The four people on my 30s Mount Rushmore are Prof. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Venkatesh Rao, Amit Varma, and Waleed Aly¹. Towards Prof. Mehta I have reverence- I have never been in the presence of a more stellar intellect. To witness how widely that man's thoughts range, how deep they go, and how quickly he gets to the core of a question, that even the asker is unsure of, is a sight to behold. His presence reminds me of what Dibakar Banerjee once said about Kubrick, "His control is.. intimidating." For Venkat I have admiration- he has taught me to see structures, and for a long time I was extremely envious of his ability to communicate omnipresent but invisible phenomena with that perfect neologism. The way he wrestles down large questions with theoretical concepts and intuition pumps, and his writerly panache have given me innumerable mental orgasms. For Amit I have gratitude- so much of what I know of India has come from him. He's made me love India more both thanks to the topics discussed but more so because of the Indian thinkers and practitioners TSATU has brought into limelight. And for Waleed I have love. Since I first heard him, with Prof. Stephens, on The Minefield, then on The Project, but mostly because of his books that I've felt a camaraderie with the man that goes beyond respect and gratitude. It is the demeanour of his speech, his prose, the adab he brings to a panel, that, on the one hand, exemplify what I rejoice about liberalism and the public space, and on the other, rejuvenate in me the aspiration to behave like that, to be like that.

His latest Quarterly Essay, Time of Monsters, is both a continuation and a response to their previous one, Uncivil Wars. The former was written celebrating and proclaiming individual human decency, forgiveness, and understanding as an antidote to the polarising politics. Building on James Baldwin's work, and on a modern, conscience-led interpretation of religion by various activists, they suggested that no matter what the powers that be imposed, the individual still had the right and responsibility to act righteously; In some ways echoing AJ Muste's famous "I do this so that they don't change me" dictum. It was a rehash of the Great Man Theory- It's not great men who change the world, its that men who insist on their self-righteousness (which probably sounds more derogatory than it should) end up inspiring more and more people to cause a swerve in the motion of the world, and are retrospectively termed great. What they aspire to is not greatness but మనశ్శాంతి, a refusal to look away, to convince themselves that that's the only way the world could be.

Its a very liberal sentiment- a profound belief that the buck stops at the individual and a revolution starts there too².

Aly picks up from there and asks a two-sided question: One, how is it that in a world of unimaginable material abundance and choice of individual lifestyle, we have so much unhappiness, and, two, how is it that all these free individuals are not able to avert the world away from environmental destructions, war, immense inequality, and fear caused by rapid technological change?

Individuals, as well-meaning and intelligent as they are, hold too little power to make a sizeable change, and they'll need to come together- be it in the form of religious groups, firms, governments etc. But once these hyperobjects have been established, they take on a life of their own and can chase ends distinct to individual, or even species-level, flourishing. The mechanisms of modernity we have to redirect those systems- majorly markets and elections- are proving to be too sluggish and inadequate to the problems at hand. That leaves us more anxious, less able to act in our best interests. Add consumerism and the proliferation of social media, and we find it even hard to figure out what our best interests are.

To combat the sense of disorientation, Aly identifies two different strands of post-liberal politics we've embraced in the last 10-15 years: Woke Politics, and Neo-Consevatism. The former argues all structures are unequal and so should be deconstructed, and the latter argues the individual turn leaves us alienated and dehumanised. From a literary theory lens, the first is Postmodern, the second Premodern. Aly convincingly argues that neither has the vitality nor a constructive mentality to last long: One can't build, one can't grow. So he eventually ends on an elegiac note, stating that for all its faults, liberalism's older traditions tried to marry freedom with virtue, and we might find a way to reclaim it- in what structures he does not broach.

I was surprised that Aly did not choose to investigate the role of technological tools in the ongoing transition³. Owing to my turn away from anthropocentrism and to an Antikytheraean (Benjamin Bratton/ Henry Farrell et al) worldview, I think ideology is but the App Layer/ SaaS of the Social Stack. We are shaped, infact constrained, by Biology, Economics, Technology in even more fundamental ways, and our ideologies are essentially window dressings, rationalising mechanisms. They're stories we tell to satiate more than to guide. I think Venkat has been the most prescient of my intellectual guides because he is able to set aside questions of aesthetics and ethics, taste and signalling as he might call it, and follow where truth leads him⁴.

I once read that mass politics is a very recent phenomenon. For most of human history, high-end politics was the game of elites and the masses lived more local lives. Not that those policies didn't have an impact but most people were only interested in coping with/ using it rather than trying to shape it. I think modern communication tools played a big part in the transformation⁵. Most of the proletariat (should I say petite bourgeoisie) felt they had a say in the matter because the information feedback loops were quick enough and a sense of commonality strong enough, to create large 'imagined communities'. It was always more illusion than reality but it was powerful enough to create patriotic countrymen⁶. Put another way, the centripetal force of a common superstructure (language/religion/ethnic group) could balance the centrifugal forces (vast geographical spaces/social hierarchies/misaligned incentives), and that led us to creating similar-ish citizens.

