Tuesday, August 18, 2026

There is no such thing as Happiness

 Aristotle’s insight about the middle class is not sentimental. It is structural. The middle class is the only group whose prosperity is directly tied to the prosperity of the whole, which makes it the only group with genuinely aligned incentives.

The poor are dependent. Not by moral failing but by position – their survival depends on transfers, on the state, on someone above them making decisions on their behalf. They vote for whoever promises more, which is rational given their situation. They cannot be the foundation of a republic because their interest is not in the republic’s success but in their own extraction from it.

The oligarchy is captured. Their wealth is large enough to seek advantages unavailable to others – regulatory protection, subsidies, privileged access, barriers to competition. They do not need the market to work fairly. They need it to work in their favor, which is a different thing entirely. The oligarch’s rational strategy is not to improve the system but to carve himself an exception within it.

The middle class has nowhere to hide. Too prosperous to depend on transfers, too broad and exposed to need special favors, their entire position rests on a society where contracts are enforced, courts function, markets are fair, schools work, streets are safe, and the currency holds its value. They cannot buy their way out of dysfunction the way the oligarchy can, and they have too much to lose to wait for redistribution the way the poor must. They need the whole thing to work – which makes them, structurally, the only class that wants it to.

This is why destroying the middle class is not just an economic event. It is a political event. When it shrinks, the ballast disappears and the ship tips – toward oligarchy above demanding favors, or toward dependency below demanding transfers, or toward both simultaneously, which is precisely where most Western democracies currently find themselves.  

https://x.com/i/status/2075187227617878169

https://x.com/i/status/2074975710821879865

Here is something Aristotle got wrong:

There is no such thing as Happiness – so you cannot go looking for something that does not exist.

Aristotle herded whole generations of humanity into a dead end by crowning it the highest good. And that is simply not how any of this works…

Let me explain:

1. You can, certainly, be unhappy. That is real, and it is the natural mechanism whose entire job is to drive you into action. We are organisms wired by evolution with a long list of needs, and with the mechanisms built in to satisfy them – that is how we function. Otherwise, we would not exist at all…

2. Leave one of the deep needs of our nature unmet, and it will chafe at you without rest – that is the whole point of the mechanism, that is how we are built. That is unhappiness: a state we want to escape, by satisfying whatever chafes hardest. Satisfy one, and another always rises to take its place. The only thing we can ever truly achieve is the satisfaction of the fundamental ones – companionship, and passing life onward: reproduction…

3. Call the satisfaction of those basic needs “happiness,” if you like – but you will never actually feel it. It is nothing more than the absence of the unhappiness that was chafing at you, and some new need, however small, will always rise up to keep you moving…

4. This, then, is a matter of recognizing what we are: a complex system whose function is to act — to live — and to pass that life forward. To carry out that function, we come equipped with mechanisms that push us in the right direction and report back on where we stand: pain, unhappiness, emotion. That is how we came to exist. That is how we live…

5. People invented “happiness” back when they lived in constant lack, in permanent need – and told themselves that satisfying it would finally deliver that mythical state. It doesn’t exist. There can, sure, be calm. General contentment. But above all, there is life – which means action. And what drives that action is wanting something: a need the organism signals through some kind of chafing, a form of pain – which, when it’s your whole life situation doing the chafing, we call unhappiness…

6. And here is where that logic actually leads: Happiness, properly defined, would be nothing but the absence of the tension that drives you to act. The end of everything that pushes you forward. In a word: Death…

7. So here is what that means for your actions, for your goals: stop hunting for “happiness” – especially in the places where nothing but unhappiness is waiting for you. Grow life instead.

Concretely: Children.

Because happiness does not exist – only life exists, unfolding better or worse, and so hurting a little less, or a little more…

https://x.com/i/status/2076272047286575548

“God is dead.” Nietzsche didn’t say this as a celebration. He said it as a warning – and then spent his remaining sane years screaming that nobody understood what it meant.

1. What dies with God is not just religion. It is the entire civilizational foundation – the shared metaphysical ground on which Western values, Western ethics, and Western meaning were constructed. Remove the foundation and the building doesn’t immediately collapse. It stands on habit, on inertia, on the assumption that the values will survive without the roots. They won’t. Nietzsche knew this. He said so. Nobody listened.

