A History Lesson for the Woke Liberals

The tectonic historical event of the twentieth century was not the rise and defeat of fascism and nazism, it was not the rise and fall of the Soviet Union either, but the end of colonization with the decimation of the British Empire and the empires of other Western powers. The end of colonization spawned several new nations, some of which made great progress after the 1970s and now they command a major slice of global economy and military strength. 

The woke liberals in Western countries today do not appreciate such facts of history and geopolitics. They do not appreciate that in the next five to ten years, the Western nations will be crushed by not just the collapse of their financial sector, the meltdown of their technology companies, the massive devaluation of their currencies, and the soaring inflation and unemployment which will lead to chaos in urban areas but also the geopolitical adventurism of the former colonies which have acquired massive economic and military strength and now want to be regarded as the world’s superpower. 

History repeats itself but in unexpected ways: I won’t be surprised if in the twenty-first century, many of the Western powers become colonies of those nations which were the colonies of the West in the twentieth century. The world is a hard place—just how hard it is, the woke liberals will have enough opportunity to find out in the next five to ten years.

The Faith of the True Believers

There is no need to ask what wokism and critical race theory revolutions mean. Instead, ask who do these revolutions target for annihilation. In a leftist revolution, meanings are irrelevant. Only the intent to annihilate is relevant. The more meaningless the revolution, the more insanity it seems to conceal, the more potential it has to cause misery to the politically unworthy classes, the more effectively it inspires faith in leftism’s true believers. Wokism and critical race theory are intended to appear profound, original, and compassionate but they are meaningless, banal, and destructive. They are intended to be taken on faith. They are intended to annihilate the nonconformist folks who aspire to live in a civilized society. Do not look for the meaning, for you will never find it. Look for the faith of the true believers. Look for the victims of the true believers.

The Incredible Faith of the Left

“The theories of Marx are true because they are correct.” ~ popular slogan among the Russian communists in the 1930s (generally attributed to Josef Stalin). This tautological slogan is a sign of the faith that defines all leftist movements. Communism might be a God that has failed, but the leftists will never lose their faith. Their devotion to their ideology becomes stronger with every political disaster which is caused by their own policies and methods. They keep learning from past failures. They keep evolving their intellectual and political strategies. Today, with the massive success of their woke and the critical race theory revolution, which unlike the previous leftist revolutions has been executed in purely intellectual and experimental settings, with academics and university students as the revolutionaries, and words and displays of emotion and feelings as their weapons of destruction, the leftists stand at a new peak of intellectual and political power. They have overthrown capitalism and are the masters of the world.

Kant: The Moral Norms are Priceless

“In the Kingdom of Ends everything has either a price or a dignity. If it has a price, something else can be put in its place as an equivalent; if it is exalted above all price and so admits of no equivalent, then it has a dignity.” ~ writes Immanuel Kant in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In Kant’s opinion, only morality, which is an offshoot of the religious and philosophical teachings of the past, has a dignity (and thus it has no price and is irreplaceable). In the twentieth century, the leftist and liberal intellectuals imposed their mastery (political power) over morality by taking mystery (religious and philosophical teachings of the past) out of it. They reduced the moral norms into a materialistic conception which has a price and hence can be discarded.

The Rubbish That Rules People's Mind

People venerate the rubbish that dehumanizes and enslaves them. This is why the mainstream media, the movie industry, and modern art, which show a profound indifference to the human condition and seek to impose frivolous and destructive remedies, are so popular and powerful.

The Two Enemies Who are in Love: Communism & Capitalism

Communism and capitalism are like two enemies who are in love with one another. Each claims that it will destroy the other, but they cannot bear to live without each other. Every capitalist country is driven by a natural instinct to embrace some form of communism, and every communist country is driven to embrace some form of capitalism.

The Bulls are Getting Exhausted—The Bears are Coming

In November 2016, Paul Krugman said in an article that now that Trump is the president, he expected the stocks to plunge. He offered a bleak prognosis for the future: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.” Krugman’s analysis of stock prices was obviously effected by his low opinion of Trump and the conservatives, but when I read his article, I thought that it would be a good thing if the stock prices in major economies were to crash and remain at a low level for at least two years. 

I have been rooting for a crash in the world markets since 2016. Like Krugman, I felt that a big crash would happen within a two or three months of Trump taking power, but my reason for rooting for a crash was different from his: I wanted to see the worldwide leftist establishment being decimated after being starved of funds. 

The left that has been dominating the world since 2010 is not an ideological or revolutionary left like the left in the twentieth century. It is a financial and industrial left. This left cannot be defeated through elections or through counterrevolutionary actions. There is only one way to defeat it: An economic crash which will starve the beast. Since 2010, the share markets have lost their connection with real economic activity. The stock prices are being driven by the low interest and high deficit regime which the central banks in most major countries (chiefly the USA) are following. If there is slightest rise in the interest rates, the markets will crash. 

In November 2016, I was convinced that Trump’s first priority would be to ask the FED to raise interest rates and manage the deficit—these actions, I believed, would suck the liquidity out of the global markets leading to a sharp fall. Trump made a strategic blunder when he continued with the low interest and high deficit regime. He could have taken the breath out of the left by crashing the worldwide markets. But he kept cheering the markets and tried to take credit for every rise. He allowed his political enemies in the leftist financial-industrial complex to make a lot of money at the cost of the middle class savers (his traditional supporters). 

But a big crash is now coming. The bulls have been running amok since 2009: for twelve years. Now bull fatigue is clearly visible. When the crash comes all the gains that the markets have made since 2009 will be wiped out in a flash. The bears will be merciless on the downside. The rule of the markets is that the duration of the bear market is approximately the same as the duration of the bull market. We can expect the coming bear market to last for around twelve years. In the lexicon of the likes of Krugman a bear market of twelve years will mean—forever. But this might free us from the financial and industrial left.

Orwell: Small Arms are Democratic

Orwell was a supporter of the right to bear small arms. He believed that the simple weapons (rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades) are conducive for a healthy democracy, while the advanced weapons lead to the rise of a totalitarian regime. In his 1945 essay, “You and the Atom Bomb,” he predicts that all nuclear powers will become like the “slave empires of antiquity.” Here’s an excerpt from his essay: 

“It is a commonplace that the history of civilization is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon – so long as there is no answer to it – gives claws to the weak.

