A common characteristic of the multiple regime change interventions in the Middle East is the financial, military, and moral support given by Western governments (US, UK, France and others, in alignment with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Gulf states) to so-called ‘moderate rebels’. …

Wahhabism is an extreme, fundamentalist strain of Sunni Islam that was created in the 18th century in central Arabia. It was originally founded by preacher and scholar Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and was greatly influenced by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s patron, the military leader Muhammad Ibn Saud. …

Wildlife documentaries bring in our living room a world that to many people looks savage and brutal. A tedious animal existence revolving around the search for food and territory. What most of the viewers forget is that, as John Gray shows in his work, these are the Malthusian and Hobbesian…

Globalization was fiercely promoted for its purported benefits to people by professors of economics, poshly-educated politicians, and ‘respectable’ newspapers all over the world. The ‘masses’, after careful consideration of the arguments of those ‘experts’ and painstaking deliberation on the subject, voted in office those politicians who were going to bring…

When people think of the mob, they usually have the picture of a boorish crowd in mind. Many people with university education think of the mob as the people without university education. For those people a university degree is the measure of being civilized. …

Judging whether someone is a fanatic is not straightforward. Unless you have access to their private or closed-circle conversations most fanatics do not look like fanatics. In fact, they may even look as normal people 99% of the time. You may not even see them or hear them for the…

I was recently reading Umberto Eco’s essay ‘Inventing the Enemy’ from his book of the same title (2012). The core idea of the essay is that humans have a need to have enemies. Conventionally, without giving it much thought, we think that it is differences and threats that cause enmity…

In his work after the early Socratic dialogues — most notably The Republic — Plato expounded his totalitarian theory motivated by a form of backward-looking radicalism. Popper summarizes Plato’s sociology in two mottoes: First, ‘arrest all political change!’, and, second, ‘back to nature!’ (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945…

Seneca, the first century AD Roman philosopher, and Emperor Nero’s chief adviser and speech-writer, was a curious case, his critics tell us. Their most common argument goes as follows: ‘In his Letters on Morality Seneca pretended to be a tranquil Stoic, indifferent to wealth and power. …