Illusion of Enlightenment

In the course of their intellectual evolution, people often reach a point where they feel they’ve arrived. But that moment of supposed arrival is usually one of quiet exhaustion, when they’ve spent their potential and stand estranged from their deeper human selves. It is precisely then that they feel at the lofty heights of knowledge and conviction. Yet what they take for a summit is merely a fog, one that subtly hacks their cognitive self. Caught in an illusory cadence or lulled into a zone of assumed clarity, they mistake exhaustion for insight, and conformity for revolution, all while aligning themselves with the very forces that erode genuine thought. Even among those regarded as the finest of the ‘arrived,’ the so-called historical exceptionals, there are those who have cloaked base instincts in the language of redemption.

Niraj Kumar Jha