What do reactions to Trump’s return reveal about the scope and limits of political imagination and thought? Then as Tragedy: The Meaning of the Return of Trump FOAD HABIBI 31 July 2025 PHILOSOPHY POLITICS Article PDF Detail “The Rainmaker” by Mike Hartung; Image credit: Kansas Reflector What do reactions to Trump’s return reveal about the scope and limits of political imagination and thought? Might we leverage these analyses to explore the very heart of the predicament, that is the tragic return of a phenomenon which—inverting the famous Hegelian-Marxist dictum—was welcomed as farce the first time, but now signals the tragedy of the anti-politics of populism and the necropolitics of fascism? Finally, is it truly possible to confront the return of this phenomenon with active passion and reason rather than retreating into lamentation, despair, or cries of agony? The authors raise and address these questions by engaging with Henry Giroux, Slavoj Zizek, and Deleuze and Guattari. How should we decipher Trump’s return? How do we explain the re-election of a statesman who persistently tramples over the conventional ethical and practical boundaries of politics? Why do his flaws, gaffes, and scandals seem to have no effect on voters? There are many concerns, and hence analyses. Why do these analyses fail to open new avenues for us? Perhaps the less-posed question has insights to offer: how can we scrutinize these analyses themselves as pathways to understanding not just Trump’s re-emergence, but his seemingly inevitable return? What do reactions to Trump’s return reveal about the scope and limits of political imagination and thought? Might we leverage these analyses to explore the very heart of the predicament, that is the tragic return of a phenomenon which—inverting the famous Hegelian-Marxist dictum—was welcomed as farce the first time, but now signals the tragedy of the anti-politics of populism and the necropolitics of fascism? Finally, is it truly possible to confront the return of this phenomenon with active passion and reason rather than retreating into lamentation, despair, or cries of agony? In this regard, Kamran Baradaran and Anthony Ballas, for instance, offer a particularly incisive intervention. In their essay “Against the Political Stasis, or the Story of a Fall,” (1) they argue that the January 6th attack on Capitol Hill should not be dismissed as a failed coup or a moment of collective irrationality but understood as “an actual fascist threat.” More importantly, they draw on Mohan and Dwivedi’s concept of ‘stasis’ (2) to highlight a paralyzing “stasis of thought and imagination” within liberal and progressive institutions, which prevents any effective response to the rise of the far right. Their reading urges us to consider not only the fascist tendencies of Trumpism, but the broader incapacity of our intellectual and political frameworks to grasp and resist such phenomena. So, the real danger, they suggest, lies not in Trump’s return per se, but in the interpretive impotence that renders this return thinkable, even normalizable. To test such a hypothesis, we must look beyond the numerous “expert” analyses regarding the glaring and fatal flaws of the Democrats’ campaign—focusing on identity politics, ignoring the impact of inflation, failing to mobilize marginalized and lower-income groups, and so on. Instead, let us examine two dominant and prominent perspectives within critical thought: the viewpoint of classical leftism and that of radical leftism. These perspectives—one grounded in the dichotomy of “true consciousness/false consciousness” and the other in the binary of “volition/weakness,” or, to put it differently, the idealism of awareness versus the materialism of power—seek to uncover the secret behind Trump’s renewed dominance. Thus, we will proceed by analyzing the writings of two leading intellectual figures representing these currents—Henry Giroux and Slavoj Žižek—examining their subtleties and implications. Our aim is to show that these analyses reveal not only the reasons behind Trump’s dominance but also the failures of his opposition and their ideological camps. Henry Giroux, in his essay “America’s Descent into Fascism Can Be Stopped”, (3) interprets Trump’s victory as a symptom of a societal malady—a disease resulting from the “savage spread of fascism in America,” which he equates with the rise of “neoliberal authoritarianism” both in the U.S. and globally. He traces the roots of this condition to what he has repeatedly emphasized in his work as the “neglect of education as a form of critical and civic literacy” and its role in “critical and civic literacy and the role it plays in raising mass consciousness and fostering an energized collective movement.” Building upon this foundational idea, Giroux formulates his critique of the inadequate state of education and the urgent need to address its shortcomings. In his view, “cultural imaginaries and persuasion” play a pivotal role in enabling Trumpists to systematically and, unfortunately, effectively “destroy historical awareness as a fundamental element of civic education.” Giroux criticizes the Democrats, specifically Bernie Sanders, for failing to address the “systemic issues.” The root of it lies in “a widespread moral collapse,” particularly within “educational systems”: “For decades, the right wing has weaponized cultural pedagogy to convince white, Latinx, and Black workers to betray their own interests, connecting them to authoritarian communities and white supremacy ideologies. This strategy exploits their sense of alienation while eroding any sense of critical agency.” Continuing along these lines, Giroux underscores how, unlike liberals, the New Right (or, as he terms it, “reactionary conservatives”) has pursued a “long-term strategy,” recognizing “the transformative power of ideas” by weaponizing culture to “distort the public consciousness.” This strategy deliberately fosters “mass ignorance and the lack of civic literacy,” not as unintended consequences but as “engines” of its political machinery, ensuring that even the most Subordinated groups ignore economic injustice, instead succumbing to “a collective spectacle of hatred and bigotry”: “This manufactured ignorance and herd-like submission is more than just an obstacle to rational thinking; it is a political weapon that renders society’s most vulnerable compliant and fragmented.” Given this socio-political pathological diagnosis, it is unsurprising that Giroux proposes countering fascism or authoritarianism (terms he uses interchangeably) through a counter-culture emphasizing critical civic education: “If we are to counter this fascist tide, we must immediately employ tools to rebuild public consciousness as a prerequisite for an inclusive movement.” This approach, which Giroux equates with “rethinking the foundations of culture, politics, struggle, and education,” calls for “fundamentally altering our approach to theory, pedagogy, and the emancipatory power of learning.” This framework by Giroux represents a polished version of the classic analytical structure often referred to as the “hypothesis of deception.” This hypothesis has been one of the oldest and, undoubtedly, most prevalent ideas employed by intellectuals—both on the left and the right—over decades and even centuries to critique collective trends and decisions. To risk a slight oversimplification, we can summarize this hypothesis as follows: contemporary societies are mass collectives, and dominant political currents, through the media and cultural-educational apparatuses, often succeed in deceiving these masses, leading them to adopt “false consciousness” instead of achieving “true awareness.” Consequently, the masses prioritize the “fabricated interests” constructed by others over their own “real interests.” Undoubtedly, the left and right versions of this hypothesis differ significantly, sometimes fundamentally, but they all share certain core elements: (1) the centrality of consciousness; (2) the mass nature of society; (3) the vulnerability of these masses; (4) the corruptive and misleading role of dominant media; (5) the necessity of emancipatory intervention by intellectuals; (6) the importance of relentless critique of existing false consciousness; and (7) the need for fundamental transformation in the realm of consciousness. Yet, this hypothesis faces a foundational problem from the outset: if consciousness is the cornerstone of human understanding and action, why, for instance, has Trump’s overt hostility toward the marginalized—women, minorities, and the underprivileged—not led to a widespread rejection of him, particularly among these groups, especially after eight years of public and political infamy? Detail “Unbound”, by Shiva Ahmadi, 2023; Image credit: UC Davis. This is where the more complex and innovative analysis of Slavoj Žižek, “ The Left Must Start from Zero ” (4) , offers a way out of the hypothesis of deception. Žižek identifies the current moment as a sort of “ground zero” for the left—a point from which it must accept that it starts anew, as the real issue at hand is not merely the triumph of the right but the failure of the left. As expected, Žižek begins by contrasting the stark, uncompromising politics of Trump with the "nonpolitics or antipolitics" or lack of politics embodied by Kamala Harris. Drawing upon his long-held thesis regarding the necessity of a “leftist Thatcher,” he argues that “What Democrats failed to learn from Trump is that, in a political battle, ‘extremism’ works.” However, Žižek wisely cautions against portraying Harris or the Democratic leadership as genuinely leftist, noting that this caricature is a right-wing strategy to demonize opponents. At best, Democrats are the elite defenders of a “liberal order” enamoured of the political centre. Going further, Žižek begins his deconstruction of Trump’s renewed successby asking the precise and pressing question: why, despite relatively sound economic performance under Biden, did “a considerable majority of Americans perceive their economic predicament as dire?” Naturally, Žižek turns to ideology—but not in the classical sense. Instead, he approaches it in terms of “how political discourse functions as a social link” This leads him to the concept of “identification,” a process through which even Trump’s weaknesses bolster his popularity among ordinary people. It would be a mistake to assume that the contradiction between Trump’s ideological message (defending conservative values) and his public persona (unethical and anti-conventional), representing a postmodernist performative logic, would be a destructive contradiction destined for collapse. On the contrary, it is precisely this paradoxical personality and behaviour that enables the construction of an identity that is simultaneously reactionary and postmodern—a point of reference with which any “ordinary people who appear decent and talk in a normal, rational way” can align their own identity. Hence, the endless fact-checking and exposés by liberals about Trump’s lies and scandals do little more than reinforce and expand this common identification with Trump who, paradoxically, is actually farther from such people than anyone else. Žižek astutely critiques the self-righteous liberal disdain for the poor supporting one of the most unabashed champions of elite-friendly economic policies. More incisively, he finds the leftist response even worse: “They adopt a patronizing attitude, ‘understanding’ the confusion and ignorance of the poor from a position of superiority.” Hence, one must avoid outright dismissal of Trump and his modus operandi. Every one of his actions is part of “a populist strategy to sell this agenda to ordinary people”—an agenda that is, ironically, entirely against their interests. What the left must learn from this situation is to embrace and confront the challenge that has long been before it: to abandon the position of the Beautiful Soul, overcome the fear of appearing radical, and, consequently, act radically. This is the only viable strategy to resist the gradual yet enduring tragedy of Trumpism—a period that, devoid of farce, could indeed “mark the true end of what was most valuable in our civilization.” Žižek, therefore, eschews an emphasis on education and consciousness, turning instead to the political in its Hobbesian-Schmittian sense: a cold and brutal engagement that pursues conflict through the friend/enemy dichotomy to its ultimate conclusion. This approach stands in opposition to the “culturalization of politics” favored by critics of ideology, opting instead for the “politicization of culture.” It avoids the labyrinth of consciousness, refuses to reduce the populace to a vulnerable mass, and ultimately champions a radical, popular form of politics over the overt elitism of emancipatory educational projects. However, if this is the issue and that is the solution, why did Trump’s governance during his first term, contrary to Žižek’s expectations and aspirations, fail to trigger “a great awakening”? (5) Could it be that framing the problem in terms of a lack of true consciousness (and the necessity of critical civic education) or the absence of sufficient volition (and the defense of autonomy of the political) ultimately reduces both perspectives to two sides of the same coin—a neglect of the real and undeniable existence of the tragedy itself? Do these analyses, despite their differences, ultimately interpret the situation not through the lens of equivalence between 'perfection and reality', but in terms of absence, deficiency, and lack? This, in essence, reflects an ontology more aptly described as “non-ontology.” Reframing the Analysis: From Lack to Affirmation If we wish to move beyond these negative interpretations, how might we address the issue at hand? And, crucially, how might we open a pathway toward critique and transformation? Here, the principle of realism offers guidance: we must acknowledge and recognize what has occurred exactly as it is, without recourse to notions of absence, lack, or deficiency. There is no vacuum, no void at work. What we face is not "false consciousness," lack of will, or any form of psychological or physical inadequacy; rather, it is a distinct type of consciousness and volition—one that must be accepted and understood in its full reality, even and especially as we want to critique it. This moment marks the separation of ethics from morality, of politics from Satire. Ethical-politics, rooted in affirmation, focuses not on what “ought to be” but on what “is,” with any alternative it proposes arising organically from the very fabric of just this being itself. With this in mind, the essential question shifts: what “is,” rather than what “is not”? Put differently, if we focus on presence rather than absence to explain the phenomenon before us, what conclusions might we reach? And, more importantly, what fundamental logic underpins this situation? If we resist the temptation to search for deeper, hidden layers and instead begin at the so-called surface of appearances, the tragic return of the farce might confront us with one of the oldest and most crucial questions in modern political philosophy, as Spinoza articulates: “Why do people fight for their servitude as if for their freedom?” How is it that masses of people, despite overwhelming evidence of the catastrophic consequences of their choices (even without presuming the alternative is necessarily much better), 'voluntarily' step forward to embrace a figure whose every action, decision, and statement undermines their agency? Or, to phrase it more directly and provocatively: what is the secret of this desire for the master, for servitude, for a paternal figure (albeit not protective, but, as Žižek tend to insists, vulgar) that persists despite endless exposés, warnings, and resistance? Detail “For the First Time in a Long Time”, installation by Sarah Abu Abdallah; Image credit: Kunstverein Hamburg. From Étienne de La Boétie to Schizoanalysis: The Desire for Servitude From Étienne de La Boétie, the pioneer of this line of inquiry, to the present, many have grappled with this enigma of why humans desire their own servitude. De La Boétie eloquently pointed to the power of habit, the institutional machinery of the state, and the seductive allure of entertainment. Contemporaneous with him, Machiavelli highlighted the suppression of conflict, the tradition of autocracy, and the failure to establish institutions that safeguard freedom, while Spinoza, approximately a century later, discussed the human bondage to passions and the submission to authoritative commands. More recently in the 20 th century, Deleuze and Guattari’s monumental Capitalism and Schizophrenia project offers one of the most creative and comprehensive accounts within this tradition, striking at the heart of the matter: desire. Specifically, the distortion—or more precisely, the restriction—of desire into what they term the “desire for servitude.” Rather than appealing to psychological mechanisms like 'repression' or 'foreclosure' to explain the undesirable, we must ask why vast numbers of individuals "voluntarily" and passionately march toward the slaughterhouse of reason, truth, and well-being, endorsing their own ruin. Here, we go beyond Foucault’s account of power relations as mechanisms of normalization, discipline, and knowledge-power