Perhaps I was told too often of His wrath and too little of His grace. Humans limited to the language of mortals, attempted to describe the ineffable to me, and left me grasping at shadows. Thus, it seems, I lent God my habits. Him keeping count, learning my patterns, growing tired of my pathetic apologies. I assume He recoils the way I do, that He withdraws affection the way I do, that disappointment hardens Him as it hardens me. I give Him my pettiness, my suspicion, my fatigue with being wronged. I teach Him to remember the way I remember, to grow cold the way I grow cold. In making Him human enough to understand Him, I make Him too human to forgive.

I have made Him intelligible to me, which is to say: small. I don’t doubt His existence; I doubt His endurance. I remake Him in my image, and then wonder why He seems so flawed.

Then, in the most agonising moments of my confusion, He offers me this:

He seems so tender, so sweet. In the posture of a lover waiting by the phone for His beloved to call. He “waits” for me, He “longs” for me, and I have done nothing but misread Him. I have measured His patience by my own, assumed His justice must mirror my judgment, and imagined His mercy is bound by the limits of my own forgiveness. I have made Him accountable to the very weaknesses that plague me. I have humanised Him because all I have ever known is human. I have loved and betrayed only creatures of flesh and fault. Between me and the divine lie thousands of suspended layers of fabric, stacked threads and linens woven from my deficiencies, my limitations, my blindness. I am left only to peel back layer by layer until perhaps I catch a glimpse of what is not human in Him. And begin to understand mercy beyond measure.

Centuries before modern psychology began to map this phenomenon, the 14th-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun identified and articulated this binding force as ‘Asabiyah’ (group feeling/social solidarity) in his seminal work, ‘The Muqaddimah’. The etymology of the word is fascinating. Asabiyah stems from the Arabic root ‘asaba, meaning to bind, to twist, or to wrap around. It implies a sort of tension; the way a turban is wound tight around the head or a ligament holds bone. This same root gives us the Arabic word for ‘nerve’ (‘asab). Khaldun’s concept, therefore, was never only about social agreement; it was about physiological connection. It describes the nervous system of the tribe, a shared circuitry where a signal transmitted by one is received by the whole, bypassing the individual mind entirely.

Moving between the cohesion of the Bedouin tribes and the corruption of royal courts, Ibn Khaldun observed ‘crowd psychology’ centuries before we had the language to map it. He saw that the seduction of belonging is the engine of history: it is, and has been, the force that can bind a people into a weapon capable of building a dynasty, and the loss of which inevitably guarantees its collapse. Asabiyah, to him, was the fundamental glue of human civilisation. The thread that binds individuals into a coherent unit, making them more resilient than the sum of their parts. But I believe it is even more invasive than than. Asabiyah is not only a sociological glue; it is a psychological solvent.

Human beings are profoundly social animals. Our nervous systems are optimised to synchronise: heart rates match, blood pressures regulate each other, emotional states converge, behaviour aligns with the group long before we consciously choose to conform. This has always been the case. What we call a ‘crowd’ is simply a larger, more volatile version of the ordinary social field in which the brain has always existed.

The philosopher Ortega y Gasset once described the ‘mass’ as “the sum of all the solitary zeros.” I suspect he meant it as an insult, but psychologically, he was not far off. In a crowd, the self doesn’t quite disappear; it simply becomes negotiable. The individual ego cedes space to a shared emotional current.

Social Surrender

Crowds have been interesting to philosophers like Ibn Khaldun and modern psychologists alike because of how they undermine the ordinary checks and balances of the brain. Under conditions of collective arousal; protest, celebration, mourning, panic, the individual amygdala becomes a hyper-sensitive signal receiver, scanning for social cues to respond to. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for moral reasoning and individual restraint, quiets. The social brain takes precedence.

You can see this shift in something as ordinary as a football match. A single person, sitting alone, perhaps would never hurl a bottle or scream threats at a stranger. But place that same person in a stadium where thousands around him are roaring, vibrating with adrenaline, and the neural chemistry tilts. The amygdala registers collective excitement as a cue for action; the prefrontal cortex, normally the voice of restraint, fades beneath the noise. What felt unthinkable in solitude becomes almost effortless in the crowd’s emotional slipstream.

Even joyous crowds can trigger this shift. At a concert, when the music swells and thousands of bodies move in synchrony, people leap barriers, shove forward, or faint from sheer arousal. The brain interprets the crowd’s energy as a signal to join, merge, accelerate. The social circuitry takes over, and the reflective self recedes.

Some call it ‘mob mentality’ in the moralising sense; but it is the consequence of neural prioritisation. The brain does not care about your individuality when it detects collective threat or collective opportunity. The brain cares about survival above all else, and for most of human history survival depended on merging with the group.

To refuse the crowd’s direction felt dangerous. And in many periods of time, it was.

The Seduction of Belonging

If the surrender to Asabiyah was simply a loss of autonomy, we would resist it. But is is also incredibly seductive.

There is a relief in handing over one’s private burdens; doubt, hesitation, self-scrutiny, to the collective. The crowd simplifies moral complexity, sometimes to our detriment. It offers clarity without thought, emotion without vulnerability, action without accountability. It lifts the self out of its lonely interior space and places it inside a kind of shared organism.

This is why movements rely not on persuasion alone, but on the orchestrated production of crowd states: rallies, chants, rhythms, symbols, uniforms, slogans. These are technologies of synchronisation designed to artificially stimulate Asabiyah. They soothe individual fear by dissolving it into a unified emotional field.

It feels like connection. It sometimes becomes coercion.

Once a person is absorbed into a crowd, ordinary moral thresholds shift. Most people commit acts they might never attempt in solitude; violence, destruction, humiliation, not because they have become worse in a sense, but because the internal feedback mechanisms that ordinarily regulate behaviour have been overridden. Responsibility disperses. Fear disperses. Shame disperses. The self becomes thin.

This is why crowds can generate both revolutions and atrocities with equal efficiency. They magnify whatever emotional charge they contain. A crowd built from righteous sorrow can shake a regime; a crowd built from resentment can tear through a city like a storm. The psychological mechanism is the same.

إن العصبية بها تكون الحماية والمدافعة والمطالبة، وكل أمر يُجْتَمع عليه

“It is through Asabiyyah that protection and security are realised, political authority is asserted, and all shared interests are achieved.”

— Ibn Khaldun, The Muqadimmah

If abandoning oneself in a crowd is a biological tendency, the challenge is to remain conscious and self-determining within it. To cultivate an inner keel that does not vanish when submerged in collective emotion.

That requires a close and trained awareness of our own physiological shifts: the quickened pulse, the tightening chest, the seductive feeling of being carried by something larger. It also requires a capacity to hold onto personal moral reasoning even as the crowd dissolves nuance. It requires the willingness and, frankly, courage to step out of formation when the emotional current begins to tilt toward cruelty. And perhaps most importantly, it requires acknowledging the uncomfortable truth: none of us are immune to the crowd. Not you. Not me. Not the people we consider thoughtful or principled. The vulnerability is universal.

The work is awareness and discipline. Because a society that cannot understand its own Asabiyah is a society that will be governed by it.

• Ibn Khaldun (1967) The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Translated by F. Rosenthal. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

• Ortega y Gasset, J. (1930) The Revolt of the Masses. New York: W.W. Norton.

• Turner, J.C. and Oakes, P.J. (1986) ‘The significance of the social identity concept for social psychology’, British Journal of Social Psychology, 25(3), pp. 237–252.

• Reicher, S.D. (1984) ‘The St. Pauls’ riot: An explanation of the limits of crowd action in terms of a social identity model’, European Journal of Social Psychology, 14(1), pp. 1–21.

• Le Bon, G. (1895) The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. London: T. Fisher Unwin.

• Cacioppo, J.T. and Patrick, W. (2008) Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. New York: W.W. Norton

Something about the boy caught his eye. His walk seemed hurried, his eyes shifty, his gait awkward, and his voice performatively polite. The man narrowed his gaze. “He took it,” he thought. “He must have.”