“The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the breech-loading rifle. This was a comparatively complex thing, but it could still be produced in scores of countries, and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition. Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans – even Tibetans – could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favored the State as against the individual, and the industrialized country as against the backward one.”

Niall Ferguson: Why is the West imitating Beijing?

The utopians in the USA and the UK might see globalization as a project for linking the nations to facilitate a free movement of goods, services, technologies, and people. But to the Chinese, globalization is simply a tool for becoming a global superpower. In his article, “The China model: why is the West imitating Beijing?” historian Niall Ferguson quotes from a paper by a Chinese intellectual who says that globalization is a political weapon that will free the world from American and British control and deliver it to China. Here’s an excerpt from Ferguson’s article: 

“In a revealing essay published last year, the Chinese political theorist Jiang Shi-gong, a professor at Peking University Law School, spelled out the corollary of American decline. ‘The history of humanity is surely the history of competition for imperial hegemony,’ Jiang wrote, ‘which has gradually propelled the form of empires from their original local nature toward the current tendency toward global empires, and finally toward a single world empire.’ The globalization of our time, according to Jiang, is the ‘“single world empire” 1.0, the model of world empire established by England and the United States’. But that Anglo-American empire is ‘unraveling’ internally, because of ‘three great unsolvable problems: the ever-increasing inequality created by the liberal economy…ineffective governance caused by political liberalism, and decadence and nihilism created by cultural liberalism’. Moreover, the western empire is under external attack from ‘Russian resistance and Chinese competition’. This is not a bid to create an alternative Eurasian empire, but ‘a struggle to become the heart of the world empire’.”

Ferguson notes: "If you doubt that China is seeking to take over empire 1.0, the Anglo-American liberal version, and turn it into empire 2.0, based on an explicitly illiberal model, then you are not paying attention to all the ways this strategy is being executed."

History’s Happy Revolution: The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution which took place in Britain in the nineteenth century was not merely a steep rise in manufacturing activity but a steep rise in manufacturing activity due to tectonic social transformations in the country. The way of life of every class in Britain was transformed beyond recognition in the first fifty years of the nineteenth century. 

These social transformations were not met with social unrest. Most British in that period supported the social transformations and enthusiastically participated in the industrial activity. 

The intellectuals in our time claim that the religious and conservative people are against industrial development because they oppose all large-scale social transformations. But nineteenth century Britain was extremely religious and conservative. The question is: Why didn’t the religious and conservative people in nineteenth century Britain rebel? 

They didn’t rebel because along with social transformations, the Industrial Revolution led to an immense economic betterment. People started earning more. Their standard of living improved. They started enjoying more liberty. They had access to better goods and services. Better infrastructure came up in their country. 

The  lesson to be learned from the success of the Industrial Revolution is that if social transformations go hand in hand with economic betterment, people will cheer the revolution and happily participate in it.

The Pitfalls of Power and Brilliance

In the world of superheroes: With great power comes great responsibility. In the world of mere mortals: With great power comes great insanity. With great brilliance comes great stupidity. [This is the inference that I draw from the speech and performance of the politicians, intellectuals, experts, celebrities, journalists, and businessmen in most democratic countries in the last fifteen months.]

From the Cave Man to the Cosmic Man

From the cave man of the Stone Age to the wielders of electronic information and atomic power in the Industrial-Digital Age—mankind has come a long way. The future is uncharted territory. Mankind might one day reach the stage of the human phenomena: “the cosmic man.” But in a dystopian future, history will become the road to perdition, forcing mankind to travel backwards till the Stone Age cave from where its journey began is reached.

The politically inclined atheists are utopian people—when they acquire power, they create a dystopia. They are nihilistic, brutal, sadistic, and angry (example: communism, socialism, nazism, fascism, liberalism). At some stage of history, the atheists, in their quest for an utterly materialistic utopia, might manage to reverse all the industrial and intellectual progress and drive mankind back to the Stone Age cave. 

What passes as the religious forces (those religious forces which are inspired by good theological philosophy) are ideologically close to the realist, romanticist, pragmatic, and humane way of thinking that was developed between the thirteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The progress that mankind has seen in the last three hundred years has happened in the nations where politics is constrained by movements inspired by a religion founded on good theology. 

The “cosmic man” will be a wise “theistic man.” Atheism is dangerous. Cato, the politician of Ancient Rome, if he had been living in the modern age, might have said: Atheism delenda est.

Faulkner: To Transcend the Clock

Man invented the clock, and the clock made man its prisoner. Man became awed by the hands on the clock’s face, frequently looking at them for guidance, moulding his daily routine to fit their circular movements. 

Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury is developed on the notion of the immense power that time exercises on man. Faulkner writes: “A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune.” In another passage, he writes, “And so as soon as I knew I couldn’t see it, I began to wonder what time it was. Father said that constant speculation regarding the position of mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial which is a symptom of mind-function.” He suggests that time cannot become alive until the clock is abandoned: “Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” There is a symbolic significance to Quentin’s act of breaking his watch. 

In his brilliant novels, Proust reminisces time. But in The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner’s focus is not time but on absolution from the clock.

The Dark Regime of the Brilliant Totalitarians

We don’t know where we are going in the twenty-first century. We only know that the people who are convinced of their own brilliance are in control of the destiny of the world. However, one thing is certain. If civilization is to survive, then this regime of “brilliant” totalitarians—politicians, intellectuals, experts, celebrities, journalists, and businessmen—has to be overthrown. Their “brilliance” has made them insane and blind to reality. They are creating darkness everywhere. They will not stop regulating; they will not stop imposing new restrictions; they will not stop propagating new fears. They will drive us into a new Stone Age. 

The stupid people are the wise people—they understand reality far better than the brilliant people. The world is safer when political power is being wielded by the stupid. There is much wisdom in what Ivan Karamazov says to his younger brother Alexei Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov: “the stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward. I’ve led the conversation to my despair, and the more stupidly I have presented it, the better for me.”

Socialism: The Politics of Santa Claus

Socialism is the God that has repeatedly failed to create a utopia, but since it is the God, it will always preside over our destiny. In his 1985 essay, “The Problems of a Successful American Foreign Policy,” Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn notes that in a democratic society, the socialist parties enjoy a massive political advantage. He writes: “Socialism is a leftist ideology and as such it has the advantage of creating radical "Santa Claus parties," (i.e., parties promising material gifts to the many—and "security" besides). These parties, all of them left—some way left—of center, are in a more favorable position than the ones which are right of center. Nobody wants to kill Santa Claus and thus these parties cannot be defeated. They can, however, terminate their rule by committing suicide....by proving utterly corrupt, by general failure, by putting up candidates who are obviously fools, bad orators or, worse still, ones who are unphotogenic. Yet, by appealing to one of the strongest (and lowest) human vices, envy, socialism-communism can arouse the masses anywhere, anytime, in the name of social justice.”

