Foucault's ignorance of History- the vase of Soissons

Wikipedia tells me that 

The vase of Soissons was of marvelous size and beauty and was stolen (together with other holy ornaments) from a church in the pillage that followed the Battle of Soissons of 486, a battle won by the Frankish king Clovis I, who at that time had not yet converted to Christianity.[2]

Saint Remigius, the bishop of Reims, sent messengers to Clovis, begging that if the church might not recover any other of the holy vessels, at least this one might be restored. Clovis agreed to do so and therefore claimed the vase as his rightful part of the booty. One soldier disagreed and smashed the vase with his battle-axe. Clovis at first did not react to this and gave the broken vase to Remigius. A year later, however, he saw the soldier again, took the man's axe and threw it on the ground. The man bent down to pick up his axe, and Clovis smashed his skull with his own axe, commenting "Just as you did to the vase at Soissons!

Why might the Church have preserved this story? Clearly, we are speaking of an offense against God by infidels. Clovis showed an inborn inclinations to heed the call of the true Religion. He converted to Catholicism- i.e. would bow his head to the True Lord- and became the first King of France- indeed, the name Clovis, became Louis, eighteen of whom reigned as most Christian majesties. Thus something better than the vase of Soissons was restored. The soldier who broke it also bent down. But it was to retrieve his battle axe- that crosier of an auto-cephalic creed- only to never raise his head again.

What does Foucault make of it? In his 'Society must be defended' lectures he says that Clovis was not a king. He was a Civil Magistrate with respect to a bunch of 'individual landlords' who acknowledged no higher authority. 

Boulainvilliers was a partisan supporter of the rights of the Aristocracy against the King as much as against the Third Estate which, however, saw the true origins of France in the Romanized Gauls and rejected the notion that invading German thugs were natural aristocrats. Yet, Boulainvilliers celebrated Charlemagne as having reversed the absolutism established by Clovis (Christianization is an example of absolutism) and rebalanced the polity by giving greater salience to the Barons and to Parliament. The fool- like others of his caste- thought Parliament would be a weapon in the hands of meritorious blue-bloods against the King and the rabble. However, there was little merit among his ilk. The Guillotine awaited them.

It should be noted that Boulainvilliers, on the basis of Remigius's congratulatory letter to Clovis, surmised that he had founded the Frankish monarchy, inheriting kingship of the Ripuarian Franks from his father Childeric, and this happened soon after he was elected general of the Salian Franks. This was to impose the terminology of a later, more modern, period on a tribal society. That the leader of a raiding party be elected though acclamation may have been a traditional requirement. Tribes use 'uncorrelated asymmetries'- e.g. which individual is uniquely identified as the son of previous war-leader- because 'bourgeois strategies' (to use the game theoretic jargon of John Maynard Smith) reduce wasteful competition and thus are 'eusocial'- for the same reason that segmentary societies use 'Dynasticism' (e.g. the Indian National Congress which is the family property of Rahul Gandhi) as a principle to reduce factionalism in their polities. One might say Boulainvilliers is distorting history but no great damage to the facts of the case was done by him.

 However, what Foucault says is nonsense. The spoils of war were always divided. The leader of the war-party got first pick. Clovis was sacrificing his rightful share so as to restore the vase to the Church. Some boorish soldier- perhaps prejudiced against the Church- smashes it. He does not say that the King, or 'elected General', does not have a preeminent right. Why? It wasn't true. Anyway, the dude was a King. Foucault  has the vase-smasher affirm this himself. The fact is the King's property is not stuff anybody else is allowed to smash.  In this particular case, the subtext is a suspicion or hatred of the Church. Clovis does not react because the time was not yet ripe. True, in the sort run, he may have benefited by picking some other prize. But that is a different type of  discussion to what Foucault has invented. This is a story about the pagan suspicion of Christianity which, presumably, was overcome as the invaders became familiar with the Church. 

Clovis and his Burgundian wife, the Saint Clotilde, were Catholic and thus gained support from the Eastern Empire against Arian Gothic tribes. Hilary of Poitiers- 'the hammer of the Arians'- may be seen as the champion of Catholicism in France as expressed by an old, Gaulo-Roman, native aristocracy.

Boulainvilliers had a caste interest in emphasizing the supposed rights of his own Frankish ancestors (though the Prince he was descended from was Hungarian and came to France much later) but why should Foucault believe his story? The truth is Clovis became Catholic and Catholicism prevailed and thus the Merovingian line became the foundation of the French Monarchy.  No doubt, all sorts of noblemen and clergymen and soldiers of fortune turned up at different times to serve the Crown while others fell by the wayside. However, what was not possible was the creation of anything of the Roman type. That would have required the creation of a standing army and colonies for ex-soldiers to populate. The truth is, the successor to the Western Roman Empire was the Roman Catholic Church. 

Altogether, we must conclude that Foucault, in refusing to accept that Religion is what matters in an 'Age of Faith',  wholly misunderstands and distorts  the

This is crazy shit. Lex Salica-Salic law- i.e. that of Clovis- was based on the family, not the individual. Homicide was a property crime requiring the payment of blood money 

Consider the unique Frankish custom called the Chrenecruda, an incredibly important ritual for a free man who killed another man and who did not have enough money to pay the weregild. Under Salic Law it was the legal right of families to feud and pursue an injury done to its honor, even with death. This meant criminals had to appeal to the law and pay fines for protection from a vengeful family, and no situation was more dire than when a murder occurred. When a murderer couldn’t afford to pay the weregild he performed the Chrenecruda ritual. First, the guilty man had to assemble 12 sworn witnesses to profess that he had no wealth left to give. Next, the guilty man had to go to his house and collect dust from each of the four corners. He then threw some of that dust over his left shoulder and onto the nearest relative, who would have to pay the weregild. If that person didn’t have enough money, he would have to keep throwing dust until he hit enough relatives that could pay. And if those relatives couldn’t pay then they would have to throw dust until they hit a relative who could pay. But if all the relatives couldn’t pay the weregild then the murderer would have to submit himself under the protection of his friends who would pay. But if neither family or friend could pay, then the man’s life was forfeit.

