Dregs of Yore

There is an argument made by Ernest Becker in his unsettlingly lucid book The Denial of Death (1973) that has never stopped gnawing at the edges of modern self-understanding. Man’s greatest cruelties, he says, do not arise from his baser animal instincts, but from the earnestness of his attempt to transcend them — from the unbearable tension between his mortal flesh and his immortal imagination, from the struggle to superimpose the symbolic world onto the physical one. Man, Becker wrote, is “a god who shits”: a being forever caught between the extremes of divinity and decay. Between the body’s rot and the mind’s grandeur lies all of history’s blood and folly. The typical modern explanation for evil (greed, lust, power, rage, etc.) is too tidy. Becker’s diagnosis cuts deeper. In his view, it more often springs from aspiration: from man’s refusal to be merely what he is. The desire to live forever, if not biologically then symbolically, leads men and nations alike to mythologize themsel...

Isn’t it exceedingly ironic that those most loudly proclaiming the imminent destruction of the planet are also those most suspicious of the only force that seems to be capable of doing something effective about it? I mean capitalism, of course. That the capitalist should save the climate, is to modern moral imagination, rather like learning that the village Shylock has been feeding the poor. Yet, the truth, always so indelicate, so inconsiderate of ideology, appears to be moving stubbornly in that direction. How many decades has it been now that the intellectual classes began treating capitalism as the unwholesome contagion of our age? The very word evokes images of smoke-belching factories, predatory merchants, and men in top hats smoking fat cigars while they plot the despoiling of our rivers. Yet, these same malign actors, driven not by virtue but by profit, have produced the electric car, the solar panel, and a battery so efficient that it now powers not just phones but the dreams ...

Co-authored by  Ankit  and  Sadhika  on October 02, 2025 The recent imposition of a 50 percent tariff on Indian exports by the United States has brought to the fore a question that is rarely addressed publicly in diplomatic circles: is neutrality a universally applicable moral principle or simply a status conferred (or withheld) by those who dominate the international system? The Trump administration’s move, announced in August 2025, doubled the existing 25 percent duty —initially reciprocal, then steepened as a penalty for India’s continued purchase of Russian oil. Estimates suggest this action jeopardizes up to 66 percent of India’s $86.5 billion in annual exports to the U.S., affecting labour-intensive sectors like textiles, gems, shrimp, furniture, and more—potentially slashing export volumes by 70 percent and dropping total shipments to just $49.6 billion in 2025–26. When India began importing discounted Russian crude oil in the aftermath of the Ukraine co...