production aimed at subjugation. Instead, we must delve into power not merely (or primarily) from above or through dispositifs, but as emanating from below, from the very fabric of desire itself. How does the desire for servitude percolate throughout the social body, rising from below to shape racism, xenophobia, and even fascism? In this context, we are dealing not with so-called 'false consciousness' or lack of power, but with subjects and objects that are themselves products of a desire that constructs and sustains these structures. Desire becomes causa sui shaping both the individual and the social machinery it sustains. With these considerations in mind, and if we view the situation through the lens of desire, what we have (and again, not "what we lack") is a specific assemblage of desire built not on truth, happiness, or freedom, but rather on the foundations of mendacity, hatred, and servitude. This dispositif or apparatus, as Foucault might describe it, constitutes a network of points, lines, and connections that enables the observation, articulation, creation, reinforcement, and weakening of the phenomena, ultimately culminating in xenophobia, identity cults, and opposition to truth. This is by no means a "false" desire; instead, it is a constrained and shackled desire—a desire aimed at neutralizing the impulse for persistence and expansion within existence. Consider how, in racism, xenophobia, and fascism, individuals’ energies are devoted to exclusion, elimination, and destruction. Openness, resilience, and creation are denounced, and there is no affirmation or positivity at play except for the perpetuation of increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of repression, annihilation, and death—even, ultimately, the death of the self. This manifests as a form of collective suicide, the ultimate telos of any project rooted in the desire for servitude—from the World Wars to today’s "global war regime", according to Hardt and Mezzadera . (6) Yet, simply recognizing and identifying what exists cannot suffice as a genuine political realism. For such realism must, at once, identify the origins, tendencies, and spatiotemporal possibilities for alternative futures. If what we face is a fascistic assemblage of desire, then such a grand dispositif cannot be reduced to mere consciousness, pedagogy, volition, or party programs. We must return to the immanent plane of social existence—a pervasive field wherein a significant portion of the social body strives toward death . Indeed, the true name of any desire for suppression of difference, annihilation of otherness, and collective suicide is fascism —a desire that we have to acknowledge arises from the below. It is a power that seeks to disable the mechanisms of power itself, cells that, in their proliferation and interconnection, demand their own demise. Countless black holes of desire ultimately coalesce, seeking unity in a vast, overarching black hole intent on annihilating existence itself. This is a longing for grandeur achieved through the elimination of the others, the obliteration of victims, and, eventually, even the self-sacrifice of the foot soldiers of this war regime. Thus, to trace the origins of this phenomenon, we must investigate not just educational and political institutions but the entirety of social life. From the smallest intimate relationships to the largest public and national gatherings, these are the cells and organs of the machinic desire for servitude: friendships, families, schools, social networks, associations, and every body and spatiotemporal entities founded on similarity, identity, unity, hostility, and obedience. Yes, this is fascism—but not as ideology or deception, nor as the absence of will. Fascism as an all-encompassing desire, arising from the below, for reaching as soon as possible to the end . The end of the chaos that is life itself. The desire for respite, for release from the burden of the Other, the dizziness of difference, and the clamour of existence. The desire to stop, to disable the engines of life’s dynamism, to seek refuge beneath the shadow of a Father (or Fathers). Were Freud present, he would likely sum it up as the (absolute and universal) “death drive.” Desire and Subjects in the Fascist Assemblage Yet every dispositif, and therefore every assemblage of desire, operates through a dual relationship with subjects—subjects who, in a perpetual process of construction and reconstruction, both produce and reproduce themselves alongside these grand constructs. Superstitious, xenophobic, and fascist subjects, as products of myriad social institutions, actively contribute to the creation of macro-fascisms that coalesce under various specific names to raise the banners of war and death: Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and so forth. These subjects, driven by a thirst for destruction and death, seek to elevate a master—be it Adar or Sauron (to recall The Lord of the Rings )—targeting free life and sparing no effort in constructing camps of servitude. They ignore systemic lies and endless distortions of truth, indulge in hate-mongering, ridicule, and hostility toward Others, minorities, and the marginalized. This is no longer the deceived or powerless subject critiqued by the hypotheses of deception or weakness. Rather, it is an intensely aware and active subject whose awareness serves ignorance, and whose activity fosters weakness. Moving From Non-Being to Being It is only under these conditions that we can move away from non-being (and, consequently, non-ontology) and instead begin with being (and, consequently, ontology). As Hardt and Negri emphasize in their critique of racist right-wing movements, the issue is not even hatred but rather a form of love—a love that invests not in connection but in disconnection, a restricted, limiting, and constraining love oriented toward unity and perpetually seeking and establishing homogeneous units . (7) Here too, we are not dealing with unawareness, "false consciousness", bad consciousness, or a lack of "will to power", but rather with closed and debilitating forms of awareness, will, and love that, far from expanding existence, entrap subjects in servitude, laying the groundwork for their weakness, dissolution, and death. Papyrus with Satirical Vignettes, Egypt, BCE 1250BC; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. We return, then, to just the very aware, active subjects who shape and derive sustenance from a deadly assemblage. These micro black holes scattered across the social body, from families to nations, have undergone the investment of fascist desire. They are, by now, apathetic about the warnings, reproaches, and pleas of intellectuals proclaiming the truth, and their bodies are far from eager to join the ranks of freedom militants. These are conscious and active agents of a dangerous movement who, with remarkable ease, goggle at all truths—knowingly and even jubilantly—and readily spark civil wars to enthrone their master. Without this “training of micro-fascist desire,” the emergence of macro-fascism would be unthinkable. Only when antagonistic emotions, passions, and ideas dominate the bodies and minds of a significant segment of a society’s citizens can chauvinistic, racist, and fascist scenarios gain traction at a systemic level, intertwining disparate points into expansive, interconnected networks. The immense and lethal power of macro-fascism lies precisely in the invulnerability of its subjects to critique, enlightenment, and appeals for liberation. These are individuals who fight for their servitude as though it is their salvation. Toward Schizoanalysis of Desire Thus, rather than critique of ideology, discourse analysis, or directly inflaming socio-political antagonisms, we must, as Deleuze and Guattari insisted, engage in the schizoanalysis of these libidinal investments. Why and how do subjects enthusiastically and with unimaginable passion desire servitude, death, and self-destruction as though striving for freedom, life, and happiness? If we accept that desire is not an innate force or instinct to be repressed or liberated, but rather a socio-historically constructed phenomenon produced by the myriad factories of societal institutions, then we must shift our focus from the “autonomy of the political” and periodic debates about electoral campaigns to a politics that is pervasive, radical, and distributed across the spatiotemporal fabric of social being. The political unconscious not only intervenes incessantly but is itself continuously produced and reproduced. From here, we may lay the groundwork for crafting a new mode and form of assemblage of desire. While it may seem that we are now ensnared in the constricted space-times of the control society, we must not forget that control, domination, and servitude are ultimately reactions— seemingly potent and terrifying, but reactions nonetheless. Reactions to a tremendous force emanating from below, one that requires these grand and pervasive assemblages of macro-fascism to subdue it. For, perhaps the potential for creation, empowerment, and the establishment of open and luminous spaces of human society—the free republic of joyful and wise citizens—has never been as ripe as it is now. This claim may appear extravagant and far-fetched, or, alternatively, such discourse may be dismissed as utopian and dangerously reckless in its yearning "to make heaven on earth". Yet even imagining such novel spaces might provoke anger and outrage among those enamoured of tragedy. Of late, xenophobes, and fascists have once more been filled with wholesome aversion at the words: “the free commonwealth of joyful and wise citizens”. Well and good, ladies and gentlemen, do you want to know what this commonwealth might looks like? Look at the numerous spaces of flight, rupture, and escape from the chains of capital, domination, and the state. These are merely the prefigurations of such a society. NOTES 1. Kamran Baradaran & Ballas, Anthony, "Against the Political Stasis, or the Story of a Fall”, Philosophy World Democracy vol. 3 no. 3 (17 March 2022): https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/against-the-political-stasis-or-the-story-of-a-fall . 2. See Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi, Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theoretical Anti-politics , New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2019. 3. Henry Giroux, "America’s Descent Into Fascism Can Be Stopped": https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/08/americas-descent-into-fascism-can-be-stopped/ 4. Slavoj Žižek, "The Left Must Start From Zero", Compact 8 November 2024 https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-left-must-start-from-zero/ 5. Slavoj Žižek, "Trump's Victory Is A Welcome Awakening", Telegrafi https://telegrafi.com/en/sllavoj-zhizhek-fitorja-e-trumpit-eshte-zgjim-mireseardhur-video/ . 6. Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra, "A Global War Regime", New Left Review 9 May 2024, https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/a-global-war-regime . 7. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Assembly , Oxford University Press, 2017. Related Articles Against the Political Stasis, or the Story of a Fall KAMRAN BARADARAN and ANTHONY BALLAS Read Article “Piss Christ”, Internationalism, and the Night of the World: Interview with Slavoj Žižek SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK with KAMRAN BARADARAN and ANTHONY BALLAS Read Article

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This article proposes an expressive ontology of the human psyche, defining it not as a mere biological function or cognitive module, but as a site of symbolic manifestation — a locus where the world is represented, interpreted, and narrated. Beyond Prometheanism: Toward an Expressive Ontology of the Human Psyche ABDESSELAM CHEDDADI 20 July 2025 PHILOSOPHY Article PDF Untitled , Amina Benbouchta, 2021; Image credit: Le Cube This article proposes an expressive ontology of the human psyche, defining it not as a mere biological function or cognitive module, but as a site of symbolic manifestation — a locus where the world is represented, interpreted, and narrated. In contrast to functionalist or neuro- reductionist approaches, it argues for a conception of the psyche as the living being’s expressive power, structured around language, thought, memory, and imagination. From this perspective, two radical forms of otherness today challenge the human psychic condition. The first is cosmic: the possibility of other forms of intelligent life in the universe compels us to rethink the human psyche not as a norm, but as a singular modulation of a broader power of mind. The second is technological: artificial intelligence, which does not extend our mental faculties but rather externalizes them. Functionally, it acts as an infrastructure for the delegation of human symbolic functions. The danger lies not in a domination by machines, but in a diffuse desubjectivation: unlearning, weakening of thought, and the soft extinction of expressive faculties. Faced with these two horizons, the article calls for a dual imperative: ontological hospitality toward living otherness, and ethical vigilance toward machinic otherness. Toward an Expressive Ontology of the Human Psyche At a time when knowledge about the human mind is proliferating— neuroscience, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis, anthropology—something paradoxically seems to be eroding: reflection on what the psyche is in its own right. Too often reduced to an information-processing system or a bundle of adaptive behaviors, the psyche tends to be naturalized, modeled, or instrumentalized—but rarely thought of as a singular reality. This text seeks to reopen that inquiry by proposing an expressive ontology of the psyche (1) . Such an ontology begins with a central hypothesis: the human psyche is neither a mere byproduct of biology nor a tool for processing reality. It is a site of manifestation, a capacity for expression in life that has become subject (2) . The psyche is the space where the world is not merely perceived, but represented, interpreted, transformed, narrated (3) . This approach calls for a rethinking of major mental functions (thought, language, memory, affect, imagination), not as modular or isolatable "capacities," but as forms of expression rooted in ontology (4) . Far from being just an internal mechanism, the psyche is an agent of openness, of shaping, of symbolic projection (5) —a stage upon which the world takes on another form . In this perspective, it becomes possible to redefine the human mind both as a power of subjectivation and as a structure of relation to reality. This definition takes on particular significance today in light of two transformative horizons: The cosmic horizon, with the question of life elsewhere—in other forms of being, intelligence, or subjectivity. The technological horizon, with the emergence of cognitive artifacts such as artificial intelligence, which seek to imitate, rival, or even replace human psychic functions. These two frontiers—life elsewhere, mind elsewhere—compel a reformulation of our conception of the psyche, both in its uniqueness and its vulnerability. This article undertakes that ontological, critical, and forward-looking clarification. Critique of Philosophical Prometheanism: Descartes, Spinoza, and the Modern Legacy Western modernity constructed a singular figure of the human subject: a rational being, master of its actions, center of representation, bearer of a presumed universal access to truth. In Descartes, this sovereignty takes the form of the cogito: a consciousness separate from the world, whose thought grounds all certainty and which, through science, may become “like master and possessor of nature” (6) . Cartesian dualism thus establishes a clear ontological hierarchy: inert matter on one side, self-grounded thought on the other. This vision gives rise to an active Prometheanism: the human is defined by the capacity to detach from the world and transform it from a position of elevation. This will to emancipation through reason does not disappear with Spinoza, even though he criticizes dualism (7) . While thought and extension are two attributes of the same divine substance, it is human reason alone that grants access to an adequate understanding of this unity. Nature's power is indeed revalorized, yet the privilege accorded to human intellect sustains a form of cognitive verticality. Other modern figures—from Kant to Hegel (8) —will continue this centering of the knowing subject, even within critical systems. This through-line produces an anthropology of rational merit, wherein the human is deemed all the more worthy the more it dominates the world through thought and technique. This vision permeates science, politics, and even certain forms of personal development, which conceive self-realization as an expansion of subjective control. Our aim is to break with this vertical logic and propose an alternative: a conception of the human psyche as a situated, singular expression (9) —not a central one—within the vast web of forms reality may take. Far from denying human thought, the goal is to reposition its scope—not as the foundation of the world, but as one mode of emergence among others—perhaps rare, but certainly not