Small Leaders, Big Egos, Bigger Wars, Biggest Wipeout
Questioner: Talking about global conflicts recently, with multiple wars all across the globe, on the news every day and you know Sometimes it can feel very anxiety-inducing, but oftentimes, it's you know a cause of human factors. So we want to ask you: what human factors do you think have led to this unrest and global peace?
Acharya Prashant: See, it has mostly to do with the rise of right wing-ism across the world. Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, and several other budding minor conflicts—if you look at them, some of them might not even be international in nature. If you look at them they are centrally related to the rise in right-wing attitudes. Now, where is that coming from? That is coming from a few places. I'll try to enumerate them. The first is that the democratic model probably itself is flawed. It is not populations that start a war. You cannot say "Russians invaded Ukrainians"— that didn't happen. It is the ruler, the man at the center, that starts the war, mostly for his own personal ambitions and based on his personal ideologies.
What’s remarkable is that this man at the center—and that’s what we’re seeing across the world today—is mostly a product of the democratic process itself, or at least a semi-democratic process, at least a pseudo-democratic process. Even in Russia, you won't officially call it a dictatorship. Right? And that's happening in the U.S. as well. The democratic process believes that people, just as they are, are capable of taking wise and sane decisions. Now, this principle—this assumption—is obviously better than allowing some random person to assume authority. And that’s why democracy has been, in a relative sense, the best system known to us, especially since World War II.
But now, 80 years since the war, the limitations of the system—its fault lines—are being ruthlessly exposed. You're talking about people casting their free vote. But people—are they free, first of all, in the inner sense? If they can be tempted, manipulated, excited — are they free? If someone can come and incite you with racist ideas or communal doctrines, how free really are you? But democracy says, “No, the person is the sovereign decision-making unit, and we’ll respect that.” So, I call that the fallacy of respect number one. There’s another place that the liberal democratic system respects too much — we'll come to that.
Yes, obviously there has to be a universal adult franchise, and people should have the right to vote. But then, a lot must be invested in education. Places where people are not well-educated are the places where democracy becomes its own annihilator. Tyrants come to occupy the throne using almost perfectly legitimate democratic means. So there’s not much really that you can even complain about. The fellow will say, “I am a democratically elected leader.” So along with democracy, what should have been mandated, just as we say “universal adult franchise,” similarly we should have said “compulsory and universal education till adulthood.” For democracy to succeed, and for these insane wars to stop, you need educated populations.
And then it comes to the matter of how to define education. Because our centers are determined by material profit and numerical success, therefore the highest kind of respect that we give to education is to vocational and professional education—science, technology—as you have the STEAM. Now, these do very little in terms of educating a young person about her own interiors. How does the mind function? How has man traveled through history? There’s so much to be learned from history, but a typical MBA grad is unlikely to know much of world history, or psychology, or philosophy, or sociology, or anthropology. Even though in the education market, in the job market, this person is going to command the highest price, you will say, “What a well-educated person this one is — B. Tech, MBA.” Now, you can be a B. Tech, MBA, or whatever—a doctor, or this, or that—but
If you have not gone through education of the self, then you are extremely vulnerable to psychological manipulation.
Questioner: I was going to say, yeah, I mean at Berkeley, it’s a public school, so those optional courses we were talking about before, you know people aren’t always really required to take them. And although every engineering major has to take an ethics course, I’ve noticed a lot of students, like my peers, don’t really care about them. But even if I feel like I can take the time to understand and learn history and understand ethics, a democracy is a body of people. And it feels very isolating to be the only one who cares and who feels like they understand. How do you get the people around you—get your whole body—to systematically change if you’re just one person?
Acharya Prashant: Wonderful. So just as democracy is a system, similarly the education that needs to necessarily accompany democracy has to be systemic. You cannot say, "Everybody will vote, but education is as per your own sweet will." Education has to be something that the state takes care of, and every single person must be educated—right till the age of 25 at least. We have come to a point where, with AI and increased longevity of life, we don’t really have to start working necessarily at 21. You needed to start working at 21 if you were to live only till 60, or if you were to become a victim to many kinds of diseases and morbidities at 60. Today, you remain healthy till 80. Today, medical science has found ways to keep you not only alive but fully functioning for a longer time.
So, you can devote 25 or 30 years of your prime to education—and you must. Why not? And that has to be, as we said, a system. Otherwise, you are very right—you would feel like an island. “Well, I’m concerned about all these things, but others are taking a very emotional and a very instinctive and reactive view of everything, and coming up with very superficial arguments.” But because these crowds are in large numbers, they prevail in a democratic system. So we are at this peculiar point in history where democracy will need to correct itself. It is offering, we said, too much respect to human discretion. It is assumed that man, as he is born—a human being just by birth—is capable of exercising discretion. That is not really the case. We are not respecting the facts if we believe in this thing.
