Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra
We think that substance dualism separates the mind from the body in an irreconcilable way. | iai.tv/articles/the-m… This is the view that has been criticised by phenomenology – most staunchly by Heidegger. However, professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto Tarek Dika argues that this misses a crucial part of Descartes' philosophy, namely that the mind and body are fundamentally united.
https://x.com/IAI_TV/status/2114697309376147480
Neils Bohr, Tesla, Oppenheimer, Jung, Schopenhauer, Schrodinger, Emerson, Huxley, Twain, Hesse, Heisenberg... You can name an entire list of highly influential people who love Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Bhrama Sutras (Prasthanatrayi) and say great things about them.
https://x.com/aravind/status/1904395268893610088
Among history’s most memorable are Neil Gaiman on making good art, Debbie Millman on courage and the creative life, Judith Butler on the value of reading and the humanities, Oprah on failure and finding your purpose, Greil Marcus on the essence of art, Joss Whedon on embracing our inner contradictions, Bill Watterson on creative integrity, and more fantastic speeches by Ann Patchett, Jacqueline Novogratz, David Foster Wallace, Ellen DeGeneres, Aaron Sorkin, Barack Obama, Ray Bradbury, J. K. Rowling, Steve Jobs, Robert Krulwich, Meryl Streep, and Jeff Bezos...
prolific poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940–January 28, 1996) took the podium at Ann Arbor and addressed the graduating class at the University of Michigan with one of the most beautiful and timeless commencement speeches ever given, offering six invaluable pieces of wisdom on good-personhood and the meaning of life. It lay dormant for nearly a decade, considered too provocative for publication, until it was finally transcribed and included in the 1997 anthology On Grief and Reason: Essays (public library) under the title “Speech at the Stadium.”
https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/12/18/joseph-brodsky-speech-at-the-stadium-commencement/
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2114504785831338109
Why do imported reforms so often fail in the Third World? Because schools, elections, and technology do not create truthfulness, conscience, trust, or self-command. Without those foundations, institutions are captured by the culture beneath them.
https://x.com/JayantBhandari5/status/2114605760336539844
Chesterton’s fence applies. A custom can look crude and still have been a restraint in a low-trust world. Remove it before truthfulness, self-command, reliable police, and impartial courts exist, and you replace one predation with another. Delayed marriage without sexual restraint or enforcement creates pressures the culture cannot hold. Freedom of movement without safe streets is exposure. Procedural advantage in caste or gender cases, where truth has little standing, can become a weapon.
When the primitive mind undergoes acculturation through contact with the West, it absorbs the outer forms without the inner discipline. It learns the words, gestures, institutional façades, technologies, and moral slogans, often using them more vociferously than Westerners themselves, but it does not absorb the truth-orientation and virtues that made them possible.
Culturally, the primitive mind tends to absorb the lowest and most performative aspects of Western culture, because these are what its eyes can see and its inner life can recognize... This is one reason older missionaries understood the problem better than modern reformers. Whatever their errors, many lived close to the people they hoped to change—hardship corrected theory; reality disciplined sentiment. The serious missionary understood that reform was not merely institutional, economic, or administrative. It required the transformation of the soul.
The modern reformer is the opposite: raised in safety, educated in abstractions, and employed by bureaucracies that reward slogans, metrics, and moral exhibitionism. He sees equality, empowerment, inclusion, democracy, and development as technical projects. He does not see the substratum. He does not understand that without truthfulness, conscience, self-command, and moral ambition, reform merely gives the unreformed psyche new instruments.
https://counter-currents.com/2026/09/why-imported-reform-fails-in-the-third-world/
Origin
- Author: Coined by English writer G.K. Chesterton in his 1929 book The Thing, specifically in the chapter "The Drift from Domesticity". [2, 3]
- The Parable: Chesterton imagines a reformer who encounters a fence built across a road. The reformer thinks it serves no purpose and decides to tear it down. Chesterton notes that a wise person will instead ask what the fence is doing there first; only after learning its purpose (such as keeping livestock separated or away from danger) should one consider modifying it. [4, 5]
Core Takeaway
- Respect Legacy Context: Existing rules or traditions often solve problems that are no longer obvious on the surface. [6]
- Avoid Unintended Consequences: Rushing to fix or dismantle something without research frequently leads to worse problems than the original state. [1, 7]
- Burden of Proof: The person who wants to tear down or change the system must first prove they understand its original utility. [3]
- GoogleAI
Ernst Bloch expresses this point well: “The world-substance, mundane matter itself, is not yet finished and complete, but persists in a utopian-open state, i.e., a state in which its self-identity is not yet manifest” (1970, 96). The world (Jaspers uses the symbol “the Encompassing” and Tillich often uses the symbol “God” or sometimes “the God beyond God”) is one dynamic dimension embracing many dualities embracing and intersecting our lifeworlds. As Jaspers puts our experience in relation to the Encompassing: “the situation in which we first authentically experience being qua being as something given to us incomprehensible, impenetrable, something that precedes all thinking and comes to meet us” (1971, 58).
