The Dilemma of Existence: Is There a Question?

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

Be the Unbeliever and not the True Believer

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

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

The Ephemerality of Capitalism

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

The Birth of the Woke Mouse

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

Nightmares and Dreams

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

America: The Coffin of Capitalism

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

On Aristotle’s Influence in Europe

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

The Paradox of Liberty, Prosperity, and Happiness

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

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

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

The Desert Grows

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

The Desire to be God

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

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

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

Citizen Sade: Eroticism, violence, and the revolutionary imagination

The very name Marquis de Sade has passed into language as “sadism,” a word that evokes cruelty, excess, and the intoxication of domination. Yet Sade was not merely a libertine or an author of obscene works; he was, paradoxically, both a powerful intellectual and a volatile political actor during the French Revolution—a figure whose life and ideas straddled the line between philosophical radicalism and moral abyss.

In his provocative essay Operation Parricide: Sade, Robespierre, and the French Revolution, Austrian political thinker Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn examines Sade’s political legacy with a mixture of disdain and reluctant acknowledgment. His account strips away the romantic veneer often attached to revolutionary heroes and lays bare the violent perversities at the Revolution’s core.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn notes that beneath Sade’s “endless pornographic and extremely boring writings” lay long political digressions in which he revealed himself as “a rabid, left-wing, materialist atheist.” Ironically, Sade’s notoriety in revolutionary history owes less to his literary productions than to his role in the events surrounding the storming of the Bastille. Imprisoned there at the request of his mother-in-law—thanks to a royal lettre de cachet—Sade found himself among an odd assortment of counterfeiters, swindlers, lunatics, and debtors. From his cell, he shouted incendiary appeals through a makeshift megaphone, urging the local populace to rise up and liberate the prisoners.

The Bastille’s governor, De Launay, found himself powerless—unwilling to silence Sade through confinement or physical restraint, yet desperate to be rid of him. On July 4, 1789, Sade was removed to the Charenton asylum for the criminally insane, only to be released in 1791. Almost immediately, he immersed himself in revolutionary politics, becoming chairman of the Section des Piques, where “Citizen Sade” played the role of a fervent Jacobin until he fell out with Robespierre. Once again, political conflict ended with his recommitment to Charenton.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn places Sade, alongside Rousseau, as a “true renewer of democracy in our time”—though the description is laced with irony. Rousseau, he reminds us, penned pedagogical treatises while consigning his own children to orphanages; Sade, for his part, gave democracy a grotesque theatricality, suffusing revolutionary fervor with cruelty and eroticized violence.

This intertwining of politics and sadism was not, in Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s view, a mere metaphor. The Revolution’s atrocities often mirrored the excesses described in Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. In Arras, for example, decapitated corpses—many of them women—were stripped and bound in obscene tableaux, as if the Revolution itself had become a theatre of cruelty. These acts were not the incidental savagery of war, but deliberate performances of domination. Women, and often their children, were principal victims, subjected to a level of sadistic misogyny that “reached unbelievable proportions.”

Kuehnelt-Leddihn concludes with a grim meditation on human credulity and the cyclical nature of collective violence:

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

Here, the French Revolution becomes more than a historical episode; it is a parable of modern politics. Sade’s story, as filtered through Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s lens, reminds us that revolutions are not purely engines of liberty—they can also be carnivals of cruelty, where the rhetoric of freedom masks a theatre of humiliation and destruction. It forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that democracy itself, when unmoored from moral restraint, can become a stage for the very vices it claims to overthrow.

The False Concept of Freedom of the Press

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

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

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

David And Goliath

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

Who Will Stop the Little Barbarians?

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

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

The Fate of the Utopia’s Supporters

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

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

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

Socialism: The Tower of Babel Without God

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

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

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

The “Science” of Leftist Political Warfare

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

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

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

The Wisdom of Dostoevsky

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

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

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

The Paradox of Humankind

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

The Future is a Leftist Utopia

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

Personal Maxim and Kantian Universal Practical Law

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

Earth’s Song of Misery and Famine

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

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

Philosophy and Religion

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

The Dualism of Samkhya and Yoga

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

The Two Worlds: Of the Poor and the Prosperous

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

The Union Between Progress and Destruction

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

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

The Politics of Unmensch and Übermensch

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

The Problem of Egalitarianism and Individualism

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

The Western Conception of Concentration Camps

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

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

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

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

The Civilization and The Nation

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

The Pitfalls of Liberty

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

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

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

The Myth of Robinson Crusoe’s Individualism

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

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

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

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

Normative Statements are not Objective or Subjective

The statements which express moral, political, and aesthetic ideals are neither subjective nor objective. They are normative. 

