Travails of the Hiding Man

Man has fled from civilization. He is hiding, crouching in fear, writing his last will and testament, dedicating his life, whatever is left of it, to nothingness, to nihilism. What does he really want?—safety, which he will never achieve because his civilization has mutated into the leviathan, a far more ferocious, hungry, and merciless predator than the thing from which he has fled.

No More Butterflies

You can’t find butterflies. Because of the pandemic and lockdown, the butterflies have discarded their wings. They have transformed into caterpillars and retreated into the pupa.

On Nietzsche’s View of Redeemer

Solitude is not a flight from reality. It is a flight from the banal ways of looking at reality. It is a method of discovering an original view of the world. In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche talks about the redeemer, who is filled with love and contempt, who gives up his solitude to redeem humanity. Here’s a line from Nietzsche’s text: “This man of the future will redeem us, not just from the ideal held up till now, but also from those things which had to arise from it, from the great nausea, the will to nothingness, from nihilism, that stroke of midday and of great decision that makes the will free again, which gives earth its purpose and man his hope again, this Antichrist and anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness—he must come one day…”

The Weaklings Versus the Powerful

The weaklings want one thing—to be powerful one day. All the thinking that they do for devising strategies for attaining power catalyzes an improvement in the quality of their brain and they become more intelligent. But the powerful, who have cornered a surfeit of power, are devoted to self-preservation and pleasure; they don’t indulge in deep thinking and over a period of time their brain becomes dull. A stage is reached when the weaklings can outthink the powerful and then they usurp power, but the rise of the weaklings marks the beginning of a fresh cycle—yesterday’s powerful is today’s weakling; it is now his turn to realize the importance of power.

On the Religiousness of Solitude

The idea that you can save yourself from a virus by living in solitude is the outcome of a debased sense of religiosity which lingers in the atheistic minds. The atheists have turned the religious belief that one can save oneself from sin by praying in solitude on its head and are now preaching that one can save oneself from virus by watching Netflix in solitude.

What will Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov do in a pandemic?

In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in Saint Petersburg, decides to murder a pawnbroker and steal her money. He rationalizes that the pawnbroker deserves to die because she is cruel and unscrupulous, and that she would die of natural causes sooner or later because she is already quite old. He is convinced that the money that he steals will enable  him to help those who, unlike the pawnbroker are moral and honest, and in the eyes of god deserve the money.

Is it right to kill one cruel and unscrupulous person to give better chances to several moral and honest people? Whose interests have a primacy—that of one individual or that of many?—that of one million or that of 100 million? Such questions are appearing in my mind because of the havoc that the pandemic has caused in the lives of millions of people in several nations. Lives can be destroyed by all sorts of reasons: psychological problems, starvation, all kinds of preexisting health conditions, accidents, crime, scarcity of essential commodities, and much else. Which problem should we address first?

What will Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov do in a pandemic? Which people will he try to save; which will he sacrifice?

The Consequences of Liberalism

When the liberal politicians acquire total power in a nation they give rise to evil enemies: statists, mafia, oligarchs, terrorists, and lobbyists. But why? Because the liberals are weak, immoral, and lacking in the will to use political power for implementing justice. They say “yes” to evil and “no” to life. They encourage evil enemies, grant them the opportunities for accumulating wealth and power, and attack the productive folks by branding such activities dangerous: industry, farming, constructing, driving, flying, using plastic products and electricity, and now even stepping out of the house. The insight from the liberal crystal ball is clear, all these activities have bad consequences and must be forbidden.

Dinosaurs and Civilizations

Nature bestows its tolerance on the feeble and meek creatures but shows no mercy to the burly dinosaurs. Whatever becomes a dinosaur is made extinct—this law of nature applies to the civilizations as well. When a civilization has reached the stage of peak development, it’s like a dinosaur, a creature that does not have any further evolutionary potential and is devoted solely to feeding and protecting itself, and this is when nature’s infinite sword falls on the civilization’s neck, making it extinct in one swift stroke. The end of potential for further evolution and progress marks the end of a civilization.

