Russian energy with impunity. The rules of the American game, it seems, are written in disappearing ink: visible only to those meant to obey them, vanishing for those meant to escape them.

This dissonance calls to mind not only Orwell but also Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, where a vast Galactic Empire rules the stars with the complacency of those who believe their reign eternal. In Asimov’s tale, the mathematician Hari Seldon predicts the inevitable decline of the empire—not through rebellion, but through the slow corrosion of its own contradictions. The empire falls, not because it is defeated from without, but because it collapses from within.

Both Orwell and Asimov were writing in the 1940s, worlds apart from today’s geopolitics, and neither could have witnessed America’s imperial overreach firsthand. Yet from the vantage point of the third decade of the 21st century, their visions appear eerily prescient. 

Orwell gave us the moral language to name the inversion of values; Asimov gave us the long view of the empire's decay. Together, they seem to be whispering across time that Trump’s America is less the shining city on a hill than the Galactic Empire in its autumn—still grand, still powerful, yet already shadowed by the mathematics of its own decline.

In the end, the fate of all empires is written in the very logic of their ambition. They teach the world that might is right, only to discover, too late, that history has a deeper arithmetic.

Fatal friendship: Why America can’t be trusted with long-term alliances

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." ~ Henry Kissinger

In an age where diplomacy is increasingly tethered to spectacle, spectacle often distracts from substance. Nowhere is this more evident than in the art—and artifice—of negotiating with the United States of America. For nations seeking enduring partnerships, the challenge is not merely ideological divergence or geopolitical friction; it is the fundamental impermanence embedded within the very architecture of American democracy.

To negotiate a long-term deal with the United States is to build a palace on shifting sands. Every four years, the tide changes—sometimes violently. Presidents are not just replaced; policies are repudiated, treaties torn, and entire geopolitical visions reversed without apology. What one administration solemnly agrees to, the next might discard with theatrical disdain.

Consider India's recent engagements with the Biden administration. Agreements were inked with all the ceremony due to a rising strategic partnership. But as Donald Trump—now a returning force in American politics—seeks to reclaim the Oval Office, he has made it clear: yesterday’s promises are today’s irrelevance. What he did not honour under Biden, he will not inherit from Biden. He demands not continuity, but rupture—new deals, new alignments, and a clean break with India's traditional ally, Russia.

To mistake American politics for a steady flame is to mistake a bonfire for a hearth.

This pattern of abandonment is not new; it is structural. It is not the exception; it is the rule. From Vietnam to Kabul, from the Kurds to the Shah of Iran, the United States has repeatedly walked away from those who trusted in the durability of its word. Its global conduct is governed less by covenant and more by convenience. There are few constants—only cycles.

In the case of the former Soviet Union, this betrayal assumed epochal dimensions. General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, in an act of profound good faith, agreed to withdraw Soviet forces from Eastern Europe, trusting in the verbal assurances of Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush that NATO would not move "one inch eastward." What followed was not gratitude, but encroachment. Under Clinton, NATO expanded east. Under Bush, it expanded further. Today, NATO’s flirtation with Ukraine has ignited a powder keg. The broken promise echoes through the rubble of Donetsk and the ghost towns of Mariupol.

And what of the Middle East—a region disfigured by the oscillations of American foreign policy? One administration arms a faction; the next bombs it. From the ruins of Iraq to the fragmented sovereignties of Syria and Libya, the United States has demonstrated a tragic incapacity for stewardship. Each new doctrine overwrites the last with the urgency of erasure. Hope is installed one term, only to be deposed the next.

India, therefore, must ask itself: can a civilisation whose statecraft is measured in millennia afford to anchor its future to a polity whose attention span is electoral?

The caution is not anti-American. Rather, it is pro-reason. It is a call to strategic sobriety. India must engage with the United States—vigorously, and on equal terms—but without the illusion of permanence. We can trade, talk, and even temporarily align, but we must never tether our sovereignty to their signatures.

Long-term alliances demand long-term memory. And long-term memory is precisely what American politics lacks. In that sense, Kissinger's mordant quip contains a bitter truth for our times: America is a powerful friend, but a forgetful one—and to be forgotten by a superpower is to be exposed to history’s cruelties.

India must, therefore, be non-aligned not out of nostalgia, but necessity. Our foreign policy must resemble the banyan tree—rooted deeply in strategic autonomy, yet flexible in its embrace of the world. Let the winds of Washington blow as they will. We, on the other hand, must learn to build shelters that do not collapse with every change in weather.