The Leftist Historiography of Hobsbawm

“In theory its [The Enlightenment] object was to set all human beings free. All progressive, rationalist and humanist ideologies are implicit in it and indeed come out of it.” ~ wrote Eric Hobsbawm in his 1962 book The Age of Revolution. He saw the Enlightenment as the first step towards the achievement of a global communist utopia. In his 1971 book Primitive Rebels, he posited that “utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.” 

In a 1994 interview with Michael Ignatieff, Hobsbawm said that the death of fifteen to twenty million people for the achievement of a utopia is justified. With his history books, especially his four volume history of the modern age—The Age of Revolution (1789—1848); The Age of Capital (1848-1875); The Age of Empire (1875-1914); and The Age of Extremes (1914-1991)— Hobsbawm has laid the foundation of leftist historiography of the twentieth century. 

Hobsbawm joined the British Communist Party in 1936 and stayed with it until 1991, when the Party was dissolved. He never wavered in his commitment to the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956, he wrote in an article stating that he approved of their action in Hungary, though “with a heavy heart.” In his 2002 autobiography Interesting Times, he wrote that being a communist means “utter emotional identification” and “total dedication” to communism. 

In 1990, when it became clear that the Soviet Union was on the verge of disintegrating, he lamented that the disintegration of the Soviet Union would revive the reactionary forces which the Soviet communists “have been kept frozen for up to 70 years.”

Have the Stock Indices Transcended the Economy?

One important function of the stock exchanges is information dissemination. When the stock indices rise, people get the sense that the economy is doing well. When the stock indices decline, they know that the economy is ailing and then they can put pressure on the government, regulatory bodies, and the business houses to do whatever is necessary to cure the economy. But these days, the stock exchanges are not distributing the right information. They seem to have transcended the fundamentals of economy. The movement of the stock indices is not showing any correlation to economic reality. 

In the last three months, there has been a 12% spike in commodity prices, which has resulted in a spike in the ex-factory prices of several goods and services, To keep the consumer level inflation under control, the USA and the West European countries are now sourcing a higher amount of cheaper goods and services from overseas which is resulting in less domestic manufacturing (resulting in loss of jobs) and a higher trade deficit (in March 2021, the trade deficit was $74.5 billion in the USA). Dollar is under pressure—at some point, it must fall. The Euro too is under immense pressure. Why is this information, and other bits of disturbing information, not having an impact on the stock indices? 

The S&P 500 Index, DJIA, NASDAQ 100, Nikkei 225, CAC 40, DAX, Hang Seng Index, and other indices have been “eerily” stable in the last five months. They have been moving in a range of just 2% to 7%, which, in my opinion, is quite unnatural—this is certainly in defiance of the laws of economics. The question is who is paying for keeping the world’s stock indices in a steady state at such high levels? The simplistic answer would be: The taxpayers. But the taxpayers do not control the tax money. Some other forces are managing this “brilliant” operation. Howsoever brilliant they maybe, I don’t think they can sustain the bubble for more than seven to ten months. 

All it takes is a little prick in the bubble economy to make the stock prices come down like a crashing meteor whose blast will decimate the civilization of the present day dinosaurs.

If Everything is Ideology, Everything is Politics

The post-1950 generations in the Western countries experienced an abundance of freedom, prosperity, technological comforts, social stability, and opportunities for growth. Yet these generations were convinced by the leftist intellectuals that capitalism is an unfair system which is supported by those who possess only the semblance of a human existence, that Western culture is inherently evil and against minorities, and that the Western moral and political norms are antithetical to personal liberty and social progress. 

How did the left manage to convince the most “pampered” generations of the West that it is not possible to exist as a free and fair human in their society? In the 1950s, the left made the decisive intellectual move of declaring that the traditional language is anti-truth because it hides the wickedness of capitalist society and it must be discarded. They posited that everything is ideology: physics is the ideology of matter; biology is the ideology of living things; mathematics is the ideology of numbers; art is the ideology of ugliness and ennui masquerading as beauty and euphoria; culture is the ideology of the decadent bourgeoise who dreams of feasting on the blood of the poor; economics is the ideology of oppression. 

If everything is ideology, then everything is a political battlefield. By this intellectual move, the left took its political fight to the spheres of physics, biology, mathematics, art, culture, and economics, and attained the power to create confusion and corruption everywhere. They managed to destroy the capitalist and democratic model towards the end of the twentieth century, and in the twenty-first century, they are in control of all Western countries.

The Age of Mussolini

Mussolini’s fascist doctrine has come of age and is fueling the political system of most advanced democracies. In the last three decades (since the 1990s) a contradiction had developed between the global regulatory framework and the economic and cultural aspirations of a significant section of the masses. Both could not coexist—either the regulatory framework had to be obliterated or this section of the masses had to be coerced to give up their aspirations and become content with less freedom, a lower standard of living, and a significant dilution of their cultural norms. 

There was no question of the global power establishment (intellectuals, politicians, and key businessmen) giving up their powers and privileges by allowing the global regulatory framework to be obliterated. They feared that the old way of free and fair elections, good law and order, freedom for the people, and a high standard of living could fuel a populist revolt and bring a new political force to power. So they adopted the strategy of coercing the masses by taking control of the elections, distorting law and order, corrupting culture, and diluting the civil liberties that people have traditionally enjoyed. 

They recruited the minorities to act as the stormtroopers for creating a socially coercive infrastructure for fascism, and they used the newspeak of woke sensibilities to create the intellectual and bureaucratic infrastructure for fascism. This is the age of Mussolini.

The Communist True Believers

The intellectuals of the left, between the 1920s and 1990s (from the Russian Revolution to the fall of the Soviet Union), could not conceive that majority of a people would reject communism. H. G. Wells and Sidney and Beatrice Webb were convinced that communism is synonymous with progress, and if a nation is given a free choice, its people will opt for the communist model. 