That day, everything about the boy confirmed the man’s suspicion. His gestures looked sly, his posture dishonest, his laughter too forced, and even his silence was strange. The more the man observed, the surer he became. Each small detail, perhaps unnoticeable before, now pointed toward guilt.

The next morning, while splitting wood, the man uncovered the axe buried beneath a pile of wood he had stacked days earlier. He stopped cold, staring at it.

Later that afternoon, he saw the neighbor’s son again. However, now the boy’s walk was light, his speech natural, his face open and friendly. The man looked at him and thought, almost with disbelief, “How different he looks today.”

有人亡斧，疑其鄰之子。

視其行步，竊斧也；

其言語，竊斧也；

其容貌，竊斧也。

不久而掘其谷，得其斧。

復視其鄰之子，非竊斧也。

Original Parable (Lieh Tzu, Tang Wen)

So much wisdom in so few words. This parable is one of the clearest demonstrations of what modern psychology calls confirmation bias: the tendency to notice, interpret, remember, and even manufacture information in a way that confirms a person’s pre-existing beliefs.

The man does not simply suspect the boy; he rebuilds the entire perceptual world around him to sustain that suspicion. Once the hypothesis is formed as a thought, “perhaps the boy stole my axe”, every observation is filtered through that thought. The boy’s posture becomes ‘furtive,’ his tone becomes ‘evasive,’ and his very silence is suspicious evidence of guilt. This is not logic; it’s a sort of cognitive immune system at work, rejecting contradictory data to preserve emotional coherence.

Lieh Tzu, who authored this story over two millennia ago, understood something that today’s cognitive scientists still grapple with: oftentimes, belief precedes perception. We don’t always see the world and then form beliefs; we also, and perhaps more often, form beliefs and then see the world accordingly. The mind is not a neutral observer but an active editor, like the woodcutter, constantly rewriting sensory input to fit its internal script.

The story also reveals the intrinsic relationship between affect (emotion) and cognitive appraisal. The man’s suspicion does not arise from objective observation and rational inference but from frustration and agitation. Emotional arousal, whether irritation, loss, or resentment, predisposes the mind to assign cause quickly, often in the direction of moral judgment. In this case, the neighbor’s son becomes a projection surface for the man’s displaced emotion. Once affect produces conviction, perception adjusts to reinforce it. The man begins to see the world through the lens of the very emotion that produced his belief.

For the woodcutter, finding the axe is what breaks the spell. Nothing about the boy has changed; only the man’s internal model of reality has shifted. The boy’s hands, his eyes, his gait; they were always neutral. The change occurs entirely within the observer.

I think the Taoist message here is simple: the world is rarely as we perceive it to be, and the mind is far less reliable than it believes itself to be. We are a species wired less for truth than for coherence. Truth must be sought out.

This story also serves as a critique of moral certainty. Human beings, when sure of their rightness, seem to become blind to alternative explanations. The man’s self-assurance is what prevents him from noticing the much more plausible hypothesis that he simply misplaced the axe and stopped searching for it too soon. His error isn’t intellectual; it’s emotional and egoic.

This mechanism is everywhere: in politics, ideology, relationships, and even science. Once people commit to a narrative, they start gathering evidence for it retroactively. It’s the same pattern that fuels conspiracy theories, prejudice, and interpersonal paranoia. The Taoist solution is not to gather better evidence but to reduce premature judgment. To hold opinions lightly, to wait before deciding, and to recognise that the mind’s first story about reality is usually self-serving.

The woodcutter’s enlightenment is painfully mundane: he found his axe. The world does not change when we discover the truth; only our interpretation of it does.

目之所見，不過形色；耳之所聞，不過聲響；心之所知，不過事理。

“The eye perceives only form and color; the ear hears only sound; the mind knows only the pattern it constructs.” — Lieh Tzu

In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley describes swallowing a small pill of mescaline (a psychedelic) and, soon after, watching his sense of self dissolve like salt in water. The ordinary geometry of perception; the categories of “me” and “the world,” “object” and “subject”, fell away. What remained was an overwhelming, incandescent immediacy: the is-ness of things. He reported that light itself seemed alive, charged with intelligence. “Each flower,” he wrote, “was a miracle of luminous existence.” The distinctions between beauty and banality evaporated; everything simply was, and its being was enough. Time lost its linear grip; moments no longer slid forward but hovered, expanded, became vast. The world ceased to be a collection of objects for him and instead appeared as a single, shimmering field of consciousness, alive with meaning and presence. Huxley described this experience, not as a hallucination or fabrication of reality, but as an unveiling. It was as though the mind had stopped editing reality and, for a few precious hours, let the whole flood in.

When Huxley returned to his ordinary state, he deduced something unsettling but logical. If a chemical had dissolved the walls of his mind, then those walls must already exist, and if it took a small dose of a compound to expand his consciousness in the way it did, then something in ordinary life must be restricting it. The brain, he concluded, was this wall. The brain functions not as a generator of consciousness, but as a reducing valve. Its job is to filter the vast field of possible experience down to a manageable trickle, allowing us to survive rather than to transcend. In other words, the brain protects us from the overwhelming fullness of what is. Without those limits, we might be blinded by the radiance of reality itself. To hunt, to plan, to build, to communicate; we need focus, not infinity. The price of coherence is exclusion. The wide field of consciousness is reduced by our neurology to a narrow aperture through which we can handle tools, build societies, and remember to eat. Every sensory filter, every neural inhibition, every linguistic category we inherit from our culture, all of it constructs the small room we call the self.

And yet, moments seem to arise when the walls of that room flicker or thin. Perhaps through art, meditation, love, or psychedelics, we sometimes sense the vastness beyond. These moments do not expand consciousness so much as they reveal how limited our usual mode of being really is. They show us that our everyday mind is a kind of nap; a strategic amnesia designed for survival. The extraordinary, then, is not elsewhere; it is here, perpetually present, simply filtered out.

In the Quran, there is a striking verse where God narrates how he “fashioned him [Adam] and breathed into him of My [God’s] spirit” وَنَفَخْتُ فِيهِ مِن رُّوحِى (15:29). It’s a bold image. God, after shaping Adam from clay, transfers something of Himself into this new creature. Ruh is the word used here; typically translated as spirit/soul/essence of God. But consider for a moment that Ruh is actually consciousness. That God is the totality of all consciousness, that he is in fact consciousness itself, and that he installed a portion of it into the blood, flesh, and bones of our collective ancestor. In other words, what makes us sentient, self-aware beings is not our biology, but the portion of consciousness (God’s essence) that temporarily inhabits it. Our ordinary awareness is not separate from the divine but partitioned from it.

If we ponder for a moment on the Arabic roots of the many words used to define the mind/intellect/consciousness in Islamic literature, an interesting parallel emerges. For instance, ʿAql (عقل) meaning Reason/Intellect. Every word in the Arabic language has a triliteral skeleton. The triliteral lexical root of Aql is ع-ق-ل (ʿ-q-l). The core concrete meaning of this root is to tie or gather, specifically tying a camel's leg to prevent it from straying. Hence, the words of Prophet Muhammad to his outraged companion اعْقِلْهَا وَتَوَكَّلْ (first tie the camel, then entrust it to God). From this comes ʿiqāl, the rope used for this purpose, still in common colloquial use. ʿAql, reason, derives from this concept directly. Reason is restraint. It is the faculty that binds a person from his impulses, as a rope holds an animal. The irrational person is not unlit but unbound. Intellect disciplines perception, curbs excess, selects, and excludes. Without it, there is no coherence, no continuity of self; but with it, there is also a narrowing. To be rational is, quite literally, to be tied.

waʿy (وعي) meaning Awareness / Consciousness is another fascinating parallel here. Its triliteral root is و-ع-ي (w-ʿ-y), meaning to gather, to contain, or to retain in the mind. In more concrete usage, to contain or hold in a vessel. A mind, then, is not an open expanse but a kind of container. It is something that receives, shapes, and limits what it can hold. Awareness is not the total field, but the portion gathered and retained within the bounds of this inner ظرف, this vessel of self. And so the two concepts converge: ʿaql binds, waʿy contains. Together they describe a consciousness that is structured less like a window onto infinity and more like a carefully managed enclosure.

