Skip to main content

Delusions of Truth


Shamsudheen Fareed, a Salafi preacher in Kerala, has decided that Onam, Christmas and other such celebrations are haram.  A lot more things are haram in his version of Islam.  Movies are haram.  Even trimming the beard is!

When a person convinces himself that he possesses the ultimate truths, he is destined to live in a bundle of delusions.  Simply because there are no ultimate truths.  Except in science and other rigid systems.  Even in those systems, truths are amenable to corrections.  An Einstein corrected a Newton.  Einstein’s theories are also not ultimate truths.  When it comes to human life and affairs, truths are never ultimate.  We keep learning and understanding them in our own way. 

Source
Joseph Conrad’s celebrated character, Kurtz (Heart of Darkness), is a good example of someone who deluded himself with his own ultimate truths.  He thought he possessed the ultimate truths and he wanted to civilize the native Africans by giving them those truths.  The result was torture and slavery.  He enslaved the people.  He terrorised them.  He became a god for them.  A monster, that was what he was in reality.  But for a terrorised people there is little difference between a god and a monster.

Kurtz isolates himself from society.  He places himself above the society because he has deluded himself into believing that he is superior to all the society.  He has certain truths.  The others don’t have them.  Hence the others are harami. 

What many religious organisations are doing today in the name of jihad and divine reign are no different from what Kurtz did.  They are placing themselves above human societies.  They are the judges of societies.  They become the moral arbiters of other people.  Yes, there is one difference.  Kurtz didn’t even fall back on his god; the terrorists make use of god.  But gods are elusive creatures.  They assume the shapes and colours given to them by their inventors or interpreters.  Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses illustrates the malady that underlies those inventors and interpreters.  It is quite impossible for any man to don the mantle of God and maintain sanity too.  Kurtz became a god to the savages.  He was mad, in fact, in the judgment of the other white people who knew him.

All the while he thinks of himself as the moral authority in the jungle, Kurtz is actually a criminal and a hypocrite.  He is a homicidal maniac who has decided that other people are harami.

The pursuit of absolute truths necessarily creates such delusions.  Many literary writers have pursued similar themes.  I took Kurtz as a prototype. 


Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniJuly 18, 2016 at 7:38 PM

    Raskolnikov came to me as well while reading the description. Satanic verses showed a different personality to a business minded prophet and I salute the guts of the author to write a book on it in spite of knowing the obvious repercussions.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 18, 2016 at 9:45 PM

      Raskolnikov also placed himself above society and morality. But he had goodness within and hence redeemed himself. Inner goodness makes the difference.

      Rushdie was questioning his religion (indirectly others too) genuinely. Unfortunately his voice was lost in the wilderness of gross ignorance and silly politics.

      Delete
  2. Roohi BhatnagarJuly 19, 2016 at 8:00 PM

    Delusional - the correct word you have used. Such people are the actual ignorant lot.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 19, 2016 at 8:33 PM

      Very costly ignorance, Roohi. The world is paying a high price for it.

      Glad to have you back after a long while. Hope you and the little one are doing fantastico!

      Delete
  3. CifarJuly 20, 2016 at 4:15 PM

    thinking your truth as the ultimate truth is where the problem starts and you closes your mind to listen to somebody's else truth to take the right decision

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 20, 2016 at 7:11 PM

      Precisely. If only people realise that truths are very relative affairs, half of the problems would be solved.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Dharma and Destiny

  Illustration by Copilot Designer Unwavering adherence to dharma causes much suffering in the Ramayana . Dharma can mean duty, righteousness, and moral order. There are many characters in the Ramayana who stick to their dharma as best as they can and cause much pain to themselves as well as others. Dasharatha sees it as his duty as a ruler (raja-dharma) to uphold truth and justice and hence has to fulfil the promise he made to Kaikeyi and send Rama into exile in spite of the anguish it causes him and many others. Rama accepts the order following his dharma as an obedient son. Sita follows her dharma as a wife and enters the forest along with her husband. The brotherly dharma of Lakshmana makes him leave his own wife and escort Rama and Sita. It’s all not that simple, however. Which dharma makes Rama suspect Sita’s purity, later in Lanka? Which dharma makes him succumb to a societal expectation instead of upholding his personal integrity, still later in Ayodhya? “You were car...
25 comments
Read more