Thus, when Clovis bashed in the head of the soldier it was either because the soldier's family couldn't avenge him or because Clovis's killing and paying for that pleasure was an ostentatious type of consumption. 

Christianity broke the link between the individual and the family in a manner similar to the 'Hlaford'- the 'loaf lord'- who ransoms you from vengeance. Christ, of course, was the supreme loaf lord who ransomed you from Hell. 

But what is eternally true of the World to come is slow to come about here below. The original right is that of proactive self defense which extends to the prolonged and collective  pleasures of vendetta. The original 'tit for tat' strategy meant that you are obliged to retaliate against anyone who isn't actively pursuing vengeance for any injury inflicted on them and theirs. That's what ensures the ubiquity of deterrence.  Such is the solution to the underlying coordination game. Oikos has to be linked to thymos.  The 'bourgeois strategy' is vendetta but this is a bourgeoisie which will always remain poor. Thankfully, where there is a coordination game, there will also be a discoordination game such that hedging and Income effects obtain. Enter the market maker.

I have said one way to avoid vendetta was by enlisting under a Loaf Lord who discharged all your obligations and transgressions. That is what the Lord's Prayer meant to Franks and Gauls and Angles and Saxons. The 'Hlaford' or Loaf Lord gives you your daily bread and when guys turn up saying they have to kill you coz one of your clan killed one of theirs then the Loaf Lord settles things. Indeed, he is smart enough to make a profit on it because every viable clan owes and is owed similar weregild. This is an arbitrage opportunity. The market maker nets out accounts for a profit. The Loaf Lord also gets the labour and gratitude of the 'broken men', from unviable clans, who aren't in a position to keep up the honour of their sept. 

The problem is that, if non-convexities arise- i.e. economies of scope and scale become available- a 'natural' monopoly will be established. Price or Service provision discrimination enables extraction of more rent without loss of scale economies. Thus, we find some people get more protection from the Law or the army etc than others. Power is costly to exercise. But exercising it yields a rent. This means that those with a high enough threat point or nuisance potential can get it to work for them for free.

Does Power have anything to do with Truth? No. It may be interested in what David Lewis called 'Conventions'- i.e. solutions to coordination problems like driving on one side of the road rather than another. It may also be interested in intentions or plans or patterns of behaviour. But it is not concerned with the truth. Power may want you to say one thing rather than another even if the thing is an obvious and stupid lie. Justice may make some more 'intensional' claim- i.e. one which os of a conceptual sort such that there is an internal logic or criteria of admissibility- as may Art and Science and Religion and so forth but Power makes no such 'intensional' claim. There is a well specified 'extension' regarding what you are expected to say or do which is determined by the wielder of Power. 

No Nation State says that its representatives are interested in the truth or that they will always speak the full truth. 

Foucault, however, thought that power wants truth and gets it through a 'right'.

Political philosophy could be associated with Power. Every totalitarian regime has its official philosophers or else the Benevolent Leader is himself described as a great Sage. But Might- the naked exercise of power- creates their right. It has no other existence. Nobody in their right mind would think that the confessions extracted by Stalin- that great philosopher- from his victims were truthful. I suppose some truthful information of a useful type was extracted by power. But the object was utility not truth. 

Power is not interested in producing discourses of truth. It may pay for scientific or other alethic research where truth is utility. It may pay for propaganda and polemics and 'political philosophy'- but it doesn't want them to be truthful at all. 

Foucault was writing about France in the Nineteen Seventies. Did any Frenchmen really believe that the French Police and the French Foreign Ministry and so forth were interested solely in the truth or that power was exercised strictly in accordance with rights? No, but it may be that the sort of people who attended Foucault's lectures at the College de France felt professionally obliged to pretend otherwise

Jurisprudence, not Philosophy, is concerned with protocol bound processes in which determinations of fact are made. In the Anglo Saxon tradition, this is done separately- by a Jury made up of ordinary people- unless both sides stipulate otherwise. In France, Judges do more than decide what law applies, they may uncover facts as well. Still, it is not Truth but what is useful in the context which matters. Witnesses swear to tell the full truth but are sharply rebuked if they consider this an invitation to mention all the filthy thoughts and foul farts that were concurrent to the events about which they are testifying. 

What is it which underlies all Social relationships? A Biologist might say that the answer has to do with the Price equation & kin selection. An Economist may speak of Utility and Resource constraints. A Priest may speak of God. A Hippy may speak of Peace and Love. A paranoid nutter who fantasizes about being tortured and sodomized by a dominant gimp while confessing to want to eat his own shit may babble brokenly of Power and Truth and Repression and Dominance. 

Foucault's domain is 'the rules of power'- though there is only one such rule, viz. use it or lose it save where you'd lose it if you tried to use it- and the power of discourse- which is zero if the thing is useless. 

Surely the general principle that guides us is that might is right as far as power is concerned. Without might there is no power. The powerless may claim all sort of rights but what good does it do them? 