2. The replacement religions arrived immediately. Socialism. Nationalism. Progressivism. Wokism. Climatism. Each one borrowed the deep structure of what it replaced — sin, redemption, heretics, chosen people, apocalypse, salvation — and filled it with secular content. The climate activist has the End Times. The woke movement has original sin — called privilege — and ritual confession. The socialist has the promised land and the class enemy. Same architecture. No foundation. Running on stolen moral capital from the civilization they claim to have transcended.

3. Nietzsche is the most stolen philosopher in history. His sister took his manuscripts after his mental collapse and edited them for the Nazis. They took Übermensch as racial superiority – the precise opposite of what he meant (he meant the moral man and had a Polish Noble in mind). The self-help industry took Will to Power as motivational rhetoric. Academics took perspectivism as relativism. Nobody took the actual point: that without genuine values rooted in something deeper than political preference, the will to power produces not greatness but barbarism.

4. Ressentiment — slave morality — is his most precise and least quoted insight. The weak define virtue as whatever the strong are not. Goodness becomes the inversion of power rather than its expression. Merit becomes suspect. Excellence becomes privilege. Achievement becomes something to apologize for. He described this in 1887. It is the operating system of contemporary progressive culture, running at full speed in every HR department and university admissions office in the Western world.

5. The Last Man is his most devastating image – the creature at the end of history who invented happiness and blinks. No aspiration, no risk, no greatness, no tragedy. Warm, safe, comfortable, and completely hollow. Brave New World’s population. Demolition Man’s San Angeles. Tocqueville’s soft despotism taken to its biological conclusion.

6. Nihilism is coming, he said. Into the emptiness left by the dead foundations rush the worst possible substitutes – ideology, group identity, outrage, apocalyptic movements that need an enemy to replace the meaning they cannot generate themselves. He predicted it would take centuries to work through. He was optimistic about the timeline. We are living inside the working-through – and the replacement religions are multiplying faster than anyone is building anything to replace them with.

https://x.com/i/status/2077047789733708099

https://evergreenessays.blogspot.com/2026/08/we-can-all-be-neo-now.html

https://becausethouart.blogspot.com/2026/08/you-do-not-arrive-good.html

https://marketime.blogspot.com/2026/08/montesquieu-bastiat-tocqueville-and.html

https://vipvak.blogspot.com/2026/08/low-budget-art-with-message-ceases-to.html

https://rainbowther.blogspot.com/2026/08/love-makes-ordinary-irreplaceable.html

https://orchidrose.blogspot.com/2026/08/from-odyssey-to-idiocracy.html

https://plasim.blogspot.com/2026/08/orwell-tolkien-and-huxley.html

https://serfrat.blogspot.com/2026/08/political-imagination-has-been-shaped.html

https://sepact.blogspot.com/2026/08/reality-doesnt-care-about-virtue.html

https://savitrieraparty.blogspot.com/2026/08/freedom-as-participation-in-moral-and.html

Monday, August 17, 2026

American founders read Burke, Hume, Smith, and Montesquieu

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

https://marketime.blogspot.com/2026/08/locke-built-foundation-and-montesquieu.html

Jean-Jacques Rousseau – the original Woke

He invented it. Every premise of contemporary progressive ideology traces directly back to one man who had never met a "noble savage", never raised a child, and never lived according to a single principle he preached.

1. His foundational claim: man is naturally good and civilization corrupts. This sounds compassionate. It is the most dangerous idea in Western political thought. Because if man is naturally good, then every failure, every crime, every inequality is caused by the system – never by the individual.

Responsibility evaporates. The oppressor is always external. The victim is always pure. This is the complete architecture of Woke in one sentence, written in 1755.

2. The "Noble Savage" is Rousseau’s Form – his version of Plato’s ideal. The uncorrupted man, untouched by property, competition, and civilization, living in natural harmony. Rousseau had never met one. He invented him from an armchair in Paris, extrapolating from travel accounts of peoples he had never visited. The Noble Savage is not an anthropological observation. He is a political weapon – a club to beat civilization with, wielded by someone living comfortably inside it.