The second thing that the liberal democratic system is respecting too much is faith. Faith, which is nothing but a belief system. You see, if I come to you and I say, “I believe in a flat Earth,” you would smirk. You would mock. You might laugh at me. And if you're kind-hearted, you might want to educate me. But if I come to you and say, “I believe in a flat Earth because that’s what my religious book says,” then you would leave me alone. And you’d say, you know, it’s a matter of faith, and I respect all faiths. No. This is nonsensical.
If we are free to denounce, contradict, and bring down all kinds of irrationalities and superstitions and illogics, why have we continued to be so respectful of this thing called blind faith? People just get away with anything. “You know, it's my personal belief system. I don't want to argue on it. I believe that land belongs to me”. I don't want to argue on it. Now, that would start a war, right? "I believe that particular land belongs to me. And don't argue with me, because this is my holy belief system. My holy Lord appeared in my dream and commanded me to invade that land." Argue with that. And since decades, we have been educated to retreat in the face of such nonsense. Somebody does a mathematical equation wrong—you would not hesitate in correcting that person, right?
But somebody comes up and says, "You know, I believe the Earth was made in four days by four holy angels"—you would not argue. Why not? why not? "No, this is my holy belief." I understand why this value system arose in the first place. It was so that we could stay clear of conflict. This person believes in one thing, citing it as holy or religious. That person believes in another thing, again citing it again as holy or religious. So, we said, let both of them maintain their beliefs in their personal private space, and we are not going to argue with them. But it’s no more in the personal, private space.
All kinds of bigotry and name any problem of the modern world and it is arising from a belief system. It is arising from an unscientific and illogical view of the world at oneself.
And those who have reason and logic on their side—they very respectfully retreat when faced with an unreasonable kind of animal. Why this respect? “No, we don’t want to hurt somebody’s feelings.” It's not about feelings. It's about facts. Facts must always prevail over feelings. What is this dictum about not hurting anybody’s feelings? And If you don’t want your feelings to be hurt, then you must keep your feelings very secure in your personal space. You must not expose them. I’m not going to enter your house or your heart to hurt your feelings. But if you come up with your feelings in the public space—and you even want votes over your feelings—then allow me to hurt your feelings. But that's not happening. Are you getting it?
Questioner: Yes, I think all of us can understand, you know, the dynamics that we're speaking about and how there is always, you know, kind of a—we keep facts and we keep feelings on one scale. And it really... you just really need to find a balance between facts and feelings. You cannot let one take over the other; otherwise, you won't be able to think as well.
Acharya Prashant: I'll serve to be a little more ruthless than that. You cannot have facts and feelings balanced against each other; otherwise, you lose out on the fact. So the fact is that the Earth is an oblate spheroid, and the feeling is that the Earth is a flat plate. How do you balance these two, and what kind of special geography do you get from that? Think of it. How do you balance these two? One of them has to prevail. There can be no accommodation in this.
Questioner: I guess I have a question about, sorry, about different—you know, different—a lot of different religions have different facts. And there's a lot of facts that we don't know; we don't have the answers to yet. So how do we say that some facts are more true over others? And is there no value in, you know, just believing that we won't have all the answers? Or is it something that we should try to find—we should try to find all the answers to these facts?
Acharya Prashant: Lovely, lovely, lovely question. You see, if I don't have the answer to something—for example, physics still does not know for sure what dark matter is—and that's a big unknown, because dark matter constitutes 85% of the weight of the universe. So that's a humongous unknown. But that does not mean that you come up with a fancy tale saying dark matter is some great monster that was created 4,500 years back by this particular demonic force and these such things, if I don't know, I simply say, "I don't know." And I'm researching it, and I don't know when I'll get the answers. But coming up with stories and labeling them against facts just cannot be entertained.
And this is something we start at the level of the family itself. It starts at the level of your most basic relationships. Don’t you see how in our most intimate relationships, feelings manage to get a weightage that they simply don’t deserve? And the results are never good. The results are never good. The feeling has to be aligned with the fact. I’m not talking of becoming unfeeling automatons — no — but the feeling has to be aligned with the fact. And then the feeling itself attains a bit of sacredness when the feeling is aligned with the fact. But if your feeling is rather aligned with your ego and imaginations, then how does one respect such a feeling?