True, we have judicial regimes which may have a notion of fundamental rights. But these are ahistorical. They are not derived from Ancient Rome or Medieval Kings. 

There are various theories of rights but 'positive law'- i.e. law as command- is the only one which might be historicist. In America, there is 'originalism' but- obviously- it is concerned with the intentions of the founding fathers of the Republic. However, rights theories are not concerned with how sovereignty arises. Either the thing exists or it doesn't. We recognize the sovereignty of nations whose regime is repugnant to us. Laws enacted by a previous, now reviled, regime are not automatically over turned. However, the way in which they are used may be reversed. 

No system of rights was centred on the King. This was obvious because there were periods when there was no King or two or three Kings. Some stupid academics may have pretended there was a problem with some shite they had made up but nobody gave a toss about them. 

The folk theorem of repeated games expresses the common sense view that anything achievable by coercion is achievable by consent. What's more, since the cost of coercion is eliminated, more can be done with given resources. No doubt, paranoid nutters might say 'domination is being masked'. People only have sex with their lovers because rape is being masked. Restaurants only exist coz cannibalism is being masked. Why would people gather together to dine? Obviously, what they really want to do is to eat each other. But, and this is what will blow your mind, they actually do eat each other! They just don't notice. They think they are tucking into steak or lobster but they are actually biting off chunks of each others' flesh! Then, to add insult to injury, the restaurant charges them an arm and a leg! You see, that's how Capitalism works! It's like biopolitics- right? We are actually eating each other but paying Olive Garden shedloads of money for the privilege!

Olive Garden think it has the right to demand money from diners who were actually eating each other's flesh. But that right was itself founded upon the polymorphous perversity of the tables and chairs which had violated us in every one of our orifices while saying 'you like that don't you? you fucking retard bitch'. Obviously we're going to need to take some precautions as we research this. I suggest we shove champagne corks up our buttholes so as to prevent polymorphously perverse items of furniture penetrating us in a hideously non-consensual manner. 

Foucault's blindness to Religion causes him not just to misunderstand the meaning of the story of the vase of Soissons. It also leads him to completely misunderstand English history- in 1976 he tells the College de France- 

In England there was conflict over Religion not Race. Normans had disappeared long ago.  The Tudors were an indigenous dynasty associated with Wales while the Stuarts were Scottish. However, Kings had been native English speakers since the time of Henry IV. Discriminatory laws against 'indigenous' English disappeared during the thirteenth and fourteenth century- e.g. the Engleschrie Act of 1340. However, it is true that Lawyers and Parliamentarians began to argue that Magna Carta had reconfirmed the immemorial rights of the Englishman as against the monarch. A problem did arise when James I came down from Scotland because Scotland had, and has, a different legal system. The story is James wanted to execute a criminal caught in the act. It was explained to him that English law prevented the King from acting arbitrarily. The criminal would be hanged but only after he had been afforded due process of law. As Sir Edward Coke explained, England (whose Common Law he asserted derived from Greek speaking Druids!) had 'artificial reason', not natural or Roman Law. In other words, it was protocol bound and had its own 'buck stopping' mechanism.

The Stuarts were 'foreign' in one sense but nobody was saying they did not speak English or were as foreign as the French or the Danes or the Normans. Nor were they saying that 'absolutism' had obtained for many centuries because it simply hadn't. Everybody knew as much history as Shakespeare depicts in his Chronicle plays. What is odd is that Foucault and his audience were wholly ignorant of all this. 

The plain and simple fact is that English Kings were beheaded or chased away if they were married to or otherwise soft on Catholics. One reason they might want to go in a Romish direction was so as to get money from a Catholic power rather than have to rely on Parliament. But Parliament was not interested in the poor. It was a rich man's club which objected to paying taxes for things which didn't make them richer. 

 In England, for centuries now, we have thought of both the Monarchy and the Law as essentially service industries- we pay the Crown and the Bench well to do a useful job. The late Duke of Edinburgh referred to the Royal Family as 'the firm'- it was an enterprise paid to perform certain services which, during the course of the Eighties, became increasingly undignified but addictively entertaining. The Bench, in England & Wales, choosing not to remain the butt of Monty Python type satire and fearing to take on the Tabloid press which could not understand why Judges didn't simply sentence every oik that came before it to being hanged, drawn and quartered, decided to get rid of the offense of 'contempt of court'. In Scotland the offense of 'murmuring Judges' remains but English Judges understood that, by admitting they had no power to protect themselves and thus were tradesmen simply, they would be left alone.

France, of course, never really understood the notion of limited monarchy or how that might turn into constitutional monarchy of a gemutlich kind. Foucault, certainly, remained dazzled by a Sun King who considered any emulation of Anglo Saxon Law & Economics as a type of lese majeste. 

In his History of Sexuality, Foucault writes- 'In thought and political analysis, we have still not cut off the head of the king.' But, though phrase-making may be French, Thought is English and considers the King's head or tail to be but two sides of what really matters- namely coin. 

Foucault claimed, in a lecture given in Brazil in 1976, that the West had no means of representing or analyzing power save in terms of the law. Yet, power had always been understood in the English speaking world as a function of wealth considered as any type of differential endowment. The very notion of an unconscionable contract hinges on one side having superior bargaining power. But determining whether such power exists is an empirical matter. A Jury must make a determination of the facts. The Judge merely clarifies that if superior power obtained and was misused, either at the time of negotiation or with respect to subsequent outcome, then the contract can't be enforced in good conscience. 

