My last testament

Version 1 dated 31 May 2011 at archive.org. Version 2 with changes tracked from version 1 (PDF).

VERSION 2 BELOW, DATED 23 FEBRUARY 2025

People make wills. I don’t see the need for one, yet. But there is something I do want to leave behind: a few thoughts for whatever these may be worth. The audience for this testament is: first, my family, for which a private section is included; and second, everyone else, particularly all children today and of the future.

Why this urge to write a last testament? I might well live another thirty years but it seemed important to say a few things – and what better time than now? Should opportunity permit, I’ll will update through later versions.

I’d like to add that my draft manuscript, Discovery of Freedom includes more extensive thoughts on broadly similar topics. Once it is finished, it should be appended to this testament.

* * *

Mine have been arduous enterprises, almost quixotic. My goal of promoting liberty in India and the world seems to be going nowhere, or at least has not gone anywhere to date. Spending effort on enterprises that yield no visible fruit perhaps calls for an explanation.

As this testament will suggest, the explanation is strikingly simple. Two things explain it: a search for the truth and pursuit of the right action. These two lodestars guide my free actions. This rules out compromise with falsehood and evil. Hence.

I hope everything is clear now. … But let me elaborate.

1. One family

Let me at the outset confirm that you, my dear children, were not born for my sake – nor I born for yours (much as you might like to think that to be the case). My children by birth are inordinately dear to me, but I have never for once forgotten that we all – all of us – are the progeny of one common ancestor, the first human – whose uniquely human traits are encoded in each cell in our body. Each of us is connected in an unbroken chain that leads to that one ancestor. We are one family.

Biologically “any two peoples’ genomes are, on average, ~99.6% identical and ~0.4% different”.[1] Your commonality with others far exceeds differences. That’s why a medicinal drug has the same effect on you as it has on any other human. That is why you experience the same emotion as others experience when you read a great novel or watch a great movie. Not just physically, we are virtually identical mentally, with similar hopes and dreams. We should bear this in mind even as we (must) assert our individual sovereignty.

Because you, my children, are human (the highest being in the universe), I have never indoctrinated you in any religion or culture nor tried to give you an identity beyond what you are already born with. This foundational equality among all humans leads us to the concept of equal freedom in which no one has a claim of superiority over others, no one has a ‘divine right’ to tell others what to say, do, or believe in.

In this world of equal humans, only our works and contributions distinguish us from others. These contributions are determined by our thoughts and that’s what is important. Parents have only one key role – to develop in their children a capacity to think. This is best done indirectly, preferably through example, but also by creating for the children opportunities to learn to think.

2. Critical thinking

You are fortunate, dear children, to be alive in a world where the risk of death from disease and war is much smaller than it was in the past. While unknowns are increasing because we now have access to many instruments and tools (such as nuclear technology) with both good and bad uses, the actual risks to life continue trend downward.

Unfortunately, we haven’t dealt effectively with a major source of uncertainty: that which arises from human bigotry and ignorance. The catastrophic consequences of nuclear technology falling into bigoted hands are too severe to mention. While having more tools is good, not having an assurance that these tools will only be used for the advancement of humanity, is a problem.

The continued existence of bigotry can be attributed at least in part to the almost universal failure of our education systems which tend to load students with ‘knowledge’ but forget to teach them to think. Knowledge, however, is merely incidental to the fundamental purposes of education.

Most teachers have never learnt to think, so naturally they can’t teach others to think. Another problem is the increasing tendency to be politically correct and thus to avoid hard questions. But in the search for the truth, nothing should be out of bounds. Education must fortify our minds and develop in us a capacity to question everyone, including ourselves. We must particularly welcome those who question us, for the opportunity it provides to evaluate our ideas. While it is relatively easy to question others, it is harder to question oneself, and even harder to welcome – as our benefactors – those who question us. But adopting such an approach is necessary if we want to get to the truth. Without hard questioning – often deemed by some to be disrespectful and disdainful of established ‘authorities’ – bigotry can’t be eliminated.

