Criminals and Victims

People strive for justice and morality, but a just and moral way of life is impossible. From ancient times to the modern age, the life of a human being has been nothing more than a frantic striving to be the criminal and not the victim. A vast majority of the people (I would say 99.99% of humanity) end up as the victims—there is no way of remedying the situation because the victims are mired in ignorance, cowardice, and malice. Their ignorance and vices make them incapable of confronting the criminals.

The Conservative Alice And The Cheshire Cat

The traditional conservatives are inspired by their conception of mos maiorum. But in the last thirty years, the leftists, with some help from the novus homo conservatives, have managed to discredit the conception of mos maiorum. With  mos maiorum no longer being the inspiring force, the traditional conservatives have become confused and disoriented. They no longer possess the spirit to fight the left. They don’t know in what direction they ought to go. In the person of Alice, a traditional conservative appears to be demanding an answer from destiny, or the Cheshire Cat:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

On Digital Supremacism

The digital revolution has spawned a new form of supremacism: Digital Supremacism. Like racial supremacism and religious supremacism, digital supremacism is a product of indigestion of history and politics. The digital supremacists have a blind faith in their digital businesses. They believe that their businesses are more moral, efficient, useful, and environment friendly than every other business in the world. They are convinced that problems of humankind cannot be solved until the entire economy transcends the real world and enters into the domain of the digital world, which to them is the ultimate heaven.

Derrida: Speech Versus Writing

In his On Grammatology, Derrida shows that there is a binary opposition between speech and writing—with speech being central and natural, and writing being marginal and unnatural. People have been writing for thousands of years, but the tradition of thought from ancient times to modernity favors speech, the spoken word, over the written word. 

The “logos,” which the ancients regarded as the hidden principle in the universe, is a voice or a word—it is a sort of super-word or a God. When we speak, the sounds that we create are closer to the super-word or God, but our writing is marked by an absence, the absence of the Godly sound. What Derrida is really going after is Saussure’s linguistics. 

Saussure had asserted that his linguistics was free of the viewpoints related to God. Derrida shows that Saussure privileges speech because he accepts the pre-scientific assumption of speech being closer to inner meaning, or the logos, and the super-word and God.

Conservatives & Liberals: Action & Inaction

The wrongdoer in politics is often the entity that has left something undone, not always the one that has done something. The liberals commit a wrong by doing something, while the conservatives commit a wrong by leaving something undone. Thus the liberals are the people of political action, while the conservatives are the people of political inaction. This gives the liberals an advantage in the politics. But the conservatives were not always the people of political inaction—they became a passive force after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, when they became convinced that with the destruction the Soviet regime, they had already played their world historical role, and that from now on there would not be any challenge to their worldview. The conservatives didn’t realize that the challenge would come from the liberals who, in the post-Soviet world, would find new ways of keeping leftism alive.

Nozick and Libertarianism

Robert Nozick was not a libertarian. He has never claimed that he was. In the Preface to his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, he is lukewarm about libertarianism. He writes: “With reluctance, I found myself becoming convinced of (as they are now often called) libertarian views, due to various considerations and arguments.” 

He has based his arguments on the claims about rights (mainly property rights), but his treatment of rights is weak. He starts with a situation in which people are living in a so-called “state of nature,” which is a mythical concept. In his later work, he has admitted that he had developed some doubts about earlier view on rights. One of his intentions in writing the book was to refute the libertarian thinker Murray Rothbard, but Nozick never took his argument with the libertarians forward. After the publication of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, he dissociated himself from the book and did not respond to the criticisms of it. His writing work after 1974 is unrelated to libertarianism. 

Anarchy, State, and Utopia became influential in libertarian circles, because Nozick was a high profile professor of philosophy and because some libertarians saw him as the libertarian answer to John Rawls.

Stoic Wisdom

There is an old stoic saying that the easiest way to demoralize a man and degrade his character is to give him something for nothing.