In France, a Court could arrive at the same conclusion by saying a contract must have an 'objective cause'- a raison d'etre- and it was unreasonable to suppose this did not involve reciprocity. I need hardly say this is very un-English. The notion that two people must have a reason for transacting business is utterly unreasonable in a dank and melancholy island where any violation of solitude is made bearable only by sweet tea and polite tedium.

In any case, whether appealing to French 'objective cause', or English 'conscience', the law clearly considered power to be something empirical and ideographic, not intensional or nomothetic, and held that proof of its unjust exercise voided a contract. 

In France, there was a growing feeling that the Napoleonic Code re. Contract law was obsolete. More and more firms elected for their contracts to be justiciable in Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions. France was slipping down the 'ease of doing business' table. The French did finally reform their Contract law some years ago but there are still some characteristic differences from English jurisprudence. In France there is a general duty to negotiate or perform a contract in good faith whereas the English have been wary of going down this road. Similarly the duty to disclose information is stronger in France. Essentially, the English feel that a business deal is no better than it should be. France clings to the hope that the two contracting parties approach each other clothed in purity and in truth. On the other hand, unlike the purlieus of the Thames, the banks of the Seine are blighted by nimbly hopping notaries, blithely bounding after frogs, hoping to bite their legs off. 

I suppose one could say, if one were that way inclined, that the opposite of law is war. Politics can certainly change the law just as it can start or stop war. But it would be foolish to speak of either as being merely the continuation of politics. Clausewitz little wotted that Wars might not merely cause Prussia to wax or wane, it might cause it to disappear as a political force. Where now is the Junker caste? 

Mathematical Game theory can give a representation to both Legal and Military strategies and tactics. But, if Knightian uncertainty obtains, it is evolutionary game theory, featuring co-evolved processes, which has salience. Thus the 'absolute metaphor' for both Law and War is to be found in the Life Sciences. This is not the case for Politics because it is itself the self-conscious attempt to mediate what is seen as a bunch of co-evolving processes. One could say the same thing for Foucault's shite, or indeed this last paragraph of mine. Since we aint actually solving an actual problem, we are like, unlike the more prestigious type of French notary, merely hopping around vainly without ever taking a bite out of the legs of imaginary frogs. 

Raji Jayaraman wrong on Modi

Raji Jayaraman is probably a deracinated Tambram like me. Daddy was a diplomat and so we didn't really spend too much time in India. What's more, that time was spent in an Anglophone bubble. Our caste had been disintermediated from Tamil politics but we did have some networks in the Civil Service, the Corporate Sector, and the Left-Liberal English media.

Raji and I were too stupid to do Maths or Physics and so got stuck with crap Econ credentials. We both write shite about India. Since Raji writes anti-national shite, 3 quarks publishes her but bars my comments. 

This is what she has to say 

I know someone—I’ll call him by his initials, KR—who is a Modi supporter.

But, does KR know who Raji supports? If not, there is an uncorrelated asymmetry here. Thus, there can't be any communicative strategy or dialogic process which enlarges the common information set. If I own x and you don't own x, a conversation we have, about how come I own x and you don't, won't get very far. Essentially, I'll just keep telling you- politely or impolitely- that you are a cretin who probably eats dog shit and that you should fuck off. 

The problem here is that Raji dislikes Modi but doesn't necessarily like anybody else. KR says he likes Modi and may then be obliged to say he dislikes other politicians. But we can't be sure this is really the case. All we can definitely say is that KR has an interest in seeing India is as well governed as possible. He is playing the 'bourgeois strategy' because that is eusocial. Raji is just virtue signaling for a reputational benefit in a country far far away.  Thus, it doesn't matter what KR says to Raji or what Raji thinks KR is saying. The possibility of communication has been foreclosed. On the other hand, we may well infer a gentle rebuke of Raji's own deracination in what KR is saying to her

I have known KR for as long as I can remember.

Did Raji call him Uncle?  Hopefully this isn't a Me Too molestation story. 

He is an intelligent, well-educated, well-travelled man. Now retired, he has a successful career behind him. He is Hindu, but he actively participated in the traditions and practices of other religions.

Which ones? Jihad? Voodoo? Why is Raji being so coy?  What is she trying to hide?

Personally, I have great affection for him. Politically, we are now like oil and water.

It is natural for a Canadian to have very different political preferences from a person who lives in India. Indeed, most Indians have little opportunity to mix with Canadians.  

I usually avoid discussing politics with him because it inevitably ends in an argument: his view of Prime Minister Modi couldn’t be further from mine. In order to understand why people like him continue to support Modi—even now, as India is ravaged by the pandemic—I did something that I hadn’t done before. I asked him, and I listened without arguing.

Why couldn't Raji have simply adopted the Muth rational solution- i.e. the prediction of the correct economic theory (in this case, that the leader whom one should support is the best, or least worst, leader on offer) which is also the bourgeois strategy (i.e. identify an uncorrelated asymmetry and accord legitimacy accordingly) . Modi actually is P.M. So far, no alternative PM candidate has been mooted- Rahul still being gun-shy) If Modi is supported, the Center has more effective power in dealing with the COVID and the related economic crisis. If he is demonized then Farmers' protests and so forth are valorized. Look where that got us!

Why is an economist listening to some retired guy? She should be able to work out- on the basis of his 'oikeiosis' what his Muth rational strategy should be. By all means she can confirm and refine this by talking to him. By letting the poor chap bite her ear off, all she is doing is confirming herself in a Manichaean view of the world.  

I have struggled to organize our hours-long conversation, but I think it can be distilled into three broad themes. The first is extraordinary reverence for Modi, which results in almost unconditional support for his policies.

