NB: Skip the first three paragraphs. What follows should be easy to read. The aphorisms are not purely mine, but then nothing is. DS
In our obscurity, in all this vastness , there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us: Carl Sagan
The biggest insult to the memory of the Holocaust is not denying it, but using it as an excuse to justify the genocide of the Palestinian people – Norman Finkelstein
Earthrise from Apollo 8 as it rounded the dark side of the moon, December 1968. Photo: Nasa/AFP/Getty
Abstract: The appearance of the term ‘post-truth’ is another step toward the ongoing dissolution of meaning. The rebellion against truth has now become a means whereby humanity’s problems are dismissed by resort to relativism, linguistic dodges and the conflation of knowledge with opinion. The domination of the public sphere by ideology has rendered all this acceptable to sizeable sections of the intelligentsia and public. The academic fascination with ‘multiple narratives’ has contributed to a situation wherein there are no standards of meaningful speech whatsoever. Is speech about ecological catastrophe and nuclear contamination not a ‘meta-narrative’? The very ubiquity of ‘narrative’ (‘account’ and ‘version’ have disappeared) points to the popularity of ‘deconstruction’ in the liberal arts.
Having abolished objectivity and truth in favour of ‘multiple narratives’, the protagonists of deconstruction are now faced with Presidents who deny climate change and Prime Ministers who speak of rhinoceri being culled to make room for Bangladeshi infiltrators. But if everything is interpretation and perspective, how may we contest anything anyone says? Scepticism is a necessary corrective to dogmatism, but if there are no normative foundations upon which to make moral judgements, if all we have is permanent scepticism, why and how should we act at all? Why is it desirable to resist domination rather than to accept it ? Radical otherness and exclusive identity have undermined truth and goodness – principles that lie at the heart of human speech. If cultural, communal ethnic identity is permitted to supersede human identity, the very possibility of communication – the basis of social life – is destroyed.
Ours is an age of ideology. Ideology is a means of escaping the present; it enables the submersion of everyday existence into dream-like transience. Ideologically-sustained life is a relentless deferral of presence on behalf of a hoped-for glorious future. If the criterion of truth is not agreement with reality, but agreement with the spirit of a nation, class or caste, we are left with neither knowledge nor wisdom, but a recipe for endless conflict and linguistic chaos. Ideology denies the value of thought; it weaponises the mind. The preoccupation with the future and the endless dissolution into multiplicity are expressions of contemporary nihilism. The ramifications are nothing short of the annihilation of truth and life.
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I knew a man who knew much, and never stopped speaking
Monologues are always silent
The Master said: To study without thinking is futile. To think without studying is dangerous: Analects of Confucius, II-15
The fanatic is a person with a terrible doubt
The tyrant is burdened by absolute fear
Ideological life is an eternal waiting room
Final solutions are the death wish of the finalists
Nostalgia is a strange emotion, it passes to the young before they have lived
All war is the same war because war is always going on (James Hillman)
Those who refuse to live together soon discover that it is impossible to live apart
Jesus wept but did not laugh; Socrates laughed but did not weep (Leo Strauss)
History is the odyssey of the unhappy consciousness (Stanley Rosen)
The spectacle is the guardian of sleep (Guy Debord)
The author is dead, except for the author who made this discovery: correction, he’s also dead
Loneliness is the discrepancy between what you are and what you could have been
What is granted under fear can be retained only as long as the fear lasts: M. K. Gandhi
God is a mystery pretending to be an explanation
The great leaders’ thirst for affirmation is never quenched
Myth is the suspension of time
Time is the humanisation of eternity
If you see two fish fighting in a river, be sure an Englishman passed by before you: Iraqi proverb
Buildings may crumble; but infamy is forever: Criminal Intent, S3 E1
The appearance of the law must be upheld; especially when its being broken – Gangs of New York
When a nation is filled with strife, then do patriots flourish: Lao-Tzu, (601-531 BC)
People all seek to know what they do not know yet / they ought rather seek to know what they know already: Zhuang Zhou (369-286 BC)
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. Robin Sharma
It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow human beings: M. K. Gandhi
Evil isn’t hard to comprehend, it is nothing but unhappiness in its most successful disguise : Franz Wright
Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise: Alice Walker
It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling – Robert Pirsig
गुनाह करके कहाँ जाओगे ग़ालिब, ये जमीं और आसमां सब उसी का है। – मिर्ज़ा ग़ालिब
Spiteful speech corrodes the mind
Why did you sell your soul? What did you get in return?