MacIntyre’s Rightwing Postmodernism

Postmodernism is leftwing, but in his 1981 book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre talks about a form of postmodernism in which there is an emphasis on traditions. MacIntyre’s traditions perform a role similar to the “scientific paradigms,” which Thomas Kuhn has described. The traditions include a worldview or conceptual scheme, and a history through time, as it’s understood by a community with its distinctive way of life and social norms. The traditions are not only rational but serve as the context in which rationality can be determined. All reasoning is conducted in some sort of tradition. 

The traditions can be judged according to the criteria of rationality, One tradition is more rational than another if it can explain the success and failure of the other tradition better than the other tradition itself can. MacIntyre shows that instead of being an escape from tradition, modernity is itself a tradition. 

According to MacIntyre, Modernity’s rejection of traditions is incoherent, and there is a need for a right-wing postmodernism. The problem of modern moral philosophy is that it neglects the notions of character and virtue and that leads to skepticism. Modernity’s focus is on what makes an act right or wrong rather than on what makes a person good or evil. Macintyre says that to learn rational ethics we have to go beyond modernity and study the Aristotelian and religious traditions which focus on the formation of character and the development of virtue.

Vertical Liberals Versus Horizontal Conservatives

The liberals think vertically. The conservatives think horizontally. Vertical thinking encourages the liberals to take a top-down approach for solving mankind’s problems. They entrust the fate of their society into the hands of revolutionary leaders, experts, and technocrats who promise to obliterate the old systems and create a utopia where safety, happiness, and purposefulness are available to all. Horizontal thinking encourages the conservatives to take a bottom-up approach and look around themselves for solutions. Their approach is pragmatic, in the sense that they desire solutions which have a track record of having worked in the past. They revere history and traditions as a compendium of experiences which can serve as a guide for future action. Between liberal utopianism and conservative pragmatism there is no scope for a compromise.

On Derrida’s Deconstruction of Logos

The search for logos (original presence) is the oldest in the history of philosophy. The Hindu thinkers believed that the logos is in the Trinity of godheads. The Platonic and Aristotelian thinkers found their logos in Plato’s forms. Augustine and his followers found it in the Christian Trinity. In the modern period, philosophy has been dominated by systems which are logocentric (which hold that meaning emanates from some sort of logos). For Descartes, cogito is the logos. For Kant, the logos is internalized in the form of the absolute self or transcendental ego. For Hegel, the logos is the idea or spirit. Logocentrism is generally expressed in the form of binaries in which one term is more privileged than the other: for instance, the Platonic Form is more privileged than the real object or idea which the Form represents. There are several other binaries: soul versus body; theory versus practice; mental versus physical; conscious versus unconscious; rational versus emotional. In these binaries, the term that is closer to the eternal, and has the ability to remain unchanging, is more privileged.

According to Derrida, the philosophers since Plato have devoted their metaphysics to the search for a higher reality which, while being untouched by materialism, gives meaning and purpose to the material world. Most philosophers, even the structuralists, who try to avoid the logocentric approach, use the traditional terminology and its binaries. These philosophers try to reverse the binaries, but they cannot avoid thinking in the terms of binaries. In his 1967 book, Of Grammatology, Derrida deconstructs the attempts to posit a center and establish a system of binaries. He tries to replace the logocentric approach with a free play of meaning. He argues that whenever we think that we have discovered the logos, or original presence, or center, we find that it points towards some other logos. Thus, the search for logos becomes never-ending, the search for meaning becomes never-ending, and there is a breakdown between the signifier (the word) and the signified (the meaning that the word refers to). Derrida saw deconstruction as a form of freedom from fixed truths or origins, and the guilt over absence of meaning.

Goethe's Words

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” ~ Goethe

A Parable on the Importance of Failure and Unhappiness

The man performed great austerities for several years. One day God became pleased by his piousness and appeared before him. God told the man to ask for a boon. 

The man then asked that he be granted the opportunity to experience failure and unhappiness in every subsequent life. 

God was surprised. He asked, “Why won’t you wish for success and happiness in every subsequent life?” 