This is silly. Extraordinary reverence is evidenced by spectacular acts of worship or sacrifice. Has KR sold all he has and joined the RSS as a humble svayamsevak? No. Raji is lying. 

What actually happened was that KR knew that this virtue signaling cretin thinks Modi is Hitler and has to go to the other extreme to make his point before Raji starts vigorously fisting herself in public to protest Patriarchy and cause Modi's beard to fall out. 

The second is visceral contempt for the opposition Congress party.

Because Rahul was gun shy. He refused to step up to the plate. We have a dynastic party whose sole raison d'etre is to get the heir, by right of primogeniture, to sit on the P.M's chair. But Rahul won't even head Congress, let alone the country. Nobody else can come forward either. Manmohan actually started to look less decrepit once in opposition. There was some mileage left in him. Why did Rahul cut him off at the knees but then refuse to crown himself? Had he done so, he'd have won as 'Mr. Clean' and 'Youth ki avaaz' in 2014. Advani would have been allowed his last hurrah, heading up the Opposition. Modi would have roared like the lions of his native Gujarat. But that would have been all he did. 

The third is a suspicion of Muslims in today’s India.

If even Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Egypt and so forth are 'suspicious' of certain Muslims- as are the governments of the US and Canada and UK and Macron's hijab-hating France- then why virtue signal on Indian Islamophobia?  

Although I mention this third theme, I will not discuss it in this essay because its perplexity warrants a separate treatment.

Not from Raji. She is a cretin. She doesn't get that her fellow Canadians are more, not less, Islamophobic than Indians according to Canadian Muslim researchers. They found

 According to survey findings: • 46% of Canadians have an unfavourable view of Islam – more than for any other religious tradition ; • fewer than half of Canadians would find it “acceptable” for one of their children to marry a Muslim – lower than for any other religious group ; • 56% of Canadians believe that Islam suppresses women’s rights ; • more than half of people living in Ontario feel mainstream Muslim doctrines promote violence ; • 52% of Canadians feel that Muslims can only be trusted “a little” or “not at all” ; • 42% of Canadians think discrimination against Muslims is “mainly their fault”8 ; • 47% of Canadians support banning headscarves in public (compared with 30% of Americans)9 ; • 51% support government surveillance of mosques (as compared to 46% of Americans)

Given these facts, we can understand why Raji- writing for a website run by Pakistani Americans, who have very good reasons to be even more phobic of certain Islamic tendencies, decides to drop the Muslim issue vis a vis Modi. 

Here, I focus on the first two themes.

First, the man himself: “People support Modi because

he, not anybody else, is the PM. This is an uncorrelated asymmetry. Others may be nicer or smarter or better but they aint PM. Indeed, currently there is no alternative PM candidate. Rahul is still gun shy. Mamta can't leave Bengal. Who else is there? Kejriwal? But a Delhi CM can't suddenly morph into a supporter of stubble burning farmers. He is stuck where he is.  

of his honesty, integrity, and nationalism.

Manmohan had those qualities. Then Rahul cut him off at the knees. But Rahul didn't step forward to crown himself. Thus, it became a case of Modi or nobody.  

Modi is not corrupt. He is not interested in personal wealth.

Raji isn't interested in serving the country of her birth. She may well be corruptly teaching worthless shite simply to gain some wealth the only way she knows how. KR is rebuking Raji and her ilk for their lack of patriotism and general uselessness.

He is a man of integrity and he expects that of the people around him.

Unlike academics who are known to be reckless with the truth and to spend all their time intriguing, or virtue signaling, to get ahead.  

Modi is a shrewd politician too. He has extraordinary oratory capacity and his level of absorption of facts is amazing. When I say he is a nationalist, I mean that he is interested in the nation as a whole.

To be fair, Raji can't harm the country from Toronto. She too may be a nationalist in the only way she can be- viz by staying the fuck away from India.

Anyway, I've said enough for you to get the general idea. Modi had little education but he is helping India. Raji has a lot of education. She is shitting on India. Thankfully, she is too shite for anybody to take any notice. 

He is interested in India’s welfare. He has powerful ideas. His policies [such as providing latrines and bank accounts] are aimed at development for the whole nation. Everything he has done, he has done for all Indians.” Even Modi’s fiercest critics would probably agree that he is not interested in amassing personal riches, and is a gifted politician and orator.

Modi is cautious in his approach to reform but deracinated cunts like me have come to see that he had good reason to be cautious. But we do want to, indeed, need to, feel good about India. We don't want a PM who says the Naxals are winning or that 'Hindu terrorists' will blow up the Taj Mahal as part of their fanatical mission to force us  to give up kebab & sharab & English-Vinglish & wearing jeans instead of sari or dhoti. 

In terms of policies, I begin by asking KR about demonitization where, in 2016, Modi announced that in a matter of hours, 500- and 1000-Rupee notes—86 percent of the currency in circulation—would no longer be considered legal tender. This is a policy, which he knows I have strong objections to as an economist because evidence indicates that it missed its target of reducing corruption, and it hurt India’s poor, many of whom work in a cash-based economy. I also know that KR is deeply committed to the welfare of the poor, and that he abhors corruption. But his faith in Modi translates into faith in Modi’s policies.

KR knows 'India grows by night'. Bribes are good if they enable Industry to escape stupid regulations. V.P Singh's anti-corruption drive would have killed off the golden goose which, after the IMF put a gun to our heads, did enable peeps like KR to do quite well and decide to retire to India or invest there rather than simply run away. 