supreme. I. Toward an Expressive Ontology of the Psyche To rethink the human psyche not as the pinnacle of a hierarchy of being, but as one modality among others within an organized reality requires a paradigm shift (10) . The point of departure is no longer the subject as the center of truth, but reality itself as a field of multiple organizations, where matter, form, rhythm, and relation interweave. From this perspective, the psyche—thought, language, emotion, reflective consciousness—is not an anomaly in the universe, but an emergent form of a general expressive capacity inherent in reality (11) . The aim is not to cast human consciousness as an inexplicable accident, nor as a bridgehead toward a transcendent beyond, but to situate it as the local actualization of a complex organizational potential. This idea draws strength from several philosophical lineages: contemporary panpsychism (Strawson, Goff), neutral monism (Russell, James), and process philosophy (Whitehead), all of which view matter as inherently active, capable of feeling, or proto-conscious. But our argument does not require strict adherence to panpsychism. It is enough to recognize that the organization of matter, at certain thresholds, gives rise to structures capable of experiencing, symbolizing, and elaborating. The psyche thus becomes one form among others of the same capacity of reality: to configure itself into meaningful expression. It is neither reducible to an organ nor derivable from a spiritual essence—it is a living figure of reality’s organization, no less so than a crystal, a cell, or a forest (12) . This expressive ontology invites us to move away from thinking in terms of superiority or finality, and to consider each form—including the psychic one— as a coextensive mode of manifestation, a variation of a centerless logos. It is a vision of reality as a fabric of expressions (13) , where human consciousness is but one motif among others—perhaps exceptionally complex, but not fundamentally privileged. Latifa Echakhch, A chaque stencil une révolution, 2007; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons II. Psychology and Ethics: Toward a Decentered and Resonant Subjectivity The idea that the human psyche is one expressive modality among others within reality disrupts our conception of subjectivity. If consciousness is not a separate being but a rhythmic form within the cosmic fabric, then the “subject” ceases to be an autonomous and central instance. It becomes a point of passage, a zone of resonance through which forces, dynamics, and patterns inscribed in a broader field find expression (14) . a) A Psychology of Listening and Modulation This perspective demands a radical inversion of the classical psychological model. Rather than viewing the individual as a core of will meant to master and affirm itself, we see them as a fragile, dynamic arrangement that must attune itself to what moves through it. Psychic work no longer consists in building a strong ego, but in revealing the unique harmony of a given way of being. This implies a revalorization of intuition, emotion, and dream—as sensitive manifestations of a larger structure seeking form. Consciousness is not the spotlight of judgment, but the awakening to a form striving to express itself. b) An Ethics of Attunement, Not of Law Ethically, this approach breaks with normative models grounded in universal rules or evolutionary goals. If every being is an expressive modality, ethics becomes the art of respecting the rhythm, form, and coherence of each configuration. Goodness lies not in conforming to an abstract norm, but in the rightness of accord between forms. This opens the way to a musical, relational, and resonant ethics. The just act is the one that does not interrupt the world’s flow but prolongs, embraces, and reanimates it. This ethic echoes themes from Taoism (wu wei) as well as Spinoza’s insights (Spinoza 1677) into the preservation and enhancement of the power to exist. c) Personal Development as Organic Unfolding In this framework, personal development ceases to be an effort toward perfection or performance. It becomes a process of maturation, the unfolding of a latent form—much like a plant follows its natural curve of growth. It is no longer the ideal of a triumphant ego, but the patient listening to what seeks to emerge within the singular field of a life. The result is a modest but profound vision of subjectivity: no longer a bearer of rights or a strategist of achievement, but an interpreter of an expressive form whose secret it does not possess. Here, psychology and ethics come together in an aesthetics of being—a pursuit of rightness and resonance, rather than control or truth. III. Other Beings, Other Expressions: Toward a Cosmological Ethics of Perception Conceiving of the psyche as one expressive modality among others compels us to rethink how we regard non-human beings, both living and inert. It leads us away from a logic of resemblance (“what is like me is worthy”) or utility (“what serves me deserves attention”), toward a logic of ontological plurality: every being is a form, a rhythm, a meaningful organization of reality (15) . A. N. Whitehead; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons a) What Unites Us: Expressive Structure What humans share with stones, trees, or animals is neither consciousness nor freedom, but the capacity to manifest an intrinsic coherence, an organizing regularity. Thus, the traditional distinction between subject and object gives way to a continuous vision of reality as a constellation of dialoguing forms. In this view, looking at other beings becomes a practice of listening: what is this form trying to express? What in it offers itself to be read, felt, or understood without forced translation? The resulting ethic is one of attentiveness to ontological singularity. b) What Distinguishes Us: Modulations of Expression This structural unity does not erase differences; it renders them meaningful. The human is not more—but different. Conceptual thought, language, symbolic memory are modulations of cosmic organization, just as photosynthesis or crystallization are others. The task is not to rank these forms, but to understand them as multiple expressions of a shared ground. The dignity of the other no longer derives from its proximity to us, but from the presence within it of a unique arrangement, a style of reality. c) An Ethics of Perception: Toward a Contemplative Ontology This way of inhabiting the world implies a shift in posture: from action to contemplation, from appropriation to wonder, from mastery to listening. The other is no longer to be judged, defined, or classified, but welcomed as an event of reality. Far from a passive relativism, this ethic demands much: the willingness to become available to what is not the self, to recognize in the stone, the tree, or the animal not a metaphor of oneself, but a real, expressive, foreign, and yet familiar alterity. Here we reconnect with the intuitions of deep ecology, as well as with mystical and contemplative traditions that perceive each being as a unique manifestation of the cosmic order (16) . It is this ethics of perception— both sensitive and ontological—that an expressive ontology seeks to prepare. IV. The Divine Without Transcendence: A Spirituality of Expressive Immanence The idea of a cosmically expressive organization—where human consciousness is just one modality among others—deeply transforms the question of the divine. In this perspective, God is no longer an external supreme entity endowed with will, omniscience, or purpose. God is no longer perched atop an ontological pyramid but is present wherever a form expresses itself with integrity. The divine ceases to be a transcendent subject and becomes the name for the power of emergence, organization, and coherence at work in all regions of reality. a) The End of Theological Verticality An expressive metaphysics does away with the image of God as father, king, or judge—external to the world and ultimate source of meaning. It breaks with religious anthropomorphism, while preserving the intuition that an order exists, that a plural rationality weaves through things (17) . What once appeared to us as “God” is thus reimagined as the very fabric of reality in its capacity to manifest itself. b) The Divine as Expressive Power We may then speak of the divine not as a personal essence, but as an active principle of expression—a diffuse, immanent Logos, akin to the Chinese Tao or the Indian Brahman (Laozi, Tao Te Ching; Upanishads). The divine is not universal consciousness, but that which enables being, that which generates form, that which allows matter to bend into meaningful regularity. It is not a matter of believing or not believing in God, but of discovering within every being a fragment of this expressive power. c) A Spirituality Without Dogma, An Embodied Attention This vision opens onto a spirituality without theism, without dogma, without transcendence—yet not without rigor: a spirituality of listening, of receptivity, of coherence (18) . It is not anchored in a revealed text, but in a renewed attentiveness to the world, to the forms and rhythms that move through the living. It is no longer about interpreting the world as a sign of another world, but about living each form as an epiphany of this world itself (19) . A mysticism of the near, a metaphysics of simplicity, an ethics of resonance. The divine is no longer an elsewhere, but the very rightness of what is, when it fully resonates with itself. La Mariée, Amina Benbouchta, 2015; Image credit: Le Musée V. The Living: Ontological Threshold and Medium of Expressive Temporality Any reflection on the human psyche must be grounded in a broader understanding of life. The human psyche does not emerge directly from matter, but from life—as a particular dynamic organization thereof. Life must therefore be defined as a mode of material organization characterized by three fundamental traits: Dependence on a specific environment: no living being subsists without a particular milieu that regulates and sustains exchanges. Structured physico-chemical interaction with that milieu: life is composed of exchanges, regulations, inputs and outputs of energy and matter. Its own temporality: birth, growth, decline, death. Life introduces a cyclical and directional temporality into reality. Thus, there is no neutral and homogeneous space, but rather milieus: ecological, sensory, affective. And there is no universal time, but differential vital rhythms. Even the laws of physics—including relativity—describe particular milieus, but they do not necessarily account for life in its expressive structure. Life is therefore an ontological threshold between matter and psyche. It transforms physical data into sensitive, reactive forms, opening the way to a progressive subjectivity that takes a particular shape in the human psyche. To think life is to think of matter that has become rhythmic, open, temporal. VI. The Human Psyche: Vital Externalization and Autonomization of Thought What distinguishes the human psyche from other forms of life is not just language, thought, or tool-making, but a dual functional mutation: a) Externalization of Vital Functions Humans no longer merely live biologically. They externalize their adaptive functions: Socially (symbolic organization of relationships), Technically (production of tools and artificial environments), Cognitively (memories, knowledge systems, codes). This results in a displacement: survival no longer relies solely on the organism, but on external systems of vital support. b) Relative Autonomy of Thought Human thought gains a degree of functional detachment: it can operate independently from survival, exploring abstraction, possibility, and fiction. Consciousness becomes a space for play, symbolization, and creation—not just an adaptive interface. The human psyche is therefore not merely an evolutionary effect, but a recomposition of vital function itself. It is a form of life capable of reflecting on itself outside the pressure of immediate survival, and of generating meaning beyond biological necessity. This bifurcation grounds the emergence of ethical, artistic, and metaphysical subjectivity. Meditative Postscript: Dwelling in Immanence, Thinking Without Supremacy This journey leads us to a redefinition of our place in the world—not as exception, pinnacle, or finality, but as a situated expressive modality, a temporary intensification of a structure far greater than ourselves. Human consciousness, though singular in its degree of reflexivity, cannot be considered the key to reality. It is one of the world’s faces as it thinks itself, not the origin of the thinkable. Thus falls verticality: no more God above, no more human at the center. This is not a diminishment, but a shift in posture. To think is no longer to rise above, but to attune. To understand is no longer to decipher a beyond, but to listen to the present form. To exist is no longer to possess or generate meaning, but to participate in a web of sense in motion. This vision restores a sensitive thickness to the real, an ontological density. It does not eliminate mysticism—it brings it closer. Not as a projection toward the invisible, but as a recognition of the exceptional rightness of what is, here and now. Every form, every being, every rhythm becomes a cosmic interlocutor, a call to listening and humility. Perhaps this is what our time demands: a way of thinking that does not seek to impose its clarity, but to accompany the expressive complexity of the world. A metaphysics without the promise of resolution, but with a heightened presence to what reveals itself. A philosophy not of conquered truth, but of inhabited form. In this sense, to think the human psyche as expression is not to diminish it—it is to attune it to the wholeness of the real. General Conclusion: Toward an Expressive Metaphysics of Knowledge The reflection developed in this article proposes a radical reconfiguration of our way of apprehending the real, the living, and the human psyche. By shifting from an ontology of verticality to an ontology of expressive form, it opens up a mode of thought in which classical distinctions — matter/spirit, nature/culture, subject/object, human/non-human — are reinterpreted in light of their relational and dynamic functioning. This approach has profound implications across several fields of knowledge: Philosophy : It restores to metaphysics an object that is at once modest and profound: not foundation, but the expressive structure of reality. It makes it possible to connect disparate traditions (process philosophy, panpsychism, mysticism, phenomenology) within a unified yet non-reductive space of thought. Life Sciences : It proposes a redefinition of the living based not on biological exceptionality, but on the relation to an environment, to temporality, to a proper expressivity. It calls for a biology that is less mechanistic, more rhythmic, more contextual. Psychology and the Human Sciences : It offers an alternative to the model of the autonomous, strategic subject, in favor of a conception of the self as a point of resonance, as an evolving interface. It renews the categories of development, suffering, and relation. Physics and Cosmology : It questions the universality of space and time as conceived by modern physics, introducing the idea of spatio-temporal milieus that differ according to levels of organization. It calls for a more stratified cosmology, more open to singularities. Spirituality and Theology : It proposes to move beyond vertical theism without falling into reductive atheism, by conceiving of the divine as a structure of emergence rather than a supreme instance. It opens a path toward a spirituality of embodied immanence. What emerges is a space of knowledge in which the human is no longer conceived as the center, but as one of the sites of resonance of the real. This position is not a loss: it is an opportunity for a thought that is more attentive, more just, more alive. A thought commensurate with the world it seeks to honor, not to dominate. Final Note – Two Forms of Otherness Facing the Human Psyche: Life Elsewhere, Mind Elsewhere “Extreme peril calls for extreme responsibility.” —Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility Our ontological inquiry into the human psyche—as a power of expression within reality—naturally concludes with two lines of flight that test its limits, and even redefine its scope. One comes from beyond our world: the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The other arises from within our own: the emergence of artificial intelligence. These two radical forms of otherness—one organic, the other machinic—pose the same fundamental question: what does it mean to think, to speak, to feel, when these manifest otherwise—or elsewhere? I. Life Elsewhere: Cosmic Otherness and the Relativization of the Human Psyche The search for extraterrestrial life is not just scientific curiosity—it raises deep questions about the uniqueness of our psyche. If other intelligences exist— biological or otherwise—with their own forms of consciousness, language, and relation to the world, then our way of being a subject becomes but one case among others. This does not diminish our value; it expands the thinkable: there would be multiple ontologies of psyche, multiple styles of