3. The "General Will" is the most dangerous concept in modern political philosophy. Not the actual expressed will of actual people – but the deeper will, the will people would have if they were "properly enlightened". Whoever claims to know it can do anything in its name. Robespierre knew it. Every revolutionary vanguard since has known it. Today’s progressive institutions know it – which is why they can override democratic majorities, suppress dissent, and compel speech, all while insisting they represent the people’s true interests. The General Will is the intellectual license for every tyranny that calls itself a liberation.

4. The chain from Rousseau to today is unbroken. Rousseau to Robespierre and the Terror. Robespierre to Marx, who secularized the General Will into historical necessity. Marx to every "liberation" movement that ended in a gulag. And today: replace civilization with white supremacy, replace the Noble Savage with the marginalized community, replace the General Will with lived experience – and you have the complete operating system of contemporary progressivism. The software is the same.

5. Voltaire, his contemporary and rival, saw him quite clearly: Rousseau made primitivism intellectually respectable. He gave the comfortable classes of every generation a way to signal virtue by denouncing the civilization that produced them, from inside it, without cost. The French Left Bank intellectual denouncing capitalism from a café. The Harvard professor deconstructing Western civilization from a tenured chair. The hedge fund billionaire funding the abolition of meritocracy. All of them are living in Rousseau’s armchair.

6. He sent all five of his illegitimate children to a Paris orphanage. Then wrote Émile – one of the most influential books on education in Western history, a detailed guide on how to raise a virtuous child in harmony with nature. He did not find this contradictory. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense – this is obłuda (remember the obłuda of communism?👇🏻). The defining structural feature of the ideology he invented: the sermon is inversely proportional to the practice. The performance of virtue replaces the exercise of it. Naming the oppressor substitutes for personal accountability. Rousseau didn’t just invent Woke – he lived it, in every detail, before anyone had the word.

7. The original Woke was woke about a fiction he invented – and spent his life performing outrage about a civilization he depended on and never left. Two and a half centuries later, the performance is the same. The noble savages have been updated. The General Will has new names. The orphanages are metaphorical. But the man who sends his children away and then lectures everyone else on how to raise theirs – that man is everywhere.

https://x.com/i/status/2075539011502817493

Voltaire – the fake antidote to Rousseau

He is the most entertaining man of the eighteenth century and the most seductive trap in Western intellectual history. He seems like the cure for Rousseau. He is the other half of the disease.

1. Where Rousseau is emotional, Voltaire is rational. Where Rousseau weeps over the noble savage, Voltaire mocks. He is the master of devastating wit, precise irony, surgical ridicule. Candide dismantles every naive optimism in ninety pages with the efficiency of a guillotine – which is fitting, since the guillotine is partly what his work made possible.

2. His great weapon is mockery. Écrasez l’infâme – crush the infamous, meaning the Church, tradition, inherited authority. He crushed it. With wit, elegance, and devastating precision. He was right that the Church was corrupt, that the aristocracy was parasitic, that the old order was indefensible in many of its particulars. Being right about what to demolish is not the same as knowing what to build.

3. Voltaire is the demolition crew without an architecture firm. He tears down, magnificently. He offers no replacement – only rubble, and the advice to cultivate your garden. Private. Disengaged. The conclusion of Candide: after every horror, every injustice, every system failure – grow vegetables. This is not wisdom. This is elegant surrender dressed as philosophy.

4. His irony is a solvent. It dissolves corruption, yes – but it dissolves everything, including the things worth keeping. A civilization marinated in Voltairean irony learns to mock every claim to authority, every appeal to tradition, every invocation of duty. This feels like freedom. It is actually vulnerability – a society that has learned to be ironic about everything is defenseless against the person who believes something earnestly enough to act on it. Robespierre was not ironic. He was a true believer. He won.

5. Rousseau gave the revolutionary the emotional fuel: the pure victim, the corrupt oppressor, the righteous rage of nature against civilization. Voltaire provided the intellectual solvent: he dissolved the legitimacy of every institution that might have contained that rage. Together they cleared the ground completely. Robespierre arrived and found no Church, no tradition, no inherited authority with enough credibility to resist him. He simply moved into the vacuum and filled it with the General Will and the guillotine.