In 1968, when there was a rebellion against the communist government in Czechoslovakia (the Prague Spring), Jean-Paul Sartre argued that the Czechs were not rebelling against communism but against the communist system with which they cannot identify since it is not “home grown.” He explained that the Soviet Union made a mistake when it compelled the “Czechs of the 1950s” to accept a communist system that was fit for the “Russian peasants of the 1920s,” and that the rebellion would not have happened if Czechoslovakia had been allowed to develop its own form of communism. 

Eric Hobsbawm refused to believe that the Czechs could be against communism. He firmly defended the cruelty with which the Soviet Union was suppressing the Czech rebellion as “a necessity of time.” Saving the communist government was for him the absolute priority.

The Problem of Writing History

History is similar to mythology in one sense; it is written as the story of a contest between good and evil—with the Godly forces trying to save the world from the machinations of the devilish forces. The historians often let their own political opinions influence their judgement regarding which side of the political contest represents the good and which side represents the evil. In the last two centuries, an immense amount of work on history has been done by Western scholars, but most of these scholars were leftists. This has led to a situation where the leftist movements (communists, socialists, and liberals) are almost always portrayed as the Godly forces, while the rightist movements (romanticists, conservatives, and populists) get portrayed as the devilish forces. The historians routinely blame the right for the sins of the left.

Mephistopheles: The Creature of the Left

In Goethe’s play Faust, when the demon Mephistopheles is asked to reveal his true nature, he says that he is the spirit who always invalidates, who reduces something to nothing, and who undoes the acts of creation. Here’s a translation of Mephistopheles’s words:   

“I am the spirit that negates.

And rightly so, for all that comes to be

Deserves to perish wretchedly;

'Twere better nothing would begin.

Thus everything that that your terms, sin,

Destruction, evil represent—

That is my proper element.” 

Mephistopheles is a natural leftist—he does everything that the leftists (Jacobins, communists, socialists, anarchists, and liberals) have been doing for close to three centuries. Leftist politics is devoted to saying no to the facts of reality, obliterating the traditional systems which have been working in the name of an ideological agenda which will never work, and undoing civilization to make space for a utopia where they will enjoy absolute political control.

Waiting for the Civilizational Apocalypse

“When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.” ~ writes Christopher Caldwell in his 2009 book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.

A nation without a culture is like a body without a mind. The decline of Western culture began after the First World War, and by the 1990s the process was complete—Western culture was finished. The reason that the Western countries (chiefly the USA and the UK) are still standing is because they are far ahead of other nations in the areas of technology, finance, and military capabilities.  But with their culture gone, they are incapable of using their collective mind to make appropriate use of their technological, financial, and military strengths—and their polices have become self-destructive. They have discarded their republican and democratic model of politics and adopted a fascist system. Fascism is enabling them to preserve order in their society, but it has the side-effect of institutionalizing corruption and incompetence in their politics and economy.

The western countries have known (at a subconscious level), since the 1960s, that their civilization is coming to an end. That is why they have become obsessed with apocalyptic end of the world theories: Ice Age, Global Warming, Acid Rain, Ozone Layer Depletion, Climate Change, Global Pandemic, and a few others. They can’t think of anything except an apocalypse.

Liberty: The Collectivist Ideal

Liberty is never individualistic—it is a collectivist ideal which is found in societies where people are united under the umbrella of a good culture. A people cannot make liberty their aim unless they make the liberty of others in their society their aim. But to make the liberty of others their aim, a people have to identify with a good culture—which entails a shared sense of religion, morality, tradition, history, economic and political principles, and nationhood. 

Since the individualists are obsessed with themselves, they are incapable of making liberty of all their aim. They demand liberty for those who accept their brand of individualism and ignore rest of the population. Their liberty is founded on a sense of alienation from society. They become part of anarchist, atomist, and libertarian movements. Some individualists accept the pseudo-conception of “total freedom” and propagate fascism and cultural nihilism.

Heidegger: Greek Philosophy and Christian Theology

Why did Christian theology supplant Greek philosophy in the time of the Roman Empire? Heidegger briefly dwells on this issue in his 1929 lecture on metaphysics. He notes that metaphysics has a twofold character—first, it represents beings as beings, or the truth of beings in their universality; second, it tries to represent the truth of the highest being (which can be regarded as God, though Heidegger has not used the word “God” in his lecture). 

The first character of metaphysics (beings in their universality) is ontological, while the second character (being of the highest being) is theological. Thus, metaphysics as a whole has no choice but to be onto-theological. The Greek philosophy which was popular in the Roman Republic and the subsequent Roman Empire was primarily ontological—the theological element was missing from it. By supplying the crucial theological element, Christian theology fulfilled the vacuum in Greek metaphysics and supplanted Greek philosophy. 

In light of what Heidegger has said, Aquinas’s work in the thirteenth century can be viewed as a continuation of the Christian theological project, which began in the Roman era, on Greek (chiefly Aristotelian, in the case of Aquinas) philosophy. In my opinion, this theological project ended in the eighteenth century with the rise of atheistic and utopian Enlightenment philosophy.

The Dilemma of Existence: Is There a Question?

The first problem of existence is not to have the answer but to understand 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 led to dead ends or catastrophic detours which cast civilization on the highway to perdition. Mankind has not reached the stage where a civilization can be founded on the answer. We are still grappling with the question. The possibility exists that we might not have discovered the right question. Perhaps, there isn’t a question, and 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.” ~ writes Edgar Allan Poe in his story The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether. This is a fine dictum—in my opinion the most pernicious people in any nation, the ones who make a significant contribution in the decline and fall of their society, 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 achieved what the Soviet Union couldn’t. They 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. Many decades from today, 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

Only the charlatans woo the people by promising them 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. It is the naive and ignorant, who are unaware of the complications of philosophy and politics, who join movements which promise to bring liberty, prosperity, and happiness.

In a free society, there will be hundreds of ways of looking at liberty, prosperity, and happiness—this leads to the paradox that true liberty means controversy about not just the nature and scope of liberty but also of prosperity and happiness. If you encounter certainty about the nature of 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 forcefully impose their worldview on everyone else. Absolute certainty about the nature of liberty, prosperity, and happiness is the fountainhead of absolute slavery and absolute misery.

The Desert Grows

"The desert grows: woe to him who harbors deserts!” says Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra. He is lamenting the rise of deserts in the minds of men who no longer have a coherent worldview because the moralists and idealists among them have accepted false ideologies, while the characterless and rationalists have turned towards nihilism. He is proclaiming that an apocalypse is imminent because there is hardly anyone left who might save civilization from disintegration.