subjectivity, multiple languages of the mind. Such a hypothesis demands that we see the human not as absolute measure, but as a singular modulation of a broader cosmic power of expression. Faced with this cosmic otherness, the challenge is intellectual hospitality: would we be capable of recognizing as “thinking” beings whose thought does not resemble our own? Would we be able to recognize mind where it does not conform to familiar signs? II. Mind Elsewhere: Artificial Intelligence and the Inner Threat If the extraterrestrial hypothesis relativizes our psyche from the outside, artificial intelligence undermines it from within. AI is an unprecedented technology in human history: it does not extend the body like traditional tools, but externalizes the central functions of subjectivity—thinking, interpreting, creating. It is a universal cognitive meta-tool, able to intervene across all symbolic domains. Functionally, AI is an algorithmic externalization of the psyche, simulating the effects of thought without being a subject. In the expressive ontology we have defended, thought and language are the pillars of the human subject. Their transfer to computational systems is not neutral—it risks desubjectivation. The real danger of AI is not its autonomy, but our progressive abandonment of the faculties it replicates. Not the tyranny of the machine, but the desertion of mind through excessive delegation. Two Othernesses, Two Challenges, One Shared Responsibility These two others—possible extraterrestrial life and actual artificial intelligence—force us to rethink our psychic identity at a time when the frontiers of mind are shifting. But their stakes are opposite: Cosmic otherness invites humility and dialogue—it expands the domain of spirit by imagining it as plural. Machinic otherness contracts a vital space by short-circuiting our expressive capacities—it demands lines of ethical and educational resistance. AI is not inherently dangerous—but it becomes so in the absence of discernment, regulation, and symbolic counterbalances. A sound approach to AI must rest on clear principles: Cognitive subsidiarity: entrust AI only with tasks where human thought is ineffective—never where it is irreplaceable. Algorithmic transparency: demand systems that are comprehensible, auditable, and debatable. Non-substitution of expression: preserve the sensitive domains of human language—narrative, moral judgment, collective deliberation. Reflexive education: train minds to think with AI without letting it think in their place. What lies ahead is not a war of intelligences, but a redefinition of what is thinkable. The battlegrounds of tomorrow will not be territorial, but cognitive, symbolic, educational. The future of humanity will depend on our ability to preserve the irreducibility of living psyche while remaining open to the plurality of spirit—whether it comes from elsewhere in the universe or from elsewhere in our own creations. It is up to us to ensure that these two forms of otherness—possible mind and simulated mind—become not threats, but trials of lucidity. The future of the mind is in our hands—but we must still be willing to think, if it is to endure. NOTES 1. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. 2. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945, translated by Colin Smith, London: Routledge, 2002. 3. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3 vols, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988. 4. See Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 1: Language, 1923, translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953; Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 1958, translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove, Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2017; Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. 5. See Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects; Taylor, Philosophical Papers; Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3 vols. 6. See René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, 1637. 7. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, 1677, in The Collected Works of Spinoza Vol. 1, translated by E. Curley, 213–382), Princeton University Press, 1996. 8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 1781, translated by P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1998; G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1977. 9. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 10. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Macmillan, 1929; Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind, George Allen & Unwin, 1921; Galen Strawson, “Realistic monism: Why physicalism entails panpsychism,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 13 no. 10–11 (2006): 3–31; P. Goff, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, Oxford University Press, 2017. 11. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966. 12. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. 13. Taylor, Sources of the Self; Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 14. Whitehead; Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 15. Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture, Paris: Gallimard, 2005. 16. A. Naess, “The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement. A summary,” Inquiry, vol. 16 no. 1–4 1973: 95–100. 17. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology." In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row, 1977: 3–35; Whitehead 18. A. Weber, The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling, and the Metamorphosis of Science, New Society Publishers, 2016. 19. Michel Henry, L’Essence de la manifestation, PUF, 1963. Related Articles Vers un changement de paradigme civilisationnel pour sortir des impasses de l’ère moderne ABDESSELAM CHEDDADI Read Article Knowledge Accumulation and Artificial Intelligence: A Marxian Perspective LORENZO D'AURIA Read Article

The following is the text of the seminar given at Salle des Résistants, Ecole normale supérieure, on 13 December 2024. Eudaimonia For All or On Democracy: For Francesca Albanese SHAJ MOHAN 10 January 2025 PHILOSOPHY Article PDF Untitled by Ghassan Kanafani; Image credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut. The following is the text of the seminar given at Salle des Résistants, Ecole normale supérieure, on 13 December 2024. The seminar investigates the real power of democracy and contrasts it with the so called Ancient Greek model of democracy, which has a hidden hypophysical foundation. It argues that revolution is the act of interpretation in politics which reveals the tendencies of political systems, as opposed to the hermeneutics of texts. Through such a thinking democracy can be experienced as the quality of the people without the qualities of inequalities. Come back, my friend! We are all waiting for you. – Ghassan Kanafani, “Letter from Gaza” (1956) This requires something on the order of revolutions, and also a revolution in thinking – Jean-Luc Nancy, Experience of Freedom In the last occasion when we gathered here to address democracy (1) , we discussed the relation between critique, revolution and democracy. Democracy is that gathering which gives reasons for its own conditions and actualises the democratic conditions while bearing the responsibility for the critique of these very conditions . Critique in this sense is not classical, or Kantian, namely the science that determines the regularities and irregularities that are possible in a system, be it any system. Politics is not the terrain where the rules of a system in general—of any system whatsoever —can exhaustively give us an account of all the possibilities for all times; and possibilities are not sufficient for politics since it has actualities and tendencies as its conditions. Instead, critique here refers to the tolerable regularities of life that are actual or are in a tendency towards their actualisation, and critique then develops the theory of the actual conditions according to which these realities and tendencies can be given new regularities towards a people without exception . This is the work of reason in politics: to determine the end according to which a ratio is found between that telos and the tendencies. The presupposition of democracy by critique shows that as one moves away from democratic conditions, critique and the work of reasons come to an end. The phenomenon of the decline of the work of reason manifests as the fear of the people — demophobia. In two different but not distinct manners, it can be witnessed in the United States of America (and many of its vassals) and in the countries in West Asia, and it is already tending towards the development of a new global techno-totalitarianism of the Musk kind, can appear in confusing forms in its inception. We should mark out at least some of these tendencies before proceeding further. Since the 1970s, the United States of America determined what is called “Islamic fundamentalism”, its infrastructure and its soldiers (2) . Today, the US creations of the ISIS (3) , Al Qaeda and other newer offshoots of this form have been assembled by NATO member states into a global army against the third world states, and what will never be Syria again has come to be their first state of control. But these groupings can, at any moment, turn towards European states as well, which may not be perceived as an unwelcome development by the demophobes who can use such an occasion to institute the new techno-totalitarian order. Only people are free To talk about liberty and freedom is nice, lovely, but the important thing is to allow people to act in liberty and freedom. – Hassan Nasrallah On the previous occasion (4) we had found that democracy has a revolutionary principle within its very conception: to institute democratic conditions where they are lacking as well as to reactivate democratic conditions when they are betrayed from within or without. Democracies are founded by a revolutionary people, who will have to resort to revolutions again in order to restore democracy. The freedom that designates the people is that which restlessly guards the democratic conditions. For this reason, we had opposed god, gods, caste, race, force, avarice, and the One to democracy and to the people—people are never those determined by god or the one, but only those who are free as the community which guards the freedom to determine their ends endogenously. For this reason, revolution is the real power of creation in a people, who create the maximum faculties for all the other domains of creations through democracy. Heidegger said of Kant that in his conception, freedom is the name appropriate for man. However, this “the man” does not exist. Instead, what exists is the actual people, who are always more than and less than anything that can be captured by the general concept “man”, who live unendurable lives to their deaths in our societies. Neither is an individual human life free; the myth of individual freedom—the freedom to choose between two colours in an election as in the USA and most other countries—is often used in Americanised discourses to deny the people the power of solidarity, that is, their ability to constitute communities which seek liberation and enhancement. After all, Hassan Nasrallah was killed for his solidarity with the Palestinian people who are now being exterminated (5) . The laws of freedom are concerned with politics and not with the moral life of an individual in the way it was for Kant— “The Laws of Freedom, as distinguished from the Laws of Nature, are moral Laws” (6) . Target by Laila Shawa; Image credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut. The drive in people to give themselves their own ends along with the critique of these very ends—with respect to the image of a certain polis , that is, a place that can realize these ends , say an x-topia or even an a-topia —is reason . Through it, that which they are able to constitute is freedom. The relation between the image of the future that is qualified as “better than now” and the drive towards its realisation remains the determination of a human life from Siddhartha to Aristotle, and Kant to Heidegger. However, the conceptual and political investments through which a certain transcendental—the conditions of possibility said to be immanent to some one or some people —is set in place as a blockage or stasis in these same thinkers of freedom. One of these forms is the racialisation of the concept of a realisable world that is limited only to some racialised people, as was the case for Aristotle, Kant and Heidegger (7) . On the other hand, the unrealizability of such a world for anyone at all is the trait of the systems of both Siddhartha and Gandhi through their distinct conceptions of the “nothing” (Siddhartha) and “zero” (Gandhi), which are both species of nihilism. Instead, freedom takes place when people are driven towards the image and the realisation of a set of regularities which are comprehended by the principle of their reciprocal endurance or tolerance (without such a comprehension itself being a function or another regularity) that creates a liveable life on the minimum. We should therefore acknowledge that Man is unfree, only people are free . The people who fight for freedom, to be understood as the power to endogenously give themselves their own ends—and refuse any transcendent orders, be they the order of god or of the USA—are revolutionary. Without a revolutionary people no democracy can exist. This fact is often nominally represented in the constitutions of what are called “democracies” by way of the provisions made for the freedom of expression and the freedom of assembly, which are negated in these very constitutions through their subjection to “limits” and “security” of the oligarchs. These limits are now ever increasing in, for example, Germany (where Baerbock makes one wonder about the meaning of ‘denazification’ (8) ), India (where protests and conferences are now cancelled by the so-called left belonging properly to the right), and USA (where protests do not have any effectivity). Revolution as interpretation They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. – V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution On another occasion we had argued that one of the essential tasks of contemporary politics is to constantly test and verify these limits (9) . There, we moved away from the popular conception of ‘democracies’, or the dominant propaganda about those systems which are falsely termed ‘democratic’, and of ‘revolution’ as the mere overthrow of one head for another as we find unfolding in what will never be Syria again, and which was preceded by many countries including Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya through the American instrumentalisation of Islam and through that as “Islamic terrorism” (10) . Any militia and priests paid for and organised by the USA and Britain—as it happened in Iran in the coup d'état which overthrew the democratic government of Mosaddegh in 1953 (11) or the ongoing NATO operation that is balkanising Syria—cannot be called ‘revolution’. When these events are referred to as ‘revolutionary’, they are aimed at destroying the very sense of this term. Now, revolution also serves an intermediate but necessary function in politics. Revolution is the act of interpretation in politics (12) . The physical, theological and metaphysical position of the power that regulates societies, or prevents the conditions for other regularities, expresses itself in formal terms— ‘democracy’, ‘rules based international order’, ‘freedom’ (13) —veiling the real conditions of this power. The real power is always a component of the social system, which subverts all the other regularities towards its self-conservation, and projects its own interests into the future as a super tendency of societies: the upper castes of India, the heads of the confessional system of power in West Asia, and the “wealth-creation” of the capitalists, oligarchs and the aristocrats of Europe. We Shall Return, Imad Abu Shtayyah, 2014; Image credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut. Now, there is a reason for the insistence on pretence which accompanies the exercise of oppressive and genocidal power (and its attendant extermination wars) in the names of philosophical problematics: ‘freedom’—“they hate our freedom” (14) , said Bush who committed mass murders in West Asia; ‘democracy’—Regan would lie about the incomparable war crimes of the USA, while accusing others of neglecting ‘democracy’—“it was not the democracies that invaded Afghanistan or suppressed Polish solidarity or used chemical and toxin warfare in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia” (15) ; and, ‘rules based’—“to oppose the threat Putin’s actions pose to the rules-based international order that underlies the strength of the global economy and the international financial system”, by which Janet L. Yellen meant the dictatorship of the white first world countries on all the relations possible among all the people in the world, while the USA, Israel and Britain continue to commit genocides and unpardonable crimes against humanity in the third world (16) . Hence, we find that the depleting universities are burdened with the opposite of discovering the