Anna Hazare's anti-corruption and 'Lok Pal' agitation had the potential to do what NGO & PIL git-pit did not- viz. permanently fuck over the country and trap it in an involuted 'rent dissipation'  low-income Malthusian trap. I blogged about this ten years ago. Raji should have been reading me, not talking to Uncleji- more particularly if she couldn't Me Too him for sexually molesting her. 

Modi used demonetization to kill off grass-roots anti-corruption crusades. Since he gained by it politically, the 'bourgeois strategy' was vindicated. If nutters create a nuisance to harm the Government, the Government can inflict a much greater nuisance on the entire country till nutters lose their constituency. Modi's genius was that he got Muslims to protest the Indian Government's settled policy of granting citizenship to non-Muslims fleeing neighboring countries. It is notable that the Govt. hasn't bothered to frame rules under their CAA bill. They are inviting applications under the 1955 Act. True, Kejriwal gained by this- but so did the BJP. In Bengal as well, the only losers have been the Congress and the Left. The 'bourgeois strategy' isn't just about having a strong P.M. Chief Ministers too need to be shown to be Goliaths on their home turf. Modi has accomplished this. Us Tamils are happy- Stalin is likely to be a good CM- Keralites are happy with 'Captain' who is a self-proclaimed Deng Xiaoping. Amarinder seems to be doing well. Gehlot was always well regarded. The big question is whether Yogi is having an impact. If the answer is yes then Modi has a successor. If not, when all is said and done, he is just a flash in the pan. That may be a good thing for the RSS.  

He doesn’t believe that Modi would institute an ill-advised policy in the first place. “Will any person who is sane want to implement a policy if he knows that it is definitely going to fail? Why would he? [Modi] thought that this policy was going to succeed. I really thought that demonitization was a master stroke—that it would cut off all corruption.”

To be fair, demonetization did hurt other parties while increasing the power and popularity of the BJP. This outcome was not inevitable. If there had been indications that vested interests had received advance notice of demonetization then there would have been a backlash against the government.  

KR defends the policy by holding Modi’s opponents responsible for its shortcomings.

No he doesn't. The poor fellow just blabs anything that comes into his head. Demonetization revealed the shortcomings of the Indian financial system and dispelled faith in a frictionless transition to a cashless economy. It was a discovery process.  

“Everyone had to be honest to make demonitization a success. Demonitization failed because people took advantage of the system. People used it to enrich themselves. The opposition and unscrupulous elements used it to convert their ‘black money’.”

Modi gets that 'leadership' is about breaking concurrency livelock or deadlock. If Raji is any kind of economist, she should know this. The 'bourgeois strategy' only works if agents act decisively, for good or ill, like the 'bonus paterfamilias' invoked by the Civil Law tradition. This has an even better expression in Hinduism but, sadly, Hindus were so shit at developing a global maritime marine that we just relied on Brits for this, and other, exorbitantly expensive, 'invisible imports'. 

One reason we like Modi is because he backs Adani- who develops Ports. Raji probably has no idea what I'm getting at. But then she is as stupid as shit.  

On the current Covid crisis, where he has personally experienced loss, he defends Modi’s action and inaction as follows: “Did we have a textbook prescription to decide on what is right, what is wrong? Could anyone have been 100%, 80%, 50% perfect?  Besides, health, and law and order, are state government issues. The central government can only make recommendations; executive authority and responsibility lies with states. Also, you have to talk about the opposition when talking about the government’s failures. When [Modi] suggested that campaigns [for state elections, which are thought to have contributed to the spread of Covid-19] be done online, they refused to accept it.”

Modi may well have believed an Indian study which suggested India would hit herd immunity by early 2021. Anyway, as with demonetization, lockdown showed the vast gap between official, or academic, models and the blindingly obvious reality- India is as poor as shit. Still, Modi put a good spin on things and, since some 'Indian variant' can be blamed, managed the international optics on this. It seems that Jaishankar- a TamBram like me and (I assume) Raji- has proved effective in diplomacy. The fact is, 'Wuhan virus' may have been 'gain of function' based- i.e. a Frankenstein monster- whereas India was the country offering help to all the world- hubris, yes, but hubris in a good cause- till succumbing to a double mutation of an English or other foreign strain. 

Why does Raji not mention Teacher Shailaja? She is our one true hero. But 'Captain' has excluded her from his new Cabinet though it is doubtful if he'd have defeated 'anti-incumbency' save for her sterling efforts. 

Our discussion of other policies followed a similar pattern, best described in Sudhir and Katharina Kakar’s book,

Sudhir Kakar is basically a failed engineer/management type. He writes like shit- perhaps because the brains were buggered out of him in Barakhamba road. Why is Raji invoking the memory of that silly man? He is as stupid as shit and almost entirely ignorant of European paideia- forget Hindu religion and philosophy. 

The Indians: Portrait of a People, which was published in 2007, well before Modi became prime minister. In it, the Kakars remark that in India,

and every other fucking country under the Sun,

leaders “take on an emotional importance independent of any realistic evaluation of their performance…

Why? Because emotions are 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind' which evolved to solve concurrency and preference revelation and 'Newcombe' problems such that Social Choice mechanisms with 'inclusive fitness' might prevail. 

Why is Raji so entirely ignorant of the foundations of her discipline in Evolutionary Game Theory? How fucking stupid is she?  

In contrast to most people in the West, Indians are generally more prone to revere than admire.