6. And when he wasn’t playing "champion of liberty", he was on the payroll of kings, literally. He spent years at Frederick the Great’s court and corresponded adoringly with Catherine the Great, flattering both in print as enlightened monarchs of the age. While he was writing these letters, Frederick and Catherine were carving up Poland – dismembering a European nation, erasing it from the map and subjugating an entire people in one of the great crimes of the eighteenth century. Voltaire knew. He didn’t care. Écrasez l’infâme — crush the infamous — unless the infamous is paying well and lives in a palace in Berlin or St. Petersburg.

7. The contemporary Voltaire is everywhere: the late night host who dismantles everything with devastating wit and proposes nothing. The enlightened cynic who sees through every institution, trusts nothing, builds nothing, and considers this sophistication – while cashing checks from the very system he mocks. The fake antidote doesn’t kill you. It leaves you without defenses when the real disease arrives. Rousseau is the fire. Voltaire is the man who dismantled your fireplace and called it progress – and then went to warm himself at the tsar’s.

Together they produced the French Revolution, with the Terror, and the template for every ideological catastrophe that followed. The most dangerous intellectual partnership in Western history wasn’t a conspiracy. It was two men who despised each other and destroyed the same thing from opposite ends, leaving the ground perfectly prepared for those who came after them with a plan.

https://x.com/i/status/2075703112489148623

The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment – the real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire

The French Enlightenment and the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment happened simultaneously, in the same century, reading the same books, arguing about the same questions. They reached completely opposite conclusions. One produced the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. The other produced the guillotine. This is the most important civilizational fork in modern history.

1. The French Enlightenment begins with the assumption that human beings can be improved by reason – that if you strip away the corrupting institutions of Church, tradition, and inherited authority, the natural goodness underneath will organize itself into a just society. This sounds like progress. It is a fantasy with a body count. Every attempt to implement it has required, at some point, a Committee of Public Safety to handle the people who turned out not to be naturally good enough.

2. The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment begins with the opposite assumption: human beings are what they are, not what they could be if properly enlightened. Hume grounds morality in human nature as it actually operates – sympathy, habit, sentiment, the slow accumulation of social trust. Smith shows that self-interest, properly channeled, produces collective benefit without a planner. Neither man is building a utopia. Both are building with the actual material available.

3. Burke is the direct refutation, written in real time. He published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 – before the Terror, predicting it precisely – because he understood that institutions are not obstacles to human flourishing, they are its precondition. They contain accumulated wisdom — the knowledge of the dead — that cannot be recovered once destroyed. Pull society apart to improve it and you don’t get the General Will. You get Robespierre.

4. The American founders read Burke, Hume, Smith, and Montesquieu – the Frenchman who looked at England and understood what France was missing. They built a system that takes human nature as given — self-interested, power-hungry, tribal — and constructs institutions to contain those tendencies rather than assume they disappear once the right people are in charge. Checks and balances are not a design flaw. They are what you build when you don’t believe in philosopher-kings.

5. 1776 versus 1789. Same Enlightenment, same century, same vocabulary of liberty and reason. One produces a constitutional republic that has survived two and a half centuries of stress, civil war, and upheaval. The other produces, in sequence: the Terror, Napoleon, 1848, the Commune, and eventually — via Marx, who was a Frenchman in spirit if not in birth — the entire catastrophe of the twentieth century. The difference was not intelligence or intention. It was the starting assumption about human nature. Get that wrong and everything that follows is wrong with it.

6. The guillotine is not the Revolution’s failure. It is its logical conclusion. If man is naturally good and the system is corrupt, then whoever seizes the system in the name of natural goodness is licensed to do anything. The General Will cannot be wrong. Those who resist it are not opponents – they are enemies of nature itself.

7. The real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire was never a better French philosopher. It was a different civilizational tradition – one that builds with human beings as they are; that treats inherited institutions as repositories of wisdom rather than obstacles to progress; that distributes power rather than concentrating it in whoever currently claims to know the General Will. That tradition was built in Edinburgh, London, and Philadelphia. It is currently under sustained assault — from exactly the same ideas, in exactly the same form, with exactly the same confidence — that Burke watched demolish France in 1789. He was right then. He is right now.

https://x.com/i/status/2075864669151998341

Sri Aurobindo stood for everything that Marx denied. Religion for him was not 'soul of soulless circumstances', but the very soul of human existence. Sri ...