Nietzsche on Napoleon

Nietzsche describes Napoleon as a synthesis of Unmensch (the brute) and Übermensch (the overman). Here’s the line from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: “Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared as a man more unique and late-born for his times than ever a man had been before, and in him, the problem of the noble ideal itself was made flesh – just think what a problem that is: Napoleon, this synthesis of Unmensch and Übermensch…”

American Elections and the Global Mayhem

The livelihood and peace of mind of no human being is safe till the 2020 American elections are over. The global pandemic is not the worst that can happen this year. An array of insane events can smite mankind: the alien empires in the far side of the Milky Way galaxy might launch a devastating attack; Zeus might hit us with his thunderbolts; Hades might release the Kraken from the underworld; Thor might send his hammer flying in our direction; there might be a worldwide zombie outbreak; Godzilla might arise, Predator might arrive. Be safe till November 8, 2020—after that things might stabilize.

On Opening a Locked Economy

The government has the power to lockdown the economy, but not to open it. The businessmen, farmers, investors, professionals, and workers are the movers of the economy—they possess the power to keep an economy open by participating in voluntary economic activity. When the world governments rescind their lockdown orders, they will discover that the movers of the economy are unwilling to wholeheartedly participate in the marketplace because they have become distrustful, demoralized, and risk-averse. The lockdowns could extend far beyond the government mandated period. There could be four to five years of tepid economic activity.

Capitalism's Tamed Man

Capitalism created unprecedented prosperity, but this prosperity had an unexpected consequence: it tamed man. The tamed man had no passion for original thinking and adventure. He wanted to be put on a leash and fed regularly. He wanted to fulfill his every need, every whim, every fancy by the click of the computer mouse and the tap of the mobile app.

The Terrible Solitude

The terrible solitude of the man who still believes in liberty, who still uses his own brain to find the difference between a lie and the truth, and who still doesn't need the experts, on the payroll of the nanny-state, to tell him what to think and how to live.

Nietzsche’s Top Fifteen Thinkers

Nietzsche was a well-read man. He had done an extensive study of several thinkers, from the ancients Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Plato, to the moderns Martin Luther, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Emerson, and his contemporaries Schopenhauer and Mill. A part of Nietzsche’s private library, which has been preserved, contains several books with his annotations. Though influenced by several thinkers, he didn’t see himself as anyone’s protege. Here’s a list of fifteen thinkers whom Nietzsche loved as well as hated (in order of importance to him):

1. Richard Wagner
2. Socrates
3. Arthur Schopenhauer
4. Immanuel Kant
5. Zarathustra (Zoroaster)
6. Benedict Spinoza
7. Ralph Waldo Emerson
8. Martin Luther
9. Sophocles
10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
11. Plato
12. Euripides
13. John Stuart Mill
14. Descartes
15. St. Paul

Why did GE Moore disappear from history?

Ray Monk's article on the rise and fall of GE Moore: “He was the most revered philosopher of his era. So why did GE Moore disappear from history?”

On the Meaning of Evil

In Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, a character went to the zoo and found an empty cage with a notice saying that the monkey that used to live in this cage was blinded by an evil man who threw tobacco in its eyes. The character was shocked because in communist ideology that he had been taught, the word “evil” was always used to describe the agents of American imperialism who plotted against the Soviet Union. It was unbelievable that an evil man would do something as immoral and meaninglessly cruel as throwing tobacco into a monkey’s eyes.

On Nietzsche’s Last Man

“What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.”— Nietzsche's aphorism is irrelevant in our time because becoming stronger is not a priority for the modern man. A concrete realization of the idea of “the last man,” which Nietzsche introduces in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the modern man is a complacent, unthinking, and effete bourgeois. He is a perfectly happy couch potato. He aspires to be pampered and protected. He takes no risks and has no passion to grapple with life’s problems. He stands at the end of the continual cycle of regeneration.

