Read Part One - Past Tense here.

Let us keep three attributes of dharma in mind: 

Point A) Dharma brings stability.
Point B) Dharma sustains.
Point C) Dharma is the bulwark against Mātsya Nyāya.

The West and prophetic Abrahamism thrive through expansionism. They do not have a template for stasis. That is, their identities and their visions of success are defined not by who they are, but by the self-legitimization offered by the actions they take against who they are not, and the extent of their self-differentiation from those ‘others’. This is not surprising and is an expected outcome of their reactionary histories. An externalized form of self-definition is unstable and constantly needs expansion in order to prevent implosion and to maintain a semblance of stability. For the evangelical Abrahamic religions, this involved the conquest and conversion of “heathens” and “kafirs” (an attitude familiar to all non-Abrahamic people who have had the misfortune of having to deal with it over centuries of mindless violence). And for the modern West, this involves the conquest of Nature and “The Regressive Past” and the conversion of those raw materials into fuel for “Progress”.  

Following the growing sophistication of industrial-scale technology, this expansionist attitude became so toxic even internally in the West, that it culminated in an orgy of self-destruction—World War 2. Unfortunately, the globalized footprint of European colonies at that time meant that most of the non-Western world was also dragged unwillingly into that furnace of Western implosion.

Post that catastrophe, one section of the Western population was so consumed by horror that they appeared to have realized the folly of their ways and chose to withdraw from active expansionism (and from the Church). But they could not yet find it within themselves to give up on the deep ideals of the Western Enlightenment that had, in fact, led them to that precipice. They chose instead to attempt to transform the entire world into a mirror of those European ideals through democracy, human rights, education, cultural nudging via mass media, and soft political manipulation via NGOs in Africa, Latin America and Asia. This global effort culminated in the invention and promotion of the phenomenon of multiculturalism—a euphemism for an artificially propped-up cultural diversity under the umbrella of Western Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. This same vision of multiculturalism eventually led to their adoption of immigration as a tool for self-transformation and global virtue signaling. The idea was to cast the world as one secular, liberal, uber-culture (obviously Western) that would compassionately house many local and religious flavors (which they imagined would remain superficial). Culture itself was seen merely as a source of human beauty (food, music, etc.) and not as a representative of anything essential (to do with essence). This is the group that can broadly be called the New-Left, and it includes innocent excursions such as the Hippie movement and the New-Age movement, and ultimately the not-so-innocent vanity-fueled Globalism and self-hate-fueled Wokism. 

Douglas Murray writes of this doomed inside-outside vision of the New-Left in his book The Strange Death of Europe - “While unsure of ourselves at home we made final efforts at extending our values abroad…” and “The world is coming into Europe at precisely the moment that Europe has lost sight of what it is.”1

Even the other, less sane, section of the Western population realized post-WW2 that it could no longer be business as usual and chose to tilt away from colonialism and direct military expansion, and veer towards using the UN and international financial instruments as a way to pursue a more indirect and hidden expansionism. Europe’s illegitimate child, America, was the spearhead in this effort with its CIA, IMF and GATT, and unlike the Europeans, it did not shy away from using military force when necessary, leading to the prolonged Cold War and the shorter, but more frequent, decadal wars that sought to engage in regime change operations in countries all over the world, many of which were merely thinly veiled attempts at capturing natural resources while installing puppet dictators in sham democracies that would kowtow to Western interests. We can call this segment of the West the New-Right (seemingly conservative but in reality deeply supremacist and hypocritical in their approach to other nations).  

To recap, the West, like Christianity and Islam before it, is expansionist. That is, it can maintain internal coherence only through the continued predation2 of  “others”. In the absence of external “others,” such systems end up creating newer and newer internal “others,” as WW2 has shown. This peculiar aspect of its being leads to pendulum-like sequences of explosions and implosions with narrower and narrower windows of peace in between cycles. In other words, inherent instability. Point A, if you recall, tells us that systems that generate instability are adhārmika. I have not read Spengler, but it seems that the pendulum motion of civilization he refers to may exclusively be a phenomenon of predatory cultures. 