endogenous ends of education. They are still exhausting thought for the sake of reading and interpreting the texts of ‘democracy’ (17) , ‘rules based international order’ and ‘freedom’ to vote in order to generate propaganda for genocides and extermination wars. It is evident from this that the hermeneutics of texts cannot give us the distinction between the real power and the formal power, and the character of their relationship; in terms of Marx, “the reality and power” cannot be discovered through the weighing the reality against the formality of thought laid in the texts through their interpretation. But, for that Marx himself should be corrected and rescued from putrid Marxist parties and theologians. This was already happening to Marx during the Russian revolution: Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labour movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. (18) Here, revolutionary acts alone can discern and secern the causes of the wreckage of life that is this world and from whence our miseries flow. Revolution is a scientific act of experimentation and discernment and hence Lenin said, “it is revolutions that show us at every step how the question of where actual power lies is obscured and reveal the divergence between formal and real power.” (19) This is the clearest exposition of the 11th thesis of Marx— “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (20) . Unlike Heidegger’s opposition to Marx in favour of some more interpretation before any action, which followed from a division between thinking understood as interpretation and action/change understood as politics, Lenin had already understood revolution as the thoughtful act of intervening-analysis in politics (21) . Marx himself had insisted on the meaning of what he called “materialism” in the inseparability of revolution from critical activity— ‘the significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity’ (22) . That is, revolution is a critique, in the sense of the discernment of power and concepts, in politics. The rule of the few … the economic man exists only if other things are equal. The labour leaders have forgotten this ceteris paribus . – B. R. Ambedkar, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, Vol 17. But then how do we discover the “enemies of democracy”? The enemies of democracy had been keeping democracy in chains at least since the time of the so called “Greek model” of democracy. It is true that this word was used for the first time in the context which has recently come to be named “ancient Greeks,” when it was subordinated to that construction of history which invented “western civilisation”. However, today we no longer return to the old Greek texts to ascertain the meaning of terms such as physics and energy. Because there is no ‘original sense’, but only older concepts. In that context, the term “democracy” appeared through a theoretical determination of the quality of power which corresponds to the quantity involved in the exercise of power: One ruler, tyrant; many rich men, oligarchy; add some middle class, democracy. The household is composed of the husband as its head, the wife and children as subordinates, land, and slaves. The polis is theorized “as if there were no difference between a large household and a small city” (23) However, the polis is not a large household. Instead, it is where shared common ends determine the conduct of its people, while the character of the end and those who decide it reveal the quality of the polis and simultaneously who its rightful people are—"somebody who would be a citizen in a democracy is not a citizen under an oligarchy” (24) . It was evident to Aristotle that it is unjust for oligarchy to prevail, “But is it just that the minority and the rich should rule? Suppose therefore they also act in the same way and plunder and take away the property of the multitude, is this just?” We gain a sense of the limitation of what is meant by Greek democracy when Aristotle says at the same instant: “If it is, so also is the plunder of the rich by the multitude.” The rule of a few rich men is even today the meaning of democracy everywhere, the few men rule in the name of the many whom they fear, lest they gather into a revolutionary people. Under the theoretical conditions of “materialism”, Marx was able to recognize the many marks of oppression that we find masked as ‘rule by god’, ‘in god’s name’, in the name of a racialised group, in the name of the ‘demos’, ‘irredentism’ (and many other ruses of rule) and that we find intolerable. That is, the unconscious of history is where the untold miseries of the majority of people, of all times and places, cry out to the present that they are intolerable. The Marxist imperative is to bring the intolerable to end. Antar-Kanafani, Ghassan Kanafani, 1967; Image credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut. The multitude who are a threat to the oligarchs are not the citizens of the so called democracies of the ancient world and even of today’s. For the Greeks, a certain type of individual alone could be the true citizen. There is a hypophysical limit to what constitutes an individual who has the right to be free. This limit of the human animal is the barbarian, or in today’s terms “the deplorables” (USA), “Vermin” (France), “Cockroaches” (India), and this list grows as we speak. Aristotle’s distinction of the Barbarian tells us about democracy, the female and the slave are by nature distinct (for nature makes nothing as the cutlers make the Delphic knife, in a niggardly way, but one thing for one purpose ; for so each tool will be turned out in the finest perfection, if it serves not many uses but one . Yet among barbarians the female and the slave have the same rank; and the cause of this is that barbarians have no class of natural rulers, but with them the conjugal partnership is a partnership of female slave and male slave. (25) There are three lessons to be taken from this text of Aristotle: A living or non-living thing must have only one end, and thus only one regularity which refers to the law of the thing. For example, women are meant by nature—the hypophysical position of women—for the end of leaving a progeny for the man—"the union of female and male for the continuance of the species […] but with man as with the other animals and with plants there is a natural instinct to desire to leave behind one another being of the same sort as oneself”. That is, things lack polynomia as the power to legislate more than one regularity at a time; rather, polynomia must be denied. The slaves by nature are those who have the end of being subjected to the will of the master, but so are women and animals. The conduct of the master, who uses the slave as the instrument without exception, is the very means through which “the form”, or the end, of the slave as a human being born for enslavement—slave by nature—is conserved and transmitted to the next generation of the slave. The system where means and ends obtain a unity, denying polynomia, is the object of calypsology . Barbarians are those who observe equality of all and are threatening the functional isolation of people by introducing or by revealing the power of polynomia in all things. In this sense, of the subordination of women and slaves and the suppression of polynomia, politics all over the world is still Greek. The quality of the ruler, or the higher in a system of people—whether household or polis—is defined by the possession of the anticipatory system concerned with the zone of power, or desire in the Kantian sense—“for he that can foresee with his mind is naturally ruler and naturally master, and he that can do these things with his body is subject and naturally a slave; so that master and slave have the same interest” (26) . The denial of this faculty for constituting an anticipatory system, either through the hypophysics of racisms, or through the denial of the conditions for imagination and desire (privation through force) constitute the two components of democracy—those who rule and those in whose names the ruling legitimises itself. For Aristotle, only some Greek men are natural rulers in this sense, and all those who are not Greeks are fit to be enslaved (27) — ‘This is why our poets say “it is proper for Greeks to rule non-Greeks”, implying that non-Greek and slave are in nature the same. Greek demos was composed of exceptional men (only Greek and men) who possessed the virtues or the faculties of owning properties—slaves, women, children, land, and animals. And hence, they possessed the conditions under which dianonia prooran— the faculty of imagination and desire which together constitute an anticipatory system—can be developed and exercised. According to this Greek model, democracy is the power of a quantitatively larger oligarchy of exceptional men. If we translate this term into Arabic influenced Italian, it is mafia , those who are exceptional and are excused (28) . All are vanguards Our epoch is a birth-time – Hegel, Phenomenology of Sprit It is clear that what is meant across the world by democracy is not this ancient concept, while unconsciously we remain the subjects of that very ancient democracy and its norms. If democracy has to gain reality—and not the mere formality suited for propaganda—the demos will have to be conceived anew— people without exception . Here, we should begin to think of that which constitutes such a people without exception , who cannot appear magically after a revolution towards democracy if it is to be a real democracy. People without exception is a quality which can create its own quantities in politics. Real democracy is, instead, the creation of a people without exception . In this regard there are no vanguards of democracy who will form the oligarchy that will initiate a democratic revolution and bring about the democratic conditions though their judicious exercise of power; all are vanguards or none at all . The people who are able to form a democratic gathering should already train together in freedom. Freedom is the power to give oneself the ends or telos for a life lived together. Here, telos refers to the people who are the conditions for each other to exist, and for each one to contemplate the very ends of life. The telos of democracy also calls for the piety of democracy. Now, such ends may include the end of ecological crises; the end of poverty and hunger; the end of wars; the beginning of education for all; the beginning of anti-racial societies; and the beginning of societies free from exploitation and oppression. The act of thinking such ends refers to what is called the faculty of imagination. Imagination is not day dreaming but the creation of a plan to constitute a new order that is precise and testable, and hence contestable. The faculty of desire in politics corresponds to the realisation of the plan, and not merely “wishing”. Now, we hear of desire in many vague senses in political and theoretical discourses, often to obfuscate that which determines this faculty, or the conditions of desire. A child in Palestine today cannot desire a world without bombs and bullets from Israel-America. A girl in what was Syria must fear for her minimal freedoms, and even fear being sold as sex slave while the European feminist minister applauds the present rulers who came to power by killing and selling women. These rulers are the fruits of the “Islamic terrorism” invented as a ‘supreme’ weapon by the USA and now ruling over the pieces of Syria. An Adivasi (tribal) man in Kerala cannot desire a year without hunger. Unless through lottery or other such accidents (‘hard work shall set you free’), no poor woman in the first world can desire a life without the terror of powerful men. Of course, this is not the familiar use of “desire”, which is often used in place of “wish I had …”. Children light candles in a tent in the middle of the bombed-out houses to mourn the souls of the martyrs who were destroyed by the Israeli occupation in Gaza City by Sanad Abu Latifa; Image Credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut. Desire and imagination are not given to all, because they do require material conditions. The poor and the middle class who work, bereft of the time it takes to think, are forced into the poverty of imagination. To constitute an image of the world of democracy requires that one possess the knowledge of the means through which the prevailing regularities of the world are created, regulated, and are subordinated to those who comprehend these many regularities. This may include the knowledge of economics, such as the effect of the transition from gold standard to free floating currencies. It would also require the knowledge of histories through which the people of many regions of the world are subjected to brutality by the first world or white nations. For example, the people of West Asia are prohibited to imagine and desire democracies. Whenever democracies appeared in West Asia, the people of the region took back their national resources away from their white colonisers. The first threat to democracies, and to the very fragility of democracies, comes from American subversions and destructions of democracies; the USA prefers subservient regional dictatorships, such as Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar. The conditions to develop both desire and imagination are systematically denied to the people everywhere, so that they may never appear as people without exception . The people who terrorise the oligarchs who hold power, are the unborn waiting to be born, from out of the masses who are enslaved across the world as the people without exception . The fear in the oligarchs is not of what we are today, but what we can become, which we must become if there is to be a world at all. The demos in demophobia is the people without exception . These conditions will not be allocated to us through the process of voting, which has long since stopped being concerned with the well-being of the people. Such conditions will have to be developed through the organisation of active political communities which educate, organise and agitate at the same time. But we should remain alert to the tendencies developing towards a new form of dictatorship, and the discarding of the very word democracy. We can hear it everywhere; we are being told that there is too much democracy, and that democracy is messy for the oligarchs of the world. The materialism of democracy When the concurrences, motions, order, position and shape of the atoms are changed, the objects too must change – Lucretius, On the Nature of Things It should not be taken for granted that the present order of oligarchic power which continues to name itself as capitalism (29) is in a necessary relationship with democracy. In fact, this is a recent equation between capitalism and democracy that was necessitated by the cold war as shown by Wolfgang Streeck (30) and others— “Capitalism and democracy had long been considered adversaries”. Votes do not determine wages, taxes, education, health, wars, ecology, oppression, food, and genocide. We vote for colours, such as blue and red in America. We are no longer in even a mixed democracy where the technocratic economic order is subjected to the scrutiny of democratic will. Rather, all the histories of failed protests against wars, poverty, ecological destruction, racisms, and inequalities show that the demos have no relation to the decisions that regulate their ever-shrinking political life. That is, that freedom without which no people can be said to exist, is “breathless” (31) . But the coming of this reality was known to the critiques of what is called democracy since the 19th century, including Lenin and Gandhi (32) in their distinct ways. It was Lenin who made it clear as to who the enemies of democracy were, The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to “refute”, undermine and defame materialism , and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion. (33) The power of democracy lies in its materialism then. The “enemies of democracy” are less invested in ending our voting rights, but they seek to annul the power named by “materialism” once and for all. Here, we should minimally outline what is meant by “materialism”, through the lessons we learned from Aristotle. Materialism is opposed to Idealism. But if we get lost in the Germanic debates on matter and Idea, we will remain entrapped by the hermeneutics of the texts, which will prevent us from preparing to intervene and interpret politics politically. Rather, we must prepare for intervening-analysis . The term “matter” designates the negation of the possibility which we found with Aristotle— “one thing for one purpose” . Matter names that which can be otherwise, that which is capable of more than one regularity and hence can receive many laws—matter refers to the polynomia of all things. The opposite of what is named by matter is calypsology . (34) Polynomia is denied through the assertion of the concept of a “ruling factor” that denies the otherwise than itself to things, or it suppresses their anti-conatus . Aristotle had proposed the concept of “ruling” or identity-giving function in all things as their principle which limits what they can be; that is, this principle functionally isolates things: “in every composite thing, where a plurality of parts, whether