The Latent Reality

What the times manifest leaves the old school of intelligentsia aghast. They cannot read the latent reality: it is that the times are waging the most desperate battles for republicism, civicism, and constitutionalism. In the absence of a commensurate epistemological framework, they do what they can do the best. They mirror the anomalous.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Let others question you

Let others question you. Answer with all sincerity and honesty. They help you fight devils occupying your mindscape.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Resisting the Tyranny of Philosophy

Philosophy liberates; such is the general assumption. In reality, it is double-edged; it does the opposite too. How does philosophy do the opposite to us? The reason is that we associate philosophy with the thoughts of mystics, geniuses, achievers or leaders. We ignore the fact that philosophising is something we all do. And, when we distrust ourselves and our fellows and rely blindly on lofty ideas, we make philosophy tyrannical. One may look kiddish while philosophising, as I do right now. But we must not be shy about being kiddish. It was a kid who told the truth about the king's regal attire. Let us all philosophise with confidence; let us dialogue about how we make sense of the world. It does not mean that great philosophies and philosophers are irrelevant; they are rather valuable. The point is that we must engage with them and must not submit to them.

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Atomisation of Society

Atomisation is an inevitable dimension of an advancing society. People choose to be either aloof or prefer only measured relations. They value privacy and non-interference. The pandemic speeded up the process greatly.

This leaves everyone vulnerable as it means less support even from family as one grows old, suffers a prolonged illness, or fell into some crisis. Even otherwise as an individual one feels helpless when they encounter different types of rogue entities which abound all around. The crisis for one is going to worsen as the support from the clan, caste, and peers is disappearing fast.

The answer is not to exhort people for strengthening families or to cement and augment social ties. These are hardly going to materialise. The answer is to revamp and build public spaces, agencies, and institutions to serve the individuals. We need a freer market as it serves the individual interest best, and a body of functional laws, which protects one from being cheated or robbed or harmed in any way. The practice of patron-client ordering would result in endless isolated tragedies, sparing perhaps none.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Neoliberalism or Neoabsolutisms

Literati's incessant cannonade reduced neoliberalism to rubble. And thus, they decided the fate of the twenty-first century. For the first time in human history, literati had got the opportunity solely to set the course of humanity.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Utopium

He offered utopium, the ultimate pain-numbing dope, the dream of heavens on the earth, to the sufferer. And, at the same time weaponised sufferance. However, I do not intend to flog a dead horse here. There is a long and ongoing tradition of weaponising sufferance, and one must exercise caution. Theocracies and ideocracies do the same and then we have famines in the fields and camps in the wilderness.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Schooling

Not thesising, I am only sharing my impressions. Schooling, the modern non-theological one, is one of the pedagogical means, though it is the prime one in the totalitarian political age. Its primacy is so encompassing that one hears hardly about other pedagogical means and what one can hear, but only those with trained ears, are the faint cries for deschooling and unschooling, It is no strange as schooling is a working part of a larger arrangement. 

What does schooling do? Learning 3Rs can be done in any setting, and even other knowledge elements can be learnt by reading books and taking help from elders, and now with multiple media. Certainly, this is not the USP of schooling. What is the exclusivity of schooling? Basically, it is a public institution, and it drafts the required number of kids to serve the public ends when they grow up; and to the purpose, it regiments the kids to grow as agents of some grand objective, which entails uniformising to make them comrades for a mission and training the mind to accept which the minds usually resist accepting. 

The thing is that minds resist rationalism and agency. And, the schooling thus does the right thing in that it applies some coercion to train the mind for science and enterprise. However, there is another aspect: that the schooling seeks to appropriate these two for denying humanism by creating secular colossuses. The Kremlin and the Commissariat make the most formidable of such phenomena. 

Niraj Kumar Jha