Symptom

“Of the 7000 languages spoken today, fully half are not being taught to children. Effectively, unless something changes, they will disappear within our lifetimes. There are those who quite innocently ask, “Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all spoke the same language?” My answer is always to say, “A wonderful idea, but let’s make that universal language Haida, or Yoruba, Lakota, Inuktitut or San.” Suddenly people get a sense of what it would mean to be unable to speak their mother tongue.”
– Wade Davis

Diagnosis

“The idea of a single civilization for everyone implicit in the cult of progress and technology impoverishes and mutiliates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life”
– Octavio Paz

Disease

What do we call a disease that spreads by pretending it is not a disease, but in fact a cure?

A Question
Why is it that when a Hindu youth enters the doors of a madrasa, and stops believing in his traditional Gods, the worldview of the Vedas, in Karma, in multiple births, in the sanctity of life itself, we say that he has converted, but when the same youth enters the doors of a university, stops believing in his traditional Gods, the worldview of the Vedas, in Karma, in multiple births and the sanctity of life itself, we ignore his conversion and go on to praise his accomplishments and call him scientific and liberal? Why do we fear our children entering the former door but not the latter when, in fact, their effects are exactly the same?

…and an answer
There are two reasons. One is that, from the time of our first mental enslavement by the British, the religion of Liberalism has brainwashed us into believing that it is “neutral”. The second reason is that the religious worldview of Liberalism is not expressed in material religious terms (worship rituals and temples) but in intellectual constructs. We fail to recognize it for what it truly is- a religion like any other.

An Intuition
Yesterday, my wife asked me why I react so strongly to counter the cultural messages that our children receive at school, “Let them have a variety of opinions and form their own” she said. “If someone were to touch our children or sell them drugs, would you not respond strongly?” I asked. “Why is it any different when someone is pouring poison in our children’s ears?”

This argument about differing opinions and the false belief that all opinions are equal is one of the most insidious conversion schemes of Liberalism. All opinions are not equal and we have to protect our children from opinions that draw them away from Dharma until they are strong enough in Dharma to fight those opinions themselves.

…and what it reveals
Make no mistake; the boundary erasing, future-centric cult of individual autonomy that has arrived at your doorstep is a religion in disguise. It goes by the name of Liberalism. It may have infected us, it is certainly infecting our children. In educational institutions, on TV, in the movies, its conversion efforts are everywhere. It is the dominant religion of our time that is spreading unrecognized and unheeded even in rural Bharat upon the wings that the internet has given it and under the cloak of neutrality and “progress” that its propaganda machinery has thrown over it.

If, like I used to, you believe that one can be both liberal and Hindu or that Hinduism is essentially liberal, you would be mistaken. As soon as you consider yourself a liberal, you have converted out of your birth-religion and are now either wholly or partially in the grip of a foreign hand. As a Hindu-Liberal your primary philosophical foundation will no longer be Dharmic but the values of the European Enlightenment – Liberty, Equality and Fraternity – and your Hinduism is now a mere flavor, something you do out of habit or performance. Liberalism likes flavors- skin colors, religions, nationalities, languages, even genders- anything that will help cover up its beating monotheistic, world-dominating heart with a veil of plural neutrality.

The morality of nothing

Inter-caste marriages, inter-national marriages, inter-race marriages, same-sex marriages among liberals are not signs of “open-mindedness” but merely a sign that both parties have shed their birth-identities to such an extent that they are able to accept their newly-adopted, commonly-held religion- Liberalism, as their primary identity marker. They are essentially marrying within their religion. Don’t let them label you “closed-minded” based on their inter-flavor marriages or any other act of boundary erasure. Call them out as converts. As faithful followers of their new religion, they have a new god and new rituals (as we will see). They are as devout in their fervor to this new god as any ordinary religious person (as we will see).

Do not allow them to insist that their actions are “moral” thereby slyly insisting that yours are not. Morality is entirely relative to the founding principles of each belief system. Liberal morality too arises from its fundamental axioms. What we need to do is to identify those axioms.

Their morality manifests in society with the following claims-
1. No-Thing is sacred
2. No Relationship is sacred
3. No Idea is sacred except for three – Liberty, Equality and Fraternity

The entire edifice of life, living, life-giving and death has been reduced and simplified to these three ideas.

The morality of something

Unlike Liberal society, Hindu society deals with real difference and embraces complexity as the very face of creation. In daily life, business, and personal life we are constantly navigating real diversity. And unlike the Liberals, our primary identity is not religious but a whole host of other local, earthy, cultural, communal markers. Additionally, our religion and therefore our morality is not ideological, it doesn’t float over the surface of the Earth in an imaginary ether, but rather is material, geographic and historic, tied down purposely and consciously by the spirit of our way-finding ancestors. In other words, our identities are real. We cannot exchange them, transfer them, or barter them away for any mere idea, not even for the ideas of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

In contrast, the identity of a liberal is flimsy. It is based on mere ideas. Worse still, in the case of a liberal Indian, his identity is based on mere ideas put in his head by his former colonial masters. Those of you who have bartered away your Real Identities either consciously in your late teens or unconsciously through the absence of a strong cultural input at home and school, you should know that you are no longer Hindus, you are Hindu-flavored Liberals. Your conversion is either in progress or complete. Within two generations, your children will no longer speak the language of your ancestors, nor follow any of their rituals, nor espouse, with any seriousness, any of their philosophical understandings on how to live life. If your conversion has been extreme, you may choose not have children at all.

The genius of Liberalism lies in its ability to pass itself off as neutral, as being not a religion at all. It is a culture of cultureless-ness. Its immateriality fools us into believing that it is not a religion at all. But though it has replaced the materiality of older religions with intellectualisms, it cannot hide anymore. When we observe the followers of a faith long enough, the contours of even a hidden faith emerge into plain sight.