I’m not sure whether disregard for the truth is increasing, but there sure is great disregard, and impatience with those who ask questions. But we must not be cowed down by those with formal qualifications or even multiple Nobel prizes, for such things do not make a person all-knowing. As formal qualifications and ‘awards’ become more widespread, many of these purportedly ‘all-knowing’ people strut about as if they are above questioning. Be not bothered by anyone’s qualifications. Just ask if something doesn’t make sense. As Buddha said:

Do not believe something just because it has been passed along and retold for many generations. Do not believe something merely because it has become a traditional practice. Do not believe something simply because it is well-known everywhere. Do not believe something just because it is cited in a text. Do not believe something solely on the grounds of logical reasoning. Do not believe something merely because it accords with your philosophy. Do not believe something because it appeals to ‘common sense’. Do not believe something just because you like the idea. Do not believe something because the speaker seems trustworthy. Do not believe something thinking, ‘This is what our teacher says’.^[2]

This open-minded approach towards the truth has many implications. It leads directly to a view that everything is work in progress, not a finished product. This approach leads to freedom, humility, and tolerance, in which – given our limited mastery over the truth – we are willing to expose our ideas to perpetual scrutiny.

The nature of the truth

A truth must be self-evident upon the undertaking of appropriate analysis. It must be as inevitable as water flowing downhill. A genuine truth does not require ‘belief’. We don’t have to ‘believe’ in gravity, nor do we have to ‘believe’ in our own existence. Further, the truth is robust to any number of questions being asked about its nature. Questions don’t change its properties, no matter how many times it is tested.

This line of reasoning gives us the necessary tools to test claims about a truth, basically that it can be questioned from all possible angles and always result in exactly the same properties. This applies to everything, including claims about God. The idea of God, for instance, should be possible to test from all angles and we should all come to exactly the same conclusion each time. (Since this hasn’t happened yet, something is amiss with the God concept, which I’ll touch upon later.)

Scientists advance the frontiers of human knowledge by proposing a range of plausible hypotheses (not ‘beliefs’) and testing these diligently for internal and empirical consistency. Thousands, if not millions of false hypotheses have fallen by the wayside over the centuries. When that happens, ‘extremist scientists’ don’t take out the sword and kill off those who don’t ‘believe’ in their failed hypothesis. When Einstein was proved wrong (he found the universe is expanding, contrary to his earlier suggestion), he did not take out his gun (if any) and shoot everyone who disagreed with him. He merely changed his mind.

Being only human, however, scientists are not exempt from an unconscious desire to distort the truth in favour of their preferred belief. Two areas come to mind: string theory and climate ‘science’. The common characteristics of these political areas, where the truth is often a casualty, are (a) the complexity involved, and (b) the absence or difficulty of defining clearly falsifiable hypotheses. Under these circumstances, speculation tends to parade as the ‘truth’. The truth, however, is never speculative. It is always empirical, it can be repeatedly tested, it is in that sense eternal. And just because it is discovered now doesn’t mean it was not true prior to its discovery.

Further, a truth exists regardless of the number of people who ‘believe’ in it. Human belief doesn’t make a falsehood true. The seeker does not count the number of his ‘followers’ (he needs none). All he wants is to incrementally advance his own understandings of the truth. The urge to indoctrinate anyone never crosses his mind. He is pretty relaxed as part of this journey for he knows that the truth will always win in the end (Satyameva Jayate), being eternal, and that the untruth is only a transient error. Time is on his side. He doesn’t need a sword to prove his case. Not even a pen. Like Socrates, all he carries about in his head is a critical, open, curious mind: asking more and more questions.

It is important to note that the truth seeker makes no claim about his own knowledge being either complete or final. He too is subject to deep ignorance and error. All he claims is to be searching for the truth, and hence willing to lay his knowledge to question, equally eager as others to find whether he is right. His ego is not wedded to his ‘beliefs’.

Given this lack of subservience to authority or formal qualification, disdain for unproven claims, disdain for haughty arrogance, disdain for proof through insistence, disdain for trickery, disdain for coercion, and a quiet confidence in his own approach, the seeker of the truth is loved by few, particularly not by those in ‘high’ places.