As Hindus, there is no reason for us to view this predatory impulse in a positive light. Even for people who love the eventual fruits of predation—TV, fridge, Netflix, Italian holidays, etc.—we must ask if all that could not have been made possible (albeit more slowly and deliberately) without resorting to predation. 

Predation, by its very definition, is the face of Mātsya Nyāya—big fish eats small fish—and Point C tells us that Mātsya Nyāya is adhārmika. We recognize it when it comes in the form of Abrahamic intolerance, but we fail to recognize it when it comes in the form of the liberal capitalist West. As Trump makes this aspect of the West more overt, perhaps more Hindus will understand what I am saying. “With us or against us”. “Convert or die”. “Recommend me for the Nobel or I’ll double your tariff ”. “Give us a military base, or we’ll institute regime change”… these are all aspects of the same predatory impulse. As dhārmika people who stand against Mātsya Nyāya, it is obvious that we must not only protect ourselves from predation, but also self-righteously stand against it. 

Similarly, in the cultural and environmental domains, any system that needs more and more novelty and extractive input just to exist is deeply unsustainable. What is the latest show on Netflix? What is the latest gizmo on the market? What is the latest fashion? What is the latest super-food? What is the latest disease? What is the latest social theory? What is the latest weapon? What is the latest energy source? What is the next big thing? How can we get ahead and stay ahead? Innovate. Never settle... In such an anxious society, political and economic action is inevitably reduced to becoming a constant search for band-aids to help stay ahead of the curve and postpone, for the foreseeable future, the inevitable implosion. The current American attempt to pivot to crypto as a response to its debt crisis is an example of just such a band-aid. An attitude of constantly surrendering the solid ground upon which one stands in exchange for flimsy new ground that is yet to be unearthed cannot possibly be sustained over any reasonable length of time. Point B, if you recall, tells us that systems leading to unsustainable outcomes are adhārmika. The Westernized mind believes that this process can and will go on forever, but resource wars, climate change, falling TFRs, soil loss, extinction of honey bees, destruction of crop diversity, rising mental illness, and exploding chronic disease all tell us otherwise. 

This need for constant cultural revolution and incessant material evolution, though labeled as a sign of “vitality” by the spin masters of predatory cultures, is a sign of sickness and not health. As per the dhārmika view, it is unchecked sṛṣṭi with no goal or even vision of sthiti2. When a single casino in Las Vegas uses more power than an entire Indian town, surely, we can see that this “quality of life” cannot be extrapolated to the whole world. What that clearly signifies is that the current system is designed to ensure that a large part of the globe will be held subordinate in order to subsidize the excesses of another part of the globe in perpetuity. This is essentially the plan, regardless of any sugar-coating that capitalists and globalists may offer us. In fact, this bias is built into global financial systems, military treaties and IPR regimes, not to mention the very structure of UN bodies. But, we accept this deal, not only because we are weak, but because we have bought into this plan, having been baited on the hooks of trickle-down economics, Hollywood, and the promise of immigration. 

The common Western refrain to counter these accusations is that we will innovate our way out of this situation so that the fruits of modernity will accrue evenly to all people. This has not happened in 300 years, though non-modern people have put up with an unimaginable amount of pain in the attempt to reach this fictitious utopia. Already, the resource requirements for AI data centers show us that the greater the innovation, the greater the resource needs and, therefore, the greater the inequalities, power concentrations, and wars that will fuel its continued maintenance. 

We have been schooled into believing that material inequality is okay as long as everyone is “above the poverty line” or a beneficiary of a UBI (Universal Basic Income). This is a very recent form of self-justificatory logic. The fundamental truth, from a dhārmika point of view, is that material inequality is the ground from which power differentials emerge, and inevitably, from those imbalances will emerge Mātsya Nyāya. Power corrupts; make no mistake. To numb us to the reality of this slow but steady enslavement, the modern world seeks to constantly distract us with entertainment and baubles. [Classical Bhārata did two things differently to address this problem—one, it distributed power through decentralized jātis, and two, it pushed societal aspiration onto the ritual plane where respect became associated with self-denial. These two actions ensured that society never becomes despotic or irreverential.] 

