What is suicide?

Is Socrates, drinking hemlock at the state’s command, a suicide? Is the soldier who throws himself on a grenade to protect civilian counted as one? The spy who swallows cyanide rather than speak? The 108-year-old woman in chronic pain who ends her life? The Japanese samurai who sliced his own stomach to take responsibility? Are all of these acts to be gathered under a single definition—and, if so, are they all to be read as mental illness or clinically depressed?

Has prohibiting ways of speaking ever enlarged understanding? It rarely has.

In societies that pride themselves on pluralism and freedom of thought, it is striking how readily a single authorized language for suicide is accepted.

For a species capable of using mathematics to predict the oscillations of quantum fields, we remain perplexingly ignorant to our own cognition. We possess no canonical framework for curiosity, no prescriptive law for envy, no generally sanctioned account of how a child extrapolates grammar from the detritus of everyday speech.

In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Joseph Alois Schumpeter delivers a deliberately unsentimental anatomy of modern capitalism, stripping it of equilibrium fantasies. For all the virtues he attributes to capitalism, Schumpeter is unambiguous in his expectation that it will eventually exhaust itself and give way to socialism. He rejects Marx’s historical materialism and the crude determinism of class struggle, yet arrives at a similarly unsettling destination: capitalism, he argues, is perfectly capable of engineering its own demise.

By now, the familiar indictments of capitalism have become a litany: the widening gulf between the affluent and the struggling, the rise of corporate monopolies, recurrent financial crises, the fading myth of the invisible hand, and the perceived failure of markets to deliver broad prosperity.

Millennials, the cohort poised to assume the reins of power, have largely internalised this narrative—convinced of capitalism’s ailments, which, in my view, have mostly stood beyond dispute, yet perhaps too certain of their provenance.

The human species is condemned to possess an advanced intellect, one that renders it painfully aware of its own inevitable death. As beings perpetually stalked by the specter of mortality, humans are ensnared in an unrelenting existential paradox. At its core, the catalyst of human behavior is the insatiable pursuit of dominion over the intrinsic and all-encompassing terror of death.

How though? Humans are forced to accept the inevitability of physical death, because there’s no denial available. Yet, we are very imaginative creatures, so in our relentless avoidance of mortality, in our aversion to finality, in seeking to deny the uncomfortable death at all cost, we place high hopes on other forms of eternity— whether that be building empires to leave a legacy, to devote ourselves to religion so we go to heaven, or to become the hero and fight the evils in order to create meanings for our lives.

Land decides what unifies and what divides. This is specifically true for India. Geography has influenced both the nation’s cohesion and its remarkable heterogeneity. The vast, predominantly flat countryside, fosters a sense of uniformity across regions, subtly reinforcing an intrinsic unity despite the manifold linguistic, cultural, and regional disparities. However, geography also acts as a potent demarcating force. The Himalayas, that towering natural bastion between India and the rest of Asia, not only shield the subcontinent but also preserve its spiritual and cultural integrity, epitomized by their reverence as the abode of the gods. Likewise, the Western Ghats, with their rugged escarpments, have significantly shaped India’s political history, particularly in facilitating the rise of the Maratha Empire, which utilized the mountains as a strategic stronghold against Mughal encroachment. These geographical barriers have decisively influenced the movement of trade, migration, and military campaigns, thereby shaping India’s political evolution.

In the book Paper Soldiers: How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order, the author Saleha Mohsin delineates how the United States has finessed the artifice of economic subversion, deploying sanctions with annihilating precision, crippling entire economies without firing a single shot.

“Cogito ergo sum”, or “I think therefore I am.”

Descartes captured this concept with his famous line. This phrasing may lead to misinterpretation. Descartes did not posit that his existence hinges entirely on his capacity to think. He aimed to address the nature of knowledge: He was certain of his thought processes, of his consciousness—and from this certitude, he deduced his existence. The indisputable awareness of one's existence as a conscious entity served as the foundational pillar of all knowledge.

Consciousness stands as the most undeniable certainty, yet it proves to be the most challenging to integrate into our scientific framework. We navigate reality through the prism of consciousness, and paradoxically, when compared with the significant strides science has made in explaining other phenomena, it becomes evident that our comprehension of consciousness remains disappointingly limited.

Terrorists live and die by media attention. Devoid of public exposure for their grievances and actions, terrorists are unable to instill the fear necessary to enact political changes and attract fresh adherents to their cause. It's not surprising then, that the rise of mass media throughout Europe and the United States, coupled with the installation of telegraph cables capable of transmitting news worldwide during the 1850s and 1860s, coincided with a trend where violent radicals, upon reading of each other's attacks, found inspiration for emulation.

Do states act rationally?

It has become commonplace for American leaders to dismiss their foreign adversaries as “irrational”. At some point over the past twenty-five years, Saddam Hussein, Mahmound Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong-un, and Vladimir Putin, among others, have been branded “irrational”, “illogical”, “crazy”, “delusional”, or “mad”, and in some cases they have been likened to Adolf Hitler, who is often portrayed as the poster child of irrationality.

Whether this imprudent habit is to achieve political propaganda or American leaders truly believe their enemies are most often irrational, their view has vastly influenced the academic circles of traditional international relation.

Typically, the word “Great” conjures notions of positivity.

Not so much in economics.

In the tumultuous realm of economics, its connotations are often far from uplifting.

From the seismic shockwaves of the Great Depression to the mercurial odyssey of the Great Inflation, history demonstrated that Great isn’t always that great.

Amidst these tempestuous chapters, one constant presence has loomed large: The Federal Reserve. As the custodian of monetary policy in the United States, the Fed has served as the linchpin in shaping the trajectory of these defining epochs. Good or bad, great or foul.

Blackmail is a crime.

Blackmail is a crime. Why though?

The mere act of revealing true information about others is not necessarily criminal, not even if it can cause harm, not even if it is disclosed with malicious intent. Likewise, the act of selling and negotiation does not inherently transgress legal boundaries. It is only when we combine the former and latter then it constitutes a crime. So why is something a crime? What philosophical justifications lie at the heart of our legal framework when we deliberate its formation and application?