On Man’s Dignity

The dignity of man consists in his liberty to choose the lifestyle that he needs to follow for safeguarding his health—if he is being coerced by another entity to take any kind of measures to protect himself from contracting a disease, then he does not have any dignity, because a man without the responsibility for preserving his own body is incapable of respecting himself and others.

Where Are The Conservatives?

The irony is that the global lockdown has been imposed when the major democracies are under conservative rule: the USA, the UK, Japan, India, Brazil, and a few others. I wonder what the conservative reaction would be if the lockdown was imposed when these democracies were under liberal control—I can imagine the conservatives criticizing the liberals in TV interviews and newspaper articles, accusing them of grossly overreacting to a mere flu virus, decrying the lockdown orders, leading protest marches on the streets, and doing all they can to drive into the mind of the voters that they stand with the common folks whose right to make a living has been taken away. There is, I suppose, some truth in the saying that the conservatives act like conservatives only when they are out of power.

On Self-Destructive Barbarians

A barbarian is a man lacking in a sense of history. If a flawed sense of history is being taught in the universities, the students (the new generation) well get indoctrinated into thinking and acting like barbarians. Perhaps a large number of barbarians have already been created by the universities and unleashed into the world—that is why we are witnessing a barbarian-like response to a flu virus. If a fly sits on a barbarian’s head, he might use a stone to hit the fly and while doing so he will crack his skull. But this is how the democratic nations are trying to deal with the flu virus. In the name of fighting the flu virus, they have caused an extensive longterm damage to their economy and culture. The democracies of the world are acting like barbarians.

The Modern Man’s War On Dark Forces

The modern man has lost his fear of the demons, witches, and ghosts, but he is terrified of the cataclysmic dark forces which conspire to steal his happiness, his life, his prospect of attaining salvation, and unleash an apocalypse which will bring his civilization to an end. The better his material condition becomes, the more weak and helpless the modern man feels. He no longer pines for liberty, justice, free markets, better infrastructure—having always had these things, he takes them for granted. He wants to devote his resources to saving the world from the next cataclysm. In the last seventy years, the advanced nations have squandered trillions of dollars in fighting the dark forces which are a figment of their own imagination—Worldwide Famine, Ice Age, the Y2K Bug, Global Warming, Hole in the Ozone Layer, Acid Rain—and in the last one month we have been furiously battling a new dark force: a mere flu virus.

The Revolution of The Virus

The event which, above all others, shaped the history of the twentieth century transpired in the century’s second decade: Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution. In the twenty-first century too, the second decade is ending on an eventful note—a pandemic has brought the world economy to a standstill for a period of, what may eventually turn out to be, several months, and it’s bound to have massive political consequences, especially in the advanced democracies. Perhaps, the global political response to the pandemic will turn out to be the outstanding characteristic of this century—one that will merit a lot of explanation and analysis, and will be labeled by the historians as: the Coronavirus Revolution.

Nietzsche—On Living Dangerously

Nietzsche on the ideal of living dangerously: “For believe me, the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is to live dangerously!  Build your cities on the slope of Vesuvius!  Send your ships into unexplored seas!  Live in war with your equals and with yourselves!  Be robbers and spoilers, you knowing ones, as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors!  The time will soon pass when you can be satisfied to live like timorous deer concealed in the forests.  Knowledge will finally stretch out her hand for that which belongs to her: she means to rule and possess, and you with her!” But modern man has lost the passion for "living dangerously"—a mere flu virus now enjoys the power to put the world under total lockdown.

On God and Rationality

When atheists say that belief in god is irrational, they are making an irrational statement. 

Between 2300 and 3500 years ago, human beings developed the notion that god is the prime mover or the ultimate creator of the universe. To this day, this notion of god continues to motivate the theistic mind. But if god is the ultimate creator, then he is the creator of all the laws of the universe—this means that whatever god does is rational; he can, if he desires, rewrite all the laws of science and mathematics and these new laws would automatically become the new rational and the structure of the universe would transform so that everything accords with the new laws. 

