Mental delusion

Delusion is a curious thing, and surprisingly common in the modern world. There's a big range: from the delusions of Guardian columnists currently writing their smug little columns on the value of a planned political economy to the delusions of the American right and their obsessions with God, guns, and gay sex; from the peculiar afflictions of irrational Hindutvas to the equally crazy New Age types in the West; and from the last remaining remnants of Western Marxism (Eric Hobsbawm, to name but one) to the neo-fascism on the rise in Putin's Russia - delusion, it seems is omnipresent. It certainly extends to the delusion of bloggers such as myself that anyone sane actually reads the tripe we post, much less cares.

At the root of delusion lies irrationality, and this, it seems, is something almost impossible to cure. Education will not solve the issue. True idiocy takes a lot of intelligence to really do well - one need merely look at the number of well-educated "ABCD" (American-Born Confused Desi) types, largely from a maths-related background, who fall for the lure of "absence makes the heart grow fonder" Indian nationalism, and Hindutva ideology in particular. Or at the open admiration for the Soviet Union displayed by many Western intellectuals during the 20s, 30s, and even during the Cold War. As late as the 1980s top CIA economists were accepting offical Soviet figures as the basis for their calculations relating to the performance of the Soviet economy, not realising (as George Orwell had done back in 40s!) that these figures were not distorted or exaggerated: they were invented. Or indeed at the large number of university-educated (mostly humanities-based), apparently sensible people, who will fork out huge sums of money for homeopathic remedies that will allegedly "cure" the common cold.

The purpose of this blog, therefore, is to bring the twin evils of delusion and irrationality out into the open, and expose them as the bogus nightmares they are. With luck, the culture of sanity on which Western civilization is based will aided and brought to a new peak of excellence.