The Desire to be God

What is the ultimate desire of a theistic mind? To be close to his conception of God. What is the ultimate desire of an atheistic mind? To be God. 

It can be argued that 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 far more dangerous, because he wants to be the God, the secular, earthly, living God—this desire gives him the potential to be absolutely merciless and unleash an incredible amount of destruction. He will spearhead or join any totalitarian and murderous movement that will give him the hope of being the 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.” He does not say that he is describing the desire of the atheists like himself, but that is the case.

Marquis de Sade’s French Revolution

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

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

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

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

The Pseudo-Concept: Freedom of the Press

Freedom of the press is a pseudo-concept because it confers on one sector of the economy, the media industry, the status of a holy entity which deserves special reverence, protection, and privileges. But the media industry is just another sector of the economy like the steel industry, the travel and hospitality industry, the small businesses, the independent professionals. Why should they have the freedom, reverence, protection, and privileges that are not awarded to other sectors of the economy? We don’t talk about the freedom of the steel industry, of the travel and hospitality industry. I have never seen the press fighting for the rights of the small businesses and the independent professionals. They want total freedom for themselves while they become complicit in pushing the rest of society into slavery. These media companies are owned by some of the worst crony capitalists, who are part of the corrupt political establishment—they have expropriated too much power and privileges. Freedom of press in our times means freedom for the corrupt crony capitalists—it is a license to loot and lie, and rip apart society by spreading propaganda, disinformation, and fear. In the age of 24-hour news channels, it has become impossible for most people to find the truth about any issue.

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? Howsoever big and powerful the Goliaths might be, they are no match for the Davids—this is the lesson of history which repeats itself again and again, in every age.

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.” ~ writes Thomas Sowell in his 1987 book A Conflict of Visions. But it is already too late. The little barbarians came of age years ago and they are clueless about how hard it is to create and sustain a civilization. They have cornered key positions in the government, multinational companies, media, and the institutions of arts and entertainment, and they have developed an exaggerated sense of self-importance and grandeur. They have spawned a progeny, another gang of little barbarians, who are proving to be far more ignorant and barbaric than their father and mother. No one is now left to stop these barbarians from decimating society to create a new utopia which will eventually turn out to be a new dystopia.

The Fate of the Supporters of Utopia

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. Lenin and Stalin had purged more communists than the leaders of any other country. Millions of communists were banished to the Siberian concentration camps (the infamous Gulags) by Stalin. Most died there and with them died the secrets that they harbored. Currently a new utopia project is underway in the Western countries: A 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.

Who Speaks for Those Who Died in Leaky Boats?

Hundreds of books and innumerable articles have been written, and many popular movies have been made, about the people who died when Vietnam became a battleground between the American forces and the communist guerrilla army. But we rarely hear the story of those who died while trying to flee Vietnam after the communists vanquished the Americans and took control of the country. In his book Carnage and Culture, Victor Davis Hanson writes: “A communist victory brought more death and even greater dislocation to the Vietnamese than did decades of war—more often slowly by starvation, incarceration, and flight, rather than by outright mass murder… Exact numbers are in dispute, but most scholars accept that well over 1 million left by boat; and hundreds of thousands of others crossed by land into neighboring Thailand and even China…. Those who died in leaky boats or in storms numbered between 50,000 and 100,000…”

Capitalism and the Problem of Idleness

People who are good-hearted can become tyrannical out of idleness. Capitalism creates prosperity, which in turn makes it possible for the top layer of the population (the elites) to have an idle lifestyle—their idleness breeds tyrannical tendencies and they turn towards communism and fascism. They can no longer feel satisfied with their luxurious way of life. Now they lust for control, for the capacity to give orders, for political power. They want to have a say in how the less fortunate folks (who are less prosperous and less idle) live. The elites lobby for a bigger and more intrusive government which, they are convinced, they will control forever. But they are not satisfied with exercising tyrannical control over their own nation; they are still idle and they lust for more power. They want to control the way of life in other nations too. First they try the diplomatic and economic methods to coerce the natives of other nations; if these do not work, they send their military to beat and bomb the recalcitrant natives into submission. Thus, the bridge that connects capitalism with communism and fascism is made out of “idleness.”

Socialism: The Tower of Babel Without God

Dostoevsky understood the connection between “atheism” and “socialism” before anyone else. In his book The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1879, decades before the Bolshevik experiment was executed in Russia by Lenin and Trotsky, Dostoevsky writes: “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 Liberal 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, who were identifying as liberals, 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 liberal—and they started using words like “deranged,” “racist,” “infantile,” “fascist,” “neurotic,” “nazi,” and “warmonger” to denounce those whose opinions did not fit the liberal personality-type. You had to be a liberal in order to be regarded as “normal”—if you were a conservative or 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 liberal method of analyzing and depicting personality-types has become the widely accepted norm in the intellectual establishment (the mainstream media, academia, and the arts and entertainment industry). Those who reject the liberal view on the hot-button issues—global warming, climate change, sexism, minority rights, feminism, multiculturalism, economic policy, foreign policy—are routinely depicted as “abnormal” in the newspapers, magazines, books, TV news, movies, and serials. 

The call is often made that the “abnormal” personality-types should be tarred and feathered, and driven out of the media, academia, the arts and entertainment industry, and most importantly politics. Having been inundated with such opinions from a variety of intellectual resources since the 1950s, the masses are convinced that the liberal way is the only way of being “normal.”

The Faith of the Utopians

Not all who rave about paradise are divinely inspired. Many of them are utopians who conceal in their heart a maddening amount of hatred, rage, and revolt. Their moral values are founded on atheism and their politics is leftist or liberal—but they are not without “faith,” not without the notion of “paradise” and “blasphemy.” They have faith in their paradise, which is their earthly utopia of science and reason where there is total freedom and total equality, and they treat the arguments against their paradise as a blasphemy—one that is punishable by a purge, enslavement, and death. They want to burn down the social institutions, rewrite history, discredit the traditions and culture, cut through the political opposition by committing every possible atrocity, including mass murders—all this to save mankind from the injustices of the world and create a new paradise for the true believers. The primary motivation of the utopian paradise-builders is annihilation; the creation of the paradise is their secondary motivation.