Huxley described a sense of union with all things, an awareness so vast and immediate that his individual identity became irrelevant. It was not quite an escape from reality but an unmediated confrontation with it. His interpretation was that the brain, on its own, functions as a “reducing valve,” constraining the flood of consciousness to a trickle fit for survival. But what if what Huxley felt was a momentary unification with the unbound source of consciousness? What if his psychedelic experience, like the deep transcendent states achieved by monks, mystics/gnostics, or Sufi dervishes, temporarily lifted a material restriction? Perhaps through silence, repetition, or chemical interruption, the mind’s habitual boundaries loosen, and consciousness momentarily returns to something closer to its source; a state of unity that mystics have long described as reunion with the Divine.

A related read:

Belief in God, by contrast, begins with an act of rebellion against this tyranny of the self. It is the humbling, liberating, and psychologically decisive admission that there exists something beyond me. Greater than me. Whatever else one may say about religion or faith, this simple shift of perspective carries immense therapeutic power. It rescues the mind from the exhausting project of self-worship and returns it to the wider stage of reality.

Depression Speaks in the First Person

Most forms of mental suffering speak in the first person. Depression establishes itself with a self-obsessive rumination and murmurs, I am hopeless, I am nothing, I am worthless. Anxiety frets, What will happen to me? What if? Even grief, perhaps our most noble sorrow, is not exempt. When we grieve the dead, we claim to mourn their loss, but I have come to realise what we often mourn is our own. We do not weep for their losses we weep for our own. Our loss of their presence, their care, their contribution to our story. It is our pain we hold a vigil for, not theirs.

This is not a moral judgment by the way, merely an observation. The self is the lens through which we experience everything, but when the lens becomes the subject, reality collapses into distortion. The self, obsessively observed, becomes pathological. And yet, modern life encourages precisely this. It tells us to look inward for truth, for peace, for meaning, never noticing that the more one stares at oneself, the less one seems to see.

Transcendence as the Antidote

To believe in God is to look outward and upward. Not necessarily to a Judeo-Christian bearded patriarch in the clouds, but to the ancient and indispensable idea that there is a reality larger and higher than any individual consciousness. “God” is a short word for the long standing intuition of humankind that life is not confined to our private psychology. It names the transcendent, the numinous, the principle of order and significance that renders our personal tragedies both bearable and, occasionally, beautiful.

The believer, in orienting toward a greater, transcendent reality, performs a profound psychological manoeuvre: he dethrones the self. Now, this dethronement is not a humiliation the way yielding to a tyrant is, but it is the first breath of freedom after one. It breaks the, frankly, claustrophobic loop of self-reference and restores proportion to existence. To believe in God is to step back from the mirror and see that one is not the main character of the cosmos, and that this is good news.

Carl Jung posited that the human psyche is inherently religious. Our consciousness and unconsciousness are imbued with the quest for meaning beyond the material world and beyond ourselves. Although Jung did not advocate for any specific religion or dogma, he believed that no man or woman can lead a truly adequate life relating only to the material world. We need to be in contact with a divine reality that is superior to us. He even wrote that one becomes neurotic if not in touch with that reality.

Relief From ‘I’

The atheist may object that one does not need God to feel awe or humility, and this is perfectly true. But belief gives that humility a language and a structure, a discipline, rather than a passing mood. It trains the mind to acknowledge its limits and to act as though meaning resides not solely in its own appetites. This is why belief, even stripped of superstition and dogma, remains psychologically valuable.

Viktor Frankl, who seemed to see the inside of humanity’s darkest chambers, argued that man’s chief need is not happiness but meaning and that meaning is not generated by introspection; it arrives when we locate ourselves in a story greater than our own. Belief in God, however one conceives Him, Her, or It, provides precisely that context. It says: You are not the measure of all things. You are part of something larger.

And what a relief that is.

The believer’s peace is not that everything makes sense, but that it doesn’t always have to to me. There is a higher intelligence, a greater coherence, a mystery that renders one’s personal failures less final.

Worship, in this sense, is an exercise in proportion. It is the mind reminding itself that it is not itself the summit of being. I personally find that when I pray to God; the bowing, prostrating, supplicating, silently wondering, the iron grip of my ego loosens and a window onto a vastness outside is opened. Therefore, to do this at five incremental times every single day, as the Islamic God prescribes, is a regular inescapable rehearsal of perspective. A daily correction of scale.

Without something greater than the self to serve, the self seems to swell to fill the void, and the results are everywhere: the brittle politics of identity, the performative despair, the disintegration of objective morality, the hunger for validation that networth, number of followers or degress can satisfy.

Nietzsche’s haunting declaration, “God is dead, and we have killed him”, was not a celebration of liberation, as it is so often misread, but an obituary laced with dread. He understood that in killing God, modern humanity had also dismantled the moral and psychological scaffolding that once held the self in proportion to something greater. Nietzsche did not believe in God and yet he knew the value of it. Without a vertical axis of transcendence, the self has nowhere to look but sideways and inward, where it becomes trapped in sterile self-reference. In the void left by the divine, we inflated the ego to divine proportions and called it freedom. But the death of God did not make us gods; it made us orphans; restless, self-fixated, and spiritually malnourished.

Even if one were to regard God as a noble fiction, the fiction is an indispensable one. Even as invention, God performs the essential task of keeping the self from collapsing under the weight of its own reflection. Otherwise we are condemned to orbit endlessly within our own miserable skulls. Wouldn’t you rather, for example, be governed by a person who believes that they answer to something greater than themselves, than by a person who recognises no judgement but their own, even if you’re certain the former’s God is imaginary?

Food for thought.

“I cannot prove to you that God exists, but my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern in the individual has at its disposal the greatest transforming energies of which life is capable. Find this pattern in your own individual self, and life is transformed.” — C.G Jung, in a Letter to Laurens van der Post.

References

• Beck, A.T. (1976) Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. New York: International Universities Press.

• Buddha (2007) The Dhammapada. Translated by E. Easwaran. Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press.

• Dostoevsky, F. (2004) The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky. London: Vintage.

• Frankl, V.E. (1959) Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

• Hume, D. (1993) Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.

• Jung, C.G. (1964) Man and His Symbols. London: Aldus Books.

• Jung, C.G. (1973) Letters, Vol. 2: 1951–1961. Edited by G. Adler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

• Kierkegaard, S. (1989) The Sickness Unto Death. Translated by A. Hannay. London: Penguin Classics.

• Nietzsche, F. (1974) The Gay Science. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage.

• Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2000) ‘The role of rumination in depressive disorders and mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 109(3), pp. 504–511.

• Rowe, D. (1983) Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison. London: Routledge.

• Seligman, M.E.P. (1991) Learned Optimism. New York: Knopf.

• Solzhenitsyn, A. (1972) Nobel Lecture in Literature. Stockholm: The Nobel Foundation.

• Tillich, P. (1957) Dynamics of Faith. New York: Harper & Row.

The mystery is as old as politics itself. Why does bluster triumph over wisdom, image over substance? The question haunts democracies and dictatorships alike, leaving citizens eventually outraged, bewildered, and resigned.

The uncomfortable truth may be that power does not reward the best and most virtuous among us; it rewards those most willing to seize it at any cost. As Niccolò Machiavelli observed half a millennium ago, politics is not a contest of virtue but of appearances, cunning, and manipulation. Leaders do not need to be good; they need only to look strong, decisive, and in control. And in that game of illusions, the ‘idiots’ we mock may not be idiots at all, but rather opportunists who understand, instinctively, how to bend human weakness to their advantage. Donald Trump is one such opportunist.