Enemies of the truth

We are perhaps ourselves the worst enemy of the truth. Despite each of us being blessed with a powerful machine (the brain) that could, if allowed to work freely, investigate almost anything that the universe throws at us, we seem to have a proclivity to latch on to beliefs, sometimes almost in desperation: as if the truth will disappear just because we don’t ‘believe’ in it. We seem to either not know, or maybe we forget, that the truth is eternal – and more importantly, that it doesn’t need our ‘consent’ or ‘support’.

None of us is exempt from the tendency to take a ‘belief short-cut’. We are particularly gullible during emotional distress, or when we are in pain or sleep-deprived. At such times we must avoid forming a view. And so by all means let’s believe in ourselves, believe in our capacity for incremental improvement, but also be aware that ninety per cent of the world’s problems – including wars, poverty and misery – are caused by the human urge to believe without first having carefully determined the truth. Belief short-circuits our brain, effectively making it worthless, like a fused bulb. We become sub-human and lose our claim to belong to the great family of humanity.

Apart from our own tendency to form hasty beliefs, there are three enemies of truth.

a) Garden variety enemies

The garden variety enemy of the truth simply rejects the idea that truth can exist outside his own belief system. He is sure that something is true merely because he believes or says so. Unable to argue and reason in support of his belief, he resorts to ad hominem attacks. On the internet, he spits out vile language. At one time, such people would have loudly cheered while someone was burnt at the stake for speaking the truth.

Fortunately, we can ignore such people most of the time. The philosophers of classical liberalism have fought for and brought about a modicum of tolerance into this world, and most legal systems allow for at least some freedom of speech.

b) Extremists

The extremists start as garden variety enemies of the truth but they are fundamentalists: they are not happy to spew vile language against those they consider to be ‘wrong’. They go on to the next step, of ‘converting’ or even destroying those who fall in the category they consider to be ‘wrong’. They resort to force. They compel others to believe their version of the ‘truth’. They are dangerous because not only do they refuse to answer questions, they can’t tolerate the possibility that they might be wrong. You may find yourself, for no fault of yours, belonging targeted because you belong to the wrong ‘race’, wrong religion, wrong political philosophy or wrong ‘scientific’ belief.

But the truth never requires the sword. From this we know that the beliefs of the extremists are necessarily false. Persuasion and explanation is the only civilised way to work towards the truth. If someone forces us to ‘convert’, we can be sure that we are being compelled to accept the untruth. And when that happens, we must resist.

Fortunately, most extremists are intellectually decrepit and cause no harm. Such people don’t know the front of their hand from the back and will cut themselves with their own sword. They will fall into the trap they set for their ‘enemies’. But there is a dangerous breed of extremists, the intelligent ones. These people can cause great harm, even as they exploit the weaknesses of lower-calibre extremists for personal gain. Some of the intelligent ones become dictators; others are nihilists who try to take the entire world down with them. All such intelligent extremists must be identified, isolated and brought to book. We can never afford to take such extremists lightly.

c) Profiteers

Magic is sleight of hand. When we go to a magic show, we expect to be fooled – and pay for the privilege. The better we are fooled the more we are happy to pay. The problem begins when someone acts as if he has real powers of magic. Such fraudsters and tricksters seek to profit from human gullibility. They profit from the untruth. Many religious leaders and gurus fall into this category, being masters of the art of deception (not necessarily through magic), deftly blocking out any investigation of the truth.

Only our training in critical thinking can save us from them. If we don’t question these fraudsters and insist that their claims be tested under controlled conditions, our money will be sucked out of our pockets, and we might even end up with delusions. Never let your guard down for a moment!

The matter of God

What about God? Why have I not taught you about God or about religion?

Religion

Let me deal with religion first.

Given the stringent requirements of truth, I have not yet found a shred of evidence to indicate that any religion is true. Instead, I have found the self-seeking fingerprints of man, the all-too-human urge for power and pelf, the ready exploitation of human gullibility, significant evidence of manipulation, deception and choreography, and a range of other shortcomings. Of the truth of their claims, I have not found any evidence.