If god is the fountainhead of rationality, then how can the belief in god be irrational? The notion that a belief in god is irrational makes no sense.

Three Reasons for Becoming a Philosopher

There are three reasons which can motivate a man to become a philosopher: first is curiosity, second is faith, and third is doubt.

Brutus: The Nemesis of the Virus

Like Julius Caesar, more than two millennia ago, the coronavirus has crossed the Rubicon and attained total domination of the world. With the political system being mired in inefficiency and corruption, and people being demoralized and confused, it seems there is no one left to tackle the coronavirus. But all hope is not lost, because Brutus and his band of idealistic revolutionaries are there to pick up arms and slay the virus that has put mankind in a state of house arrest. When they strike at the coronavirus with their swords, Brutus will say, “Sic semper tyrannis!" and the words that coronavirus will utter before dying will be, “Et tu, Brute?” Brutus will once again be the tyrant’s nemesis; history will repeat itself.

The Tyranny of Virus

A measly flu virus has achieved in less than a month what the great tyrants of history—Alexander the great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin—dreamed to achieve but could not in their lifetime: World domination. Modern civilization is corrupt and pathetic; it has allowed a flu virus to wreak havoc on the life of billions in several nations.

A Fantasy on the Problem of Certainty

It is not possible for a man to be certain that he is not at this moment the Emperor of a civilization, located on a planet in the Andromeda galaxy, dreaming of being billions of lightyears away from his kingdom, on a planet called Earth, in the Milky Way galaxy, where there exists a primitive civilization and he is locked inside a house because the local government has issued a lockdown order to save its population from a virus called “covid-19” which, unknown to the earthlings, originated in a cloud of stardust located in the other end of the Milky Way and was transported to Earth by a meteor which, fifteen-months ago, fell on the Wuhan region of a nation called China and from there spread across the entire planet.

Wars, Epidemics, and Philosophy

The philosophy of the past consists of the unhappy reactions to the post-war and post-epidemic distress that the philosophers have encountered. The Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian philosophy can be seen as an outcome of the anti-establishment thinking that was catalyzed by the distress that Ancient Athens was put through after its defeat in the Peloponnesian War. The philosophy of the late middle ages and the early modern period carries the mark of the multiple plague epidemics, which wiped out more than half the population in many parts of Europe. I believe that the present pandemic might spawn a philosophical thought that is significantly different from the philosophical trends of the last fifty years.

Society & Risks

People seem to have become convinced that their community can be free of all risks, that they don’t have to worry about disease, unemployment, inflation, poverty, crime, and any other problem, and that the government will always be there to shield them from every risk. But it is impossible to have a community in which there are no risks. If you shutdown your community to avoid risks, then you will remain shutdown for a long time and then there will be no community left.

The Journey From Optimism To Pessimism

The young man is an optimist; he thinks he can achieve anything; he is contemptuous of the social norms; he wants his life to be a whirlwind of success and happiness; his mind is a cauldron of ideas; he is in a hurry to achieve great things; he is enthusiastic about changing the world. When he gets older and mature, the realization dawns on him that there are limits to what he can achieve, that dreams never come true, that good things rarely happen in life, that every action has unexpected consequences, that change is rarely for the better, and then be becomes a pessimist.

On Quarantine

The community that uses quarantining as a method of protection from disease is in the long run infinitely more weakened than it is by the prevalence of disease. The more effective the quarantine, the less immune people become to new diseases and the less incentive they have to develop better methods of treatment—and this makes them more vulnerable to any future outbreak.

