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Birth of Individuals in an Age of Anxiety



I

All forms of knowledge are system-driven. You dare to take a leaf out of tree and call it autonomous self. The fall and flight of it may be glorified as freedom, but in the end, one must admit its reality as a tree. And every tree is a system, a network of its multiple parts, whose identity and functions are determined by inter-play of its various parts. Knowledge is a system like a tree, whose possibility is actualised in cybernetic sense. 

           II

The modern culture likes to propagate a culture of specialization and produces a few specialists, who barely understand life and its organic playfulness. A doctor, an engineer, a bureaucrat, a political leader, or a cosmologist perceives the truth in isolated sense, their education is limited, their sense of truth suffers from cave-mentality. A doctor who cannot feel the spiritual reality in patient is just like a shopkeeper who knows price of everything but value of nothing. A lawyer, who is amused in conflicts and thrives professionally at the cost of perpetuating 'litigative miseries' without realising the loss of fraternal feeling, is a poor fellow having earned lots of money but lost his own soul in acquiring it. A political leader, who delivers hate-speeches to divide the people on the basis of caste, religion, ethnicity, is as good as an ignorant ruler, who wants to have emperium at any cost even if masses suffer from hysterical and xenophobic tendencies. 

III

Behind the fall of a leaf, there is no problem. But the moment, it was glorified as an act of freedom of an individual or a defiance against the natural order, that very moment, humankind established a radical culture, which is popularly known as modernism, and its pitfalls can be visualised and experienced in the 'professionalised public sphere' supported by a tendency to be an expert of a part rather than realising the organic whole, and which has produced impoverished-acquisitive individuals, who are fighting against all the adversaries including natural and cultural forces to establish their own self-identity, coherent and luminous. 

IV

This culture is producing desires and further desires are producing acquisitive individuals. The mythological character of individuality is championed as freedom, a defiance against group rather systemic identity. The glorified fall of a leaf is a curse, whose religiosity is the most underrated form of mysticism, pervading in the law and through legal systems, and creating a violent culture of right, enforcement, and narcissistic desires to overpower others. The otherisation and objectification are the essential concomitants of individuated-selves, whose lives are a constant fight and this struggle and anxiety die that very day when that individuated-self takes the last breath.

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