The subjective statements represent the matters of personal taste and feelings; for example: “I like black coffee,” “The political situation makes me feel sad,” “Modern art is rubbish.” The objective statements are logical and descriptive; for example: “The dog is barking,” “2+2=4,” “Lenin was the founder of the Soviet Union." The normative statements are the statements of value—they are not verifiable and they cannot be connected to personal states of the mind; for example: “Liars are sinners,” “Honesty is the best policy,” “Capitalism is better than socialism,” “Rembrandt was a great artist.” 

A fully-rational system of morality, politics, and art cannot be developed because the normative statements are not based on objective criteria—they transcend rationality. The origin of some of the normative statements can be traced to the ancient and the prehistoric times.

“The Past Is Not Dead. It's Not Even past”

In his line, “The past is not dead. It's not even past,” William Faulkner is referring to the paradox of time. We live in the past, the present exists in our mind as an abstraction, and the future never arrives. The moment you say, “right now”—that moment is gone; it is past; it is history. You can reminisce about the past, you may try to understand it, but you no longer live in it. By paraphrasing Faulkner, a philosophical point can be made: “The past philosophies are not dead. They aren’t even past.” Philosophical ideas never die. On the wings of new arguments, they keep coming back in age after age, giving rise to insights, new controversies, new clashes, and new collaborations.

A Passage From Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf

An exchange between Humphrey van Weyden and Wolf Larsen, in Jack London's The Sea-Wolf: 

"But history tells of slaves who rose to the purple," I chided.

"And history tells of opportunities that came to the slaves who rose to the purple," he answered grimly. "No man makes opportunity. All the great men ever did was to know it when it came to them. The Corsican knew. I have dreamed as greatly as the Corsican. I should have known the opportunity, but it never came. The thorns sprung up and choked me. And, Hump, I can tell you that you know more about me than any living man, except my own brother.”

"And what is he? And where is he?”

"Master of the steamship Macedonia, seal-hunter," was the answer. "We will meet him most probably on the Japan coast. Men call him 'Death' Larsen.”

"Death Larsen!" I involuntarily cried. "Is he like you?”

"Hardly. He is a lump of an animal without any head. He has all my—my—”

"Brutishness," I suggested.

“Yes,—thank you for the word,—all my brutishness, but he can scarcely read or write.”

"And he has never philosophized on life," I added.

"No," Wolf Larsen answered, with an indescribable air of sadness. "And he is all the happier for leaving life alone. He is too busy living it to think about it. My mistake was in ever opening the books."

Modernity: The New Oedipus

The fate of modernity is like the fate of Oedipus; it has been left to die of neglect at the mountainside on the orders of its Western father (who has transmogrified into a King Laius-like decadent figure). Modernity might die. The world might revert to a premodern way of life. But that will not happen—like Oedipus, modernity will survive through the care of a foster father (a King Polybus-like figure, who could be China, or Japan, or Russia; perhaps India). Modernity, a child of the West, will become a force that is antithetical to its parents. It will attack the West as Oedipus attacked King Laius.

The Masses And The Elites

There are two kinds of men: the masses and the elites. The masses use their senses, instinct, habits, wisdom, and their sense of morality and traditions; they think of man as he is thought to be. The elites use their reason, rationalizations, intelligence, and their notions of power and perfection; they think of man as he ought to be. In Cartesian terms, the masses are therefore they think, whereas the elites think therefore they are. In Lockean terms, the masses have the body and the soul, whereas the elites have the body but no soul. In Kantian terms, the masses inhabit the phenomenon world, whereas the elites inhabit the noumenon world. In Hegelian terms, the masses are the thesis, whereas the elites are the antithesis.

Nietzsche: The Philosopher’s Intellectual Conscience

“A very popular error: having the courage of one’s convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions!” ~ says Nietzsche (in his notes). This is a good point. A philosopher should have an intellectual conscience. He should be capable of arguing against himself. Whenever he develops a new philosophical position, he should remind himself that I may be wrong, I may be very wrong, I may be hopelessly wrong.

Full Belly Libertarianism

While communism is the movement of people with an empty belly (the starving masses), libertarianism is a movement of people with a full belly (the filthy rich). The only country where libertarianism has gained a substantial following is the full-belly USA. There are no libertarians in the poor countries where the empty belly folks live.

Kaufmann: Critique of Religion and Philosophy

“Modern philosophy has not yielded any remotely acceptable picture of man. The thinkers of the Enlightenment showed too little understanding of religion and art, feeling, passion, and the imagination; and neither romanticism nor any modern philosophy has produced a conception of man that would even tempt us to assent.” ~ Walter Kaufmann in his book Critique of Religion and Philosophy. 