Virtue vs. Realpolitik

Machiavelli, the Florentine diplomat and author of The Prince, rather cynically rejected the notion that leaders should strive to be ‘good’ and moral. Perhaps in an attempt at realism, he argued instead that the most effective rulers understood the flaws of human nature and learned to exploit them. That the appearance of virtue mattered more than virtue itself.

Donald Trump embodies this lesson. By most conventional measures, policy knowledge, discipline, and decorum, he was shockingly unprepared for the presidency. Yet his ability to project strength, defiance, and certainty won over millions. He understood, instinctively, that politics is not about truth, but about narrative. A polished reputation for wisdom is less effective than a commanding appearance of decisiveness. And when reality clashed with his image, he doubled down on the performance.

Trump’s presidency was and is defined by this ruthless pragmatism. He treated institutions not as guardians of democratic norms but as tools to be bent toward personal survival. Cabinet members, intelligence chiefs, and even allies in Congress were discarded the moment they threatened his image of control.

Foreign policy, too, was filtered through the same lens: alliances were transactional, loyalty was valued over principle, and decisions were framed not in terms of long-term strategy but in how they reinforced his immediate narrative of strength. In true Machiavellian fashion, Trump’s realpolitik lay in his refusal to be constrained by morality or precedent; he understood that in politics, appearances of dominance could be more powerful than the substance of governance itself.

Virtù: Skill, Not Goodness

Machiavelli’s ‘virtù’ is this very skill: the ability to seize opportunity and bend fortune to one’s will. Trump’s rise reflected this. He did not study policy like a scholar, but he most definitely mastered the spectacle. His rallies, Twitter feed and press conferences were theatre. He dominated news cycles through provocation.

Consider his handling of scandals. Where another politician might have apologised or resigned in an attempt to salvage the image of virtue, Trump often escalates, attacking his accusers and reframing himself as the victim of a corrupt system. By doing so, he projected control. Machiavelli would have recognised this as virtù: not wisdom or virtue, but the ruthless flexibility to seize opportunity and crush threats.

Genuine goodness is fragile: it is dependent on trust, on reciprocity, on the hope that others will meet sincerity with fairness. Cunning, on the other hand, exploits the cracks in human psychology: our tendency to follow confidence, to seek certainty, to mistake boldness for competence. In this light, it is not surprising that the ruthless so often triumph over the righteous.

Manipulation and the Illusion of Control

Machiavelli recognised that power is sustained not through flawless governance, but through the careful management of appearances, by scripting the narrative, shaping collective belief, and constructing the illusion of strength even where none exists. In psychological terms, this is impression management: the leader as performer, calibrating symbols and rhetoric to elicit confidence and obedience.

Donald Trump personifies this dynamic with uncanny instinct. When economic cracks appeared or the pandemic exposed glaring shortcomings, he reflexively shifted responsibility outward, casting blame on China, on hostile media, on political rivals. When facts threatened to erode his image, he did not retreat; he countered with repetition, broadcasting his preferred version of reality until it felt, to many, indistinguishable from truth. Psychologists call this the “illusory truth effect”: the more often a claim is repeated, the more credible it feels, regardless of evidence.

Exploiting Human Weakness

Machiavelli was blunt about human nature: people are motivated by fear, greed, and vanity. Successful rulers exploit these drives. Trump’s playbook mirrors this insight.

Fear: Historically, fear is perhaps the most powerful political tool. It heightens vigilance, narrows focus, and drives people toward strong authority figures. Trump wielded it relentlessly, portraying immigrants as invaders, casting elites as corrupt enemies (despite arguably being one himself), and amplifying conspiracy theories about hidden plots against ordinary Americans. By presenting himself as the sole defender against chaos, he positioned fear as the glue that bound followers to him.

Greed (or desire): Humans are motivated by the promise of gain as much as by the avoidance of loss. Trump understood this, framing his campaign as a golden ticket to restored prosperity. The slogans were simple and evocative: “jobs coming back,” “factories reopening,” “America winning again.” This promise of abundance, often untethered from economic reality, appealed to the deep-seated desire for security and status. It was a carrot dangled before a weary public, and many chose to believe it.

Flattery (vanity): Perhaps Trump’s most effective tool was his instinct for flattery. He told his supporters they were special, the “forgotten men and women” whose greatness he alone could restore. He did not just promise to lead them; he validated their identity, their worth, and their grievances. Psychologically, this fed their need for recognition and dignity. To attack Trump became, in their minds, an attack on them. In this way, loyalty hardened, not just to the man, but to the symbolic self he reflected back to them.

These were not accidents. They were tactics as old as politics itself, wielded with the intuitive cunning Machiavelli described centuries ago.

When Illusions Fracture

Yet Machiavelli also warned of the fragility of deception. Lies demand constant reinforcement; once cracks form, the illusion requires ever more energy to sustain. Followers, too, are not infinitely pliable. Cognitive dissonance, when reality persistently clashes with belief, eventually erodes even the most fervent loyalty. Illusions work, until they don’t.

In Trump’s case, that pressure point may now be arriving. His unapologetic support for Israel, even amid widespread outrage over the Genocide in Gaza, has fractured and alienated segments of his base, particularly younger, populist-leaning conservatives uneasy with foreign entanglements and humanitarian costs. At the same time, his refusal to release the Epstein files, a promise long wielded as a badge of purity, has cracked his loyal MAGA coalition. Demands for transparency, once a unifying call, now amplify disillusionment as supporters question whether they were baited into conspiracy rather than clarity

Machiavelli would not have been surprised. He knew that fear and manipulation can sustain power only so long before cracks appear. And when they do, the fall can be sudden and brutal.

It is tempting to view Trump as an anomaly. But he is not. He is a symptom of a deeper truth: societies often reward confidence over competence, spectacle over substance, manipulation over wisdom. Machiavelli forces us to face this uncomfortable reality.

References:

• Machiavelli, N. (1998) The Prince. Translated by H.C. Mansfield. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Peter, L.J. and Hull, R. (1969) The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. New York: Harper & Row.
  Paulhus, D.L. and Williams, K.M. (2002) ‘The Dark Triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy’, Journal of Research in Personality, 36(6), pp. 556–563.

Dante organises Hell in a way that places certain sins above others, some more damning, more painful, and more inescapable than others. This hierarchy doesn’t merely reflect medieval Christian theology like I had expected it to, but it taps into deeper psychological and moral realities. Each level of Hell in Dante's Inferno corresponds not only to a specific sin but also to the way each sin challenges the individual's sense of self, their relationships with others, and their place in the world.

Why did Dante order the sins the way he did? Why is lust punished higher up than fraud? Why is betrayal placed at the very bottom, beneath murder and violence? There’s a logic to it that isn’t just theological. In many ways, Dante was not only a poet and theologian but also a proto-psychologist, intuitively charting the ways in which human beings lose themselves and the path through which they might find themselves again.

Sin

At the core of Dante’s Inferno lies a principle that resonates across most medieval, religious, and even modern psychological perspectives: sin, in its most fundamental form, is the result of a failure to properly align the self with the highest good. In Dante’s worldview, this is God’s divine order. From a psychological perspective, sin can be seen as a deep misalignment of an individual’s expressions (motives and behaviour) with their moral or ethical standard.

But not all misalignments are equal. Some are deep incongruences of personality, while others are more surface-level expressions of misjudgment or momentary weakness. It’s this psychological spectrum that Dante taps into when he places certain sins in more treacherous and torturous circles of Hell than others. His structure actually seems to mirror the psychological concept of moral agency: the capacity to understand and act on moral principles. The more deliberate and intentional the harm, the graver the sin.

Upper Hell: Sins of Incontinence

Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth and Wrath

Dante's hierarchy begins with the sins of incontinence: sins of weakness where individuals act against their better judgment or moral compass. In Dante’s view, these sins are less damaging to the soul than those rooted in cruelty, but they are profoundly painful. The four sins that Dante places at the uppermost circles (lust, gluttony, greed, and sloth) are indicative of the human tendency to indulge in basic, natural desires without consideration for their consequences. In psychological terms, they represent failures of emotional regulation & conscientiousness rather than outright malice and spiritual disease.