The Old Flu Versus The New

The modern mind is enamored of the new and contemptuous of the old. Modern men are contemptuous of old traditions, of old books, of  old relatives, of old wisdom, and lastly, of old seasonal flu. On the subject of flu—between three to five million people get infected and between 290,000 to 650,000 people die every year from seasonal flu, but the media and the politicians have never paid any attention to such high casualty figures. They can disregard the seasonal flu because it’s an old flu; our society prefers to be tormented by the new flu, the ultimate arriviste: Coronavirus.

The Platonic View Of Isolation

In the Republic (496d), Plato says that a man has to retire “under the shelter of a wall in the storm of dust and sleet”—or live in total isolation from others—for realizing the unknown potential that may exist inside him. I wonder how many people will realize their unknown potential, now that they are being forced to live in some kind of isolation due to the coronavirus pandemic?

The Plague Of Athens

The plague that struck Ancient Athens in 430 BC, the second year of the Peloponnesian War, wiped out a third of its population of 300000. The historian Thucydides, who was in Athens, contracted the plague and survived. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, he claims that the plague entered the Greek world by the way of Egypt and Libya, before moving into the wider Mediterranean. Wherever the plague went it killed close to thirty percent of the population. He writes, “...the catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law.” The physicians, he says, were the first to die since they were in contact with the sick.

The Athenian general Pericles and many infantry and sea commanders were among those who were slain by the plague. Thucydides laments that after Pericles, Athens was led by weak and incompetent rulers. Pericles might have made Athens vulnerable to the plague because, to defeat the Spartans, he developed the strategy of making all Athenians live inside the city walls—he could not have foreseen that the crowded city would become a breeding ground for the plague. Had Athens not been struck by the plague, it might have emerged victorious in the Peloponnesian War, which they continued to fight for more than two decades before accepting defeat at the hands of the Spartans.

On The Malaria Pandemic

No one cares that malaria is causing more than 400000 deaths worldwide, almost every year, since 1972, when a ban was placed on the use of DDT. The publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, in 1962, played a pivotal role in getting DDT internationally banned—she alleged, without presenting any scientific evidence, that DDT has carcinogenic effects and can lead to a cancer epidemic which might wipe out the entire human race within a single generation. The ban on DDT has made the people in poor countries an easy prey to malaria. Millions have died because Rachel Carson lied. Her lies were widely popularized by her backers in mainstream media, politics, and environmentalist movements—they turned her into a cult figure. But DDT is safe; it does not have any carcinogenic effects (WHO confirmed this in 2006).

On Saving Humpty Dumpty

Once Humpty Dumpty falls and breaks, the nursery rhyme rightly notes, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put him together again. The confused fight against the pandemic has pushed Humpty Dumpty (the world economy) dangerously close to the wall’s edge. The power-drunk politicians and intellectuals should exercise caution—if they continue to push with their draconian measures, they will make him fall. When Humpty Dumpty falls and breaks, the political establishment will not survive; they too will fall and break, resulting in great instability, lawlessness, and violence.

The Establishment Versus The Pandemic

I do not fear the pandemic. I am certain that most people possess enough self-discipline and inner-strength to overcome any pandemic. But I fear the global political (and intellectual) establishment, which is quite clueless, incompetent, and corrupt, and is hell-bent on using its massive power to “rescue” humanity from the pandemic. By imposing draconian restrictions on individuals and businesses, they are creating a psychological and economic nightmare for millions of people. Their response to the pandemic will eventually prove as costly, fruitless, and messy as the global war on terrorism that they have been waging for almost two decades.

Totalitarianism & Liberty

There has not been a single totalitarian movement in the last two hundred and fifty years that has not proclaimed that its aim is to bring liberty and dignity to the people. Liberty and dignity, it seems, are as much an opiate of the masses as religion. But Marx insists that religion is the only opiate.