According to old stereotypes, the 'heteronomous' Hindu was more prone to chuck an idol on the rubbish heap if it failed to perform. We'd kill our Gandhis before they got too shite- which is why Rahul is gun shy. But, we also emigrate first chance we get. Thus, I now get to vote for Priti Patel who spends her days biting the faces off undocumented migrants.  But I don't 'revere' her. I can't say I admire her- though she does have a Thatcher like quality. Still, this country is stuck with Brexit and the Muth rational strategy is to back those who have the power to make it work for the working class of this country.  

It is not that Indians are not sceptical of authority figures. Indeed, their cynicism towards leaders, especially political leaders, is often extreme. It is only that when an Indian grants authority to a leader, his critical faculties disappear in the waves of credulity that wash over him…[T]here is a complementary tendency to idealize the leader and look at him as a repository of all virtues, an almost superhuman figure deserving of their faith and respect.”

Raji is certainly credulous and uncritical. But this aint because she is Indian. It is because she is as stupid as shit and what she teaches is actively mischievous. 

Why is Modi idolized? The answer is because he has an inspiring life-story. For the first time in history, a 'backward caste' person- too poor to attend College- has risen to the top on the basis of merit. Since he is a celibate- what Hindus call a 'brahmacharee'- and his family has not amassed wealth, he is considered a self-less patriot who works hard for the common-weal. He takes risks because it is part of his jobs to take risks. Even if when he fails, he gets marks for trying to do something good.

It is not irrational to support a leader if no alternative is on offer. Under conditions of information asymmetry and concurrency deadlock, the bourgeois strategy is to affirm an extreme of faith w.r.t a Kavka toxin. This has a reputational benefit and solves a coordination problem. What Raji is doing is virtue signaling by reason of a discoordination game. But we don't think she is smart at all. Basically she is saying 'I iz Indian- i.e. as stupid as shit. Please give me intellectual affirmative action coz all my Uncles fucked me in the head. Gimme tenure already coz I alone can empathize with all the other very special little flowers whose long and sordid history of epistemic self-abuse has left them incapable of paying for any other sort of sheepskin.'  

KR’s reverence for Modi and credulity for his policies go hand in hand with cynicism regarding Modi’s opponents.

What fucking opponents? Who did Congress put up to challenge him as C.M of Gujjus? Shankarsih Vaghela! Why not simply say- 'Modi is merely a 'merchant of death'. Come vote for his RSS senior who is from the Warrior class and thus can be the Genghis Khan of death! Let us have proper pogroms! not this miserly and exiguous ethnic cleansing!'

The Godhra atrocity was committed by Ghanchis connected to those in Karachi who were linked to the ISI (but also the Congress Party). Modi, as a Ghanchi, was- obviously- the guy whose 'oikeiosis' gave him highest interest in managing the fall out 'economically'. That's what he did. Such was his 'artha'. This was not 'rajdharma' but good 'modi' transaction tracking and 'netting out'. 

In 2014, Rahul refused to step up to the plate coz, he says, his Mummy came to him weeping. She may be Italian but she aint stupid. She had noticed that three people with the surname 'Gandhi' had been assassinated in a manner which benefited the Congress Party. So Rahul gave Modi a walkover. The Commies back in the mid Nineties refused to let Jyoti Basu become PM. They wanted to concentrate on 'fighting American Imperialism'. They had no interest in running the country. Thus only the RSS was left as a non-corrupt cadre based organization which could supply enough people to do booth management. Still, the RSS had little traction in Bengal. Only Mamta could beat the Left Front at its own game and then keep beating and killing Commies till they gave up and started voting for Modi. In the recent Assembly election, the Left and Congress lost all their seats. The BJP's tally went from 3 to 77. However, since Mamta's goons are now beating up BJP supporters with vim and vigor, some will defect to the TMC.

 It must be said that few intellectuals- more especially from the South- thought that the Hindu 'Sangh Parivar' could replace as the Communists as the main challenger to the INC. Vajpayee & Advani, somewhat unexpectedly, were able to take over the 'Mandir' cause after Rajiv's assassination. Since 'Mandal' was threatening to turn caste against caste, Hindutva had a clear role in promoting national integrity. But it was only after everyone else had failed to form a stable coalition that they got their chance.

Raji is an economist. She must know that 'credulousness' is linked to Credit- i.e. Currency as solving the problem of double coincidence of wants- and that it must have objective, economic, determinants.

Being brown, she wants to virtue signal about her 'specialness'. Though Indian she has overcome some atavistic tendency to reverence Modi. Toronto should give her tenure and put her in charge of the 'special education' of very special little snowflakes. 

“Let me tell you why I instinctually support Modi. Because the people who are complaining, who are throwing this mud at him, are worth nothing. No matter what he does, everyone will criticize him. They are just waiting for him to make one major mistake and lose his popularity and support. Then, by default, useless nincompoops will get into power. That is what I dread more. The Congress Party.”

This is silly. Congress does not have a candidate. Rahul wants to do what Raji is doing- the guy attended Harvard and has an MPhil from Cambridge- he doesn't want to run the country.  

This dread comes from a conviction that, “Congress is corrupt and has no competence to rule the country.”

They don't have a Prime Ministerial candidate.  

Again, many will agree that corruption was a serious issue during the Congress/UPA regime, and that dynastic rule is not exactly meritocratic. “The problem lies with the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Nehru was not a democrat. He appointed his daughter as president of the Congress Party.

Not true.  

He disbanded the first democratically elected communist government in Kerala. [Nehru] filled important posts with his trusted circle of elitist, foreign-educated, light-skinned people.

Krishna Menon was dark. The Kaulas of Kashmir have an affinity, not with Namboodris, but the sambandham 'Pillais'. 