But Sri Aurobindo is not merely a political philosopher. He is a political thinker when he analyses a particular phenomenon like the Indian nationalism—its nature or its course. He is a political theorist when he discusses a general phenomenon like obliteration of national boundaries or types of democracy, while in his evening talks with disciples we find in Sri Aurobindo a keen observer and astute analyst of national and international politics. All these indicate not only the multidimensional interest of Sri Aurobindo in matters political, but also the dynamism that marks his political thinking. He kept changing and expanding his focus, his priorities and his horizon without compromising on his basic stand on human freedom and unity of mankind.

https://incarnateword.in/journals-and-magazines/sri-aurobindo-mandir-annual-1942-2015/2012/sri-aurobindo-as-a-political-thinker-unique-and-original

[PDF] A mediated collision: nationalism, mediacricket, and Indian cricketing hegemony

C McMillan - Sport in Society, 2026
… more specifically Hindu nationalism and Hindutva – the idea that Hinduism is the
essence of Indianness (Ogden Citation2023b) – arose with India’s entry into the
global economy in the early 1990s. Neoliberalism and the rising Indian middle-class …

Human Rights, Journalism, and the Politics of Representation: A Study of Writing with Fire

A Ghosh - Human Rights and Indian Literary Communities
Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s critically acclaimed documentary Writing with
Fire (2021) follows the story of three Dalit women journalists of rural reporting
collective Khabar Lahariya in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The film attempts to …

Born, Dying, and Reborn: The Transformations of Literary Community

R Vanita - Human Rights and Indian Literary Communities
… , where Shohini Ghosh and I presented our work about same‑sex pleasure in
literature and cinema, one famous woman historian said that discussing Sanskrit
texts that were either celebratory of or non‑judgmental about same‑sex relations …

[PDF] Interreligious Dialogue and Religious Nationalism

D Thorsen - The Ecumenical Review
Although the rise of religious nationalism problematizes interreligious dialogue and
collaboration, progress may occur by emphasizing biblical precedents for
engagement, correcting misconceptions about Christianity, and addressing common …

How Modi Constructed a Nationalist

AE Coalition, T Wojczewski - Populism and World Politics: Exploring Inter-and …
… that India's identity and nationhood are grounded in Hindu culture and religion (
Hindutva ). The BJP, as the political wing of the Hindu nationalist … As we will see in
the following section, these two fantasmatic narrative forms also structure the …

[HTML] Mamata Banerjee in the Supreme Court Why the street fighter is hard to pin down The Indian Express

S Nath
… Second, her politics cannot be easily branded as “muscular”, as she is a woman,
and the central government, with its pro-Hindutva affectation, appears more
muscular than a regional force like TMC. This makes brand Mamata hard to take on …

Shutting down Anand Teltumbde talk, the authorities are imprisoning our imaginations

N Fernandes - 2026
… The police order came hours after Hindutva “influencers” took to social media to
criticise the decision to offer Teltumbde a platform to speak about his horrific
experiences in jail. Though no official complaint seems to have been made, the …

[PDF] A Feminist Critique of Cybersecurity: Techno Feminist Imaginaries of Vulnerability and Care

R Gajjjala, M Basu, K Stanfield, T Kanchan… - Encounters, 2026
… Tanvi Kanchan examines Indian queer activists ‘connections with Indigenous and
Black politics in the US and anti-gender rhetoric that travels between American
conservative contexts and Indian Hindutva contexts to highlight how digitally …

Science Journalism in Postcolonial India: Mapping the Political Economy of Ayurveda in Digital News

DO Dowling, S Paul - Journalism Practice, 2026
As the alternative medicine system that has emerged in recent years as India’s top-earning
export through its pharmaceuticals, oils, and herbs, Ayurveda has become central to
science journalism since the 2020 outbreak of COVID-19. Its status as a symbol of …

Sanatan Dharma (Vedic, Jain, Buddha): The Future of Civilisation

HB Joshi - 2025
… Therefore, all Indians from the traditions originated in India can be identified with
Hindu and Hindutva. Hindutva, expresses the behavioral aspect of Hindus, making it
a nation whose basis is adherence to Dharma. It is uniting force. Those people who …

[HTML] Islamophobia in India: Building a new temple or demolishing a secular republic identity?