Affirmation. Repetition. Contagion.
For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across, confirms his lunacy: Greil Marcus
Which land is not sacred?
Praise is best when it comes from another
When I was young I knew everything
Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: Alexei Yurchak
The tree on the height is its own enemy: Lao Tzu
Pain make man think. Thought make man wise. Wisdom make life endurable: The Tea House of the August Moon (John Patrick)
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present: Albert Camus
Myth taken symbolically is the glass through which we darkly see: Hans Jonas
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past: George Orwell
The devil is an ape of God
Nation-worship is right-wing atheism
Party-worship is left-wing theism
Nation-worship is dishonest atheism
It is self-evident that a pious fraud cannot work if it is to be announced as a pious fraud – Ronald Beiner
It is algia – the longing – that we share, but nostos – the return home – that divides: Svetlana Boym
Loathing for the present takes refuge in the spirit of the past and prophesy of what is to come
A Bright Future Awaits Us. Kiss your ass goodbye
Creation implies a beginning. What preceded the beginning?
Everything speaks. Does everyone listen?
The lie must always be one step ahead of the truth: George Orwell
Kitsch is an aesthetic ideal in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist
Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch: Milan Kundera
Image = appearance, something other than the reality
It is A Very Bad Thing to Tarnish the Nations’ Image
Heidegger is important for showing that people will defend you from accusations of being a Nazi even if you were a member of the Nazi Party: (thedeadauthor)
Dogmatism (is) the inclination to identify the goal of our thinking with the point at which we have become tired of thinking: Gottfried Lessing (1771)
I am German, and still waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere – Victor Klemperer (1942)
O Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name! – Madame Roland (1793)
The primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable: Sigmund Freud (1915)
All patriots are not scoundrels, but all scoundrels are patriots
(the Germans)… belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow – but they still have no today. Friedrich Nietzsche (1886)
Only the Germans?
Hyperbolic speech is like underlining a sentence three times
Militant ignorance is the order of our time
The morning news is our daily hate-prayer
The ancients were the youth of humanity; it is us moderns who are ancient
The eyes of megalomaniacs are sinkholes of nothingness
Pity the poodle who thinks he’s a bulldog
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth (Bible, Genesis). Who is saying this?
The inter-generational transfer of guilt is a moral fraud.
The inter-generational inheritance of victimhood is also a fraud
Propaganda is violence committed against the soul
Propaganda is not a substitute for violence, but one of its aspects: Franz Neumann, Behemoth (1942)
Censorship is silent propaganda; propaganda is voluble censorship
When the banner is unfurled all reason is in the trumpet: Roumanian proverb
Not the state commands us but we command the state: Adolf Hitler (1934)
Normal men don’t know that everything is possible: David Rousset; The Other Kingdom (1947)
The secret societies of today conspire in broad daylight
The permanent militarisation of society requires a permanent enemy: Hoodbhoy & Nayyar in Islam, Politics and the State: the Pakistan Experience (1986)
Ignorance is Strength; Freedom is Slavery; War is Peace
The thirst for affirmation is never quenched
Forward! into the past
An ethical commmunity is bound together by decency, not doctrine
Passport to Profundity = post-coloniality; intersectionality; conditionality; governmentality; historicity; historicality; subalternity; multiplicity; multiplicities; plurality; liminality; discursivity; subliminality; vernacularity, foregrounding; privileging; siting; situating; imbricating; embedding; unpacking; mapping; embodied practice (as opposed to disembodied practice?); …
The Bible is not a title-deed
There are homosapiens; and of late there are pomosapiens who worship Mumbo-Jumbo
WhatsApp university is the factory of semi-literacy
Communism is like the horizon: an imaginary line that retreats as you approach it
Capitalism is the mixture of universal prosperity + enforced destitution
All ideas are historically produced, including the idea that all ideas are historically produced
All creatures were made by God, but God is on our side
Post-modernism is the botox of the mind
Reminder for rapidly ascending Members of Parliament: the higher the monkey climbs the more you can see its a….
Hugging the high and mighty brings one or both closer to halitosis
Modern education resembles the Thirty-six Chambers of Shao Lin
Abraham Lincoln to Donald Trump – O what a fall there was my countrymen!