What Tillich calls “symbols” Jaspers often terms “cyphers.” The cypher involves what I am calling “Word,” the dimension of language and meaning, but at the same time mysticism: direct awareness of unsayable absolute mystery to which the cipher points. For Jaspers, “The World and everything that occurs within it is a mystery.” All superstition and “mania for mystery” end “where genuine astonishment begins. Philosophy illuminates the mystery and brings it completely into consciousness. It begins with astonishment and increases the astonishment” (1959, 37).
Symbols and ciphers, forming a large part of language, point beyond language to what Tillich calls “the dimension of depth.” We must “be grasped by” that which is symbolized by this phrase. Tillich affirms that, “No one can experience depth without stopping and becoming aware of himself. Only if he has moments in which he does not care about what comes next can he experience the meaning of this moment here and now and ask himself about the meaning of his life” (1987, 3).
https://www.preprints.org/frontend/manuscript/46fa7169869bb84cfdf8fe7aa386ebeb/download_pub
“Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.” ― Aldous Huxley
https://x.com/OutlawsPoetic/status/2114387136065527947
“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.” ― Aldous Huxley
https://x.com/OutlawsPoetic/status/2113679145846624558
'Those who love only the sweet are incapable of knowledge. Knowledge can bestow on us moments of joy and of highest elation, but the fruits of knowledge are bitter. In our world-aeon, knowledge means exile from Eden, the loss of...bliss' —Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man
https://x.com/OutlawsPoetic/status/2114163053662978388
“Gradually, as the universe took its present form, the weakening human imagination was slowly pushed down and contracted into its present helpless state. Yet gigantic energies still remain in men, imprisoned, but struggling to be free.” —Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry
https://x.com/OutlawsPoetic/status/2113258158315667701
"The American middle class's faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources." --Nelson Algren
https://x.com/OutlawsPoetic/status/2112268748878954800
There's nothing wrong with wanting a comfortable life. But when comfort becomes more important than curiosity, we risk missing the very things that make life worth living. Sometimes the best experiences begin when we step outside what feels safe.
https://x.com/nicknackpaddy71/status/2112274493510992101
[PDF] Secularism in India in the Modern Age: Constitutional Foundations, Judicial Interpretations, and Contemporary Challenges
as it was … the electoral use of the idea of 'Hindutva' and insulated the dominant
religious narrative from … The ruling of Hindutva is now law, and it continues to …
Biryani, non-veg and Durga Puja–why food politics may backfire in Bengal
coincides with the rise of the BJP and Hindutva forces. … Unlike before, the
Hindutva forces are not calling for a ban on non-vegetarian food, as such a call …
'Abd al-Hadi, Husni, 123 Abdul Majid, Syed HR, 236 Abdur Rahim, 78–80, 119, 234–5 Abu al-'Afiyah, Darwish, 123 Abu Sittit, Ahmad Hishmat, 312–13
Another method of defending Hindu law from the charge of inequality was to question the desirability of equality itself. In his 1958 book, Pal referenced the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche.Footnote53 Indeed, Pal devoted several pages of that work to a summary of Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian stance (based, it seems, on a chapter in a popular book, Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy), discussing Nietzsche’s admiration for the Laws of Manu, and repeating Nietzsche’s anti-democratic and anti-Christian ideas.Footnote54 The allusion to Nietzsche’s thought, it seems, was meant to imply that inequality was not merely a characteristic of ancient societies and ancient law.Footnote55
Periodicals Not Available in Listed Databases
primary and secondary sources used in writing this book (excluding most
newspaper articles and some encyclopaedia entries). Archives Archive of the …
Anuradha Bhasin, A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After
Their suffering has been compounded not only by the follies of their own leaders but
also by the manipulations of outsiders. The decisive rupture came on August 5, 2019 …
[PDF] Erratum: Populism and territoriality
Modi's mobilization of Hindutva both cast politics as civilizational restoration and the
recovery of imagined lost grandeur, albeit through different historical and …
Magnifica Humanitas: Reflections from an Asian Perspective.
and Tribal peoples, and refugees persists, as the ethno-nationalist political ideology
Hindutva seeks to define India’s cultural identity exclusively in terms of Hinduism. …
[PDF] FADING FRANKINCENSE: READING CULTURE IN
Mosque.’ ‘Yes, but that was –’ ‘And what about all the hatred of minorities that Shiv
Sena has spread for the last thirty years.’ (Mistry 32) …
[PDF] DISCOVERING THE CHANGING DIMENSIONS OF DEMOCRACY AND INDIAN POLITICS
property, the quality of living standard of citizens in Indian society has some
differences in practices. Politics and elections in India, as in the India of the 1930s …
Adebowale Akande
maintain power, often relying on military force and claiming to have significant
popular backing (Applebaum, 2024; Bakhtin, 1984; Baranovitch, 2021; Baym, 2010; …
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