FK Sarıaslan
Hindutva ideology is a modern right-wing ultra-nationalist formulation first
mentioned in Savarkar’s 1923 book Hindutva. Hindutva ideology has perceived
Islam and Muslims as a “foreign power which is destroying the natural state of …

Otherizing of Muslims in the Islamophobic Narrative of India's Online Ecosystem Regarding the Gaza War

A Naseri Taheri - Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Communication …, 2025
… inhuman; drawing unrealistic parallels between events in India and Israel;
comparing terrorist attacks in India with the October 7 Hamas attack; aligning India's
historical struggles with those of Palestine; equating Gaza with Kashmir; and making …

[PDF] Examining Dalit Defiance and Solidarity against RSS'Hindu Nationalism in Bhanwar Meghwashi's Memoir I Could Not Be Hindu: The Story of a Dalit in the RSS

DGK Prakash Dhule
… The Hindutva project is good deal for the upper caste, since it effectively stands
for the restoration of the traditional social order that places them at the top. As one
might expect, the RSS is particularly popular among the upper castes. Its founders …

[PDF] Disrupting Core-Periphery Dynamics: Diasporic Spheres of Influence in International Relations

O Kadhum - The Routledge Handbook of Peripheries in European …, 2026
… The support for Trump has gained the Hindutva movement enormous clout with
Republicans, which has advanced their influence abroad … Thus, in a perverse
move, the diasporic Hindutva movement that has been transported from the …

[PDF] RHETORIC OF MEMORY AND POLITICS OF SPACE: A STUDY OF PARTITION STORIES OF BENGAL

N CHAKRABORTY - NEGOTIATIONS: An International Journal of Literary …, 2025
The paper examines four short stories on the Bengal partition - one written in the
direct aftermath of the Partition, the other two tracing displacement during 1971
Bangladesh Liberation War and the last story is set decades after the Partition – to …

India and Western Narrative Infrastructures: Reputational Power and Sovereignty, 2005-2025

AA Bhowmick - 2026
This thesis examines how Western narratives about India are assembled and how
they shape struggles over identity, protest, and sovereignty between 2005 and 2025.
It asks not who is right, but how some interpretations become authoritative and …

[PDF] Harmless Us, Dangerous Them

S Bouchafra - 2026
Along Hungary’s southern border stands a massive, barbed wire, four-metre-high
fence. This intimidating barrier is technologically strengthened with cameras,
thermal imaging and electronic alarm s 1–a “smart fence” that was built amidst the so-called …

Thursday, August 13, 2026

New powers have to be acquired by the body

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

Sri Aurobindo's visionary message on India's destiny - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra An Offering on 154th Birth Anniversary of Sri Aurobindo | Auro Kalakriti 1:02 Sri Aurobindo does not belong to the past n...
Don’t retreat, Burn brighter - Sapolsky begins by separating ordinary sadness from major depression. Everyone experiences disappointment, grief, discouragement, and periods of feeling...
Nothing get attached to nothing - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra Before Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose, there was Sokal. In 1996, he wrote a completely nonsensical paper on how phy...

Bergson pointed out that the molluscs in the order of evolution proceed by steady steps to develop an eye, which resembles very much the eye developed by the independent line of vertebrates. How does it happen, he asked, that similar effects appear in different lines of evolution brought about by different means? How could the same small variations occur in two independent lines of evolution if they were purely accidental? According to Bergson, the two series must have been governed by a common vital impulse to this useful end. There is something more in evolution than merely mechanical urge. He is inclined to attribute a ‘rudiment of choice’ to the species which, travelling by different paths, reach the same goal. Given a new situation, the ‘urge’ (elan vital), common to all members, leads them to meet it by a new method. According to Bergson, it is the inner urge, or life force, or an upward drive, that incites the whole species in a definite direction. The striving of the organism is the creative effort to which evolution is due.

The biological theory of evolution assumes that life always came from life. Herbert Spencer questioned this assumption and attempted to give a philosophical account of the rise of the living from the non-living, the mental from the non-mental. According to him, the differences between these are due to the degree of the complexity of the organization. But still the question why life should evolve out of Matter or in Matter is not explained. Why should life occur at all? The theory of the survival of the fittest does not carry us far. Life has little survival value as compared with matter from which it is supposed to have sprung. A rock survives for hundreds of millions of years, while even the oldest tree is only a few thousand years old. If survival was the aim of nature, life would never have appeared... 