Trump and Vance are the anal end of retention
For some of us, the status of victim is the only available mark of self-definition
Because it is based on knowledge, i.e., – in this case – the lack of familiarity, barking at strangers is a sign of a dogs’ philosophical nature (paraphrase of Socrates, in The Republic # 376a).
Ergo, barking at those whom you wish to cast into the mould of a stranger renders you lower in status to dogs
The sophists taught the view that the summit of happiness is to combine the appearance of justice with actual injustice: Gregory McBrayer
He lies like an eye-witness: popular saying among Soviet peasants in the 1930’s
Your horse has diabetes: Popular joke about a lab report on beer in the Third Reich
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like banana
Aao, secular secular khelien
Be careful whom you choose as your enemy, for you will soon become like him: Ashish-da
Albert was suddenly transformed from an ass into a philosopher and from a philosopher into an ass: Gotthard Marbach (1810-1890) on St Albertus Magnus (1200-1280)
“How do you know I am mad?” said Alice. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Permanent conflict requires permanent emergency requires permanent conflict requires…
मैंने फिर ईमानदार बनने की कोशिश की और फिर नाकामयाब रहा – पगडंडियों का ज़माना: हरिशंकर परसाई
She laughed like a hyena who has just heard a good one from another hyena: P. G. Wodehouse
It’s just miles and miles of bugger-all: Denis Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher’s husband, after a visit to the Falkland Islands
Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought of a fool than to open it and remove all doubt: Denis Thatcher
Revolution is the completion of a circle
Mathematics is ethically neutral
Revolution is the neurosis of the age
Language is ontologically creative: Derridian jargon
You can always rectify history by rewriting text-books
Language is historically creative too
Let’s hope the Indian government can finally defeat the Mughals
At which end of the tunnel were we supposed to find the light?
The destruction of civil society by the state = the absorption of the state by a secret society
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned: The Communist Manifesto
A Hindu Kingdom became a secular republic; a secular republic is en route to becoming a….
Esteemed Gentlemen of the Academy! I feel honored by your invitation to present the academy with a report on my former life as an ape… Franz Kafka: A Report to an Academy
Post-modern mobius strip -: overthrowing logocentrism by means of logos
Tomorrow is a long time: Bob Dylan
Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary: Mahatma Gandhi (1919)
The study of ideology is among other things an inquiry into the ways in which people may come to invest in their own unhappiness: Terry Eagleton
There is much more conformity among intellectuals than among plumbers or car mechanics: Simon Leys
I like Forrest Gump; there’s something in me of the village idiot, shambling through the beauty and rubble of history
Why are all reminders ‘gentle’ ?
I loooove jet lag: Subir Sinha
Next time round, I’ll be the pigeon, you be the statue
The true hero, the true subject, the center of The Iliad, is force: Simone Weil (1940)
Religious traditions contain the seeds of their own implosion
A ghostly potency: the rightful interpreter
Every founder of a new faith must have blasphemed against the existing ones
Why it’s time to talk about poo
Jealousy destroys life
Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture: Iris Murdoch
If you define yourself by hate; sooner or later you will drown in your own bile
Have you ever thought how many hours are spent every day on smartphones?
In the dreaming man’s dream, the dreamed man awoke: Jorge Luis Borges
Mathematicians are men who dream that they are awake: Plato, citing his teacher
Nothing, no matter how horrible, ever really happens without the approval of the government. Shooter
To make money to gain power to make money to buy justice to make money to
The obsession with origins is the obverse of the conviction that we are going to a predetermined place
Post-mortems are performed upon certified corpses; where is modernism’s death certificate?
The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it… To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see: C.S. Lewis; The Abolition of Man (1943)
Self-definition via confrontation with enemies leads inevitably to self-destruction
War begins in the mind, with the idea of the enemy: John Mack
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts: C.S. Lewis (1943)
The Master said: The gentleman considers the whole rather than the parts. The small man considers the parts rather than the whole: Analects of Confucius, II-14
The disinterestedly wise ought to desire the holding together of all being: Bhagwadgita III 25
The Master said: To attack a question from the wrong end, this is harmful indeed: Analects of Confucius, II-16
Those who look no further than our own borders dislike such names as Peter and John and will only accept Zhang the Third or Li the Fourth, and so we get original writers: Lu Xun, Waiting for a Genius, 1924
Time is a property of prophets
Don’t see evil. Then it will go away
Don’t speak truth. Then lies will become true
Don’t hear voices of pain. Then pain will disappear
After all, we are post-truth. Like post mortem
God is dead: Nietzsche, 1882
Nietzsche is dead: God, 1900
The truest intuition of the existence of the soul is the query: mother, where was I before was born?