• Lust is the elevation of physical and sexual gratification above the cultivation of intimacy, mutual respect, or virtue. Psychologically, it can be understood as a displacement behaviour: seeking sensory stimulation as a substitute for or a means of avoiding emotional intimacy or security. This pattern may emerge from attachment insecurities and unresolved emotional wounds. Philosophically, lust represents a distortion of eros, in which the drive for union becomes detached from the pursuit of the good, reducing another person to an object of consumption rather than a co-creator of meaning.

• Gluttony reflects an unbalanced relationship with consumption, most obviously in food, but more broadly in the way one approaches pleasure, comfort, and abundance. In psychological terms, gluttony often aligns with compulsive or self-soothing behaviours, sometimes tied to unmet emotional needs, trauma, or the dysregulation of reward systems in the brain. Philosophically, it is an excess that violates the Aristotelian golden mean, mistaking quantity for quality, and treating the satisfaction of appetite as an end in itself rather than a means to support a flourishing life.

• Greed embodies an excessive attachment to material possession, power, or status, driven not by genuine need but by a restless desire for more. Psychologically, it is rooted in scarcity thinking: an internalised sense that one is never safe, complete, or valuable enough, leading to obsessive acquisition and control. Greed distorts the relationship between means and ends: it subordinates the pursuit of virtue and communal well-being to personal accumulation, violating the principle that wealth should serve human flourishing rather than define it.

• Sloth, often misunderstood as mere idleness, signifies a deeper refusal to act, to choose, or to engage with life’s moral and existential demands. Psychologically, it may manifest as depressive withdrawal, chronic procrastination, or an avoidance of self-confrontation. It can stem from fear of failure, disconnection from purpose, or a paralysing perfectionism. Philosophically, sloth is a neglect of one’s telos: the Aristotelian idea of the inherent purpose of a being, and a betrayal of one’s potential for self-actualisation. In this sense, it is not merely “doing nothing” but a subtle form of self-abandonment.

The Middle Circles: Malice

Wrath, Envy, and Heresy

As the descent continues into Dante’s middle circles, we encounter the sins of malice: transgressions in which the will does not merely yield to impulse but consciously turns toward the harm of others. These sins are more damaging because they reflect a deeper psychological malady: a breakdown in the individual’s relationship with others, a sense of alienation, or a projection of inner chaos onto the external world. They mark a decisive rupture between the rational and social dimensions of the self, recalling the Aristotelian insight that humans, as politikon zōon (political animals), realise their nature through harmonious coexistence, not through antagonism or isolation. These are sins that involve not just weakness, but active hostility and harm.

• Wrath is the unbridled surge of anger that subordinates reason to passion, often seeking the destruction, whether physical, emotional, or reputational, of its object. Psychologically, wrath is the culmination of unresolved grievances, humiliation, or chronic frustration, frequently rooted in trauma or perceived injustice. It is sustained by rumination, which keeps the nervous system in a state of perpetual mobilisation. Philosophically, wrath is the antithesis of the Stoic ideal of apatheia (freedom from destructive emotions) and the Aristotelian virtue of praotēs (meekness or gentleness), in which anger is proportionate and guided by reason. Left unchecked, wrath consumes both its target and its bearer, severing the possibility of reconciliation.

• Envy is a corrosive fixation on the advantages, successes, or possessions of others, coupled with the wish to see them diminished. Psychologically, envy is linked to low self-esteem, chronic comparison, and the internalisation of unattainable ideals. It may serve as a defence against feelings of inadequacy, externalising self-discontent as resentment toward others. Envy distorts the perception of the good by equating another’s flourishing with one’s own deprivation, a fallacy that denies the potential for shared prosperity. In Dante’s vision, envy blinds both literally and metaphorically, for it clouds the moral imagination, rendering a person unable to perceive the intrinsic worth of their own existence.

• Heresy represents an intellectual break from a unified worldview. In Dante’s moral topography, heresy is not simply doctrinal disagreement but the willful rejection of a unifying truth that orders life toward meaning and coherence. Psychologically, heresy can be understood as a radical cognitive dissonance: the conscious or unconscious need to reject inherited frameworks, even at the cost of existential fragmentation. For some, this may emerge from disillusionment or betrayal by institutions, leading to a reactive embrace of beliefs that disrupt rather than heal. An exile not only from community but from an integrated self-understanding.

The Deeper Circles: Betrayal

Fraud, Treachery, and the Loss of Self

In the deepest and coldest recesses of Dante’s Inferno, the sins of fraud, treachery, and betrayal take form: transgressions that signify not the momentary weakness of incontinence or the heated malice of wrath, but the cold, deliberate choice to violate trust and distort truth. Here, will is not overpowered by passion but is actively enlisted in the service of calculated harm. These sins are markers of a fractured moral identity: a disconnection from conscience so complete that empathy becomes subordinate to manipulation, and integrity is sacrificed to self-interest. These sins represent the perversion of reason itself, using the faculty meant to discern the good as an instrument to undermine it.

• Fraud is the intentional use of deception to manipulate others for personal gain. It is a crime of intellect rather than impulse, requiring foresight, calculation, and an awareness of the moral law that is consciously set aside. Fraud often arises from narcissistic entitlement, Machiavellian tendencies, or chronic insecurity masked by control over others’ perceptions. It thrives on the exploitation of trust, bending reality into a shape that serves the deceiver’s ends. Philosophically, fraud is the antithesis of truthfulness, one of the cardinal virtues in both Aristotelian and Thomistic ethics. It violates the shared symbolic order, language, promises, and mutual understanding upon which human community depends.

• Treachery is betrayal in its most intimate form: the turning against a friend, a person who has given trust, love, or loyalty. Unlike fraud, which may target strangers or institutions, treachery corrupts the very foundation of personal relationship. It is rooted in a capacity to suppress empathy in favour of self-preservation, vengeance, or ambition. It may involve pathological detachment, the rationalisation of harm, or an ingrained belief that loyalty is expendable when weighed against personal advantage. Philosophically, treachery is the inversion of fides (faithfulness) an ancient and sacred bond without which society cannot exist. It is a rebellion not only against another person but against the relational fabric that makes one human. In Dante’s vision, it is the ultimate estrangement: the self sealed away from love, warmth, and the possibility of redemption.

The treacherous souls that Dante places at the very bottom of Hell, those who have betrayed, are condemned to an eternal, unyielding frost. Betrayal, according to Dante, represents a profound internal fracture, a total disavowal of the self, a severance from one’s values, and a rejection of the possibility of redemption. The frost and ice characteristic of this deepest circle of hell captures this emotional and spiritual paralysis, where the soul is encased in a state of perpetual isolation, cut off from the warmth of love, hope, and reconciliation.

What strikes me most profoundly in Dante’s Inferno is not the biblical code and the severity of the punishments, but the underlying psychological commentary on the ethical health of the soul. True warmth is felt when we are attuned to others and ourselves. We lose that warmth as we rupture our connections to the rest of the world. The further we isolate ourselves through sin, the colder our reality becomes. Hell, in Dante’s vision, is not just a place of suffering; it is a psychological landscape that reflects the inner turmoil of the human condition.

Dante’s revelation is that the path to redemption is through self-awareness and self-correction. The deeper the sin, the more distant one becomes from divine order, but this also means the possibility of reconnection becomes more arduous and complex. Dante’s journey is, in a sense, the journey of psychological integration. The sins in Hell represent the fragmented parts of the self, and the downward journey is a path to confronting the dissonances that exist within.

But if happiness is considered ‘health,’ what does that make grief, stress, anxiety, or failure? Is grief ‘ill-health’? Or is it simply part of the human condition? Isn’t struggle natural and inevitable? How plausible is it to enjoy life? Is unhappiness actually bad? What even is happiness?

