Today we reach the final part of Ashok Panikkar’s THE TEN LIES THAT KILLED DEMOCRACY. Please sign up as paid to enjoy this important, explosive, NECESSARY piece of work. The next book from The Guerre and Shalom Publishing House will be “Rooted Truth” by Uri Zehavi. Coming soon, only for paid subscribers.
CONTENTS:
Preface: The Ten Lies that killed Democracy // The First Lie: Liberalism //The Second Lie: Cosmopolitanism // The Third Lie: Progress // The Fourth Lie: Freedom and Liberty // The Fifth Lie: Justice // The Sixth Lie: Open-Mindedness // The Seventh Lie: Equality // The Eighth Lie: Power // The Ninth Lie: Diversity // The Tenth Lie: a. Proving Truth, b. Destroying Truth, c. The Return from Woke to Reality
THE TENTH LIE THAT KILLED DEMOCRACY: Conclusion
by Ashok Panikkar
The Mother of all Lies: And how we took down a wondrous civilization, one lie at a time
Somerset Maugham called his autobiography ‘The Summing Up’. In it he reflected upon his life, career, and philosophy, with the kind of wit and wisdom that only comes with having lived- what I imagine- might have been a fairly satisfying life. Alas when I think about my own life, ‘satisfying’ is not the word that comes to mind.
In any case, this book doesn’t really sum up anything at all. If anything, it is a cautionary tale about the costs of societal idealism. Books like this might once have been written only by conservatives congenitally opposed to change who resisted even necessary reform. However, six decades of progressive-socio-cultural-political experimentation has forced even a dyed-in-the-wool liberal like me to say ENOUGH!
This book is an attempt to make the case that high ‘morals’ are not always good, and that excessive ‘goodness’ itself may cause intolerable cruelty. Hence, here at the end of my book, I am neither concluding nor summing up but merely leaving you, my hard working readers, with one elementary question (and a few more lies).
THE QUESTION: What does it mean to be human?
I know, I know that sounds terribly sophomoric or even depressingly ‘heavy’. Particularly when so many of us are struggling with immediate and practical matters- health, jobs, relationships or incipient political, economic chaos. But bear with me.
Years of teaching people how to ‘do’ philosophy (as opposed to ‘study’ it), has taught me that nothing gives us perspective and settles the mind as much as going back to our basic and foundational truths. These are truths or principles that guide us and we (literally) ‘base’ our lives around. For the religious these are non-negotiable and have to do with their creation myths, their God’s (or prophet’s) divinity and moral commandments. Secular truths are derived from our physical and social realities as discoverable by observation, science and reason, and hence are more susceptible to change upon discovery of new evidence.
In general, we tend to start off with clarity about our foundational truths (who we are, where we are, vision of the good life, values and goals) and over time the exigencies of daily life impose secondary values and understandings upon the original. Before long our foundational truths are obscured and long forgotten.
There’s another reason why we should ask ourselves elementary questions such as “What does it mean to be human?”. We no longer live in the same community we grew up in and most of us are transient creatures- having moved cities, states and countries several times already. With every move we have lost our foundational ‘tribes’, the people who might have reminded us of the truths that we grew up with. When we lose our tribes, we also lose the truths that they carried with them. This then is the purpose of all philosophy: not to make the ordinary complicated or to navel gaze, but to remind ourselves of why we struggle through the vicissitudes of life. To give us the ‘WHY’.
This book has focused on ten simple questions about values that are at the core of open and free societies. Ten values that we have taken for granted, reduced to slogans, and effectively turned into whoppers. Lies.
So, then, ‘What does it mean to be human?’ Let’s start with going as far back to the beginning as we can: We know that distinctly human behaviors such as cooperation and social bonding, as well as complex cognitive, social, and emotional behaviors developed gradually over 2–3 million years ago. What we today understand to be human behavioral patterns and intellectual capabilities most likely took shape only around 300,000 to 200,000 years ago. Furthermore, it was only as late as 50,000-100,000 years ago that we even got around to developing complex language, symbolic art, and abstract thought. It is important to remind ourselves that this all this development took place at a glacial pace, often over tens of thousands of years.
Once our transient hunter-gatherers ancestors became farmers and established roots, clusters of farms and farmsteads evolved into villages.
Over generations these ‘villagers’ then created what we understand to be ‘culture’, which is nothing more than a people’s specific and time-tested way of solving the problems of daily life: procuring and cooking food, mating, nurturing the young, clothing, recreating, and educating themselves.
Cultures that clustered around broadly similar geographies and evolved with similar values became civilizations. This is to say human societies (and the average person) changed very slowly and despite periodic upheavals- conquests, famines, plagues- we remained ‘human’ in just about the same way until around the end of the eighteenth century.
Sure, the Transformational Triad was already doing its disruptive thing, but grandparents continued to tell grandchildren morality tales about good fairies and evil witches, about cruel barons and wise kings. And through it all, our appreciation of the world we live in as well as society and the human mind itself changed only marginally. To those alive in the year 1700, our agrarian ancestors from 1300 or 1500 would have seemed surprisingly like them.
Then everything changed. As Hemingway said of bankruptcy (or as I would say about societal and democratic collapse), it comes “gradually, then suddenly”. Something happened around the turn of the nineteenth century that called into question everything that we’d hitherto understood to be ‘human’. Unlike previous upheavals, this time it wasn’t spurred by meteorites, ice ages, colonists, or imperialists. This devastation, the destruction of what millennia of homo sapiens had understood to be distinctly ‘human’ was almost completely the fault of the eleventh lie (more on this later).