I resent their brazen attempts to proclaim the ‘truth’ without providing evidence. They take me for a fool. That I’m not. Plenty of fools to go around, though; it would appear.

The stories of most religions are implausible to the extent of being absurd. This earth is smaller, in relation to the universe, than a single grain of sand on the combined beaches of the earth. God surely has better things to do with His time than to visit the earth to tell us things (about Himself and his Heaven) that can’t be empirically verified. Why are we, who are not even ants on the scale of the universe, so important? And can he please get His story right, for once. So much confusion. So many self-contradictory claims. This is all man-made.

Some religions tell us that God is omniscient and all-powerful and even created the universe. But when the same God comes down to the earth (or sends His emissaries) he becomes impotent. Either He manages to get hung up on a cross or He perpetrates cheap tricks of a standard worse than those of a common magician. He seems also to lack any capacity to influence us except through the sword, which He doesn’t wield Himself (which would at least be the understandable), but delegates this to droves of maniacal human squadrons that cause riots, burning to death innocent women and children. This feeble, cowardly creature surely can’t have created the universe! You’ll pardon me if I’m not impressed. I need to see and understand true power, true knowledge, true purpose, true goodwill for life. Man-made religion doesn’t interest me, just as I’ve outgrown my interest in novels.

God

Let me therefore leave aside the distraction of religions which are best spurned, and turn to the broader question of God. This question is extremely pertinent. Not sullied by religion, it is also amenable to objective investigation.

Now, much as I would have liked to tell you something useful, I haven’t yet found much to say on this topic. One thing is becoming evident, though, that as scientific knowledge expands, the universe no longer (logically or empirically) requires a God in order to come into existence. The zone of events that can be plausibly explained by the intervention of God is becoming increasingly smaller. There’s not much left for God to ‘do’.

While there remain many plausible hypotheses about God (and there may well be others we have not yet thought about), two characteristics seem most likely to be found in a God, if He does exist. First, He is likely to take the form of all-pervasive energy (noting that energy is never created nor destroyed). Second, God’s primary ‘job’ seems to be to establish the laws of nature, and to then let go. He never, ever, dabbles with the laws of Nature. It is also increasingly harder to fit a human ‘soul’ into this picture, particularly since nothing super-natural has ever been established.

But these are mere pointers. I have not closed my mind on this topic and suggest you don’t close yours. I continue to suggest a plausible ‘minimal faith’ in God, particularly if that helps you. Prayer has never harmed anyone (unless we pander to our brain’s ready capacity to invent delusions). There’s no harm in starting and keeping up a conversation with God, hoping one day that we will find the truth. Till that happens, i.e. till after we die and find out, let us create our own meaning in life. Let us search for the truth, follow the right path, and help this great family – one mankind – to which we belong, advance one step forward to unprecedented heights of wisdom.

The many benefits of critical thinking

A habit of critical thinking may be challenging, but it does have a huge personal dividend. They rightly say that health is wealth, and in my case I have encountered at least four major (very painful) health problems which doctors and ‘experts’ pathetically failed to solve. In each case I did not give up and resorted to my own thinking. Through diligent investigation and by using myself as a guinea pig to experiment with remedies (including some that I’ve discovered myself), I have achieved tolerable results. Without the ability to think, I would have been in trouble. That I have not only survived so far but remain largely fit as a fiddle, is living proof of the health benefits of critical thinking. (This doesn’t mean that nothing will go wrong with me in the future but I do take much care to apply my mind to matters of personal health.)

And so, whether or not you find God, you will surely find many practical advantages of critical thinking. For that to happen, have no heroes. Be confident in the use of your magic machine: the brain. Use it fearlessly.

3. The right action

It is important to create a close consonance or alignment between the truth and what one does. Let me tell you a bit about right action.

The way to the right action is through applying the blowtorch of critical thinking to one’s actions, as one might apply it to ideas. I question myself before doing something, and question myself after doing it. Often I fail to undertake the right action in the first go. The review informs a revised action that is typically better than the first one. Trial and error and lots of questioning. Why am I doing something in a particular way? (Or not in another way?) That’s the question of interest.