Let us begin with a basic truth: emotional pain is inescapable.

Every life is marked by suffering. No matter how wealthy, loved, or socially fortunate we are, we will all face loss, fear, disappointment, rejection, and mortality. Struggle is a non-negotiable in life. To set the absence of pain as the ideal is to set ourselves up for chronic dissatisfaction. And yet this is precisely the model that dominates much of contemporary thinking about well-being.

The neoliberal modern wellness industry often frames mental health as a matter of mood regulation, life hacking, and lifestyle optimisation. But in doing so, it rarely engages with the deeper philosophical and spiritual dimensions of being human. It promises to eliminate pain without addressing its meaning. The result is an increasingly fragile inner life, where discomfort becomes pathologised and the tolerance for adversity (psychological resilience)diminishes.

This shift is not only a theoretical one, it is the symptom of a deeper cultural and ethical transformation.

The Culprit: Neoliberal Individualism

The collective West has long been driven by a desire to accumulate, first through colonial conquest and economic imperialism, and now through consumer capitalism. Wealth, resources, and influence were the spoils of nations. Today in the neoliberal West, these ambitions have trickled down to the individual level. Modern life is structured around the pursuit of more: more money, more success, more visibility, more comfort.

Mark Fisher, British cultural theorist and writer, has been steadfast in his portrayal of mental health issues as political & cultural rather than individual phenomena. In 2014 he wrote:

“Writing about one’s own depression is difficult. Depression is partly constituted by a sneering ‘inner’ voice which accuses you of self-indulgence - you aren’t depressed, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, pull yourself together - and this voice is liable to be triggered by going public about the condition. Of course, this voice isn’t an ‘inner’ voice at all - it is the internalised expression of actual social forces, some of which have a vested interest in denying any connection between depression and politics.

Fisher was one of very few people writing about how if there are observable increases in markers of human suffering in a society (depression, suicides, drug addiction, PTSD etc) then we should look at what’s going on in society and change that instead of only ever throwing individualised ‘treatments’ at individuals (e.g psychopharmacology and psychotherapy). Psychotherapy can be transformative and enlivening, but it is not a substitute for political change. It does not develop a better political & cultural economic future for everyone. It does not eradicate social injustice.

Opinions on what is making society terrible will always conflict, but Fisher believed it was primarily neoliberal capitalism. More frequently referred to as ‘neoliberalism.’

Richard Schwartz (the creator of the Internal Family Systems branch of psychotherapy), in his book No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model, writes:

“We need a new paradigm that convincingly shows that humanity is inherently good and thoroughly interconnected… Such a change won’t be easy. Too many of our basic institutions are based on the dark view. Take, for example, neoliberalism, the economic philosophy of Milton Friedman that undergirds the kind of cutthroat capitalism that has dominated many countries, including the US, since the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Neoliberalism is based on the belief that people are basically selfish and, therefore, it’s everyone for themselves in a survival-of-the-fittest world. The government needs to get out of the way so the fittest can not only help us survive, but thrive. This economic philosophy has resulted in massive inequality as well as the disconnection and polarization among people that we experience so dramatically today. The time has come for a new view of human nature that releases the collaboration and caring that lives in our hearts.”

Psychiatrist and researcher Dr Anna Zeira published a comprehensive piece in the Community Mental Health journal in 2022, titled Mental Health challenges Related to Neoliberal Capitalism In The United States.

Dr. Zeira suggests that most mental health professionals have little to no understanding of neoliberalism, let alone its impact on psychological well-being, so she breaks down what neoliberal policies were starting in the 1980s:

• Deregulation of big business and banks and corporate tax breaks

• Introduction of practices that strongly favour employers over unions;

• Transferring resources from public ownership to contracted out private sector services

• Drastic budget cuts to the public sector

• Elimination of various social programs

• Deregulation of foreign investment rules for global 'trade liberalisation' leading to more international trade

• Outsourcing manufacturing jobs overseas for the cheapest labor possible

• Increase in government surveillance, policing, mass incarceration to deal with increases in poverty, crime, behavioural problems in society

To zoom in on the individual level, we now spend our days climbing professional ladders, curating online images, accumulating possessions, and benchmarking our worth against others. Life has become a performance, and identity a product. Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking who we are and started asking what we are worth.

This materialistic cultural framework is not neutral. It reshapes the values we associate with well-being and success. Historically, being a ‘good’ ethical person (someone with integrity, courage, or compassion) was a central aspiration. But today, material comfort, emotional positivity, and self-image have eclipsed moral development as the dominant goals of life.

Ethics, once seen as essential to personal and communal well-being, has been dismissed. In its place stands a new idol: comfort. Where people once sought to live rightly, many now seek simply to feel good. This abandonment of ethical development would have alarmed many of psychology’s foundational thinkers. To name just a few, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers, despite their differing approaches, all believed that authentic psychological health is inseparable from moral and ethical growth.

Ethics as Psychological Health

For Jung, the goal was not to eradicate suffering altogether but to find meaning in the suffering such that it becomes tolerable. He posited that psychological suffering often stemmed from the individual's refusal to confront and integrate the shadow: the repressed, denied, and morally complex parts of the self. Jung believed that individuation, or becoming whole, required a deep ethical confrontation with oneself. True mental health involves accepting responsibility for one's inner contradictions and finding a way to live truthfully and consciously in the world. He warned against modernity’s tendency to prioritise comfort over authenticity, arguing that avoiding the discomfort of moral introspection leads to a shallow and fragmented self:

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” — Carl Jung

Maslow, known for his hierarchy of needs, placed self-actualisation (realising one’s full potential in service of something greater than the self) at the top. He defined self-actualising individuals as those deeply motivated by ethics, creativity, truth, and altruism. Maslow noted that people who were psychologically well were not those who felt happy all the time, but those who were committed to living with integrity, even at the cost of comfort or conventional success.

Similarly, Carl Rogers emphasised the relational concept of congruence: the alignment between one’s inner values and outer actions, as an absolute essential for mental health. For Rogers, the goal of psychotherapy was not to make the client ‘happy’ in the conventional sense, but to help them become more real, more responsible, and more connected to others. Ethical awareness and emotional openness were not optional; they were foundational.

All three recognised that the self cannot flourish in isolation, or in the absence of truth. They understood that well-being cannot be severed from the moral and relational dimensions of life. And they warned, either explicitly or implicitly, that the pursuit of superficial happiness, when unanchored from ethics, becomes a trap.

Not the Absence of Pain, But the Presence of Meaning

So what, then, is psychological health? It is not a permanent state of pleasure. It is not emotional invulnerability. And it is certainly not comfort at all costs. Sound mental health is the capacity to live a meaningful and engaged life, even in the face of suffering. It is resilience, grounded in purpose. It is connection, built through vulnerability. It is maturity, forged in ethical tension.

A psychologically whole person is not one who avoids pain, but one who through pain, deepens their character. They do not retreat from moral difficulty; they rise to it. They do not pursue only what feels good, but what is right, real, and necessary.

The modern pursuit of happiness, shaped by capitalism, individualism, and comfort, has led us away from something vital. We have traded the richness of moral struggle for the convenience of quick relief. We have mistaken pleasure for peace. We have redefined success as emotional ease rather than ethical strength. This redefinition is dangerous. It produces fragile selves, disconnected communities, and a hollow culture of self-promotion. We are more anxious, more medicated, and more disoriented than ever, not because we suffer, but because we no longer know what suffering is for or how to tolerate it.

We need a new definition of mental health, one that is actually very old. One rooted in the timeless truths that suffering can be meaningful, that ethics matter, and that selfhood is a soul to cultivate.

References:

• Ehrenreich, B. (2009). Bright-sided: How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America. Metropolitan Books.

• Fromm, E. (1976). To have or to be? Harper & Row.

• Illouz, E. (2008). Saving the modern soul: Therapy, emotions, and the culture of self-help. University of California Press.