The man said that he wants to experience failure and unhappiness in every subsequent life because he desires to forever be a man of wisdom and faith. God smiled and granted the man the boon of failing and being unhappy in every life. 

The irony is that wisdom and faith come to a man when he experiences great failure and unhappiness.

On Wisdom

Knowledge can be taught, but not wisdom. A wise man teaching wisdom to someone will sound foolish because wisdom cannot be expressed in words. You either discover wisdom in your own way, through your life’s experiences, or you remain unwise.

The Digital Revolution’s Unexpected Consequence

The digital revolution has turned man into a cyclops, who is missing one eye, the eye of wisdom. While teaching metaphysics, Immanuel Kant used to remind his students that learning metaphysics is not easy. He used to say: “One who would seek pearls, must descend to the depths.” But the digital technologies of the modern world hinder man from descending to the depths. They make everything easily accessible. What is easily accessible is often superficial. When information and facilities are available at the click of the mouse and a tap on the app, why should anyone descend to the depth or exercise his mind? In the digital age, wisdom has become a vestigial attribute.

The Paradox of the Tiananmen Square

The rise of China is proof that a world class free market economy can be created after destroying a popular pro-democracy movement. In 1989, the Chinese communist government sent troops armed with assault rifles and tanks to Tiananmen Square to massacre thousands of pro-democracy protesters. The Tiananmen Square massacre put an end to opposition to the communist regime, and China became a politically stable country. Having implemented free market reforms in 1979, China had been receiving foreign investments for a decade. After the Tiananmen Square massacre there was a giant leap in the investments coming into the country. The big corporations prefer to invest in countries which are being ruled by a strong and stable regime. In 2010, China overtook Japan as the world’s second-largest economy.

The Long Wait for the Barbarian

I am taking a month long break from blogging. I will use the time that I spend online to do some extra reading and writing. When I am back online, I hope the pandemic related fears will have subsided and the lockdown of the world will have ended. But whether the lockdowns are lifted or continued, I think that the next five years will bring economic decline and political instability to most democratic nations. I would not be feeling this pessimistic if the downfall were the consequence of some natural calamity, like a meteor strike or a super-volcano. What we are presently witnessing is mankind rushing headlong to commit collective suicide. Nietzsche was right—the world cannot function without the barbarians who are capable of taking big risks and doing terrible things to achieve just goals. The democratic nations are in trouble because they are too liberal and effete. They have lost touch with their inner barbarian. But the next five years will bring them ample opportunities for rediscovering the barbarian who hides inside their skin.

Heidegger and the Countermovement to Nihilism

Heidegger never accepted that he had erred by supporting the Nazis. He was convinced that Nazism had failed to achieve its philosophical objectives because it went astray. In a 1930s lecture, he said that he saw Fascism (or Nazism) as a countermovement to the problem of European nihilism which Nietzsche has described. By endorsing Hitler, Heidegger thought that he was endorsing a countermovement to nihilism and bringing Germany closer to the metaphysical realm of Nietzsche. He aspired to have with Hitler the kind of relationship that Plato had with Dionysius (the king of Syracuse). But after the Nazi regime’s fall, Heidegger complained that he felt let down by Hitler. On Heidegger’s dalliance with the Nazis, Karl Jaspers said, “Children who play at the wheel of world history are smashed to bits.”

Between a Utopia and an Apocalypse

Humans are doomed to forever live in a world which is being pulled by the dream of a utopia in one direction, and by the nightmare of an apocalypse in the other direction.

The Liberal and His Favorite Apocalypse

The modern liberal recognizes himself in his favorite apocalypse. With the advanced society in which he lives, he identifies just the material dimension of his existence. His spiritual dimension, or his soul, he discovers in the idea of an apocalyptic event, one that will swallow his society as a whole, ripping apart the entirety of his material existence and that of everyone else, leaving behind only their souls. Thus an apocalypse is a spiritual need for the liberal. If ideas like Global Warming, Climate Change, Ice Age, Ozone Layer Depletion, Acid Rain, and Virus Pandemic did not exist, he would feel lonely, lost, and traumatized. He would lose his spirituality and his soul.

