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?

The cryptocurrency boom ended in frauds and fines. The revolution in digital asset is grinding on nonetheless. Banks and institutional money managers have long been intrigued by the scope for efficiency gains from using the technology underlying crypto — the shared immutable digital ledger, or blockchain.

Blockchain. The term has frequented my perusal of news articles, creating the illusion of familiarity, although the precise extent of my comprehension remains elusive.

“You can’t blame someone who doesn’t know,”  a Chinese proverb asserted.

Except in fact, you can…

Wilful blindness first emerged as a legal concept in the nineteenth century. The English judicial authorities referred to the state of mind that accompanied one who “wilfully shut his eyes” as “connivance’ or “constructive knowledge”. Since then, lots of other phrases came into play – deliberate or wilful ignorance, conscious avoidance and deliberate indifference. What they all had in common is the idea that there is an opportunity for knowledge, and a responsibility to be informed, but it is shirked.

Things have changed.

There were no blaring sirens or flashing beacons to herald the change, nor were there thunderous drums or resounding trumpets to announce it, yet a discernable shift has indeed occurred.

Traditional notion of masculinity is no longer celebrated.

Men now find themselves operating within progressively narrower boundaries.

What defines human mind? How is knowledge attainable? What is reason? Is logic universal? What constitutes truth? Whence do moral values emerge?

These perennial inquiries have occupied the central stage of Western philosophy for centuries.

Philosophers, in grappling with these questions, have traditionally anchored their explorations in certain assumptions— namely, the conviction in our ability to comprehend our minds through introspection, the notion that our contemplation of the world is predominantly literal, and the belief that reason is both disembodied and universal.

Yet, the veracity of these bedrock assumptions finds itself under scrutiny in the face of established findings in cognitive science.

The mind is inherently embodied.

Thought is mostly unconscious.

Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

Today’s Western civilization is usually envisioned as the culmination of past triumphs, tracing lineage from classical Greece and Rome as progressive leaps from the near Eastern palatial economies to Western Europe. Adopting this self-congratulatory perspective, contemporary institutions such as individualism and the security of credit and property contracts are traced back to classical antiquity as flawless, positive evolutionary developments, steering civilization away from what is labeled as “Oriental Despotism”.

Yet, the reality is that Rome’s predatory oligarchies waged five centuries of civil war to deprive populations of liberty, blocking popular opposition to harsh pro-creditor laws and the monopolization of the land into latifundia estates. But the dynamics that drove labor into clientage and ultimately into serfdom have been downplayed by modern historiography that focuses more on Rome’s military conquests and biographies of its leading consuls and emperors than on its struggles over debt and land tenure. The verdict is merciless: What impoverished the population of the Roman Empire bequeathed a creditor-based body of legal principles to the modern world.

Poetry tells us that time “passes”, it moves like a river, inexorably dragging us with it, and, in the end, washes us up on its shore while it continues. Metaphor tells us time is money, a commodity for us to budget, invest, spend, or waste. Language tells us time has volition: it flies, drags, stands still. The verbs alone suggest that we have always understood time as subjective, something experienced according to individual circumstance.

Yet, between past and future, cause and effect, memory and hope, regret and intention … in the physics elementary laws that describe the mechanism of the world, apparently there is no such difference.

Clock time, is an illusion…according to Einstein.

Adam Smith. We’ve all heard of him and his invisible hands. Smith was a revered professor of moral philosophy, the ultimate establishment figure of the early Scottish Enlightenment, and is now often hailed as the founding father of capitalism. In contrast, David Hume, though widely regarded as the most important philosopher ever to write in English, during his lifetime was labelled as the Great Infidel, notorious for his skeptical religious views and deemed unfit to be teaching. Remarkably, these iconic thinkers were in fact best friends!

Benjamin Franklin’s observation to a woman that the United States was “a republic, if you can keep it” has become so ubiquitous that its original foreboding tone has almost been lost entirely. The phrase in our own day has become almost a cheerful maternal admonition. Yet, the Revolutionary generation that wrote the United States Constitution and shaped the American republic’s regime treated the phrase not so much as a kindly or triumphalist admonition, but as a threat with consequences that were near at hand.