The Faithful

My friend told me yesterday that she is going to allow her son to choose his religion, little realizing that this act of not imposing culture and choosing Choice is itself a liberal imposition upon her child which will shut the door of his tradition to him forever. This decision of hers falls in the same category as that of the Mumbai man who is suing his parents for having birthed him without asking his permission and all those woke people who believe that their parents choosing their name is an imposition. This stance…these very thoughts presuppose that the sanctity of individual autonomy must never be breached, that it stands apart from the lowly matrix of culture, geography and even time. This is also the same train of thinking that leads Elon Musk on a popular podcast to declare that “the human condition is merely a conduit for the emergence of Artificial Intelligence.”

Listen carefully to what the faithful are really saying… “There is nothing here in our relationships with each other, our ancestors and the Earth that is worthy and noble…all must be sacrificed at the altar of the new God in his new Heaven.”

And their Faith
Look at how the “left-liberals” behave when any of their “holy cows” are touched or questioned – minority rights, individual rights, human rights, choice, rebellion, the brotherhood of academia – don’t they behave like the faithful? Doesn’t their vehemence carry a touch of the religious? Don’t they take to the streets like religious people? Aren’t their foot soldiers ready to risk life and limb for their religious icons? Do any of them look remotely like neutral, dispassionate, rational observers that they claim they are? Don’t they excommunicate apostates? Don’t they refuse to talk even to their parents who hold differing political views from them?

Are they not the converted?

The fog lifts…and doubt fades, Liberalism is indeed a religion. Remember, it is a religion of ideas, not things or relationships. Now that we know their 3 sacred ideas, we need only to understand what these ideas mean to them.

Liberty is defined as “Individual Autonomy”, which is freedom from any relationship- from the Earth, animals, plants, history, geography, tradition, family, our bodies…everything.

Equality is defined as “Power Redistribution”, which involves the cultivation of the delusion that equal distribution of power among groups will lead to the emergence of a higher morality amongst these groups. Today, the Equality camp insists on power redistribution on the basis of gender, religion, ethnicity and anything else under the sun.

Fraternity is defined as “Monoculture”. It is the military-industrial-media complex that is hell-bent on world domination and the imposition of one single set of Western social and economic ideas on every human, thereby making them “brothers”.

And now to arrange these ideas in the proper religious framework –

The Father – Liberty (represents Power/Control over relationships)
The Son – Equality (represents a Love that must be sacrificed for the sake of the Father’s dominion)
The Holy Ghost – Fraternity (represents the Monocultural spirit spreading through the world)
Liberalism has a Heaven– A Perfect Future (imaginary and ever receding)
It has Baptism – The Rebellion of Youth (a mark of both their Liberty as well as their longing for Equality)
It has Rituals – The daily enactment of Individual Choice
It has Missionaries – Academia, Entertainment and Technology

We can view the on-going clash between Classical Liberals and Capitalists who stand for Liberty and the Left-Liberals who stand for Equality, as a fundamental fault-line in the Liberal religion’s conception of the world. Liberty tells us we must choose, but Equality tells us that we cannot choose because all choices are equal. The failure to bridge the divide between Liberty and Equality is the main reason for the weakening of the Liberal Religion that we are currently witnessing both in Europe and the USA. Liberty and Equality are mutually exclusive. One must be sacrificed for the other. Among postmodernists and the youth, the clamor for the Son to overthrow the Father is growing louder and louder. It is a full-blown rebellion. For Hindus there is no difference between the Father and the Son, we must encourage them to fight while we grow strong enough to withstand the spread of The Holy Ghost.

Recovery from Disease

If you find that you have been unknowingly converted out of the religion of your birth into Liberalism, you can remedy your situation by reverse engineering yourself out of its core concepts.
1. Get away from its Missionaries – Stop watching TV, curate your movies, stop reading mainstream news, get away as often as you can from gadgets into Nature and People.
2. Revoke your Baptism – Stop rebelling and start building constructive long-term relationships
3. Reject its Heaven – Meditate. Recover the Here and Now. Do not fetishize the future like its some guaranteed solution for all problems.
4. Disbelieve in the Son – Stop believing that everything and every idea is equal. Stop believing that the perfection of equality can be achieved. Think. Act on a case by case basis with compassion.
5. Disbelieve in the Father – Stop believing that individual autonomy is the end goal of societal organization. You are not an “individual”…you are connected permanently to other people as well as the Earth. Develop appropriate rituals to reflect this in your life or adopt traditional ones.

Let me now lay out a very basic counter-point to the values of the European Enlightenment from which the religion of Liberalism has sprung. Let us examine the Bharatiya equivalents to these core European values and what each value enables for society and the individual.

If we are to create a new Smriti under the shadow of Liberalism’s overarching power at this point in history- a Bharatiya document for the Bharatiya people – we could start by replacing Liberty, Equality and Fraternity with Dharma, Equivalence and Mutual Respect and expand these concepts into organizational ideas. If not a new constitution, a small group of thinkers should at least be able to construct a preamble.

————–

Does Modernity inevitably lead to Liberalism?

Does Modernity inevitably lead to Individualism?

Can the deep value systems of Bharat tame this beast?

The time for a conscious Hindu Modernity is now.

References: Real Life

Sincere Thanks to:
Rajiv Malhotra ji for rescuing the phrase “Mutual Respect” from the obscurity of daily use
Nithin Sridhar ji for his book “Samanya Dharma”

Featured Image: The Economist

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. IndiaFacts does not assume any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information in this article.

Maragatham