The Wisdom of Dostoevsky

The notion that man is born free, that total freedom is his natural state, and that all rational men want to be free is a myth that got developed in the Age of Enlightenment by French philosophers who hoped that their philosophy would inspire the rise of a new kind of human material which is untainted by the belief in God and cultural traditions and would be ready to fight and die for a new atheistic utopia of reason and science. These philosophers believed that God and cultural traditions are the two major forces which hinder people from being free. 

Since the Age of Enlightenment, this myth of total freedom and the hope of an atheistic utopia has been perpetuated by several powerful schools of modern philosophy. 

Most people (who are not obsessed with philosophy and utopian politics) want to be part of religious and cultural groups which can give them a sense of belonging and security. In Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, the character called 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 a utopian like the Enlightenment philosophers and their modern counterparts—he was 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—and 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 political war councils. The left never gave up its fanatical faith, not when the Jacobins were decimated, not when the Bolsheviks were thrown out like yesterday’s garbage. 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, and he had become convinced that the earth was a celestial ball of everlasting misfortune. In a footnote to the Harmonice Mundi, he writes: "The Earth sings Mi-Fa-Mi, so we can gather even from this that Misery and Famine reign on our habitat.” 

Kepler makes 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 is proportional to certain notes of the Latinate musical scale popular in his day: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. He rationalized that the sound of a planet corresponds to the character of life that it supports, and that the earth’s notes were mi-fa-mi.

The last one year has given me an insight into the smugness of the twenty-first century man before the vast perils that he faces. If the twenty-first century man who commands vast intellectual, technological, and economic resources can be so smug, then humanity has no future. Perhaps Kepler was right about misery and famine being the reality of life on earth. Can mankind be free from the misery and famine—I don’t think that a permanent solution to these problems is possible. People might become happy and prosperous in some parts of earth at certain periods of time but the happiness and prosperity never lasts. 

The happy and prosperous societies are the first to be judged on the metaphorical Judgement Day; this is because their happiness and prosperity makes them morally, psychologically, and intellectually weak, and unfit to survive. When they decline and fall under the weight of their weaknesses and immoralities, they pave way for the rise of another society in which the human mind is regulated by the harsh whiplash of misery and famine.

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.

Culture: Who Creates It?

The conservative belief that the past is the fountainhead of culture contains the seeds of its own destruction. Culture operates not just through the past but also the present. The past supplies the foundational structure of culture, but in the present, powerful groups in society can impregnate culture with their own ideas. By powerful groups, I mean the groups which control academia, the entertainment industry, the mainstream media, publishing houses, social media, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the trade unions, and geopolitical associations. Through their control of these businesses and institutions, powerful groups dictate how culture is perceived by the people. In most democracies, the businesses and institutions (which I have listed above) have been under liberal control since the 1960s—this means that, for over sixty years, the liberals have been the most powerful group and the masters of the forces of culture in their nation. They have been using the institutions and businesses that they control to propagate new cultural norms which invariably push large large sections of society towards nihilism and leftism.

The War of Books

“In the war between capitalism and Communism, books are weapons, and, like all serviceable weapons, loaded.” ~ said Whittaker Chambers in his 1952 classic Witness. But I think that the communists (the leftists and the liberals) have won the war of books. Their books have greater firepower and the capacity to blow to bits their enemy’s fundamental values than the books by the pro-capitalism authors. The capitalists might be good at at building roads, skyscrapers, shopping centers, and bridges, but in the intellectual and political space their performance is naive and feeble, and they are no match for the communists who turn out to be completely ruthless and firmly grounded despite the fact that they are fueled by a utopian ideology.

The Conservative Rip Van Winkles

The American and British conservatives are the alter ego of Rip Van Winkle, the protagonist in Washington Irving’s short story. In 1991, when the Soviet Union fell, these conservatives partied like never before with liquor supplied by “mysterious globalist forces” and fell asleep. 

They slept for almost forty years  (twenty years more than Rip Van Winkle), and between 2016 and 2021, they woke up in a changed world, having missed the decline of their culture, the corruption of their political establishment, the degradation of their universities, the derangement of their youth, the leftward tilt of their bureaucracy, the nihilism of their mainstream media, the alienation and fury of their minorities, the totalitarian digital revolution, and the rise of China. Now it is too late for these conservatives to conserve their society, because there is nothing left in their society that is worth conserving. Every value has turned into a lifeless fossil. 

This decade and the next one will be all about the creation of a new world order in which the Americans and British do not play a dominant role. The transition to the new world order won’t be peaceful—it will be marked by economic chaos in major markets, civil wars in several nations, reworking of military alliances, and military conflicts in the hotspots. The geopolitical tsunami that is coming (perhaps it is already here) will not spare any nation, though America and Britain will be the hardest hit since they have the most to lose.

The Myth of Perpetual Peace

The idea that “perpetual peace” is possible in a nation which is guided by reason and science is one of the great political myths to come out of the Age of Enlightenment. Perpetual peace is an unrealizable concept, because national politics (like the tribal conflicts of the prehistoric times) has always been and always will be: Civil War. 

The use of political violence is the “natural” method of achieving political objectives. Mankind is incapable of creating a nation in which every political faction voluntarily adopts the peaceful methods of politicking. The breaking of one chain of political violence, leads to the start of another chain. When old conflicts end, they make space for new ones, and a new cycle of political violence commences. Through the contest of antagonistic political forces, the nation keeps transforming itself, it becomes better or worse, it rises to greater heights or declines and falls. A nation can never be free of political violence, but it can try to prevent such violence from getting out of control, by deploying counter-political violence through law enforcement agencies (such strategies are effective in creating a semblance of peace in the short-term but never perpetually). 

The price for short-term political peace is frightfully high—heavy financial and psychological investment must be made for creating a system of rule of law which cannot be corrupted by the forces which are battling for political power. In the words of Vegetius, the Roman General, only those nations which prepare for war, can attain peace.

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

Throughout history the forces of progress and destruction have marched hand in hand. The price of great progress in one area has always been great 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 and can never be broken. Classical liberalism, which originated in the eighteenth century, was aimed at creating a perfect society which is based on civilization, liberty, innovation, compassion, and reason and does not have to invoke the powers of barbarism, repression, traditions, cruelty, and faith. But this project has been a colossal failure. The classical liberals (and their twentieth century cultist avatar, the libertarians) have failed to create their perfect society (their utopia) in which mankind is all roses and no thorns. Nature does not allow roses without thorns.