Even for those of us who desire Modernity, mustn’t we at least ask if we can do this differently? Are we better able to have a family, educate our children, find fulfilling work, and take care of our parents today than earlier? If not, then what is the course correction that is needed? The so-called “poly crisis” that some Westerners have started speaking about is a simple problem of predation. A world built on predation will go through a crisis if its prey starts drying up (both natural resources and cheap human labor). If the tigers in a forest eat up all the deer, then the tigers begin to starve and attack each other or become man-eaters. When the flow of converts dries up, Abrahamic cults start to implode and fight amongst themselves. Newer and newer heretical cults develop within like cancers. Wokism, for example, an internal implosion of the New-Left, can be seen as a symptom of the problem of too much predation and too little prey (that is, a society that has lost external purpose and has no route-map for internal stasis is constantly on the lookout to manufacture purpose and meaning through fresh mutations). Wokism was merely the latest stage in the post-colonial evolution of a template for creating more and more internal “others”. A similar template exists on the New-Right, too, with millenarian cults, racist brotherhoods, and conservative purity spirals. 

We now see that on all three dhārmika parameters—stability, sustainability, and anti-Mātsya Nyāya, the West (and the Abrahamic template that it runs on) reveals itself to be adhārmika. 

For Hindus, what is important now is to develop a mental model to understand these different groups. We do not have to spend time talking about Abrahamics with whom we have had centuries of close personal experience and association, but we do require clarity on the two major Western groups—The so-called New-Left and New-Right. [Just to clarify, the Old-Left would be pure communism, and the Old-Right would be pure feudalism/colonialism. Dharma stands against both communism and feudalism.]

For a deeper insight, I will plug into Kundan Singh’s4 razor-sharp intuition on this matter.

The Left, he says, is a permanent rival of Dharma not because it is the opposite of us, but because it seeks to monopolize the landscape of morality, which for millennia has been Dharma’s domain. 

The Right, he says, we must not even engage with in good faith because it is so obviously adhārmika in its outlook and actions. 

In other words, the Mātsya Nyāya of the Right is obvious, but the Mātsya Nyāya of the Left is cloaked in a complex weave of moral-sounding ideals, many derived from dhārmika sources but perverted with the monotheist poison.

Take, for example, Bentham’s famous maxim—“The greatest good for the greatest number.” This is a direct reworking of Ārya morality as spelled out in the Aṅguttara Nikāya (~500 BCE)3: 
Bahujana-hitāya bahujana-sukhāya

Group #1: The New-Right

The vocabulary of the New-Right is race, genetics, skull diameter, nose length, grip strength, IQ, GDP, and garden-variety supremacy... sometimes tinged with a varnish of religious sanction or progress statistic. In their fight against the Globalist New-Left, they sometimes speak of tribalism but only with the caveat that their pan-national “tribe” gets to have dominion over the Earth. All others must submit as vassals in perpetuity or will have to face war in various forms. We have seen this in multiple forms over the last four hundred years, but for a recent example, we can examine the fate of MAGA’s pre-election promise of a return to pure nationalism. MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporters and leaders alike had indicated that they had learned their lessons from the excesses of Leftist universalism, that they were done with globalism, and that they sought a return to a true pre-World-War American nationalism (this stance was cheered on by Indian-American conservatives who voted in large numbers for this coterie). Within months, the American reaction to Operation Sindoor, arm-twisting over Russian oil purchases, unhinged tariff wars, and crypto deals with Pakistan showed us that American exceptionalism continues on all cylinders across the globe. The same attitude of global predation exhibited earlier by the New-Left continues unabated under the New-Right, with the only difference being that the moral sermonizing of the Left has been replaced by the amorality of the Right. The New-Right offers no moral stance at all, aside from making a virtue out of short-term self-interest while ensuring that the ‘self’ in ‘self-interest’ remains in constant flux. This gives us (and indeed, even Americans, as they will eventually discover) absolutely nothing real to have a relationship with.