Questioner: "Yeah, another thing I was going to ask about this is: sometimes we declare things fact because someone in power declares it — like eugenics, for example. You know in America, when white people were in power, they declared eugenics was the truth. How do the people who don’t have the opportunity to speak voice their feelings? Because in that way, they don’t have the facts to say eugenics is not true; they only have their personal experiences."
Acharya Prashant: You see, facts by definition are falsifiable. You do not accept something as a fact just because somebody in authority proclaimed it to be. That’s not the process by which something attains the status of a fact. A fact by definition is falsifiable, verifiable — there are peer reviews. Einstein came up with his relativity theory and there was this huge book published against him: 100 Authors against Einstein and he came up with a really smart one. He said, “If I were false, even one would have been enough. Why 100?” Even one would have sufficed — why 100? And that’s the thing with facts. If a fact is proven to be untrue even once, it loses its status. And it is publicly available to be tested and denied. You can test it. You can deny it. It is always in the public domain.
The acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s². Now, this is not a holy commandment. You and I can verify it on our own, and then it becomes a fact. And then there are theories that are not yet in the realm of facts. It is just a theory. It looks like a good theory. This is a theory that is yielding verifiable results. But still, it is a theory because there still are gaps. So science is, I suppose, pretty honest about things. And just because things are commonly accepted, they don’t attain the status of facts. “I feel about this thing, I feel about that thing.” Why do you feel so much? Go and read up. Instead of feeling so much. Why not visit a library — an e-library available right on your phone?
Questioner: I think what I was trying to get to is that, now having said that, the reality of our world is that facts usually come from power. It should probably not be that way. Facts should be, as you said, available in the public domain — up for discussion, debate, and perhaps even falsification. But in today’s world, you know, facts always come from a position of power. We are so conditioned to looking at things in monetary terms that we believe that the one with higher monetary funds would perhaps be able to get a better judgment of the world is all about. But just onto that, I was trying to get to the real question — it seems as though the most non-virtuous people, at least in the eyes of us.
*Acharya Prashant: May I address the first part of your statement? See
Facts that come from power are called propaganda. That’s not a fact. And if you believe in a so-called fact just because it is coming from power, then it is belief.
There is propaganda coming from authority, and there is gullible belief on behalf of the receiver. Nowhere is something called fact in the picture. Why must I believe in something just because some big name is behind it? Some big name proclaims there is nothing called climate change — “It’s a hoax.” Somebody comes up and says, “You know, population decline is happening.” Why can’t you check the numbers? Is it really happening? And it’s a very verifiable number — you’re just counting heads. There can be no possible discrepancy in it, unless there is a very organized kind of manipulation.
So authority is in no way a touchstone for something being a fact. Right? And that’s the reason why we need to be educated — in history, psychology and philosophy. We need to see how entire nations, for centuries, could be successfully manipulated into believing in stuff that was totally fantastical. Once you see that, you realize the vulnerability of the human mind to propaganda. Yes please.
Questioner: Yeah, so I just — I mean, this just stimulated me even further and I was wondering — humans usually have this tendency of not being able to accept uncertainty. We always want everything secured. We always want something that, you know — we know that 10 years down the line I’ll be in this job, working at this company, with this particular x amount of salary, right? "And we always look for answers. I mean, even in our personal context, when we don’t know something — as students, we either try to go to our textbooks; in our personal lives, we try to go to beliefs.
And often when facts are not proven, they are not verified or falsified, we just tend to blindly believe them, just so that we can get some form of certainty — especially, that’s in my case. You know, if I don’t know whether something can be verified or not, I’ll take it up from my parents, I’ll take it up from the people around me — because I need something to believe in. I need something to be certain. So how do you recommend people to not be afraid of this uncertainty, to embrace the uncertainty, and to realize that not everything is black and white — there’s a color spectrum that we need to look at when we’re looking at different opinions and ideas?
Acharya Prashant: It should be. It should be quite easy — should be very easy, no? Yes, of course, I agree — when we do not know of things, we turn to figures of authority. Right? They could be parents or teachers or people around us — sometimes even friends, colleagues.
So my question is: name the most wicked creature in the world. And I turned to these people for my answer — and these are all cats. And I find that unanimously they agree that the answer is “rat.” I mean, shouldn’t that ring some bells here? And then I ask these people there's another set, and they say cats. And I notice—I observe—I observe that these are all dogs. Shouldn't that tell me that the answers in no way are reliable?