The Politics of Unmensch and Übermensch

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

The Problem With the Enlightenment’s Notion of Freedom

The notion of freedom that developed in the eighteenth century, during the Age of Enlightenment, was devoted to overcoming the old forms of authority, chief among these being faith in God and religion. The Enlightenment philosophes surmised that freedom from God and religion is the ultimate form of freedom. They made their philosophical case by asserting that there is a dichotomy between faith and reason—a man can have either reason or faith, never both. They rationalized that only a man of reason (who is free of the taint of faith) can be truly free and that faith in every form is an enemy of freedom. But if man is free of faith, then he lacks the inner capacity to believe in anything that is not provable by science. On what basis does a man who is free of faith make himself believe in metaphysics, norms or morality, norms of good culture, norms of good art, and the idea of a political system which respects man’s rights, all of which are not provable by science? A man who accepts reason as his sole means for understanding the world, faces the risk of becoming a nihilist—he loses not just his religious beliefs but also his standards in metaphysics, morality, culture, art, and politics. This is a recipe for disaster.

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 conceived in Europe in the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment, as a tool for indoctrinating the masses. The Enlightenment philosophers and politicians believed that by teaching the right kind of philosophy and by applying sufficient amount of coercion, it is possible to transform men into better beings who are motivated by reason, science, and logic, and who cannot be swayed by the irrational 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. But this strategy didn’t work out. 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 became communists. During the time of Stalin, the Gulags (the Russian name for concentration camps) were used on a massive scale 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 sufficient number of people could not be transformed through the Gulags and the Soviet Union fell in 1991.

Most communist countries have made extensive use of concentration camps. In Mao’s China, large swaths of the country had been turned into concentration camps where millions were starved, tortured, and worked to death. The post-Mao China continues to operate a large number of concentration camps.

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 capitalistic and free. In the next five years their fake notion of being free and capitalistic will shatter under the weight of the contradictions and corruption 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 the last year, are experiments to prepare people for a new way of life. Most people have accepted the lockdowns as the “new normal,” and they will accept the concentration camps as another new normal.

The Naivety of Carl Sagan

Is Carl Sagan taken seriously? I rank his two books—The Demon-Haunted World and Cosmos—among the low-quality propaganda books written in the final decades of the twentieth century. Much of the science that he offers in these two books is pop-science of the banal kind; you generally read such pop-science in third-rate tabloids. He was, I am certain, a believer in the Whig theory of history—his two books are written in the style of a Whig historian. I say this because he tries to present the movement from the ancient times to the modern age as an inevitable progression towards liberty, enlightenment, and technological advancement. He attributes all the progress that mankind has made to the work of the scientists who were motivated by an empirical view of the world. He excoriates the spiritual, theological, and religious movements of the past for creating roadblocks in the path of the scientists.

He suggests that calculus could have been invented by the time of Christ if the works of the Ancient Greek atomists like Democritus had not been lost—this is an absurd hypothesis but he offers this as a self-evident fact. To him Socrates and Plato are of less importance than Democritus—he tries to turn them into caricatures by mentioning them in reference to their purported belief in demons and ignoring their philosophical and political achievements. He prattles about the virtue of using reason and being a nonconformist, but he was himself a conformist. He blindly accepts every scientific myth of his time—from environmentalism to evolution to Big Bang to time travel and much else. He fails to see that most of the scientists of the past had a spiritual and religious side to their life. While talking of Newton, he does not mention the fact that Newton was born as a sickly child and he could not have survived to adulthood had he not been sustained by his faith in religion and God. 

The complication of human psychology is inconsequential to Sagan; man’s need for philosophy, spiritualism, and faith is inconsequential to him; the rise and fall of the empires of the past and the movement of history is inconsequential to him—the only thing that matters is the scientific theories which a few scientists have discovered. But I don’t see Sagan as a scientist; he was more of a glib talker, a shrewd marketer, a narcissistic actor, and a mediocre political theorist. His books are not about science. His basic interest is in preaching a materialistic or leftist (atheistic) view of the world. His leftism is quite simplistic and hollow. What I dislike most in Sagan is his naivety. He is like a Pollyanna, always optimistic, constantly hopeful of a prosperous and scientifically advanced tomorrow, smiling and cheerful like a clown at the circus.

Diamonds and Philosophy

Digging for good philosophy is similar to digging for diamonds. You have to shift through a mountain of rubbish before you find a few grains of diamonds, or good philosophy. But the effort is worth it because both, diamonds and good philosophy, are forever.

The Decline of the Conservatives

According to Ted Cruz, none of the 500 top performing companies in the USA are being run by Republican-aligned CEOs. If this is true, then this is a major indictment of American conservatism. If the captains of the 500 top performing companies despise the conservatives, then there must be something wrong with conservatism. How pathetic the conservative political movement must be if they can’t get the CEOs of a few top performing companies to support them? 

It is not just the top CEOs. It seems most successful (the creamy layer) Americans despise the conservatives. The top members of the bureaucracy, much of academia, the top players in Hollywood, the top journalists, and most of the chattering celebrities despise the conservatives. Perhaps the conservatives are too naive, they do not understand the post-Soviet transformations in geopolitics, they do not understand the social changes that the digital technologies have brought to society in the last twenty years, they are too weak and they never fight to achieve their conservative political agenda. Perhaps their politics is too uncouth and unpalatable for the over-intellectualized generation of modern Americans. 

The world has marched into the twenty-first century, while the conservatives remain stuck in the twentieth century. America is a socialist country which pretends to be a capitalist country.

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 of the wrong ones too. When a man is liberated from the bondage of political systems, he is free to play an active role in society. But liberty never keeps itself confined to cutting the bonds of politics, it operates simultaneously 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 rise in substance abuse, libertinism, and violence. 

When the masses become degenerate, the politicians become corrupt, the businessmen become totalitarian, and the intellectuals become messianic. With the fall in the intellectual, political, and moral standards, society becomes an easy prey to the utopian movements which promise to create a new paradise—and this marks the end 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 a Robinson Crusoe, and he must live in a metaphorical deserted island where he is free from all collectives. But such views are a sign of their ideological over-maturity and psychological backwardness. 

Man is not just the maker of civilizations (which are the largest collective of humanity)—he is the product of civilizations. 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 as a human. But man is not designed to be like Crusoe. His mind might identify as an individual, but the heart of most men identifies with the collectives: relatives, friends, customers, associates, employees, employers, and the religious, political, social, and intellectual groups of which he is a part. 