Without illusions life would be nothing at all; but some illusions will transport us quickly to nothing
Violation of truth poisons everthing gained by the violation: Karl Jaspers
What was the point of all our prophets, when we remain mesmerised by destruction
We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn: Mary Catherine Bateson
What is most terrible in it is the mixture of truth and falsehood: Nicolai Berdyaev, on communism
No one can take my Germanness away from me, but my nationalism and patriotism are gone forever.: Victor Klemperer
Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history! Leon Trotsky to the Mensheviks, 1917
We are the flowers in your dustbin, the poison in your human machine: The Sex Pistols, 1977
Goli khaane wale ko bhi naman; goli maarne wale ko bhi naman
India today: smoke, mirrors, turbans in many colours; and the sudden, silent garroting
‘I saw the emperor – this world-spirit – riding out of the city on reconnaissance’. Hegel, upon seeing Napoleon in Jena in 1806. Alas! the horse ran away with the spirit when no one was looking
Facebook is the capitalisation of anxiety
Twitter was a glimpse of Hell – other people, in Sartre’s description
Rebellion confronts immediate injustice; revolution is mediated by revolutionaries who know best
Why do daschunds wear their ears inside out? P. G. Wodehouse
An odd law, to be sure, which knows the murder it commits and will never know the one it prevents: Albert Camus; Reflections on the Guillotine, 1957
The capacity to embrace evil is directly proportional to the passion for mental slavery
We march to a better tomorrow: Slogan seen on public buses in Delhi, 1975
Judicial conscience requires a human backbone
Violence has no place in America – really?
This is not who we are – this is exactly who you are.
Whence your conscience upon the death of tens of thousands?
Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner? Shakespeare, Macbeth; 1:3
Macbeth’s insane root has sunk deep in the bowels of men
Militarism is the ground shared by enemies
Capitalism knows the secret of eternal warfare: there’s money to be made in conflict
God does not hold a monopoly on inscrutability
Ideology transforms commitment into bestiality
Contemporary ruling classes work relentlessly to abolish the distinction between legal and illegal violence
Gandhi rebelled against the tidal wave of history
The Right has become dynamic and the Left has become conservative
By becoming continuous war has ceased to exist: George Orwell, 1984
An organized attempt was made to eradicate the concept of the human being: Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers on the Nazi death camps, 1946
Gaza is not only a war on a people but a war on the very idea of innocence
We only shine in another persons’ gaze; even if it’s in our imagination
The current chaotic world order shows that is no honour amongst thieves
The jealous defence of orthodoxy disguises the urge toward bloodshed
If God is on our side as well as on the side of the enemy; this looks like bipolar disorder
The sky is an eternal reminder of the mystery of existence; only the arrogant speak of ‘unlocking’ its secrets
Mansarovar is said to be the mind of Brahma; Kailash the abode of Shiva, the still point of a turning world
The world is defiled by prejudice, and kept alive by love
The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be: Carl Sagan
The excessive praise of religion is the reverse side of complete indifference to the truth of religion
The aesthetic reaction to nature is proof that humans are not enclosed in cultural compartments
How will we know it’s us without our past? – John Steinbeck
Americans liked seeing people eye to eye, the General had once told me, especially as they screwed them from behind: The Sympathizer; by Viet Thanh Nguyen
DISMANTLES, DESTROYS, SLAMS; SMASHES, etc: Algorithm-enabled news feed for cretins
The fundamental division in humankind is between those who like Marmite and those who don’t
Break away from what you know; and you will end up knowing more: The Grandmaster
Political nostalgia reflects a kind of magical thinking about history: Mark Lilla
(Magical thinking about history is magical dreaming about the happy future)
Try not to get high on ideology: one hit and you’re out for a century. Spliffs are less dangerous
Ancient Greece is the most beautiful invention of the modern mind: Paul Valery
If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own: San Francisco radio KSAN; late 1960’s
We are God’s chosen – and my daddy can beat your daddy: Prophetic theology in brief
Socialism is the longest and most tortuous mode of transition between capitalism and capitalism
the true knowledge of the souls, and hence of the soul, is the core of cosmology: Leo Strauss
we are, all of us, but visitors from eternity, destined to return to it
Fascination with the end of time (Hegel called it the end of history) is distinctive of the prophetic tradition
Time neither began (what happened before the Big Bang?), nor will it end. Deal with it
Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to
The imposition of homogeneity upon diverse peoples is a precursor to disintegration
There is nothing which so much resembles virtue as a great crime: Léon de Saint-Just; the French Revolution’s ‘Archangel of Terror’
No water can wash away a sin; not the body but the soul carries the burden. Ask Lady Macbeth, and tell those Israelis who silenced their conscience
A 10 km wide asteroid struck the Mexican coast 66 million years ago. The tsunami caused a mass extinction of 75% of plant and animal species. But what if the impact had happened a minute later?