Alexander’s philosophy is called the philosophy of emergent evolution. According to him, when physical structure assumes a certain complexity, life ‘emerges’ as something new. When the physical structure alters in complexity, as it does when it produces a central nervous system, mind emerges, and the gap between life and conscious behaviour is supposed to be covered. Alexander finds the explanation in a nisus or thirst of the universe for higher levels. It is the nisus that is creative, that satisfies the thirst.

But is nisus an unconscious drive coming by degrees to consciousness in man? Unless we assume the nisus to be a spiritual power ever drawing on its resources and ever expressing new forms, Alexander’s whole account becomes unsatisfactory.

Lloyd Morgan, who comes very close to Alexander in his account of emergent evolution, acknowledges God as the nisus through whose Activity emergents emerge, and the whole course of emergent evolution is directed. According to him, God is not the emergent deity, but an Activity within which qualities emerge. God is the breath of the whole movement, the deep root which feeds the whole tree. The course of history is the gradual coming of God to Himself. Lloyd Morgan contends that emergent evolution is not predictable. But it is not in the strict sense undetermined like Bergson’s creative evolution, not only unpredictable for human minds but, in principle, for all minds. Lloyd Morgan infers the coming of divinity from the purposeful direction of the universe, and he is inclined to make his God completely immanent. He maintains that the whole course of events subsumed under evolution is the expression of God’s purpose.

Lloyd Morgan is basically an adherent of Spinoza, and although he speaks of ‘emergence’ in the evolutionary process, one suspects that changes occur according to rule, and there is no spontaneity... 

‘Ingressive evolution’ is a phrase that aptly describes Whitehead’s theory. There is, according to Whitehead, a progressive ingression and incorporation into the cosmic series of the eternal order which God embraces in himself. The ‘primordial’ nature of God is the conceptual consciousness of the possibilities capable of harmonious concurrent realization. These possibilities are called by Whitehead ‘eternal objects’. They are eternal forms or ideas, to use the Platonic expression, but unlike Plato’s ideas, they are not substances, but possibilities, conceptually realized in God. They are not imaginary or abstract. Some of them are apprehended as possibilities logically prior to their manifestation in existence, and others as symbols of values that we pursue. The relation of form to the temporal world is that of potentialities to actualities. In the view of Whitehead, the temporary actualities realize the possibilities surveyed in God’s nature. The order and purpose we see in the world is the result of actuality fulfilling the highest possibilities it sees before itself, which is the vision of God as relevant for it. - Kireet Joshi 

http://kireetjoshi.in/books/philosophy/a-philosophy-of-evolution-for-the-contemporary-man/a-deeper-question

Sri Aurobindo acknowledges that all does not have to be fundamentally changed; on the contrary, all that is still needed in the totality has to be preserved, but all has to be perfected. ‘The human body has’, says Sri Aurobindo, ‘in it parts and instruments that have been sufficiently evolved to serve the divine life; these have to survive in their form, though they must be still farther perfected, their limitation of range and use removed, their liability to defect and malady and impairment eliminated, their capacities to cognition and dynamic action carried beyond the present limits ‘ On the other hand, new powers have also to be acquired by the body which our present humanity could not hope to realize, could not even dream of or could only imagine. - Kireet Joshi

http://kireetjoshi.in/books/philosophy/a-philosophy-of-evolution-for-the-contemporary-man/an-experiment-in-evolution 

Being caught talking to yourself can feel embarrassing, but decades of research shows that most of us engage in some form of self-talk every day. Digging into the science, this animation explores self-talk in its many manifestations and outlines how it can be beneficial buff.ly/aqyKPZU 

https://bsky.app/profile/aeon.co/post/3msxgso33oo23 

We should all nod quietly to the existential lie that all cultures are equal whilst recognizing apparently that all cultures are indeed superior to the West.  No!  The West in general and the United States in particular are unique civilizations.  Historically speaking, people did not have the right to criticize their rulers.  They did not have the right to practice any religion or no religion.  They did not have the right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness as codified in the Declaration of Independence.  The fabric of a nation and its greatness is not defined by the majesty of its shoreline or its mountain ranges.  What makes a nation great, or not, are the organizing principles that define that society.  

https://x.com/i/status/2087518255204208889

7 hours ago — Few works of modern spiritual philosophy rival Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine in ambition. Published in revised form in 1939-40 after first appearing ...