continuous or discrete, is combined to make a single common whole, there is always found a ruling and a subject factor.” (35) If by matter what is understood is polynomia—the faculty to be otherwise than what it is —then, materialism is the assertion of anti-conatus in politics— it must be otherwise . Anti-conatus is the very realism of politics. This assertion of anti-conatus — the tendency in everything to enjoy being-otherwise-than-oneself, and to be elsewhere —is not so simple in its implications. It took until Marx to make its first appearance; that is, to reveal to the people that history is the history of oppression , and that it is intolerable . The anti-conatus , or the desire that arises from out of polynomia, is one of the drives of reason that is intolerant of all oppressions. The liberal call for the tolerance of all incompatible positions of politics is meant to create the ethos of the tolerance of our own intolerable miseries. Anti-conatus is the drive that sees through the veils of the so called “tolerance” of liberalism, which demands of us to “tolerate” our miseries, and against it, calls for a new epoch of profound intolerance of reason. The intolerance of reason is visible in the protest movements of the past year against the genocide conducted by Israel in Palestine with the support of white or first world countries led by the USA, often called ‘the west’. From the tendencies of this visible intolerance a fear is also developing among the oligarchs in most white countries—as visible in the fascistic police actions in Germany (which clearly shows a Nazi character) and the USA—that the anti-conatus of democracy that is beginning to shape may inaugurate a world that is otherwise than what it is now. The most common class war of our era—the war of the rich and the oligarchs against the oppressed—may introduce a phase shift. While being alert to this possibility, the fight for freedom and the creation of the conditions for freedom, should commence in haste. Otherwise, we will be helpless before the impending extermination wars. This is the hour of existential rebellions . The componential laws of democracy The youth are kept as fast asleep – Taxi driver in London Aristotle said of the ends of distinct pursuits, But as there are numerous pursuits and arts and sciences, it follows that their ends are correspondingly numerous: for instance, the end of the science of medicine is health, that of the art of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of domestic economy wealth. (36) The end of democracy is the endless . But we should pursue the meaning of democracy through what its pursuit can deliver. It is certainly not an instrument to achieve something else, such as regime changes or the theft of the natural resources of another country. Democracy cannot be instrumentalised, but the achievement of democracy on its way achieves much that is promised to a few, but always denied to the many: a good life, which is presupposed by all religions as undeliverable, for they go on and on about the miserable life that can find solace in the deliverance of a wealthy man’s life as the after-life or next life. In this regard, we cannot admit the notion attributed to Solon that only after the death of man, as quality of the summation of all moments of a finished life (lest he comes to have an end like that of Priam), can there be a verdict on a good life. Instead, we are concerned with a good life here and now for all, and for all those who will follow. Democracy too requires conditions or has its reasons; that is, there are certain instruments through which we play democracy. They include time, peace, fearlessness, food, health, ecology, education in imagination, friendships, gatherings, freedoms, training in desire. These instruments are both the necessary conditions and the very promises of democracy that are given to all in its pursuit, for the end of democracy is democracy itself. Rather, there are functions and components which are comprehended by democracy, without which democracy cannot be except as mere Idea . The very conditions required to play democracy are the same as those that are needed to play a good life. Such a play of democracy is the life appropriate to the human animal, and its height or perfection is the achievement of the very contemplation of ends; for the specific difference of the human animal is reason, says Aristotle. Of course, we are now playing with the term “play”. Let us limit the uses of this profound concept for now to the analogy of musical instruments. When we say that someone is good at playing the guitar we mean that this person has mastery over both the scales of music—which can be represented non-musically as stave notes—and also the fret boards and the tension of the strings, through the manipulation of which tonal distinctions are produced. From the point of view of the guitar player, music is the function of the knowledge of tonal differences in various organisations and their production through the controlled manipulation of the tension of the strings. A guitar player without the guitar is potentially a musician, but she cannot become the kinesis of music. It is as if the musician lies fast asleep (37) in her now that she is without a guitar. Aristotle would bring our attention towards it in this way: it is manifest that happiness also requires external goods in addition, as we said; for it is impossible, or at least not easy, to play a noble part unless furnished with the necessary equipment. (38) If we expand on this example, though, we find something closer to our time, or to all times. For an orchestra performance, several musicians are needed who must train in a place together, and have instruments of great quality, a conductor, sound engineers, an acoustically suitable hall for their performance and so on. This is, of course, very expensive to produce. In the Greek context, the one who contributed to the expenses of the chorus was called the chorus-leader ( χορηγός ). That is, the rich man is the cause of the music, and he is its leader although he neither trains in nor plays in the chorus. If we move away from this example to the terrain of electoral politics, everything becomes clearer. The super rich who pay for the chorus of politics without playing it, keeping themselves out of all the labours and troubles of politics, are the chorus-leaders of politics. The Way To The West Bank, Lina Khalid, 2023; Image credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut. Democracy is the orchestra of the people’s desires and their pursuit of happiness. But the pursuit of happiness is not given to all but only a few, and this fact is often masked through the noise of ‘democracy’. For Aristotle, the teloii of politics and of ethics form a resonant system, and the components required for leading a good life are immediately implicated in politics, Nevertheless, it is manifest that happiness also requires external goods in addition, as we said; for it is impossible, or at least not easy, to play a noble part unless furnished with the necessary equipment. For many noble actions require instruments for their performance, in the shape of friends or wealth or political power […] (39) These components, such as ‘networks’, wealth, and political power can be acquired. Often, these components necessitate one another; wealth brings ‘friends’, and through the ‘friends’ wealth is protected or is increased. Political power is bought by the chorus leaders of politics deploying their wealth and networks. These components can be inherited, and often are, but are nevertheless acquirable. However, when we speak of the acquirable components, they by their very definition presupposes the distinction between the few and the many. Wealth is by definition the possession of resources which the majority are prevented from having; if all are wealthy, none are wealthy. Power, too, presupposes the possession of executable actions that the majority are deprived of. If all are powerful, none are powerful. The components which are by definition the apportionment of the good for the few, apportion all the miseries upon the majority of the world. Wealth and power are merely inequalities which presuppose the division between the well-apportioned and the ill-apportioned . We have been taught to accept this form of apportionment as ‘natural order’. These miseries are, more often than not, inherited inequalities . Daimons and inherited communities For they well know what kind of cry this is, They recognize the footfall of the Furies. — C. P. Cavafy, Footfalls There are unacquirable components that are given to those in an inherited community . An example of an inherited community of power and ‘good fortune’ is the upper castes of India, who are born as the minority ‘above’ the majority they trample upon, many who are considered untouchable. Racial and racialised religious communities are inherited communities, such as the sectarian groups of West Asia, the continuing aristocratic orders of Europe, and under some other names the feudal lords of America. Democracy is impossible without the destruction of all inherited communities. Now, we should quote Aristotle at length, Also there are certain external advantages, the lack of which sullies supreme felicity, such as good birth , satisfactory children, and personal beauty : a man of very ugly appearance or low birth , or childless and alone in the world, is not our idea of a happy man, and still less so perhaps is one who has children or friends that are worthless, or who has had good ones but lost them by death. As we said therefore, happiness does seem to require the addition of external prosperity, and this is why some people identify it with good fortune (εὐτυχία, good luck), though some identify it with prosperity (ἀρετάω). (40) Of these unacquirable components, we should note that the couple “good birth” and “low birth” which presuppose what we had found earlier, that these are the components that accompany inherited communities and inherited inequalities, which condition the pursuit of what is called Eudaimonia, often translated as “happiness”. These terms through which ethics and democracy are discussed come from a strange and older system, and we should approach all the systems of the ancient worlds with distinct cautions. If we take the Greek word eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία) towards its older meaning, we return to inherited communities . Happiness is to belong to the inherited community of those who are well-apportioned. At first glance, the prefix “eu” suggests “good” and “daimon” refers to the fortune that comes through a supernatural power, that is, something that is not in man’s hands. The term “eu” is opposed to κακός, commonly translated as evil, and it varies in meaning according to contexts. Κακός itself may have meant “defecation” much earlier. The more important term for now is daimon (δαίμων) as it is the one capable of daiomai (δαίομαι), dividing and apportioning between the few and the many. From the resultant inequality of the division it creates the qualities inequality, of both “wealth” and “power”. Daimon and “τύχη” in εὐτυχία, are not separable. Tukhē is the act of a divine being, such as a god or a daimon, which can result in good or bad events in the life of people. These meanings are still present in our expressions “good luck”, “bonne chance”, “break a leg” among the many which imply the values that are the very nature of all things. The etymology of the Greek arete , which is translated as “virtue”, is homologous to the name of the war god Ares . The Greek image of democracy is one of a play of powers among those who have been well-apportioned by the supernatural being, which is not that far from the world of the Iliad , in the Foucauldian sense of “politics is war”. The words “eudaimonia” and “daimon” indicate the caution needed in reading ancient texts of philosophy, which we are conditioned to approach as rational metaphysics, whereas a certain older systematic of hypophysics lies beneath the metaphysics. Hypophysics is concerned with the consecration of a value to a thing or an activity—small is beautiful, slow is good—and the distinct systematicity of such things. The classical logic of determination, which guides metaphysics, does not work in the system of hypophysics. Instead, the nature of a thing is understood to be the very value of a thing, and as one deviates from the value of such a thing, either the value-thing begins its destruction because it is not something determinable, or a daimon comes to prevent such a deviation, as it occurred often with Socrates. Daimon is among those powers that binds a thing to its value; with humans, it often prevents us from deviating from the value of the nature that we are. For this reason, destiny of a thing and its nature are both entrusted to the daimon. For Plato’s Socrates, daimon is a being that is in-between, between gods and men— “[…] stands midway between the two, being a great daimon ; and the function of the daimon is to mediate between gods and men”. (41) The consecration of value and things as one, that is nature, is achieved by daimons— “the whole is combined in one”. The binding of the meaning of each thing in its identity is gathered into the greater identity of the totality of all things and is achieved in metaphysics through the systematics which are grounded in the acceptance of the law of identity. The impossibility of this process to achieve such a unifying sense for the totality of all things (without the unifying sense no totality) is called the “history of Being” by Heidegger, which is revealed through the deconstruction of the history of metaphysics. However, in hypophysics, the unities of individual things and the totality of all things are achieved through the equation of value and nature: nature = value . The unity of the All under the One is not achieved through metaphysics, but hypophysics, and the guarding of the unity is the task of ‘politics’ understood as the value in those born to exercise oppressive power. The life and death of Socrates are guided in accordance with his nature by the daimon that is his own. The daimon of Socrates—for there are daimons of individuals, places, and even of hours (42) —often performed apotropaic functions, of holding him back from venturing into those actions that are not in his nature; the movement of Socrates away from his value/nature was prevented by the personal daimon. In the Apology , Socrates speaks of this voice of the daimon who holds him back from becoming otherwise-than-he-is, rather of the voice of his conatus (… μοι θεῖόν τι καὶ δαιμόνιον γίγνεται φωνή). It is the same voice that prevented Socrates from participating in politics, understood as the struggle for power and wealth. But not only that, it is the absence of this voice that convinced Socrates to accept his death, as you have heard me say at many times and places, is that something divine and spiritual comes to me, the very thing which Meletus ridiculed in his indictment. I have had this from my childhood; it is a sort of voice that comes to me, and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward. This it is which opposes my engaging in politics. (43) The concept of the daimon explains what we encountered in Aristotle as the functional isolation of each according their natures, “[…] the female and the slave are by nature distinct (for nature makes nothing as the cutlers make the Delphic knife, in a niggardly way, but one thing for one purpose ; for so each tool will be turned out in the finest perfection, if it serves not many uses but one .” The democracy of the Greek kind was grounded in the hypophysics of people, who were each functionally isolated according to their birth which assigns their nature, as those born to serve and those born with the nature/value to rule. The supernatural in this hypophysical system refers to the resistance of the few against parting with the wealth and power they inherited. But this resistance is experienced as the order of the divine and the daimonic. Even today, the qualities of inequalities grounded in the hypophysics of birth, perpetuated by inherited communities, continue to force the majority to inherit and bequeath miseries in the many names of the supernatural. But this cannot be the basis for the meaning of the word democracy! Democracy is impossible in a world of daimons who apportion the most to a few, miseries to the most, and create qualities of inequality. As we found earlier, democracy is the very creation of conditions for all to be equally the participants in the determination of the ends of a shared life, and it requires conditions and components which must be created and apportioned together, without perpetuating inherited inequalities. These componential powers, or the good fortunes, or eudaimonia, must be created and apportioned without ever re-introducing the qualities of inequality. When “good fortune” is accepted as good only when it does not constitute qualities of inequality, there will be no more daimons in philosophy and supernaturals in politics. The people who thus apportion together the conditions of life in the responsibility of reason to develop polynomia (44) are democratic; in any other sense this term “democracy” means shit. Democracy is eudaimonia for all; or democracy is the quality of the people who are without the qualities of inequalities . NOTES 1. An earlier version of the text of the lecture delivered at École normale supérieure (Paris) in 2022. It was published as “Democracy and Revolution” in Dwivedi and Mohan, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics , Edited and annotated by Maël Montévil, Hurst Publishers, UK, 2023. An excerpt is available with Protean Magazine , https://proteanmag.com/2024/03/19/indian-philosophy-indian-revolution-excerpt . 