• Jung, C. G. (1954). The practice of psychotherapy (Vol. 16, R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1946)

• Jung, C. G. (1961). Memories, dreams, reflections (A. Jaffé, Ed.; R. & C. Winston, Trans.). Pantheon Books.

• Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346

• Maslow, A. H. (1971). The farther reaches of human nature. Viking Press.

• Rogers, C. R. (1961). On becoming a person: A therapist’s view of psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin.

• Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Harvard University Press.

This measure of value represents a fundamental difference between Western and Eastern philosophies. Perhaps a re-evaluation of our ethos is needed. Do we live to have, or do we live to become?

To Have

In the mode of having, a person defines themselves by what they own. This includes material goods: houses, cars, clothes, but also extends to less tangible things: opinions, beliefs, achievements, status, relationships. The self becomes an inventory of possessions and roles. “I am what I have” is the silent mantra.

This orientation finds a powerful cultural ally in the individualistic and capitalistic values of the modern West. From early life, individuals in such societies are conditioned to pursue success as a personal conquest: to distinguish, to excel, to win. Identity is not communal; it is competitive. The goal is not harmony but dominance; over the market, over others, over uncertainty. Capitalist ideology, at its psychological core, incentivises acquisition. Ownership becomes synonymous with power, with security, with self-worth. Life is viewed through a transactional lens: time is money, relationships are investments, and success is visible, quantifiable, and often flaunted. The economy is not just a system; it becomes a spiritual framework where salvation is found through consumption.

In this worldview, the human being is reimagined as a consumer, a competitor, a self-contained unit of production and desire. Ambition is valorised, and limits, whether ecological, emotional, or ethical, are often seen as obstacles to overcome. The internal world shrinks, while the external world becomes a showroom of identity.

The psychological cost of this model is subtle but profound. Anxiety, envy, loneliness, and a persistent sense of emptiness haunt those whose selfhood is tied to what they have. The fear of losing possessions, be they material or symbolic, becomes existential. Even love is distorted: it becomes attachment, not connection; control, not mutual flourishing. People no longer ask who they are, but what they are worth, and the answer often comes with a price tag.

To Become

The mode of being offers a radically different orientation, one deeply rooted in Eastern collectivist philosophies and spiritual traditions. Here, the essence of life is not in possession, but in presence. To live is to act, to engage, to express, and to relate. In contrast to the Western focus on the individual ego, many Eastern traditions view the self as interconnected, fluid, and impermanent. In Buddhism, the idea of anatta (non-self) challenges the very notion of an isolated, fixed identity. In Taoism, the ideal is not mastery, but harmony with the flow of life. In Islam, the goal is to move the self closer to the divine in character and temperament. In Confucianism, the self is defined not by inner conquest but by one's relationships and moral responsibilities within the social order.

These traditions emphasise being over having by prioritising experience, humility, and the collective good. The goal is not to compete with others, but to integrate with them. Wisdom comes not from accumulating knowledge but from emptying the mind of illusions. Happiness is not sought in distant goals but discovered in everyday awareness. The family, the community, the natural world; these are not obstacles to personal freedom but essential components of being fully human.

From a psychological standpoint, the being mode nurtures empathy and psychological resilience. It teaches people to let go not only of material things but of the compulsion to define themselves by rigid categories. Success is measured not by ownership but by integrity of presence, how one shows up in the world, how deeply one connects, how gracefully one accepts impermanence. In these cultures, the collective often takes precedence over the individual, not out of oppression, but out of a deep understanding that the self is never truly separate. The child is seen as a part of a family line, the worker as part of a social organism, the soul as a drop in the ocean of being. This doesn’t erase individuality, it contextualises it.

Even the language used in collectivist societies reflects this shift. Personal pronouns are often less emphasised. Success is described in communal terms. Well-being is not measured in personal gain but in social harmony. This worldview encourages a slower, more contemplative life. Less about owning the world and more about belonging to it.

It is truly a fascinating question: to have or to be?

I don’t want to offer a personal prescription for how anyone should live, but I do believe we need a more honest reckoning with what we in the West, even on an individual scale, have come to value most. Would the West be where it is now (complicit in active genocide) if it could answer that question differently? How different could the world look? The pursuit of having, of owning, accumulating, and controlling has shaped our borders, our societies, our relationships, and even our inner lives. And while it’s brought comfort, progress, and power, it has also left many of us traumatised, displaced, depressed, disconnected, and searching.

Food for thought.

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References

• Fromm, Erich. To Have or To Be? Harper & Row, 1976.

• Fromm, Erich. The Art of Loving. Harper Perennial, 1956.

• Maslow, Abraham H. Motivation and Personality. Harper & Row, 1954.

• Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Translated by Stephen Mitchell, Harper Perennial, 1988.

• Buddha. The Dhammapada. Translated by Eknath Easwaran, Nilgiri Press, 1985.

• Confucius. The Analects. Translated by Arthur Waley, Vintage Books, 1989.

• Horney, Karen. Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization. Norton, 1950.

• Bauman, Zygmunt. Consuming Life. Polity Press, 2007.

• Nhat Hanh, Thich. The Art of Living: Peace and Freedom in the Here and Now. HarperOne, 2017.

• Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. W.W. Norton, 1977.

• Jung, Carl. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Harcourt, 1933.

• Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Harvard University Press, 1991.

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One morning, the horse broke free, galloping into the hills beyond sight. The villagers, hearing of his loss, gathered to mourn his misfortune. "Such terrible luck," they said. "Without your horse, how will you work your fields?" The farmer’s eyes steady as the sky whispered: "Who can say what is good or bad?"

Days passed, and one evening, as the sun melted into the horizon, the lost horse returned—not alone, but leading a small herd of wild Hequ stallions. Now, the farmer had more wealth than any man in the village. The people marveled. "Such incredible luck!" they cried. "You have been richly blessed!" The farmer’s hands steady as the earth, whispered: "Who can say what is good or bad?"

Eager to tame the wild beasts, the farmer’s only son climbed atop one of the new Hequ stallions. The beast reared high, throwing the boy to the ground. His leg snapped like a dry branch, leaving him crippled. The villagers gasped. "What a terrible tragedy!" they mourned. "Your only son, broken and crippled! Who will help you now?". The farmer, kneeling beside his son, whispered softly: "Who can say what is good or bad?"

Weeks passed. Then, without warning, war darkened the land. The emperor’s soldiers arrived at the village, seizing every able-bodied young man for battle. Sons were torn from fathers, brothers from brothers, marched toward a distant war many would never return from. The farmer’s son, his leg still healing, was left behind. The villagers wept as their children vanished down the dusty road. Then, turning to the farmer, they said, "How fortunate you are! Your son has been spared!" The farmer, standing in the shifting light of dusk, only whispered: "Who can say what is good or bad?"

“祸兮福所倚，福兮祸所伏。

"Misfortune is where fortune rests; fortune is where misfortune hides."

— Laozi’s Dao De Jing

I was first told this parable during a time when nothing in my life felt good and nothing felt bad. My blessings were not visible to me and my suffering was inconsequential. The farmer is not a boundless optimist and not a neurotic pessimist, he watches life’s events like ripples in a river—one leading, merging into another, their consequences beyond our sight. Joy and despair are equally potent emotional charges but fortune and misfortune often travel together. The farmer’s wisdom lies in accepting both without emotional attachment to either. To grasp too tightly at happiness is to invite fear of its loss, and to wallow in misfortune is to forget that even the longest night must give way to dawn. The farmer helped me understand this for myself. True peace is not found in controlling the tides of fate, but in surrendering to their rhythm, embracing each moment as it comes—neither yearning for what has passed nor dreading what is yet to be.