Arendt on the Schreibtischtäter

In her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, which is on the trail of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt says that the holocaust was perpetrated through a new, modern type of murderer: the Schreibtischtäter or the desk murderer. She does not see a linkage between the holocaust and German history. She asserts that the German bureaucrats (the Schreibtischtäters) were responsible for the Nazi atrocities. Modernity, she notes, empowered the Nazi Schreibtischtäters, who blindly obeyed orders, and without personally participating directly in the murders, sent millions to their death by putting their signature on the official documents that came before them. She presents Eichmann as the prototype of a Schreibtischtäter.

The Discontents of Freud

Now that I am a certified pessimist, I can empathize with Sigmund Freud’s discontents. I am talking about his final book Civilization and Its Discontents in which he pours out all his pessimism. He examines the senseless slaughter of the First World War and the Russian communist revolution, and his own financial difficulties, his stomach ailments, his fight with cancer and presents a bleak picture of mankind. Life, he notes, is not being possible without suffering and that there are three ways by which a man might try to alleviate his suffering: first, intoxication; second, seclusion, which might not work for most people because by nature we are gregarious creatures; third, sublimation, which entails giving vent to aggressive impulses in socially acceptable ways (sports or work). He rejects the religious idea that man should love his enemies and agrees with the saying, homo homini lupus (man is wolf to man). Man is naturally inclined to enslave other men and to destroy all those who cannot be enslaved.

Three Impossibilities of Conservatism

The conservatives are stymied by the three impossibilities: first, the impossibility of deciding what is the national tradition; second, the impossibility of deciding what is to be done to preserve the tradition that they believe is national; third, the impossibility of making national progress while preserving the national tradition. But liberalism is itself a tradition. Leftism is itself a tradition. Fascism is itself a tradition. Modernity is itself a tradition. A conservative who wants to follow the traditions cannot avoid being a liberal, leftist, fascistic, and modernist because these are as much a part of his tradition, as his religion and culture is.

Nietzsche’s Rejection of Conservatism

Nietzsche has called his approach to philosophy “philosophizing with a hammer.” He has claimed that his books are the “dynamite” and the “assassination attempts,” that he was a revolutionary, a destroyer of traditions, a man who lusted for radical social transformations, and that there is nothing conservative in him. The conservative dictum is to keep everything as it is. If the conservatives inherit a corrupt, incompetent, and cruel socialist system, they will ignore the corruption, incompetence, and cruelty, and preserve the socialist system because that for them becomes the embodiment of the national culture which must be conserved. There is no possibility of a conservative Nietzsche, and there is no possibility of major reform under a conservative government.

On The Conservative “Will to Power”

Twenty-first century conservatism has the will to power, but it lacks the will to build a better world. The conservatives expect to find redemption and meaning in a government that is conservative in name only. They have no desire to fight for the implementation of conservative principles. The conservative mindset follows Walter Benjamin’s insight: “The work is the death of the intention.” For the conservatives, winning the election means the death of the conservative intention; once political power has been acquired, they forget about conservatism.

The Right is the New Left

The right is fascistic, authoritarian, and imperial. Their focus is on winning elections and enjoying the perks of political office. They do nothing to safeguard the civil liberties, dignity, and economic interests of the people. The inability of the right to resist the move towards totalitarian leftism is linked to not only their obsession with winning elections but also to the weakness of their rightist agenda and their contempt for the concerns of the members of the public who hold a rightist worldview. The maxim from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov applies to the right: “We are all guilty of everything and everyone, towards everyone—and I more than all the others.” For the downfall of society, the right is more guilty than all others, more guilty than the left.

Indoctrination in the Trenches and Lockdowns

When people are hiding in the trenches, they become susceptible to the ideologies of hate and violence. In the twentieth century’s second decade, when millions of men were in the trenches of Europe, fighting the First World War, they were being indoctrinated in Nazism, Fascism, and Communism. At the end of the great war, they emerged from the trenches as the warriors of ideology. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, people are once again in trenches (lockdown), which run across homes and offices around the globe: What kind of indoctrination is happening to them? The global lockdown could prove to be a point of no return; it could turn out to be a breeder of revolutionaries, who will plow without mercy through the present and future.