Now that the effects of the Divergence Machine have started to manifest, we're going to go back to being dispersed, albeit interconnected, beings- just that again actions in one part of the world will take a while and transform before becoming effects in another part. For instance, Climate Change, for all its globe span has, and will continue, to affect different places differently. We will all go back to living more provincial lives, our attentions narrower (and hopefully deeper) than they have been. Again, this isn't anything new- its an even distribution of cozyweb. The underlying structures won't be consigned to pre-modern trade routes though- and now that we're weaning away from fossil fuels, we won't be directly impacted by war and commodity markets- It'll also be the Internet. To reiterate, this is not to say that we will be insulated and can live in siloes. It's that we, the mango people⁷, won't be on the frontlines. Public Policy, Monetary & Financial decisions, War, Technological Tools will still be shapers of world history; Just that we will, and have begun to, turn our lives towards more local nodes providing a modicum of protection against global exposure.

That I think is the principal component I'll track to orient myself- Agency. I think Hegel's dictum that a people used to more freedom can never go back is a fundamental truth. We will relinquish some of our information channels, give up on some of our baffling, innumerable choices but contrary to what it seems like, that's not because we want to become supplicants to a strongman. Its so that we can make reclaim some agency, and we've spent the last century mistaking choice for freedom.

I really need to get to Prof. Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue but, for now, I have transitioned from Prof. Sandel's Welfare -> Freedom -> Virtue trajectory and want to place Freedom above Virtue. It is freedom to act, and to act on the self, that allows us to become virtuous.

Aside from the political dimension where two citizens are hardly, if ever, treated equally, our singular self too has been fragmented in two ways: one, technology has enabled us to create horcrux-equivalents, preserving our images, videos, words, actions, tweets, blogposts to be used and abused by others as they see fit to build a persona to suit a need, and two, inescapable neoliberalism has made it impossible for to truly stay out of the system. We are all complicit now and yet rebelling in some ways- that has transferred the political arena into us. And so here we're in 2026, both globalised and provincial, instigators and victims, more powerful than any human before us but equally powerless to change much at all.

I'm fairly convinced that we're primarily biological beings who live and act in a material + informational ecology. And I think information is always subservient to agency. The problem, we as its inhabitants, face with our present ecology is that all this information has us paralysed. And when these two come head-to-head, we will choose agency over comprehensiveness. I'm not saying we will end up becoming egomaniacal. We will still help out friends, be kind to strangers, give to charity, laugh and bond, live as social beings enabled by owning so many of our tools of production. We will still be countrymen, ethnic categories, particular language speakers, but we will not be swayed as much by forces way beyond our immediate, material worlds. I think it would make us less scatterbrained and less prone to be manipulated by TV journalists and Social Media algorithms, and more conscious, gentle, and powerful.

¹ Prof. Dawkins, and his The Selfish Gene, perhaps contributed most to my metaphysical transformation to evolutionary materialism this decade but these four deal with the outside world

² The heroes of the modern world are those individuals who fought against what they saw was injustice- Gandhi, Mandela, Lincoln et al. But what if in a Post-Modern world they are insufficient- what if the powers that be have found a way to co-opt, ignore, and undermine them. Reminds me of that old Russell quote about Gandhi that his Satyagraha could not have worked against the Nazis because they'd abandoned even pretence of equality and justice

³ After watching the HBO film Conspiracy recently, I wrote to myself that what the Nazi's did, could even imagine doing, could only be possible on the infrastructure of a modern, legibility-enforcing state

⁴ I can see accusation of a Sacasasian Absconding there, and I have been having issues with Venkat since he started publishing Sloptraptions, but identifying the winning horse is not the same as wanting it to win, and while he maybe resisting/ allowing new tools into his life based on his personal value-system, as a public intellectual he's been remarkable at predicting trends

⁵ I think its high time I pickup the Media Ecologists- I know how much of an influence Prof. Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death has been on me, and I need to pick up more of their tools because that's fundamental to start understanding deeply what's going on

⁶ There's a lovely little story that Amit told on TSATU- After the Partition of India was finalised, a group of Muslim League officials went to Mehrauli, gathered all the Muslims there, and told them to get ready to go to Pakistan, their new country. After a long, heated debate asking why they should leave their village just because a few politicians signed a new agreement, finally one young man stood up and said, "When I was fighting for the British in the fields of Europe, got grievously injured, and thought I was dying, I didn't think of India or Pakistan, of Mecca or Karbala but of Mehrauli." Echoing what Amitava Kumar once said how we're never citizens of a country or a state but of a village or a city.

⁷ aam junta