FLAVORS OF ADVAITA IN VIVEKANANDA, RABINDRANATH, AND SRI AUROBINDO

D Banerji - Praise for Swami Vivekananda: His Life, Legacy, and …
… , Aurobindo Ghosh, aka Sri Aurobindo, … Aurobindo was also intimately
connected to the Brahmo Samaj, though he did not think of himself as a Brahmo—his
mother was a daughter of Rajnarain Bose, one of the important stalwarts of the …

The Origin of Indian Nationalism: Mazzini's Influence on Savarkar, Gandhi and other Freedom Fighters

MK Oza - 2026
This thesis examines the ideological and intellectual influence of Giuseppe Mazzini,
the Italian revolutionary nationalist, on Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a central and
contested figure in the articulation of Hindutva and militant Indian nationalism …

Humanism in Cinema: The Work of Satyajit Ray

R Maloni - Critical Social Science Perspectives on Indian Cinema
… Ray’s ideology also recalls Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo’s Vedantism.
Certain parallels may be observed in the works of Tagore and Ray, in portraying the
restless reformism of the Bengal Renaissance. It was Tagore’s concept of India that …

[PDF] Politics of Control in Orwell's 1984: Education, Surveillance, and Authoritarian Legitimacy in South Asia

FH Meem, NN Afra, MA Maruf - Journal of Literature and Linguistics Studies, 2025
… Comparable trends appear in India, where textbook revisions under Hindutva
ideology reshape historical narratives, and in Pakistan, where online propaganda
and surveillance mirror the Party’s slogan,“Big Brother is watching you.” The …

[PDF] Personal Peace Practices, Skills, and Competencies

A Lincoln, N Mandela - Fostering Hope in a Divided World
The reviewed personal peace leadership literature demonstrated that peace leaders
often share core embodied traits, characteristics, and behaviors that support their
efficacy in promoting peace and resolving conflict among communities and structures …

[PDF] Fostering Hope through Peace Leadership: A Reflective Review of the Field

WMI Miller, CS Clancy - International Journal for Peace and Justice, 2026
This reflective review posits that the emergent area of peace leadership may be the
beacon of hope needed in a world riddled with conflict and divisiveness. Exploring
over 60 pieces of peace leadership literature, this review highlights the skills …

[HTML] Contemporary Issues in Bioethics

RB Deokar, RC Dere, P Arora - Journal of Indian Academy of Forensic Medicine, 2026
Bioethics is a branch of applied ethics that deals with the interdisciplinary study of
social, philosophical, and legal issues arising in life sciences, medicine, technology,
nonhuman biological environment, and public policy. 1 It mainly focuses on the …

Redefining spiritual leadership: the growing role of women

S Chauhan, S Vashist, K Sharma - Organizational Resilience and Leadership issues in …
This paper argues the growing role of women in spiritual spheres as leaders through
the analysis of past and present. It also highlights the critique of patriarchal spiritual
structures and the tension between spiritual equality and institutional exclusion with …

CHARITY FOR OUR FAMILY GODDESS:: The Marwaris And A Caste Association In Colonial India

T Tanaka - The Indonesian Journal of Social Studies, 2025
This study analyzes the Kedia Sabha (association for the Kedia lineage) as a case
study for historical analysis on how an Indian merchant community, known as
Marwaris, described themselves through managing a caste association and …

[PDF] Provincialising English”: Northeast India as an Ethnopolitan Space

J Prodhani, D Sharma - Rupkatha Journal, 2025
Obiajunwa Wali predicted in the early 1960s that African literature could only
emerge in African languages. However, in the late 1980s, African literature in
English emerged as a new canon. Even the debate between Ngugi wa Thiong’o and …

Selected Speeches, Writings and Statements

M Bose, B Bose - Sarat Chandra Bose, A Vision Denied
I thank the President, for having done me the honour of calling me to reply. I express
my keen disappointment at the selection of the speaker on this subject. 1 I would
have expected the persons who had recently come out with suggestions of …