Nietzsche’s Attack On Socrates

Nietzsche despised Socrates. He rejected the Socratic way of identifying reason with virtues, and virtue with eudaemonia (human flourishing). In his work on ancient Greek thinkers, Nietzsche asserts that the truly great spirits (destiny’s children) are motivated by instinct and that the frigid, self-aware reason, which Socrates represents, was not only antagonistic to instinct but also a sign of decadence. According to Nietzsche, the teachings of Socrates (and his disciple Plato) precipitated the decay of Ancient Greek culture and paved way for a Roman takeover. He excoriates Socrates for being ugly, noting that ugliness is symptomatic of a perversion—the man with a monstrous face, Nietzsche maintains, must have a monstrous soul. He even conjectures that Socrates might not even be of Greek extraction.

Revenge of the Sith

“So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause.” ~ Padme Amidala in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

Woolf’s Last Lines In "To The Lighthouse"

The last lines in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse: “It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.” The exhaustion of the protagonist (Lily Briscoe), and perhaps the writer, is palpable in these two lines.

The Advanced & The Backward

Nature favors the economically and culturally disadvantaged. Communities that are mired in poverty, ignorance, and intractable conflicts have a high birth rate, while the advanced communities have a low birth rate. A community, it seems, can either produce the BMWs and iPhones or it can reproduce large number of children. There has never been a community that has achieved technological advancement and growth in its population at the same time. In case of a devastating global pandemic, it is the advanced communities that undergo lot of pain while for the backward communities there is hardly any change—they continue to exist in the same sort of backwardness in which they have always lived.

On Frank Sinatra’s Opinion

"The best is yet to come!" —This is Frank Sinatra’s own opinion and not something written in stone. I think the best has already happened—the best is the gleaming specter of an impossible long-ago era that will never return.

On The Metaphysics of Lucretius

Stephen Greenblatt describes the metaphysics of Lucretius in a single 108-word paragraph in which every line points towards the word “atoms,” which appears at the paragraph's end. Here’s the paragraph from Greenblatt’s book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern: “That Lucretius and many others did more than simply associate themselves with Epicurus—that they celebrated him as godlike in his wisdom and courage—depended not on his social credentials but upon what they took to be the saving power of his vision. The core of his vision may be traced back to a single incandescent idea: that everything that has ever existed and everything that will ever exist is put together out of indestructible building blocks, irreducibly small in size, unimaginably vast in number. The Greeks had a word for these invisible building blocks, things that, as they conceived them, could not be divided any further: atoms.”

On Nihilism

Nihilism is never inborn. It’s learned. It’s learned in the world’s best universities. It’s taught by the world’s best professors. It’s propagandized around the world by the world’s best media companies. But the foot soldiers and the ultimate victims of nihilism are the world’s gullible masses.

Zeno’s Paradox & Progress Of Civilizations

Zeno’s paradox against movement is easily refuted; however, it can be used to draw some conclusions regarding progress of civilizations. The case can be made that no civilization founded with the aspiration of attaining moral value X can actually reach point X, because it must first cover half the distance between where it is and where it aspires to be, and before that, half of the half, and before that, half of the half of the half, and so on till infinity. This means that perfection is unattainable for any civilization and that all civilizations exhaust themselves in trying to achieve goals that are unattainable and then they vanish.

The Politics Of Crisis

When people become convinced that the crisis they face is massive, their collective intelligence vanishes and they become conditioned to act according to blind instincts and reflexes. This is the seventh heaven for those who control the government, because, with the people transformed into unintelligent creatures, they are free to use the crisis as an excuse for advancing their own political agenda. They can redesign any political process or institution, pass new laws, impose new restrictions. The crisis has turned them into the god of the political system, the savior of the people, and there is nothing that they can do wrong.

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death

I am thinking of Edgar Allan Poe’s story, "The Masque of the Red Death,” (published in 1842), in which Prince Prospero and many of his wealthy nobles try to save themselves from a dangerous plague by fortifying themselves in an abbey with high walls. They are having a wild revelry inside the abbey while the country’s population is succumbing to the plague. Unfortunately, the plague manages to enter the abbey in the form of a mysterious figure disguised as a Red Death.