We can now clearly see that, regardless of who is in power, whether Left or Right, the attitude of global predation remains intact because it is a pure distillate of the predatory model. The predator cannot help it. His model of material (and religious) purpose cannot be sustained without total control over all resources, supply chains, markets, and souls. This requires them to psychologically look upon others as inferior and worthy of either exploitation or reformation (sometimes explained as “for their own good”). This is the same sickness of mind (and heart) that led to the garroting of the last Inca, Atahualpa, after accepting his ransom of 70 billion dollars worth of silver, after providing a promise to release him, and after baptizing him into a foreign faith. This perfidy is today considered “history” and “the true nature of Man”. In fact, it is the history and true nature of only one kind of man. But hey, it is a “high trust society”.

The only sub-segment of the New-Right that we need to approach without such all-encompassing cynicism is one that displays the humility to recognize that tribes and nations have the Gods-given liberty to determine their own destinies, and that we are not all on a ladder to reach a Western or Abrahamic destination. We can call this group the Decentralized-Right, usually Christians who have rejected material progressivism and evangelism, and conservatives with a pagan streak who have a soft corner for the philosophies of the world. 

Group #2: The New-Left

The vocabulary of the New-Left is equity, progressivism, representation, emancipation, oppression, intersectionality and garden-variety revolution... sometimes tinged with a varnish of philosophical sanction or sociological statistic. The biggest problem that Hindus have with the New-Left is that they are constantly interfering. So much so that it sometimes feels that the open antagonism of the New-Right is a better option than the gnawing subversion of the New-Left. But we need a deeper understanding.

If the birth of Christianity represented the contradictory confluence of an expansionist, imperial Rome with a self-negating, self-sacrificing Jesus, then the Western political system today represents the splitting of that Christianity back into its two original components—The Roman component and the Jesus component. The Colonial Right is the inheritor of the Roman component, and the Woke Left is the inheritor of the Jesus component. For centuries, the Roman component was all-pervasive. But, post World War 2, the Jesus component started emerging as a reaction to the sheer depravity of the Right (colonialism, slavery, Holocaust). Though it has become more visible since the 1960s, the Jesus strain was already in incubation for a long time, ever since Bentham and Marx. The journey through Utilitarianism, Communism, Feminism, modern art, anthropology, Post-modernism, Deconstructivism, and finally Wokism was a long and often violent one.

Kundan Ji’s thesis, which I hold to be accurate, is that the Left is not to be defeated by standing in opposition to it (because the opposite of the Left is the Right and we already know that we want nothing to do with the mainstream Right), but rather by reclaiming the domain of dharma… by declaring through our actions and systems that we are more moral than the Left, thereby cutting the ground from under its feet.

As people who have suffered under the Right (colonialism) and whose ancestors gave their lives seeking to overthrow it, our natural ally should be the New-Left, which has the same goal as us—the end of Mātsya Nyāya (in the form of feudalism and colonialism). Unfortunately, as we well know, the New-Left, even though it can be deeply empathetic and righteous (when it is not being hypocritical), is also deeply clueless. It has arisen from the womb of the Right and, like a child of abusive parents, turns to abuse itself even as it struggles to escape the psychological orbit of its childhood. Its monotheistic roots limit its understanding of true complexity, and all its solutions are roads to hell paved with good intentions.