The Blood Brothers: Capitalism & Communism

Capitalism and communism are not antithetical doctrines—they are blood brothers. Both were born in the heart of the western civilization, in the years following the American and the French Revolutions of the eighteenth century. Since their birth, the two blood brothers have coexisted. They have marched hand in hand and transformed the culture and politics of several nations. 

There has never been a capitalist nation that is not rocked by communist movements, and there has never been a communist nation where a section of the population is not rooting for capitalism. All democratic governments are a compromise between capitalist and communist tendencies. The rise of capitalism is linked to the Industrial Revolution. The rise of communism is an outcome of the intellectual work and political activism of Marx and Engels, and their followers. 

Since the eighteenth century, the regulatory system in most nations has kept pace with industrialization. When the first industrialist was building his industry, the first bureaucrat was writing his regulations, and the first communist was arousing the working class.

Blind Faith in Philosophy and Politics

The fervent supporter of a political leader is the man who does not understand his political agenda; the same is true of the fervent adherent of a philosopher—he does not understand the philosopher’s philosophy at all. Blind faith motivates the followers of both political leaders and philosophers.

The Overman’s Enslavement

Man’s debt towards fellow human beings is a profitable enterprise for those with Nietzschean Last Man mentality, who become collectors of the debt and join the ruling class, but for most people, who exist in the twilight between the Last Man and the Overman, the debt is an instrument of enslavement and torture. The Last Man, who possesses the master mentality, is fit to rule and extort, while the Overman, who owns the slave mentality, is always the toiler and the payer.

On Over-Civilization

Civilization is a good thing, but over-civilization is a sign that people are no longer conscious of their history and culture, and that a clique of erudite-barbarians has taken charge and is directing civilization towards an unknown future.

The Truth Never Prevails On Its Own

Truth prevails in the end. But when will the end which will witness the enshrinement of the truth come? No one can tell. The expression, “Truth prevails in the end,” is a mindless anodyne, a fatalistic banality. It symbolizes the unfulfilled hopes of a defeated people. If it is a lie that prevails today, then people have two alternatives: either submit to the lie, or fight to expose it. Tomorrow it will be too late. A lie that is not exposed today becomes the established point of view tomorrow. With every passing day, the lie gathers more strength, more corruption, more immorality, and one day it has enough power to crush all those who won’t submit to it. The truth never prevails on its on, only when people are willing to fight for it.

Apocalypse: The Timeless Instrument of Power

An apocalypse is a method of attaining power. When political movements fail to attain support by conventional methods, they use apocalyptic theories to frighten the people into submission. Almost all civilizations, in the past two thousand five hundred years, have invoked the vision of an apocalypse to keep their population frightened and in control. When you hear modern intellectuals and politicians thundering from their pulpits (TV studios) that an apocalypse is imminent—that the apocalypse will rip your life apart, that your world is coming to an end, that they are the only ones who can save you and your world but only if submit to their will—then you should become aware that a new version of the brutal ancient game of power is now being played.

The Distortion and Corruption of Values

The world is dying because every civilizational value is being used to breed its antithetical disvalue: capitalism is being used to breed fascism; democracy to breed mob rule; reason to breed unreason; science to breed adherence to sociological paradigms; liberty to breed a culture of manipulation and dominance; innovation and enterprise to breed conformism in the marketplace; industry to breed massive military machines; digital technologies to breed systems to spy on the people; mainstream media to breed tools of propaganda and indoctrination; academia to breed a conformist population; philosophy to breed a class of erudite barbarians; healthcare to breed an outcome that is worse than the disease.