There’s a second aspect to right action: undertaking it without concern for the fruit (Nishkama karma). A journey that is based on the right action is fruit enough.

You will, of course, need to feed yourself and your family (may you prosper!). It is relatively easy to find a job after acquiring some bookish ‘education’. But is this enough? Is the job the right action? Our work and livelihood must also be consistent with the truth. If one is required to compromise the truth in one’s job, or to glorify undeserving individuals, then one must withdraw support. I am not suggesting that we don’t look after ourselves and our family, but it is important to ensure self-respect and the primacy of the truth.

My work on India

A digression about my work on India will illustrate. But first, why do I focus so much on India? I am not parochial, nor xenophobic, nor jingoistic. I don’t glorify India or any other nation. So why is India such a big deal for me?

India is where I was born and grew up. I learnt a lot about life and society from India. I also started on a life-long search for good policy while I was in India, a search that led me through considerable reading, reflection and learning, to what I think is the truth about what works and why – in relation to matters of governance. There is a way, in my understanding of this truty, by which everyone in India can live a decent life. Poor Indian children don’t need to scavenge in rubbish heaps for food.

Given this search was based primarily on investigations in relation to India, the right action (in my case) involves (a) offering the information about this truth to India, and (b) offering my services (at cost) to reform India’s governance. Till around 2013 I was happy to return full time to India to participate in the political process if things had moved in the right direction. But that did not happen, so the services I now offer remain more in the space of general advice.

I’m not in a hurry. The truth wins, so I know that what I have said (in Breaking Free of Nehru) will ultimately be accepted. I don’t have to use the sword to buttress the truth. The people of India are responsible for their lives. Let them decide whether they want to use any of this knowledge to convert India from an underperforming and corrupt Third World country to a world-best economy and society.

But making such an offer is not enough. The right action involves withdrawing support for wrong action. I therefore left the IAS (to enter which I had at one time spent considerable time and effort). I can’t possibly wage war against untruth (socialism) while supporting socialist misgovernance through the IAS.

Whether these actions yield fruit is irrelevant. The important thing is to do the right thing. With that I will die knowing that I did not support falsehood, and I tried to do the right thing for India. That’s more than most people will be able to say on their deathbed.

I can add to this my resignation as an economist in Victorian Treasury to protest the criminal actions of the Daniel Andrews government, but there is no need for detail: the principle remains the same. I am at peace with my actions which cost me income and positions in society. They were the right actions to take.

Conclusion

We must stoutly defend our freedom to search for the truth and to undertake the right action. I trust you will become genuine seekers of the truth and maintain your self-respect and dignity by undertaking the right action.

Do find yourself a good partner (this applies to all), someone with openness of mind and willingness to give you some leeway. Give your partner the same leeway. Above all, feel good about being alive. There is so much negativity in this world, so many fanatics, so many bullies, so many paternalistic know-alls, so many haters of the truth, so many forceful preachers of falsehood.

The only way to maintain your spirits in the midst of such people who are intent on taking us back to the medieval era, is to maintain your health in the best condition. So take care of your body. Note that you can’t do that without understanding how it works. Ask questions.

I sincerely hope my journey continues a little bit longer, but like all good things it will come to an end. It has been good sharing some time together. The ‘extra time’ that I will now enjoy with you would be relieved of the apprehension that I did not spare some time to say what I had to.

To those who have not yet been born (my second and other grandchildren, but also the children of my larger family: humanity), let me assure you that life as a human offers many challenges but its rewards are unparalleled. So do get born! (Everyone, please have plenty of children!) Let the world resonate with the joyful squeals of children. Let mankind also squeal in delight at the discovery of new truths.

This is Version 2.0 of my last testament, dated 23 February 2025. I will update it as time permits.

[1] https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/educational-resources/fact-sheets/human-genomic-variation

[2] Kālāma Sutta, Anguttara Nikaya, Vol 1, 188-193 – [http://oaks.nvg.org/kalama.html]