Darshana & Itihasa: The Civilizational Gaze

I highly recommend Professor Gad Saad’s book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense . Here are five quotes from t...

In The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, Michael Pillsbury—a seasoned China schol...

One of the most revealing ways to understand a civilization is to examine how it measures time. A culture’s sense of history is, in many way...

Scientists estimate that there are between 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. The number of humans on earth is m...

“False fears are a plague, a modern plague!” ~ Michael Crichton, State of Fear I agree with Michael Crichton that false fears are a modern p...

The belief that human beings are rational is a myth. Everything of which we are certain is not based on reason and is not verifiable. The be...

“Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species cap...

Trump survived the assassination attempt. The assassin was killed. This makes me think of the book by Frederick Forsyth that I read decades ...

The purpose of taxation is not merely economic or collecting revenues for the government. Taxation is also a tool for achieving certain poli...

Winston Churchill’s political career extended from 1900, when he entered politics at the age of 26, to 1955, when his second term as Prime M...

None of us actually lives as though there were no truth. Our problem is more with the notion of a single, unchanging truth. The word 'tr...

“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance” : ...

Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction is a mirage and a myth. It is a mirage because it creates a vision of a utopia that is governed by the ...

I am reading Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century . I am not a socialist but I am not a capitalist either. Both sy...

In his book Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy that Works for Progress, People and Planet , Klaus Schwab makes the case that the large...

A bullshit job is usually one that does not create any value for society. Mostly it is socialist governments that are accused of employing m...

The most important drivers of nations are not the economic and political realities but the collective hopes of the masses that in the future...

My negative opinion of Bill Gates has been confirmed by my reading of Tim Schwab’s book The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of t...

Environmentalism is founded on the idea that whenever men create material things, they destroy nature. But nature is indestructible. No powe...

The theories of economics are not definite and provable like the rules of mathematics and physics—they are mythologies (lies and fiction) im...

The belief that a perfect society can be brought into existence through communism is, at its core, a modern secular mythology. Yet capitalis...

When a civilization becomes obsessed with preserving the ruins, records and artifacts of ancient civilizations, which fell and disappeared c...

What does the word ‘natural’ mean? It means everything, mental and material, that exists in the universe. Nothing that exists is unnatural. ...

Truth is of value only in the realm of science and mathematics. In philosophy, religion, politics and culture, which are the fundamental bui...

“It does not matter how good your theory is, but if it does not agree with experiments, it is wrong. According to experiments all our theori...

The purpose of philosophy is to contemplate the possible answers to questions that are unanswerable, and make human beings envision God. The...

Censorship can be imposed on a country in two ways: first, by cutting off the sources of information, and second, by bombarding people with ...

The history of humanity can be divided into three stages:  First stage—Ancient man : God created the universe and all forms of life. Humans ...

Modern liberalism is founded on two pillars: materialism and humanism. The pillar of materialism entails that there is no God, the universe ...

The biggest discovery that mankind has made is not the discovery of wheel, agriculture, language or nuclear energy—it is the discovery of ig...

Is Yuval Noah Harari an ideologue draped in futurist garb, or a dreamer masquerading as a prophet of silicon salvation?  Perhaps he is all o...

Sarah Bakewell’s book At The Existentialist Café covers the history of existentialism in the 20th century. Set in post-Second World War Fra...

A wise philosopher would know that the human mind is not designed to discover the ultimate answers to the fundamental philosophical question...

Philosophical ideas do not travel through history on their own. They travel through the medium of political movements. How influential a phi...

I am reading Karl Sigmund’s Exact Thinking in Demented Times .  The book narrates the story of the Vienna Circle that was spearheading logic...

Liberals, as a political force, seem haunted by two persistent fears: first, the influence of religious and cultural elites; second, the pos...

The belief that conservatives will rescue the world from Marxism, socialism, communism, nihilism, or religious fundamentalism is both naïve ...

We examine the history of past civilizations through the stories of decline and fall.  When civilization is being built, the society is led ...

Every Democratic nation is a battleground of two irreconcilable forces: the nationalists and the counter-nationalists.  The nationalists fig...

I am inspired by the books of Leon Uris, especially his book Exodus , which describes the founding of the nation of Israel. But I have alway...