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Conscience over Nonsense

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Abhijit Naskar

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“Clearly, on the world’s highest battlefield, a protracted war over the glaciers and passes had begun. The commanders in khaki reported the shooting and called the shots. Headquartered on the distant plains, the governmental chiefs of Pakistan and India depended on what their commanders from the desolate ice-covered peaks would report. Isolated with their platoons, and weighed under by snowman’s gear, these were often daredevil commanders. They were tasked to fly their country’s flags on the sequestered Himalayan peaks. Programmed into their DNA were nationalist narratives framing the other as ‘the enemy.’ Without this mindset, their hardship at such incredible heights would make no sense. From the clash of narratives alone could flow their will to battle their adversary. Institutional training and Statist historiography had programmed these men with guns into being willing warriors. Yet, when they accidently drifted into close proximity, this ‘processing’ would give way to human connection. With their weather-battered bodies and lonely hearts, quarantined from civilization and set in the harsh and desolate heights, they would share a smoke or a smile with an ‘enemy.”

WarHuman NatureIndiaPakistan
Book:From Kargil to the Coup: Events that Shook Pakistan
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“If Faustian restlessness is one of the defining characteristics of modern humans, then, by Pääbo’s account, there must be some sort of Faustian gene. Several times, he told me that he thought it should be possible to identify the basis for our “madness” by comparing Neanderthal and human DNA. “If we one day will know that some freak mutation made the human insanity and exploration thing possible, it will be amazing to think that it was this little inversion on this chromosome that made all this happen and changed the whole ecosystem of the planet and made us dominate everything,” he said at one point. At another, he said, “We are crazy in some way. What drives it? That I would really like to understand. That would be really, really cool to know.”

PsychologyHuman NatureHuman ConditionAnthropoceneBehavioral Genetics
Book:The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
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“The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. 'Good is a transcendent reality' means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.”

RealHuman NatureEgoIllusionGoodTranscendence
Book:The Sovereignty of Good
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