Our biggest problems with the Left are that it: 

1. is anti-religion (and therefore anti-dhārmika Liberty)
2. is anti-community (and therefore anti-dhārmika Liberty and dhārmika Equality)
3. believes in universal morality (and therefore anti-dhārmika Equality and dhārmika Fraternity)
4. believes in centralized power structures (and therefore anti-dhārmika Liberty)

The only sub-segment of the New-Left that we can hope to build common ground with is one that has descended from the rarefied world of ideals and works in reality with real human communities. Given a sufficiently long rope, many such leftists come to appreciate the complexity of the world and break free from the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy they were schooled in. They come to appreciate the dangers of centralized state control and universal moralities. They come to appreciate the importance of community. And eventually, if they are lucky, they will come to appreciate the eternal, unspoken rules that guide collaborative community life, and therefore, individual well-being and true liberty. Many of us (myself included) have taken this intellectual route back to dharma. We can call this sub-segment the Decentralized-Left. Many dhārmika causes, including environmental, cultural, and anti-Mātsya Nyāya underdog causes, are supported by the Decentralized-Left and not the Right. 

We see now that we do not belong in this Western Left-Right dichotomy at all. What we need again, and what we have always had in classical Bhārata, is a spiritualized, community-centered, distributed power structure as explained in Part One of this essay series.

However, we are currently stuck in the middle of a pincer move. The New-Right hates us simply because we are brown, heathen, poor and weak; and the New-Left hates us because it seeks to legitimize itself at our expense. That is the reason why the Left so doggedly attacks our traditions, our community life, dharma in general, and Hinduism/Brahmanism in particular. They want us gone, so that they can be Jesus to the world, and no one will be around to point out their pretense, except Satan on the Right. And we, like sacrificial lambs, have obliged them. Today, every other Hindu has nothing but disdain for his own traditions. We are convinced that our families are oppressive, that our communities are evil, that our religion is superstition. The rock-solid certitude our ancestors had in our innate goodness is no more. We are no longer ourselves.

And so, unfortunately, instead of reviving/redesigning the pre-feudal classical arrangements that made us the moral light of the world for millennia (like the West attempted by looking to ancient Greece), we are hell-bent on sabotaging ourselves to the beat of the drums of the New-Left while hoping to postpone having to deal face-to-face with the New-Right. At this moment in history, we are both pathetic and weak.

Hindus have to build the required cynicism, the material heft, and the military strength to withstand and respond to assaults from the New-Right. We also have to build the intellectual strength and self-knowledge to protect ourselves from the subversions of the New-Left (they are not forcing us to sabotage ourselves; we are doing it willingly because we lack self-knowledge). Simultaneously, we must find a way to marry the compassion we share with the Decentralized-Left and the urge for true liberty that we share with the Decentralized-Right, with our inherited dhārmika frameworks of personal transformation, decentralized duty, and spiritualized nobility, which will take our moral consciousness to a just and beautiful Ārya destination.

What is demanded of us is nothing less than Rāma-Rājya—the strength to establish a just state… one that will secure a good society.

Post Script

Some people on our side are likely to have a problem with my use of the word expansionism in a negative sense. Don’t we want to dharmify the whole world? Did not saṃskṛti once reign from Xinjiang to Java?... they may ask. And it is true, maybe I need a different word instead of expansionism—something that signifies “sṛṣṭi without a vision of sthiti”. In other words, a vocabulary that indicates how the growth of cancer cells is different from the growth of normal cells. Both are growth, but one is responding to inner ṛta, while the other is rudderless.

While we are at it, I would also like to say that I see a difference between expansion and expansionism, just as with individual and individualism. The former merely represents a facet of what exists in the world; the latter represents a doctrine or ideology. In my understanding, Sanātana Dharma is not a doctrine of expansion; it is a doctrine of self-realization. It is organic, not reactionary. That is why people come to it when they are ready; it does not go to people who are not ready. In that sense, I am okay, for the time being, with using the word expansionist as a differentiator when referring to Abrahamic ideologies.


Note: Part three, Future Continuous, will be published soon.  

References

1. The Strange Death of Europe, 2017, Douglas Murray
2. Terminology courtesy Shankara Bharadwaj
3. Terminology courtesy Shivakumar G.V.
4. Concepts courtesy of Kundan Singh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf9XFVEM8T4