Kaufmann notes that the inheritors of the legacy of the Enlightenment thinkers, the professors of philosophy in today’s universities, are mired in lifeless scholasticism. “Whatever professors of philosophy take up nowadays tends to become scholastic, and the rigor of the scholastics is rigor mortis… Scholasticism has not changed its ways. Rigor sets in after the life has been driven out of its parts. To creep is a virtue, to leap a vice, and speed the sin of the spirit. As for “The Philosophic Flight” (the title of the first chapter of this book), that is to the scholastic a contradiction in terms.”

Senility and the Superpowers

“Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad.”—an Ancient Greek saying. The Gods do something similar to the superpowers that they wish to destroy—they first drive them mad or senile. The great superpower of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union, went senile in the 1980s and was finished in 1991. 

On 12 November 1982, the Soviet Union gave a public display of the senility of its political establishment by promoting Yuri Andropov, a sick man, to the post of General Secretary. Within three months of being in office, Andropov suffered total kidney failure; he spent the rest of his life in the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow where, for long periods, he was unconscious. He died on 9 February 1984. 

Konstantin Chernenko, who succeeded Andropov as General Secretary on 13 February 1984, was also in an advanced stage of mental and physical decline. It was rumored that he used to forget that he was holding the highest political office in the Soviet Union. Before his public appearances, his aides used to remind him of who he was. Within weeks of taking office, he was rushed to the Central Clinical Hospital where he spent much of the remainder of his life. He died on 10 March 1985. 

A day later, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was young, healthy, and charismatic, was made the General Secretary. But Gorbachev could not be the savior of the Soviet Union—he was an ignorant and naive leader. In his hurry to catch up with America, he took a series of disastrous decisions, including the policy of Glasnost and Perestroika, which was antithetical to the character of the Soviet Union. 

When simultaneous rebellions erupted in several towns and cities in Russia and Eastern Europe, Gorbachev was taken by surprise and he could not act decisively to crush the rebels. His weakness emboldened the rebels, leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. Two years later, in 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved, leaving the USA as the world’s only superpower.

The Terrible Tragedy of History

History is a terrible tragedy. It is a tragedy because it tells you about the fragility of civilizations, and it is terrible because it gives you a vague sense that the decline and fall of your own civilization is inevitable. All civilizations are doomed. The history of all existing civilizations will one day be read by the future generations as a terrible tragedy.

Chambers On the Two Faiths: Freedom and Communism

In his book Witness, Whittaker Chambers talks of “this sick society, which we call Western civilization,” locked in a deadly struggle between “the two irreconcilable faiths of our time—Communism and Freedom.” Chambers is right in describing “freedom” as a faith. The philosophy of freedom is a sort of religion, which preaches the establishment of a promised land where there is total freedom. 

After the First World War, the idea of freedom took a utopian trajectory through the work of a wide range of classical liberal and leftist thinkers: I can think of the nihilistic notion of total freedom developed by the Neo-Marxists (the Frankfurt School, the Fabian Society, and the anti-fascists like Gramsci), the ersatz individualism in Ayn Rand’s utopian fiction, and the utopian stateless society of Rothbard.

Letter from Whittaker Chambers to William F. Buckley, Jr.

In a 1954 letter to Whittaker Chambers, William F. Buckley, Jr. expressed the hope that National Review would play a role in stopping the communists from wrecking the West. In his reply, dated August 5, 1954, Chambers crushed Buckley’s hopes. 

Chambers begins his letter by declaring that it is too late to stop the communists: “I no longer believe that political solutions are possible for us. I am baffled by the way people still speak of the West as if it were at least a cultural unity against Communism though it is divided not only by a political, but by an invisible cleavage. On one side are the voiceless masses with their own subdivisions and fractures. On the other side is the enlightened, articulate elite which, to one degree or other, has rejected the religious roots of the civilization—the roots without which it is no longer Western civilization, but a new order of beliefs, attitudes and mandates.” 

Chambers then notes that communism did not originate in Russia; it is a Western creation: “In short, this is the order of which Communism is one logical expression, originating not in Russia, but in the culture capitals of the West, reaching Russia by clandestine delivery via the old underground centers in Cracow, Vienna, Berne, Zurich, and Geneva.”

He ends his letter with these lines: “It is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.”

Machiavelli: History as Cyclical Returns

Machiavelli sees history as cyclical returns, a succession of ups and downs. In The Discourses, he notes that customs and laws are necessary since “men are more prone to evil than to good.” This trait of men ensures that history oscillates between the bad and the good, with the bad being in control more often and over longer periods of time. 