Kuhn’s Theory of “Bandwagon Effects” in Science

The extreme measures that many “expert” scientists and doctors are advocating for dealing with the coronavirus problem makes me remember the “bandwagon effect” that Thomas Kuhn has described in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn says that the view of the scientific community is strongly influenced by a bandwagon effect. The scientists are not open-minded. They do not base their views on evidence. They do not conduct proper experiments. Instead of being objective, they tend to view the world in terms of the prevailing paradigm (by “paradigm” Kuhn means an overwhelming consensus on what a scientific view ought to be). Over a period of time, the paradigm leads to the accumulation of anomalies, which the scientists address by allowing gradual divergences—this process leads to paradigm breakdown and the rise of a new paradigm. The work of scientists, according to Kuhn, is not fully rational. It is a sociological enterprise.

The Soviet Union and The USA

Communism was the great destroyer of liberty in the twentieth century, but after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the interest in communism, as an ideology of world dominance, was finished and the mission for destroying liberty was picked up by a spate of movements which were developed by the intellectuals and politicians based in the nation that straddles the globe caparisoned as the knight of liberty and capitalism: the USA. The list of American liberty killing movements since the 1990s include: global warming, climate change, war on terror, war on drugs, and currently, the war on a virus. In the twenty-first century, the USA has become an alter ego of its former foe, the Soviet Union.

The Celebrity Who Believes in Apocalypse

Why do the celebrities propagate apocalyptic theories like Ice Age, Global Warming, Climate Change, Global Pandemic? The typical celebrity preacher of an apocalyptic theory is a man who at achieves great worldly success, but fails to understand why he is successful. He tries to convince himself that his success is genuine, and when he fails to convince himself, he blames the people whose support has made him what he is. Then he pines for their downfall and annihilation. The idea of an apocalypse becomes a psychological need for him, because an apocalypse, in which all will die, is his revenge against those who have inflicted on him the ignominy of a false success.

On The New Trojan Horse

Here’s my prediction: The word “coronavirus” will become emblazoned in mankind’s collective memory. The coming generations will never forget this word because it will become associated with the fall of the world order which was established in the twentieth century. Philosophers and historians will state in their books that coronavirus entered the advanced nations like a “Trojan Horse,” enticing their governments to take draconian steps to counter it, but instead of stopping the virus, these steps led to a fatal decline in their culture, economy, and military strength. With the fall of the advanced nations, the existing world order was finished and the quest began for a new order. The game of the new Trojan Horse has already been played and now it cannot be reversed or unplayed.

The Wars of Twenty-first Century

“There will be wars, as there never have been wars on earth,” says Nietzsche in Will to Power. This statement is not a hyperbole. It is Nietzsche’s prediction that the wars of the twentieth century would be different from the earlier wars. The wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were motivated by dynastic and national concerns, whereas the wars of the twentieth century would be immense—why? According to Nietzsche, the twentieth century wars would be a clash of ideologies. Mankind is now in the third decade of the twenty-first century. What kind of wars are the nations waging now or are likely to wage in the future? The age of ideology ended with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the wars since then have been over control of territory and resources. This trend will continue and going forward. The new wars will be limited in scope, and will lead to a world order which has multiple power centers. The days of the superpowers are over; we are now in a multipolar world.

Extinction of the Neo-Dinosaur: Modern Man

The modern man finds himself at a midpoint between a lunatic asylum and a zombie apocalypse. His way of life is on verge of being destroyed in an ignominious and pathetic manner. Nature bestowed on the dinosaurs the dignity of having the opportunity to become extinct from the impact of a meteor which turned the earth into a fireball for a thousand years. Modern man, the neo-dinosaur is going down with the whimper of a flu virus. Now men face two stark choices: either they can become a lunatic and live in the asylum alongside the stark raving mad, or they can turn into a zombie and join the rampaging cannibalistic hordes. What will your choice be?

Don Quixote—The Last Knight

The modern man is helpless. He is tired of living. He is fed up with change. His mind is filled with dark apocalyptic thoughts. He feels such contempt and disgust for his fellow human beings that he takes social distancing as a virtue. Don Quixote is not like the modern man. He still has some life in him. He still loves humanity. Attired in his rusty armor, astride his wretched old horse, Don Quixote is setting out with Sancho Panza, who is on his donkey. They are the world’s last knights, humanity’s last hope. They will defy lockdowns and fight for our civil liberties.