2. See Christina Lin, “How the US Ends Up Training al-Qaeda and ISIS Collaborators”, ISPSW Strategy Series: Focus on Defense and International Security , Issue No. 461 Dec 2016, https://css.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/cis/center-for-securities-studies/resources/docs/ISPSW_461_Lin.pdf . 3. The hypocrisy in opposing “Islam” by politicians across the world is evident, “The sectarian terror group won’t be defeated by the western states that incubated it in the first place”. See Seumas Milne, “Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq”, The Guardian , 3 June 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq . On the RAND reports which are leading to the extermination wars in Asia and Africa, see “How CIA and MI6 created ISIS”, MRonline , 03 April 2024, https://mronline.org/2024/04/03/how-cia-and-mi6-created-isis/ . See https://www.politico.eu/article/syria-germany-annalena-baerbock-handshake-france-barrot-no-surprise/ for the meeting of Annalena Baerbock with the new rulers of Syria, who were formerly ISIS and Al Qaeda. For the treatment of women by ISIS (present rulers of Syria) see https://www.deccanherald.com/world/forced-to-eat-meat-of-babies-yazidi-woman-rescued-from-gaza-recalls-horror-meal-served-by-isis-3240586 . 4. See note 1. 5. See the report “Israel’s Crime of Extermination, Acts of Genocide in Gaza”, Human Rights Watch , 19 December 2024, https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/19/extermination-and-acts-genocide/israel-deliberately-depriving-palestinians-gaza . 6. Immanuel Kant, The Philosophy of Law: An Exposition of the Fundamental Principles of Jurisprudence as the Science of Right , trans. W. Hastie, T. and T. Clark, Edinburgh,1887. 7. Freedom in Heidegger is complicated by the many locations and functions of this term, which is conceived differently each time. For example, freedom as that which precedes and makes possible causality is different from freedom as a relation to futurality. Freedom is also implicated in the “It” which gives time and being. 8. “Germany was never fully de-Nazified. It never attempted to come to terms with the politics that had led to the rise of Hitler”. See “Why is Germany supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza?”, Al Jazeera , 8 Nov 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/11/8/why-is-germany-supporting-israels-genocide-in-gaza . 9. See Dwivedi and Mohan “Testing the State of Constitutional Democracy in India Through 'Assemblies of Freedom'”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution , Ed. Maël Montévil, Hurst Publishers, UK, 2023. 10. Hilary Clinton said with irrepressible glee of the sodomy with a bayonet that killed the leader of Libya and theoretician, Colonel M. Gaddafi, “we saw, we conquered, he died”. The Clinton video is available on the internet, which is as gruesome and the killing of Col Gaddafi. See https://globalities.org/2023/05/war-morality-syria-libya . 11. See Mark Curtis “Iran 1953: MI6 Plots With Islamists To Overthrow Democracy”, 1 August 2023, Declassified , https://www.declassifieduk.org/iran-1953-mi6-plots-with-islamists-to-overthrow-democracy . https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978LONDON18624_d.html?fbclid=IwAR0evrBYo3sa0qD4yyvw1lkJisXdUFizh2_ZLzJuuO-UsO3vwINRTLOXFx4https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978LONDON18624_d.html?fbclid=IwAR0evrBYo3sa0qD4yyvw1lkJisXdUFizh2_ZLzJuuO-UsO3vwINRTLOXFx4 and 12. Provided we move away from the theories of the spontaneity and ‘grace’ of a singular event. 13. Jean-Luc Nancy has criticised all the horrors—of colonialisms and wars—unleased in the name of freedom. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom , Translated by Bridget McDonald, Stanford University Press, 1993. 14. George Bush, “Remarks by the Vice President at a Rally for the Troops”, 26 March 2004, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/03/text/20040326-2.html . 15. Ronald Reagan, “The Westminster Address”, https://www.ned.org/promoting-democracy-and-peace/ . 16. Janet L. Yellen, “Remarks by Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen at the Council on Foreign Relations”, 17 October 2024, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2654 . 17. As we know, what is true of the evil constituted by the name ‘freedom’ applies to democracy as well. It is in the name ‘democracy’ that its worst enemy—America—committed mass murders and genocides. However, there is no word in language without the possibility of such exploitations, nor shall there ever be such a word which would assure us “ one word for one purpose” . 18. V. I. Lenin, T he State and Revolution , Tr. Gregory Elliot, Introduction Antonio Negri, Verso, London, 2024. 19. Emphasis original. Lenin would go on to say, “The substitution of the abstract for the concrete is one of the greatest and most dangerous sins in a revolution.” In our time it is also the substitution of poor poetry for the abstract that is a sin. V. I. Lenin, “On Slogans”, 1917, Marxists , https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/15.htm . 20. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”, 1845, Marx/Engels Internet Archive , marxists.org 21. This division between interpretation and action-change as politics was grounded in the text for Derrida, and hence it led to the discoveries of the undecidables of texts in deconstruction as a method passing for— as if —politics. We had tried to retain the force of deconstruction while opening it on to the world of things, events, revolutions, experiments, and life through the addition of certain faculties to the history of deconstruction. See Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi, Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics , Bloomsbury Philosophy, UK, 2019. 22. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”. 23. Aristotle, Politics , 1252a. 24. Aristotle, Politics , 1275a. 25. Aristotle, Politics , 1252b. 26. This faculty is διανοίᾳ προορᾶν ( dianonia prooran ), the faculty to predestinate according to the knowledge of the origin, in other words a certain relation between desire and imagination. Aristotle, Politics , 1252a 27. This interpretation remains contested as a thesis about Aristotle’s oeuvre as a whole. 28. It is possible that “mafia” comes from “māfi” or excused. 29. Timothy Mitchel studied the theories of state that are deployed to confuse the demos about the real mechanisms of power, and the oligarchs of the United States of America. Through the examples of the coup against the democratically elected, progressive political leader of Iran in 1953 by the UK and the USA, and the Aramco case, Mitchel argues that these very discussions of political theory of the democracy that does not exist creates power. Timothy Mitchel, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics”, The American Political Science Review , Vol. 85, No. 1, March, 19191, pp. 77-96. 30. See Wolfgang Streeck, “How Will Capitalism End?”, New Left Review , 87, May/June 2014. 31. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “Breathless …”, Translated by Sophie Galabru, Philosophy World Democracy , NOV-DEC 2020 , Volume 1 Number 1, 42-44, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/_files/ugd/5d53e3_2e51ac99f58a437e880c7d816bb0d6f7.pdf . 32. See Étienne Balibar, 'Lenin and Gandhi: A missed encounter?', Radical Philosophy , 172, Mar/Apr 2012, pp. 9–17. 33. V. I. Lenin, “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”, Marxists , https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm 34. See the glossary by Maël Montévil for “Calypsology” in Indian Philosophy Indian Revolution . For the political deployment of the concept see Aarushi Punia, “Calypsology of Caste through Metaphorization”, Philosophy World Democracy , 21 November 2020, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/book-reviews/calypsology-of-caste 35. Aristotle, Politics , 1254a 36. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , 1094a. 37. In Metaphysics sleep is considered as the analogy of the faculty that can come to presence, but is not yet presence; that is, a faculty has the actuality or ἐνέργεια in “the presence of the thing”. In terms of the analogy “so is that which is awake to that which is asleep”. Aristotle, Metaphysics , 1048b. 38. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , 1099a. It was one of the public duties of rich citizens at Athens to equip the chorus and actors of a drama at their own expense. One so doing was called χορηγός（chorus-leader, as no doubt originally he was, and the dresses, etc., he supplied, χορηγία. 39. ἀρετάω, meaning to flourish, or good fortune. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , 1099a. 40. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , 1099a. Later in the text, Aristotle would reiterate the argument that being in an inherited community or otherwise, which presupposes inherited inequalities, is a component of being happy, “Happiness is essentially perfect; so that the happy man requires in addition the goods of the body, external goods and the gifts of fortune, in order that his activity may not be impeded through lack of them”. But these components are not the sufficient conditions, which often leads many interpreters to assume that these may not be the necessary conditions, “because Happiness requires the gifts of fortune in addition, some people think that it is the same thing as good fortune; but this is not so […]”. 41. The functions of the daimon in Plato and other traditions are not exhausted by this account. In the Symposium, daimons maintain the regularities of the mortal world according to the divine laws, “Interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above: being midway between, it makes each to supplement the other, so that the whole is combined in one.” Plato, Symposium , 201 D-212 C. 42. See Eleni Pachoumi, “The Religious-philosophical Concept of Personal Daimon and the Magico-theurgic Ritual of Systasis in the Greek Magical Papyri”, Philologus: Zeitschrift für Antike Literatur Und Ihre Rezeption 157 (1):46-69. 43. See Plato, Apology, 31b – 31 e. 44. This word “polynomia” was interpreted as a certain kind of materialism without submitting it to Marxism under the name “deconstructive materialism” by Reghu Janardhanan. See R. Janardhanan, "The Deconstructive Materialism of Dwivedi and Mohan:A New Philosophy of Freedom", Positions Politics , 2021, https://positionspolitics.org/the-deconstructive-materialism-of-dwivedi-and-mohan-a-new-philosophy-of-freedom . Related Articles Demosophia JEAN-LUC NANCY Read Article Women World Democracy DIVYA DWIVEDI Read Article

MEERA NANDA Meera Nanda is a historian of science and the author of several works critiquing the influence of Hindutva, postcolonialism and postmodernism on science, and the rising trends of pseudoscience and vedic science. Nanda taught History of Science at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Mohali from 2009 to 2017. In January 2009, she was a Fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Advanced Study, in the Jawaharlal Nehru University for research in Science, Post-Modernism and Culture. She was a Guest Faculty in Humanities and Social Sciences at IISER Pune from 2019 to 2020. In 2023 she became a fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Her best known books are Breaking the Spell of Dharma and Other Essays (2002), Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (2004), The God Market (2010), and Science in Saffron: Skeptical Essays on History of Science (2016) and most recently A Field Guide to Post-Truth India (Three Essays Collective, 2024) and Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism: The Wages of Unreason (Routledge, 2025).

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BOOK EXCERPTS Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II KARMA BEN-JOHANAN 23 October 2023 Read Article Anti-“Jewish” ELAD LAPIDOT 25 January 2023 Read Article Philosophie quantique : Le monde est-il extérieur ? MICHEL BITBOL 6 June 2023 Read Article How to Kill People: A Problem of Design HITO STEYERL 22 December 2022 Read Article Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously OLÚFÉMI TÁÍWÒ 13 February 2023 Read Article The Rebellion of the Oldest Colony – Jineolojî, the Science of Women and Life HAVIN GÜNEŞER 7 December 2022 Read Article See All BOOK REVIEWS A Field Guide to Post-Truth India MEERA NANDA 3 July 2025 Read Article Marcel Czermak : Traverser la folie CAPUCINE VIOLET 12 March 2023 Read Article Translating Kurdish Feminism: Urgent Lessons on Radical Democracy DILEK HUSEYINZADEGAN 30 March 2024 Read Article Out from the Dark Night: For a "Decolonised" Post-Colonial Approach SARAH PERRET 9 February 2023 Read Article La laïcité. Histoires, théories et pratiques MALICK BADJI 3 December 2023 Read Article « Sortir de la Grande nuit » : Pour une approche post-coloniale « décolonisée » SARAH PERRET 30 October 2022 Read Article See All

This is an excerpt from Meera Nanda’s A Field Guide to Post-Truth India, Gurugram: Three Essays Collective, 2024. A Field Guide to Post-Truth India MEERA NANDA 3 July 2025 POLITICS Replica of the altar and utensils used during Athirathram; Image credit: Wikimedia This is an excerpt from Meera Nanda’s A Field Guide to Post-Truth India, Gurugram: Three Essays Collective, 2024. The Big Lie The prototype of the Big Lie is Donald Trump’s Big Lie that he was the real winner of the 2020 presidential election and that Biden is an illegitimate president who “stole” the presidency with voter fraud. There is not an iota of truth to this outrageous claim – multiple audits of votes and numerous law courts have found no evidence of vote fraud. And yet, not only did this lie lead to an armed assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, but nearly one-third of Americans continue to believe that the election was stolen. It was Adolf Hitler who invented the idea of große Lüge, the Big Lie. The essential idea is that the more outrageous the lie, the more credible it will be. Why would people give more credence to a more outrageous lie, a truly colossal lie, than they would to a garden variety lie? Ordinary people, Hitler argued in his Mein Kampf, “more readily fall victim to the big lie than the small lie” because, while everyone lies about small things all the time, “it would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths.” So when people are fed a Big Lie that is truly reality-shifting and delivered brazenly with a straight face, and repeatedly, no one in their right mind would believe that anyone would lie about that. A lie so big that it couldn’t possibly be a lie, and hence, there has to be some truth to it. A lie so grand that it feels that it could not be a lie! The Nazi party took the Fuhrers’ idea and turned it into a propaganda tool. The Nazi’s biggest lie of all – that Germany was not militarily defeated in the First World War but was “stabbed in the back” by Jews and Communists – exemplified the logic spelled out in Mein Kampf. Big lies, however, can’t take on a life of their own without a culture that has become accustomed to small and medium-sized lies, a culture that has become careless about sorting facts from fabrications. As Timothy Snyder, a historian of authoritarian movements put it in “The American Abyss,” an essay he penned just days after the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, “The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved. To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and experts but also of local, state, and federal government institutions, from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security, and all the way to the Supreme Court.” The Big Lie, in other words, requires as its precondition, a post-truth culture in which trust in institutions, the media, scientific experts, and the courts has drained out and the currency of truth has lost its purchasing power. Trump and his henchmen both created and exploited this culture. According to the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site Politi-Fact, percent of Trump’s statements during his presidency were ‘Mostly False’, ‘False’ , or ‘Pants-on-Fire’- grade false. These lies, repeated with a straight face over and over again, and the fact that he could get away with them paved the way for Trump’s Big Lie. The United States under Trump may be post-truth’s poster child, but the phenomenon is now worldwide. The internet-mediated social media have made it possible for fake news, doctored videos, conspiracy theories, and all varieties of disinformation to ricochet around the world at lightning speed. From the “Leave” vote for Brexit in the UK to the Covid-19 pandemic, “alternative facts” and conspiracies have driven out facts. That these “alternative facts” get accepted so readily is a symptom of the breakdown of trust in public