You turn to your parents—the answer points in one direction. You turn to a career counselor—the answer is pointing another direction. Don’t you know that the answer is coming from their own center of self-interest? Should be easy to see. Should be easy to see. So while it is true that one will ask people around, and there is no harm in seeking advice and letting information come to you from all sides, one must also see that the fellow providing the information is going to be biased. And that's why there is going to be a huge degree of subjectivity. And what is good for that person who is counseling you need not necessarily be the right thing for you, because he's coming from his own center of self-interest, which will generally not coincide with the point where your interests lie.
Questioner: Totally, yes. I think it’s really important to understand the context, as you were mentioning, of where we are getting our facts from. Otherwise, the validity of those facts cannot hold in the first place.
Acharya Prashant: Where is that person coming from? You know, sometimes it's possible that the person is uttering just the right thing, but still you have to ask him, “From where are you coming?” For example, you are in no mood to go out tomorrow, right? But your girlfriend is insisting, and she says, “No, such fine weather and sunny days now, and we must venture out.” And so you look up the weather report, and the weather report says there is a fair probability of turbulence tomorrow—it might even rain, and there might be a blizzard or something.
And then she comes up with another report that says the meteorological department has been off the mark exactly 37% of the time. Now the fact she is quoting is absolutely right, but you have to see where she’s coming from. She's coming from a point of self-interest. She's not quoting the fact for the sake of the fact; she’s quoting the fact so that she can elicit a particularly favorable personal response from you that coincides with her own desires.
So it's not as if people fool us just by hiding the real thing—just by hiding facts. Sometimes, people fool us by quoting facts. Even when somebody is quoting facts, you have to ask: what is his motivation in quoting this particular number or whatever? And for that, you don't need a degree. You need to be attentive. You need to observe. You need not be swayed by the authority of the person in front of you. You have to ask, “Okay, fine. This is where he's coming from. Can I dispassionately, very very neutrally, look at him?”
Questioner: Definitely. I think that’s a really great piece of advice for all of us here. We also had in mind—in today’s world, we see the most non-virtuous people, at least in the eyes of us laymen, become the most successful. And we always feel as though the people at the helm are the ones that are wicked, perhaps, or at least they do not have a strong inclination towards faith. And we were wondering what your response is when we always keep preaching about the fact that we should follow faith, but sometimes people feel as faith never takes them to success. Again, there can be different interpretations of success in this context, but we were just wanting to know—why is it that we see the most non-virtuous people at the helm of success in today’s world?
Acharya Prashant: You see, they are there not by the virtue of anything special or extraordinary that they have, right?
Questioner: Okay. Yes.
Acharya Prashant: You take a very slimy kind of liquid—thick and slimy—and you put a speck of dust in it. Or you can even take the speck of dust and place it right at the bottom of that fluid. What would the fluid do to it? It would throw it up, right to the top position, because it is slime and it loves to put dirt on its head. The person that you see at the helm of affairs is a personal representation of an aggregate consciousness. If you find that person to be non-virtuous or wicked, it is because people in general are non-virtuous and wicked. So that's the person they chose for the top job.
There's nothing that special that person has done. In fact, if you can get a bigger crook, he would unsettle this man at the top. There is nothing honorable there. There is nothing to be learned from that person. You cannot go to that person and ask him, “Please share your great secret with us. How did you come to occupy this high throne?” He didn’t come to occupy it—he was placed there by forces beyond his control. He might think that he's a smart man and he fought an election or did something great and then manipulated the audience and this and that, and therefore he obtained the popular vote and got there. But that’s not happening. In the kind of system that we have—democracy—that person there is representative of how the electorate is.
And if the electorate continues to be confused, confounded, ignorant, bigoted, then these people will continue to sit at the top. So there is no need to idolize them. There is no need to take it to heart. There is no need to feel demotivated or depressed on seeing such people at the top. In fact, if they are at the top, in some peculiar way, it is the greatest insult that could be shot at them. Assume we here have some kind of a counter-Mensa—you know of Mensa, right? That hallowed group of people with high IQs. Let's say this set of my friends sitting over here are a unique group of people with low IQs, let's say. And they all elect me as their supreme leader. Is that a compliment or the biggest humiliation that I could face?
So why should you be jealous of me? Or why should you then think, “Oh my God, this person, in spite of being non-virtuous, has attained such great heights?” Do your own thing. I suppose it was Albert Camus who said that this world is so screwed up that just being truthful to yourself is an act of great rebellion. These are not the exact words—you can look up the exact thing.
There is nothing in these people full of pomp, pelf, power—nothing. Nothing. There is no way you should be ascribing any respect to them. You need not go and throw a shoe at them—that’s not needed. But inside here, you should be free of any respect for them. And when it comes to throwing a shoe—if, you know, you get such a chance—that, that too is fine.