The Never-ending Fear of the Virus

If you keep people locked in their homes till the virus goes away, then the virus will never go away. It will become a chronic problem. A year or two years from today, we will still be fearing a catastrophic attack from some form of the virus. In such a climate of fear and uncertainty, the economic woes will keep multiplying. A point will be reached when the economic black hole becomes so massive that it will swallow many nations.

A View from “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

When a civilization is on its last legs, it becomes devoted to minimizing suffering and maximizing security for its people. In his novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr. provides an insight into the apocalyptic consequences of the quest for mitigation of suffering and maximization of security. Here’s a quote from the novel: “To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security."

The Apartheid Between India and Reality

There exists a cartesian apartheid between India and reality. Having convinced themselves that they are incapable of dealing with reality on their own, the Indians have entrusted the world’s only superpower, the USA, to serve as the broker between them and reality. But by using a superpower to cut a deal with reality, the Indians have lost control over their own economy and culture. They are now the blind and dumb followers of the USA, which is likely to decline and fall in near future. But most Indians do not realize that the USA is failing. They continue to follow it like a faithful dog.

Socialism and the Seven Dwarfs

The political movements in the last hundred years are modeled after the Grimm fairy tale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Socialism has won the pole position of Snow White while all other political movements have been relegated to the lowly position of dwarfs.

Moore’s Refutation of Idealism

In his essay, “The Refutation of Idealism,” G. E. Moore notes that the claim esse is percipi is essential to the idealist view of the world. 

He does not attack the idealist notion that reality is spiritual (or to be is to be perceived)—instead, he shows that the arguments that the idealists use to support the claim esse is percipi lead to a contradiction and hence are flawed. He comes to the conclusion that idealism violates the law of non-contradiction. 

Moore’s essay is not a defense of realism—the positions of both the realist and the idealist can be challenged by two central claims of skepticism: first, it is possible for appearances to differ from reality; second, the veridical experiences can be indistinguishable from the non-veridical experiences.

The Monsters of Pseudoscience

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been outdone by the monstrous conceptions of science (“pseudoscience”): ice age; global warming; climate change; ozone layer depletion; acid rain; hackers precipitating a global nuclear war; artificial intelligence capturing human brains, turning people into zombified slaves; tyrannical supercomputer leading an army of killer cyborgs; and the newest in the long list of apocalyptic monsters is the virus. Science is supposed to be the fountainhead of inventions and discoveries, but when science gets corrupted by intellectuals and politicians, there is a rise of pseudoscience which is the ultimate producer of fictional monsters.

Awareness and Language

Is anyone aware that he was ever sensorily aware of anything for which he does not have the words to describe? The answer to this question is: such awareness is not possible. A man cannot be aware of being aware in the past of seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, or imagining anything which he cannot describe to himself in words. Man’s capacity for being aware of past awarenesses, or his capacity to consciously recollect the past experiences, is dependent on his ability to use language. A creature without language will not possess the ability of being aware of past sensory awarenesses.

In Defense of Naive Realism

Naive realism is a strange name for a philosophical position. This name creates the impression that the position is innocent, infantile, and ignorant. What else can the word "naive" mean? When someone new to philosophy encounters the term “naive realism,” he might become disenchanted. Why should he waste time on a philosophical position which is naive? But naive realism is not naive; it’s a sophisticated, and probably the most interesting position in philosophy of mind. It holds that the world of physical objects exists irrespective of whether or not anyone is observing them and that our senses present us a view of the world as it is. Every realist theory of perception makes use of the tenets of naive realism. In my opinion, direct realism is a better, more honest, name for this position.

William Faulkner’s 1288-Word Sentence

William Faulkner was a master of long sentences; his longest sentence, in his novel Absalom, Absalom!, is a 1288-word marathon:

"Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’61 had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They ain't whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they ain't whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point."