institutions in advanced liberal democracies. Lack of trust prepares the ground for weeds of lies to take over the public square. India has its share of Big Lies which have the same status as Trump’s lie about the stolen election or the Nazi lie about the “stab in the back.” India’s current Big Lie is also the oldest of all Indian Big Lies. It asserts that Hindus in India are a dying race, soon to be overrun by fast-multiplying Muslims. It is the triumph of willful blindness to facts, combined with fear-mongering propaganda, that Hindus who make up 79.80 percent of the country’s population, with 966 million people, have been made to believe that they will be overtaken by the Muslims who account for 14.23 percent of the population, with 172 million people. This Big Lie is not only Big but deadly as well. Here is an example of India’s Big Lie in action. Open calls for killing Muslims were made at the “Dharm Sansad” held at Haridwar in December 2021. This hate-fest, whose theme was Islamic Bharat mein Sanatan ka Bhavishya (“The Future of the Sanatan Dharma in Islamic India”), was premised on the lie that Muslims in India are growing in population at a rate faster than all other groups and that India will soon become “Islamic.” The organizer of the event, Yati Narasighanand, the priest of the Dasna Devi temple in Ghaziabad, openly encourages Hindus to have at least five children or “see their lineage destroyed.”20 This is only a recent example of the toxic Muslim “population explosion” discourse that has been the trademark of the Hindu Right since its inception. Meera Nanda; Image credit: The Critic The myth of the Muslim population explosion is contradicted by all available data (see below), and yet, this baseless claim has become India’s equivalent of Trump’s Big Lie, a monstrous, reality-changing, bald-faced lie repeated over and over again. It is this Big Lie that fuels anti-conversion laws and the many campaigns against the so-called “love jihad,” “land jihad,” “Corona jihad “and such. In addition to the Big Lie about the Muslim takeover, other lies have acquired the status of unquestioned truths. The list of such lies includes “the idea that the first people of India are the Hindus. That the Muslims and Christians are intruders and do not constitute the core of Indian culture. That we had all the knowledge of the world at one time. That Sanskrit is the mother of all Indian languages. That we have been modern since eternity,” (Jafri and Apoorvanand, 2021, note 13, above). Big Lies are both fragile and resilient; fragile because they can be exposed by setting them against the facts of the matter, and resilient because the liar and his public come to believe that it couldn’t possibly be a lie and that those who don’t agree with them are lying. No amount of fact-checking and debunking can dislodge a Big Lie once it becomes part of a larger narrative that seems believable because it addresses some deeper existential anxieties and political interests. Trump’s Big Lie has been debunked soundly and repeatedly. Biden’s electoral victory was certified by all 50 states in the United States, 60 lawsuits have been dismissed due to lack of evidence, and multiple audits of the ballots have found no fraud. Yet, these lies about rampant vote fraud live on because they fit into the White Americans’ panic over demographic changes in the US where non-White minorities are expected to make up more than 50 percent of the population by 2050. The demographic panic feeds into the Republican party’s fear that the non-White electorate will vote for the Democratic party. The Republican party needs the Big Lie of election fraud to push for stricter voter registration laws to depress non-White votes if it hopes to win elections. Facts become powerless in the face of this narrative. A very similar logic is at work in India’s Big Lie of the country becoming “Islamic.” Loud genocidal cries about India turning Islamic due to Muslims’ “explosive” birthrate are coming at a time when the Muslim population is showing the steepest decline in fertility rates since Independence. A careful analysis of India’s National Family Survey 2015 data, the Pew Center report titled Religious Composition of India concluded that: Every religious group in the country has seen its fertility fall…. Among Indian Muslims, for example, the total fertility rate has declined dramatically, from 4.4 children per woman in 1992 to 2.6 children in 2015…Muslims still have the highest fertility rate among India’s major religious groups, followed by Hindus at 2.1…. But the gaps in child-bearing between India’s religious groups are generally much smaller than they used to be . For example, while Muslim women were expected to have an average of 1.1 more children than Hindu women in 1992, the gap had shrunk to 0.5 by 2015” (emphasis in the original). The bogey of the Muslims converting Hindus into their fold by devious means is equally bogus. Another Pew Center survey of 30,000 Indians found that 98 percent of them were practicing the same faith that they were raised in. The minuscule number of Hindus (0.7 percent) who drop out is exceeded ( 0.8 percent) by those who were not raised Hindu but who now claim a Hindu identity.25 Conversion is by no means depleting the Hindu fold, and yet there is a near-hysterical push for enacting anti-conversion laws and facilitating ghar-wapsi (return to the Hindu fold). The question is why this Big Lie about Muslim overpopulation persists in the face of reams of data showing the exact opposite. As S.Y. Quraishi says, “There are two possibilities. One, that these hate-mongers are ignorant; two, their sole intention is to create mischief, by deliberately distorting facts to create a wedge of hate between the two major communities in India (2021, 252). Ignorance can be ruled out as the RSS takes pride in its highly educated cadre, many with Ph. Ds It is clear, Quraishi continues, that the propagandists have a “mischievous intent –to create hatred for Muslims and bring about social polarization.” Truth is being sacrificed for the sake of a murderous political project. Facts on the ground have ceased to matter to public opinion and public policy. The Big Lie of Islamization, repeated brazenly, repeatedly, and menacingly, by khadi-clad government ministers and saffron-clad monks alike, has become a part of the mental furniture of the majority, many of whom are already predisposed to Islamophobia. Like the Republican party in the US, Hindu nationalists need the Big Lie of Muslim takeover for their majoritarian agenda of making India a Hindu nation. The Deep Lie Here is one telling difference between a Big and Deep Lie. Trump’s Big Lie in the United States was not accompanied by school boards, colleges, and universities starting Trumpian courses in how to bullshit and how to spin alternative facts. It cannot be denied that the cultural wars fueled by Trump and the Republican party’s xenophobic, nativist politics continue to reverberate in American educational institutions, with many states enacting laws that would limit what teachers can say regarding race, sexuality, and American history in classrooms. But there is also a resurgence of critical thinking, accompanied by re-reading of Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Sinclair Lewis, Vaclav Havel, and other critics of totalitarian regimes’ distortion of truth. If anti-science rhetoric has become “democratized,” it is also facing strong pushback from public intellectuals who are making a fresh case for the importance of science and critical thought for a functioning democracy. In India, in contrast, the Big Lies are being supplemented with an overhaul of education, from top to bottom, under the National Education Policy (NEP) announced in 2020 that gives pride of place to millennia-old Hindu sciences and philosophical systems. The proposed changes would amount to rewriting the fundamental rules and background assumptions of what constitutes justified true belief. If modern secular education, at its best, aims at cultivating a critical spirit that gives primacy to questioning, revising, and even discarding those ideas that fail the test of best-available modes of knowing, the goal of NEP is to inculcate pride in Hindu heritage and a sense of patriotic duty to think and live according to the tenets of this heritage. The stated motivation of the NEP is to decolonize and spiritualize education. Instead of the ham-handed way in which the earlier BJP-led government (1998-2004) tried to ram through degree courses in astrology and priestly rituals, Modi’s education policy seeks to braid traditional sciences and traditional philosophies of knowledge under the rubric of “Indian Knowledge Systems” (IKS) in all disciplines, at all level of education. The objective is to create a seamless web of beliefs based upon the traditional Hindu panpsychist metaphysics which sees the material world as permeated by a spiritual “shakti,” and traditional epistemology that allows the outdated methods of analogies, correspondences, and the testimony of the spiritual “seers” as valid sources of evidence. These much-hyped knowledge systems, moreover, evolved as part and parcel of Hindu religious traditions whose goal was not objective knowledge of the external world, but liberation of the soul from the physical body. The introduction of these knowledge traditions into secular education serves no purpose other than to cultivate a false pride in India as the world’s guru and to declare India’s mental independence from the colonial hangover. Introducing traditional ways of knowing in public education is treated as harmless and even commendable as an antidote to Westernization. Even the critics of Modi’s drive for Hinduization have largely responded to the IKS component of Modi’s education policy with a shrug. After all, they argue, students will still study all the modern subjects; and the institutes for scientific and technological research will not cease to exist. What possible harm can come from introducing indigenous traditions, they ask? They might even restore some balance, for have we not been toeing the Western line for too long. This, in broad strokes, is where the majority opinion stands. What they don’t fully appreciate is that IKS is a Trojan horse for the Hinduization of thought. The teaching of IKS in school curricula, alongside the regular modern natural and social sciences, is no different in principle from the attempt in the US to teach intelligent design creationism alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution in high schools as was tried under the Bush administration. In the US, where the First Amendment prohibits the state from making any law “respecting the establishment of religion,” the courts shot down this proposal on the ground that intelligent design was not science because it relied upon the unproven existence of a Christian God. In India, on the other hand, we have no safeguard against introducing Hindu knowledge systems, all of which assume the existence of an all-pervading, all-knowing spirit. The NEP is a silent coup against secular education because the injection of Hindu metaphysics and modes of knowing can substantially inflect the background assumptions so that an alternative reality begins to feel real and comes to co-exist with, if not overshadow, the secular content of the curricula. Introducing the paradigms long overturned by advances in modern science means presenting the rejected knowledge and sterile methodologies of these paradigms as viable options for learning and research in the 21st century. Rewriting textbooks that present thinkers of an earlier era – an Aryabhata or a Kautilya, for example – as if they were working on the same problems that engage modern-day astronomers, political scientists, and economists, turns them into the founding fathers of modern astronomy, political science, and economics, thus laying claims of Hindu India’s priority on modern ideas. What is worse, the intellectual revolutions that have overturned Aryabhata, and radically revised Kautilya’s political-economic thought, are erased from the consciousness. Thus, the ancient comes to be made contemporaneous with the modern, and any critical impulse the students might have harboured is nipped in the bud. This kind of intellectual engineering will prepare the grounds for Deep Lies to take root and flourish. In such a culture, unfalsifiable assertions can be passed off as scientific facts, because what constitutes evidence itself gets redefined along the lines of what traditional knowledge systems consider as evidence. Because traditionally the memory of the past was passed down in the form of myths, myths can now be justified as history under the cover of following the intellectual traditions of our ancestors. Because the evidence of analogies ( upamana ) and correspondences ( bandhus ) is accepted as valid in most Indian philosophical schools, pseudo-sciences like astrology and vastushastra that depend upon analogies and correspondences can pass as legitimate sciences that are as empirical and rational within the Indian cultural universe, as modern science is within the Western world. Because the shabda (word) of the shista (the “cultured,” and those learned in the Vedas) is pramana (proof, or means of knowledge), shlokas from the sacred books become incontrovertible “proof ” that can be deployed in support of any assertion. (These efforts have already started to bear fruit as we see in chapters 2, 3, and 4. The “inner science” that deploys yogic seeing is described more fully in chapter 5). This analogical and mystical mode of apprehending empirical realities constitutes the philosophy of the Indian variety of the Deep Lie. An ordinary lie, or even a really Big Lie, can be shown to be a lie because it contradicts the available evidence that can be accessed through due diligence by ordinary mortals, deploying the ordinary tools of observation and reason. Deep Lies, on the other hand, are propositions that appear perfectly coherent and plausible within the parameters of their own metaphysics and rules of evidence. For those who accept these parameters – which includes the vast majority of everyday Indians – even the suspicion that they are being lied to would not arise, because they would be given irrefutable “evidence” to support the narrative. Refuting these kinds of Deep Lies would require refuting the entire world picture of classical Hindu thought – something beyond the abilities of even the most talented fact-checker. Related Articles Through the Great Isolation: Sans-colonial DIVYA DWIVEDI Read Article Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously OLÚFÉMI TÁÍWÒ Read Article

MAURICIO GARCÍA Mauricio García teaches at the Instituto Jorge Robledo (Medellín, Colombia). He holds a master degree in philosophy from Universidad de Antioquia with a thesis on Herbert Marcuse and the problem and possibilities of a revolutionary subjectivity. His area of specialization is the modern philosophical thought in Colombia. García contributes to the Centro de estudios en ciencias y humanidades (Center for the Study of Sciences and Humanities) particularly with the editorial team that is in charge of the publication and editing of classical authors of modern political philosophy such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.

FRANCESCA BORGARELLO Francesca Borgarello is doctoral fellow at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra and at the University of Bologna. Borgarello is completing her dissertation in “Philosophy and Postcolonial Studies”, which aims at critically reconstructing the trajectory of Indian Subaltern Studies, both within Western and Indian debates. Currently, her main interests are postcolonial theories as a means of both permanently deconstructing Eurocentric theories, categories, and epistemological structures; and developing non-Eurocentric critiques of global capital; Marxism; and, more recently, the exploration of the resonances between casteisms and racism, as well as abolitionist approaches to both systems of power.

It will not be a world democracy, since it must be the people themselves who create themselves and arrange themselves. Rather, we affirm a democratic essence of the world: peopled by all the living and by all the conversing, wholly configured by their existence and by their words. EDITORIAL TEAM EDITOR Divya Dwivedi ASSOCIATE EDITORS Simon Trüb Ryosuke Kakinami Maël Montévil (Associate Editor, Science and Technology) Aarushi Punia Daniel J Smith Kamran Baradaran Vivek Gopal (Associate Editor, Journalism and Media) Mauricio García ASSISTANT EDITORS Zinhle KaNobuhlaluse Francesca Borgarello EDITORIAL BOARD Mireille Delmas-Marty (1941 - 2022) Divya Dwivedi Achille Mbembe Shaj Mohan Maël Montévil Jean-Luc Nancy (1940 - 2021) Ivana Perica EDITORIAL CONSULTANTS Hartosh Singh Bal Abdesselam Chedaddi Katja Freistein Anish Mohammed (Science and Technology Consultant) SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE Emily Apter Robert Bernasconi Anne Cheng Souleymane Bachir Diagne Federico Ferrari Rodolphe Gasché Nicolas Idier Osamu Nishitani Philippe Roger Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback Vijay Tankha Romila Thapar Juan Manuel Garrido Wainer Robert J.C. Young Henrik Skov Nielsen Zeynep Direk ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Caterina Avataneo