The Universal Common Denominator

Homosapiens have a seemingly unmovable inherent human inclination toward perfection. This is not an original observation of mine; many of the greatest Western & Eastern minds, including Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, and Ibn Sina, have articulated time and time again an inherent drive for perfection. It is not a difficult thing to observe for yourself. We are all intrinsically attracted to the whole and flawless. We beautify ourselves, we climb cooperate ladders, we look for the perfect partner, we seek bigger houses and better cars. We yearn to self-develop; to become better than we currently are. For centuries, this impulse was conceived in metaphysical terms. Self-development was not a social aspiration; it was an ontological orientation. After the rise of Cartesian materialism and the decline of classical metaphysics in the West, it was recast in a new vocabulary: self-actualisation. Carl Rogers wrote about this drive and posited that every person has an innate self-actualisation force deeply embedded into the depths of their psyche that, without any obstacles in its path, inevitably and necessarily develops each person to become their highest and most complete form. The task is simply to remove the obstacles.

One way in which this inherent drive for perfection manifests most plainly is as human admiration. When I admire a person, it is because there is something about the way they are that inspires respect or awe in me. That awe may be a feeling, but it is not passive; it compels imitation. It produces a desire to become what we admire. In admiring, I encounter a quality or way of being that reveals to me what I could be. Consider a genuine example of my own: I was somebody who struggled to inform restaurant service staff when a mistake was made with an order, and it maddened me. The prospect of correcting them was so mortifying to me that I often resigned myself to eating the meal I didn’t order and didn’t want. That changed more or less instantaneously after watching a colleague do it so masterfully. She raised a hand, smiling to call the staff over and then explained the mix-up with effortless grace. She was clear, kind, and exuding confidence. I was in awe and, naturally, sought to imitate it. I now, almost unconsciously, find myself borrowing her very words in moments like that.

What happened in that small moment is a microcosm of something profoundly human. The same impulse that drives a person to apply for a promotion, to start therapy, to train for a marathon, or to embark on a PhD springs from the same source: the insistent urge to become more than we are. We are in constant admiration of excellence wherever we find it. What moves us in those moments is often awe and sometimes envy, but always a glimpse of our own latent potential made visible in another.

God as The Imagined Totality of All Perfection

This is where faith finds its place. If admiration is the mind’s recognition of a semblance of perfection in another, then what are we truly admiring? Each instance of admiration, whether for eloquence, beauty, courage, wisdom, kindness, or composure, is a momentary encounter with an ideal. When I admire someone’s grace or patience, I am not merely responding to the person themselves, but to the quality they momentarily embody; a fragment of something greater, a glimpse of perfection itself.

This, I’ve found, is one of the most fascinating ways to understand what we call God. The traits we admire in others are reflections of an ultimate standard; mere glimpses of the absolute source of perfection: God. If we were to take every admirable person and extract from them only the essential features of what is ‘admirable’ and worthy, and then gather and unite those fragments into a single being, we would arrive at something resembling the divine. He is the imagined totality of all perfection. Therefore, a functional way to define God is: the complete spirit a person must emulate in order to thrive. A personality framework to implement. What I have just described is the unique Islamic conceptualisation of the monotheistic God (God as الكمال المطلق), which differs in fundamental ways from Christian and Jewish theological accounts.

This totality of perfection is every admirable trait measured to the absolute amount. Therefore, God is not merciful; God is mercy. God is not just; God is justice. God is not benevolent; God is benevolence. God is not wise; God is wisdom. God is not generous; God is generosity. When we, as human beings, imitate and acquire those ethically admirable traits, whether observed in nature or in others, we imitate God and implement the ideal personality framework. We become merciful, just, wise, and generous, and it is that very imitation of His perfection that is considered worship.

In the Islamic tradition, the purpose of life is to ‘meet God.’ Heaven is only the reward for doing so; the real aspiration lies in the encounter itself, in ‘reaching’ God. As a child, I would hear those words in Saturday school and at home, mysterious and cryptic. My curiosity was shared even by the adults who so often spoke of it. It is a concept scattered throughout Islamic literature and so often repeated with reverence, even when its meaning is unclear. It is through the conception of God outlined above that the meaning of those words has begun to unfold for me. If God is the totality of perfection, what does it mean to reach Him? To move towards Him?

What becomes clear is that this movement towards God is not in distance, but in character. To perfect our character, to trim the edges of our pride and greed, to imitate his justice and kindness, to emulate his essence is to move towards Him. If we are to reach God, we must become like him. What happens to be even more beautiful than this conception of gaining proximity to God, is what the Islamic tradition describes as happening when you get there. The more we imitate and exhibit the traits that are essential to God and thus become a microcosm of his essence, the more we gain an understanding of him. This understanding is not scholastic or literal; it is experiential. How magnificent is that? To imitate him is to move towards him, and to move towards him is to know him, and to know him is, of course, to love him.

Every Islamic practice (Sunnah) taught and implemented by the Prophet was done with the intention of formulating the ideal character and personality structure for humanity to imitate. Prayer done meticulously five times a day at precise and inflexible times is a clear exercise in developing an individual’s discipline & focus. An annual fast of 30 days is a clear exercise in developing an individual’s patience & empathy. A compulsory charity tax on any disposable income made is a clear exercise in developing an individual’s generosity & humility. Rituals and practices serve the sole purpose of elevating a person’s character in the direction of the divine. Each act of worship is not merely a ritual but a transformative tool designed to refine the soul and align human nature with higher virtues.

However, this attempt to formulate an exemplary personality through religious constructs is not unique to monotheistic religions. Ancient archaic belief systems, such as Greek mythology, reveal a similar underlying structure. The pantheon of Greek gods represents various facets of the human personality, each deified and exaggerated to archetypal proportions. In Homer’s Iliad, for example, the gods are magnified as large expressions of human dispositions. Ares, the god of war, is the personification of unrestrained aggression and bloodlust. Homer describes him as the “most hateful to me of all gods who hold Olympus” (Iliad 5.890–897), condemned by Zeus precisely because he embodies violence without measure or reason. By contrast, Athena represents strategic reason harnessed to moral restraint. She is glaukopis (clear-eyed), and intervenes not through brute force but through counsel, foresight, and tactical precision. He depicts the fascinating process of integration that the gods demonstrate. For example, in a glorious dramatisation of the struggle between fury and reason within the human soul, it is Athena who restrains Achilles at the moment his rage threatens to become self-destructive.

Unlike Islam, which anchors ethical life in a unified and absolute source of perfection, Greek religious thought was fundamentally pluralistic. The gods were not worshipped so much as contemplated, admired, and selectively imitated. They were individually flawed. The objective was sōphrosynē: a state of balance and self-mastery achieved by acknowledging the legitimacy of multiple drives (represented by each god) without allowing any single one to tyrannise the whole. It was an early attempt to externalise the structure of human personality, fragmenting it into divine figures so that it could be examined, admired, feared, and ultimately integrated.

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Similarly, in polytheistic systems like Hinduism, deities such as Vishnu, Shiva, and Kali represent radically different modes of being: preservation, destruction, ascetic withdrawal, creative chaos, each necessary, yet none exhaustive of the whole. The gods themselves often grapple with their flaws, making them relatable and serving as lessons for mortals. Moral insight arises not from obedience to a single ethical axis, but from discerning when a given quality is appropriate and how it ought to be expressed. In such systems, religious narratives invite the individual into an active role as moral interpreter. By observing the often contradictory actions of the gods, their triumphs as well as their failings, humans are encouraged to decide for themselves which traits to emulate, which to restrain, and which to reject altogether. The ideal self is not handed down fully formed; it is assembled through reflection, comparison, and judgment. Moral authority is therefore less centralised and more dependent on individual interpretation.

Regardless of theological framework, it seems that human beings collectively seek, with a remarkable desperation that transcends time and culture, to self-actualise and religion, at its core, functions as a blueprint and strategy for self-transcendence. Whether through monotheism or mythology, faith offers a vision of what we could be, if only we had the discipline, patience, and humility to pursue it. Perhaps the ultimate purpose of religion is not merely to worship for the sake of worship, but to worship to travel closer to what it is we worship; to strive, to evolve, and to reflect, in our own limited way, the perfection we so instinctively seek.