Man qua man is a political creature and politics can never transcend collectivism. We join the collectives in order to find a sense of security and belonging, to develop spiritual, cultural, and political bonds for defending our way of life, and to avoid the one thing which we truly dread: loneliness. The man who sees himself as an individualist is no Crusoe; he is naive, politically ineffective, and culturally alienated, and he lacks the sense to realize that he is overestimating his virtues and capacities. The nations where individualism becomes a popular movement generally see a steep decline in the quality of their politics and culture. 

If these individualists end up on a deserted island, they will not last for a week—they will undergo mental disintegration from the feeling of being lonely and they will eventually starve to death. Individualism is not a virtue; it is a vice.

Knowledge, Wisdom, and Ignorance

The worst type of ignorance is found in people who are ignorant of their ignorance—and have come to believe that they possess perfect knowledge. Being unaware of their ignorance, they keep making bad choices, and if they acquire a position of power, in the government or any large corporation, they get regarded as the “experts,” who are always “scientific” and can never be wrong, and they go on making bad choices for the hapless masses. (An expert is a man who is ignorant of his ignorance but has acquired massive political power.) When you are aware of your ignorance, then you are not ignorant, since you have the knowledge of what you don’t know, which is the most important knowledge, since it can prevent you from making bad choices and inspire you to make efforts for fulfilling the gaps in your learning. Knowing the limits of your knowledge is a sign of wisdom and maturity, the two qualities which have become rare in our technocratic, information-deluged, expert-worshiping world.

On Kaufmann’s Resurrection of Nietzsche

After his death in 1900, Nietzsche acquired the reputation of a wrathful and unsystematic thinker, an apostle of teutonic chauvinism, barbarianism, and ruthlessness, whose thought has inspired the Nazi movement. His reputation was resurrected after the Second World War with the publication of new books on his life and work. The most important of these books is Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, published in 1950. 

For Nietzsche’s ugly posthumous reputation, Kaufmann places a major part of the blame on Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth. In 1885, she married Bernhard Förster, a prominent teutonic nationalist and antisemite. Nietzsche was against the marriage and he did not attend the wedding.  After her husband died in 1889, Elizabeth became devoted to caring for her brother, who suffered a loss of mental capacity in the same year, and managing his intellectual legacy. She assumed the name Förster-Nietzsche. Regarding this name, Kaufmann writes: “The irony of this name suggests almost everything that could be said against her: the gospel she spread was indeed Förster first and Nietzsche second.” 

Nietzsche had distanced himself from Richard Wagner—they last saw each other on November 5, 1876. But Elizabeth was inspired by Wagner’s Teutonism; she could not accept her brother’s rejection of Wagner, and desired to create a union between their thoughts and motivations. Kaufmann reveals his low opinion of Wagner’s political and cultural philosophy in several lines. Here’s a line in which he suggests that there is a symbiotic relationship between Wagner and Nazism: “Hitler, of course, knew fifty times as much about Wagner as he did about Nietzsche, and Wagner’s essays, unlike Nietzsche’s, did not have to be expurgated by the Nazis before being used in schools.”

Kaufmann says that Elizabeth, in her zeal for reconciling Nietzsche with his opposites (Förster and Wagner), intentionally or due to lack of understanding, misrepresented Nietzsche’s thought, especially in The Will to Power, which she published from an arbitrary selection of Nietzsche’s personal notes which she compiled and crudely edited, and which were consequently taken out of context. According to Kaufmann, Nietzsche is not antisemitic and he is not the supporter of a dominant state. He is the enemy of all types of states, totalitarian as well as liberal, and his ideal man is not Napoleon (he would have despised Hitler) but Goethe. 

Nietzsche’s philosophy, Kaufmann says, is rooted in Kant, Hegel, and Socrates—the reference to Socrates, of whom Nietzsche has been very critical, is surprising. But Nietzsche had a kind of love-hate relationship with both Socrates and Wagner. Kaufmann rejects the jingoistic and revolutionary conception of the overman (Übermensch) that was popular in the first half of twentieth century—he asserts that the overman is not a biological or racial concept; rather it indicates the enterprise of “overcoming” oneself (one’s own weaknesses, vices, and doubts) and not others. 

Kaufmann's Nietzsche is, like Kierkegaard, and two of the most important philosophers of the 1950s and 60s, Heidegger and Sartre, an existentialist. There is no doubt that, in his attempt to reinvent Nietzsche, Kaufmann went too far. He is often accused of sanitizing Nietzsche, making him appear too soft. Perhaps it was necessary to go this far, otherwise Nietzsche could not be rescued from the taint of Nazism. By exaggerating the gentle aspects of Nietzsche, Kaufmann managed to establish him as a serious thinker.

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 it is impossible to connect them 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.” The quest of the philosophers, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, to develop a fully-rational (based on an entirely objective criteria) system of morality, politics, and art has proved to be a spectacular failure because it was based on a misunderstanding of the nature of normative statements. Where do normative statements come from? It is hard to say with certainty, since normative statements are a part of the religious, philosophical, and cultural knowledge of mankind whose origin 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 the past, you may try to understand it, but you no longer live in it. By paraphrasing Faulkner, a philosophical point might be made: “The past philosophies are not dead. They aren’t even past.” Philosophical ideas never die. On wings of new arguments, they keep coming back in age after age, giving rise to 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; could be China). 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 West has lost control of the narrative of modernism—they now prefer liberal primitivism. China is trying to turn modernism into its ally and the West’s worst enemy, just as Oedipus became King Laius’s worst enemy.

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 an excellent point. A philosopher should have an intellectual conscience. He has to argue against himself, be his own critic, and he should be able to bear an attack on his fondest convictions.

On Full Belly Libertarianism

The libertarian notion of liberty is not an attempt to escape the tyranny of the government; rather it is an attempt to escape culture. The libertarians talk about how good life will be in their utopia: state-less society. But what they aim for is a culture-less society. All manifestations of culture are an original sin in their eyes. Libertarianism might seem like an antithesis of communism, but the suspicion of culture is a discerning feature of both. The Enlightenment is the mother of Jacobinism and the grandmother of communism, libertarianism, and a few other utopian movements. There is one important difference though between communism and 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 idle rich). The only country where libertarianism has gained a substantial following is the “full-belly USA” of the post-1950s. There are hardly any libertarians in the poor countries where people with empty belly live.