Lady Fortuna, the goddess of fortune, possesses a mercurial character and plays a pivotal role in the succession of ups and downs. In The Prince, Machiavelli says that all rulers, despite their craftiness, ruthlessness, and wisdom, are playthings in the hands of Lady Fortuna. In his essay, “On Fortune,” he writes: “Lady Fortuna turns states and kingdoms upside down as she pleases; she deprives the just of the good that she freely gives to the unjust.”  

Political stability is unattainable—things tend to degenerate till an absolute bottom is reached and from there a recovery is made in case of some nations, and fortune alone has the true suzerainty over men’s political affairs.

No form of government is immune to failure. In The Discourses, Machiavelli observes: “For a Monarchy readily becomes a Tyranny, an Aristocracy an Oligarchy, while a Democracy tends to degenerate into Anarchy. So that if the founder of a State should establish any one of these three forms of Government, he establishes it for a short time only, since no precaution he may take can prevent it from sliding into its contrary, by reason of the close resemblance which, in this case, the virtue bears to the vice.” 

The greatest threat to a state, Machiavelli says, comes from the feeble princes: “no kingdom can stand when two feeble princes follow in succession.”

Kołakowski: On the Utopian Mentality

The utopian mentality is devoid of historical consciousness; it views the past as evil and oppressive and does not believe in stage by stage advancement from one level of existence to the next. Leszek Kołakowski has given a good description of the utopian mentality that has been the driver of European politics since the eighteenth century: “History is portrayed as catastrophic, not evolutionary… There is a radical discontinuity between the world as it is and as it will be; a violent leap is needed to do away with the past; a new time will start.” The utopians ignore the will of the people, and advocate despotic means for achieving their promised land. Kołakowski defines the idea of utopia as “a desperate desire to attain absolute perfection; this desire is a degraded remnant of the religious legacy in nonreligious minds.”

“He loved Big Brother”

What if there is an Orwellian climax to the totalitarian turn that the world has taken in the year 2020? What if instead of fighting back to regain the civil liberties that they have lost, people submit to their oppressors, in the manner of Winston Smith, the protagonist in Orwell’s novel 1984, whose mentality is described in the end of the novel with a pithy chilling line: “He loved Big Brother.” Perhaps mankind’s ultimate destiny is to transform into the docile and dumb creatures whose most discerning feature is that they love their oppressor: they love Big Brother.

On Nietzsche’s Pessimistic View of Civilization

Nietzsche was filled with doubts about the future of civilization. In The Anti-Christ, he writes: “Mankind does not represent a development toward something better or stronger or higher in the sense accepted today. ‘Progress’ is merely a modern idea, that is, a false idea. The European of today is vastly inferior in value to the European of the Renaissance: further development is altogether not according to any necessity in the direction of elevation, enhancement, or strength.” In his Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche laments: “Nothing avails: one must go forward—step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern ‘progress’)."

Gibbon: Savage Kingdoms Versus Civilization

In Volume Six of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon contemplates the possibility of barbarians from the savage kingdoms annihilating his own Western Civilization, just as the Germanic Barbarians (the Visigoths) had annihilated the Roman Empire. He writes that while the barbarians might manage to cause some harm to the West, they will not “injure our general state of happiness, the system of arts, and laws, and manners, which so advantageously distinguish, above the rest of mankind, the Europeans and their colonies.”

In the line that follows the above-quoted line, he is back to talking about the “savage nations” in Eastern Europe and Asia sending their barbarian hordes to destroy the West. “The savage nations of the globe are the common enemies of civilized society; and we may inquire with anxious curiosity, whether Europe is still threatened with a repetition of those calamities which formerly oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome. Perhaps the same reflections will illustrate the fall of that mighty empire, and explain the probable causes of our actual security.” 

Gibbon believed that the military superiority of the West would render it invulnerable to the barbarian invaders. He thought that the barbarian cultures would learn from the West and become civilized. He did not see any parallel between the West and the Roman Empire. “Europe is secure from any future irruption of Barbarians; since, before they can conquer, they must cease to be barbarous. Their gradual advances in the science of war would always be accompanied, as we may learn from the example of Russia, with a proportionable improvement in the arts of peace and civil policy; and they themselves must deserve a place among the polished nations whom they subdue."

Gibbon naively believed that the nations which possess the knowledge of science and arts would not be savage and were unlikely to attack other nations. The truth is that the primitive nations seldom attack other nations, mainly because they lack the resources for fighting a great war. Most great wars have been started by nations that are highly developed. Gibbon does not realize that the threat to the West might arise from within, by the emergence of new, more horrific forms of barbarism, under ideologically motivated leaders like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.