EDITOR’S FOREWORD (Daniel Clarke-Serret):
Last week we read the preface. Today Ashok, founder of MetaCulture and Village Idiot Studios, dives into the First Lie that killed Democracy, namely that liberalism is an unadulterated virtue. Having spent an entire morning reading and editing this masterpiece, I can tell you that becoming a paid subscriber is well worth your time and money. This work - just the first chapter may I remind you - will transform how you think about Indian conservatism, European early modern history and the nature of today’s American liberal democracy. Ashok praises the life-affirming virtues of liberal thinking from Kerala to California, but warns us how it may contain the seeds of its own decline….
BOOK BLURB: What if we have completely misunderstood what it means to live in free and open societies? What if we have neglected the very liberal systems that gave us our freedoms and rights? What if the decline of democracies is not because of Trump, MAGA, the Right-Wing, Orban or Modi, but our own ignorance of democratic vulnerabilities? The TEN LIES THAT KILLED DEMOCRACY comes out of three decades of designing, repairing and sustaining democratic communities and organizations in the USA and elsewhere. Over 12 chapters you will receive a whole new (and genuinely radical) understanding of what liberal values really are— and how we can protect them.
PRICE: As per Guerre and Shalom policy, all new published book chapters are behind a paywall. Where the author is someone other than the editor, there is a 50-50 split. So if you subscribe to Guerre and Shalom from one of Ashok's chapters, Ashok will receive 50% and Daniel will receive 50%, giving you the right to all our Substack material for the entire year.
THE FIRST LIE THAT KILLED DEMOCRACY - LIBERALISM
by Ashok Panikkar
Chapter Summary:
Around the age of 13, my parents took us on a family pilgrimage to one of the holiest of Hindu temples in Tirupathi. Instead of undergoing a spiritual awakening, it killed my faith in organized religion. This experience forced me to embark on a clumsy quest to make sense of the world outside of the framework handed down to me by my people and Indian society.
It would be fair to say that my quest was a meandering and confused one. I made every mistake in the book and a few creative ones of my own— before I stumbled upon liberalism. In this chapter, I want to give you my version of the story of liberalism as I have studied and experienced it. This chapter will trace Western civilization’s journey over a historically minuscule span of 300 years, as it quite fortuitously discovered (or invented) individual autonomy, creativity, reason and science to create democratic societies. I will present the key historic movements that enabled the United States to become a vanguard of liberalism, shape the West and transformed the world.
CHAPTER SUBHEADINGS: The First Lie: Liberalism is an unadulterated virtue // Missing out on Patriarchal Privileges // My Free Thinking Years // Incredible India! // Historic Freakshow // Ancient, Non-Western and Indigenous ‘Democracies’ // Transformational Triad // Renaissance // Reformation // Enlightenment // Capitalism and Enlightenment // The City as a Hub // Meritocracy // The American Experiment // What made America different // America’s Greatest Innovation // Head-Spinning America
THE FIRST LIE:
The First Lie: Liberalism is an unadulterated virtue
By prioritizing individual rights and freedoms and placing restrictions on society’s and the government’s powers (or as I presumed my parent’s and teacher’s powers), Liberalism came across to thirteen-year-old me as the most attractive of political philosophies. What made this lie so irresistible was that it put me back at the center of my universe, which had been mine by rights until my kid sister came along when I was two and a half.
When I first encountered Liberalism, it sounded like an atheist’s version of heaven. At that age, I was already discovering the pleasures of my half-baked attempts at creativity and the dramatic effects of even my clumsy and elementary reasoning on adults— who were often stumped by my questions.
By privileging the questioning mind, by promising equality before the law, and most importantly, by giving ordinary people the right to decide how we would be ruled, the idea of Liberalism blew me away. In the Kerala, India, of the late sixties, it sounded too good to be true.
Decades later I realized that it might, indeed, have been too good to be true. Many Liberals, impatient at the slow pace of change have crossed over from gentle, reasonable and skeptical Liberalism into ardent Progressivism and even aggressive Social Justice Activism. Both these movements, stirred as they are by the inequalities and injustices of the world, focus on the fair distribution of existing resources rather than on producing wealth and increasing the size of society’s pie. In fact, both are deeply antagonistic to capitalism, which is popularly viewed as a merciless dog-eat-dog system that lacks empathy and compassion. While I was never enamored by capitalism, reason and logic didn’t allow me to indulge in dreams of a perfect life under communism or socialism either. I was skeptical of any economic system that was based on plucking the fruits rather than the planting and nurturing of fruit bearing trees.
However, my greatest grouse against Progressivism and Social Justice Activism is that they have quite unforgivably replaced inquiry, skepticism and critical reasoning for moral certainty. Having had my fill of orthodoxy, growing up and knowing a little something about the horrors of totalitarian regimes, I was naturally suspicious of any movement (Communism, Fascism, Islamic fundamentalism) that not only purported to know all the problems and where they came from, but what the solutions were. In an increasingly complex world this seemed to me to be not just arrogant, but inexcusably ignorant. Moreover, not that it was a deal breaker, but I found their language and tactics to be aesthetically distasteful— given that more often than not they leaned towards the emotional, reactive, irrational and dismissive.
Like any self respecting philosophy being open to being challenged, genuine liberalism is rightly challenged by authoritarians, progressives and populists who worry that an emphasis on individual rights will make people selfish and self-centered. As I will explain there is much to that criticism— even if like everything else, liberalism is not monolithic and there can be many different interpretations of it.
However, at its core liberalism is a philosophy that seeks to protect individual dignity and autonomy over that of the compulsions and sensitivities of the group or the state. As a political philosophy, it was particularly reassuring to me because it told me that my mind, my ideas, and my needs counted and were just as important, if not more than those of society. How could any budding egotist not love it?
Before I tell you why I call liberalism a lie, I must confess that I have not only held onto this lie all my life but have lived with it joyously (and even aggressively). Even as I write this chapter, I confess that I love this lie and even giving it up over time, even if in bits and pieces, kills me.
Being a misfit in the Victorian rote-learning based Indian educational system, I instinctively understood the idea of serfdom and servility. Unlike my academically talented or well-adjusted peers, I felt trapped by the lessons, homework, teachers and even my mom, whose affections ebbed and flowed based on the grades I brought home. I was a mess of hormones and reactivity who yearned for purpose and meaning as a child, which in the India of the late Sixties and Seventies required blind compliance to the EFEI (Extended Family/Education/ Industrial) complex. Inquiry and questioning brought me nothing but trouble at school and at home.
Missing out on Patriarchal Privileges