The Nation as ism captures the state; then the state inexorably destroys the nation
Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind: Albert Einstein
Niranjan Takle’s book has disappeared from the market. What could the reason be?
Our time combines domination with chaos: an unfolding catastrophe. Can anyone see this?
The self-destruction of reason is manifest not in its attempted domination of nature, but in its divorce from virtue and the good
Our lives are but a small sliver of eternity
The golden past is the obverse of the bright future: dreamers of phantasms mourn the passage of time
We’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding: Rudyard Kipling
that was the river / this is the sea: The Waterboys
the particular wants dominion over the earth, yet hail itself as particular
beauty is intensified in the recounting of it
there’s a difference between loyalty to truth and loyalty to the Nation, Cause, etc
contemporary regimes thrive on relentless provocation of conflict + non-stop lying
once nations possessed armies; now armies possess nations; and criminal gangs possess armies
total and permanent war is the era of the communalisation of innocence
today you are punished for what you are; not for what you did
you could even be punished for nothing at all: Kafka wrote about this in The Trial
You could not search out the furthest limits of the soul, even if you traversed all of the ways, so unfathomable is its logos: Heraclitus of Ephesus, ca 600 BCE
the true knowledge of the souls, and hence of the soul, is the core of the cosmology: Leo Strauss
there can be no intellect except where there is soul: Stanley Rosen
How was it possible that the amount of wickedness required to accomplish the ultimate crime, a disproportionate crime, was equal to zero? – Günther Anders on the pilots who bombed Hiroshima
War was a continuation of politics by other means; now politics is the continuation of war by other means
Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension of diplomacy; Monsieur Verdoux feels that murder is the logical extension of business: Charles Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux
The apocalypse is in the hands of criminals and the incompetent: how did we let this happen?
The only real scandal is that we are not scandalised by the scandal
Crime could be defined as an action devoid of the any vestige of decency
Aphasia = cognitive decline; more widespread is aphasia of the soul, the death of conscience
So much faith is founded on history: no wonder history tends to be reconstructed as faith
In April 2020, Donald Trump wished Americans a Happy Good Friday. Good luck to America’s Christians
Our fuhrer loves to hate Jawaharlal Nehru: vitriol dissipates in the ocean
Our National Volunteers are in the trenches fighting the Mughal dynasty, defunct for three centuries
our rulers obtain their pleasures in humiliating their chosen enemies: such poverty
Kant deified the Subject; Hegel deified History; Nietzsche deified Fate; Heidegger deified Being. Now we deify pronouns
I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth: Last message by Stefan Zweig (1881-1942)
interesting that those who speak of Oneness get sustenance from relentlessly preaching hatred
the claim that a party represents an entire people is the first step toward building an edifice of lies
The force of love is the same as the force of the soul or truth. We have evidence of its working at every step. The universe would disappear without the existence of that force…. Mahatma Gandhi, Hind Swaraj
Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: What shall we do and how shall we live? – Leo Tolstoy; cited by Max Weber (1917)
Capitalism has left us in a moral void; devoid of food for the soul
… more to follow
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Reflections on ideology, morality and conscience
When Charles Chaplin Became the Enemy
Andha Yug (Dharamvir Bharati, 1953) / धर्मवीर भारती लिखित नाटक ‘अन्धा युग’
Andha Yug by Dharamvir Bharati (1953): Theatre of Roots
Kabir and the Question of Modernity
Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being author dies aged 94
After the truth-shower 