He wanted international recognition and acceptance. He did not tolerate dissent or competition. Modi is trying to undo the damage the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has done to India.”

Modi represents the vernacular languages and a rejection of Cambridge or Ivy League educated Libtard economists. That is perfectly sensible.

In his view, the Modi government represents the first clean break from a millennium of colonial rule. “Hindus and Indians suffer from an extreme inferiority complex.

Sadly, Gandhians suffered from a spiritual superiority complex while Nehru, for some reason, was awfully patronizing to Chou En Lai. Our arrogance was that of the Brahmin mendicant who curses the poor American who refills our begging bowl. 

What others think of us determines our sense of self-worth. One reason for this is our basic philosophy. ‘Vasudeva Kudumbakam’: the whole world is one. Let knowledge come from everywhere and be assimilated to our system and society. We had eight-hundred years of Islamic rule, and another two-hundred years of British rule. English was thrust upon. We lost our Sanskrit. We lost our identity. This realization dawned on me late in life, when I started learning from contemporary scholars—both Indian and non-Indian. Many of them are naturally Hindus.”

KR is getting on years and is taking more interest in his ancestral Religion. It appears that he links it to the cherishing of family and kinship ties- oikeiosis. To show special consideration, loyalty and love for those close to you in blood is considered a good thing. To abandon your kinfolk and the wider community they belong to so as to go off to where you may be materially better off is not, speaking generally, considered a mark of filial piety or eusebia. If the whole world is one, then it is so only in the sense that a family is one and a community is one and a nation is one. Raji does not understand that she is being rebuked. She is unfamiliar with the notion that as one advances in Religion, one's circle of belonging widens. Perhaps she thinks that if the world is one then one should abandon one's own parents so as to go attach oneself to parents or others better suited to serve one's ambitions or desire for wealth.

KR quite rightly observes that Hinduism declined under Turkish and British rulers but began to revive with the beginning of the Independence movement. However, under the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty it began to decline once again. That is why people like Raji and me can't spell 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam'. Modi has reversed this trend. That is a good thing for those who believe in Hinduism- i.e. about 80 per cent of the population. It is a very bad thing for those whose virtue signaling consists of being anti-Hindu and anti-Indian. 

He speaks of his early career in 1960s India. “We were trained to be clerks and made to believe that this is all we were good for.

Unless they had joined in the managerial cadre or were hired as engineers or marketing professionals. 

But I knew that the mill manager [in the company where I first worked] had been a blacksmith in Yorkshire. He came here as a manager!

Indian manufacturing failed to thrive because of lack of technical competence on the part of entrepreneurs and managers. Kiran Majumdar Shaw started as a brew-master. She is now a billionaire with her own biotech company. 

Another British export manager didn’t even have a high school graduation. Many of the people that came here to rule us were riffraff. But we weren’t allowed to even think that.”

This is foolish. Back in the Fifties and Sixties, everybody could see for themselves that such firms were being acquired- and run into the ground- by Marwaris etc. Naipaul described his own Brahmin maternal family doing something similar to a Trinidadian plantation they bought. Believe me, back in the early Sixties, the enemy wasn't 'ex-blacksmiths' from Yorkshire (how fucking stupid is Raji if she believes that farriers constituted a substantial class post the First War?) but the shite quality of the Indian entrepreneurial class. But they upped their game. Raji's class did not. Let her rot in Toronto teaching totos with very very special educational needs indeed. 

There was a good reason we TamBrams- who are as stupid as shit- backed first the bania Gandhi and then people like the Old Etonian Commie Kumaramangalam. It really did look as though the guys who gave us a bit of money for doing their domestic or other religious rituals were shite at running a modern industrial enterprise. But, who thinks that now? Nobody. 

In many ways, the people who control Congress strike him as indigenous versions of the Yorkshire mill manager.

Fuck off! If 'blacksmiths' become managers on the basis of earning more money for the company- that's a good thing! KR came into the firm as a clerk. Accountancy and its associated 'ars dictaminis' was his bread and butter. But that bread would be snatched away if Marwaris bought the enterprise and very quickly ran it into the ground.  I know about this. Some 'clerks' of my caste were brought back to the UK by the Managing Agency. Then, Heath came to power. Asset stripping happened. It wasn't till us guys started to do well in IT that- maybe also coz of the increasing hegemony of 'Andhrapreneurs'- we dared raise our heads. 

They are a group of people who have been accorded privilege and power through no merit of their own; and they exude a sense of superiority and self-importance with which they try to mask their own incompetence.

This is mad. A 'black smith' running a textile mill probably has very high competence. A clerk doing so, does not at all. But TamBrams knew that. We raised up Engineering as a Divine pursuit and deprecated the Law once Independence was achieved. Sadly, the stupid economic and educational policies India pursued led to a 'reversion to the mean'- i.e technically qualified guys taking white collar, Government or quasi Government jobs.  

This makes KR contemptuous of their ill-gotten authority. The personal appeal of Modi, then, comes from the fact that he is cut from a different cloth. He was not born into privilege. He is not a blue-blooded Indian. He speaks English with a thick accent.

Wow! Does this cunt really not know that 'big gun' Princes would not be caught dead speaking English? How fucking deracinated and ignorant is she? 

Atal spoke English with 'a thick accent'. Modi speaks Hindi of a type very different from Atal- his is nasal and seeks to suggest a muscular yeoman origin. He has  prevailed. He may actually know quite good English, but like Naveen Patnaik who hasn't learned Oriya, though promising to do so more than twenty years ago when he started to rule that Province, this ignorance works in his favor. 

He had nothing, he was no one,

he has the RSS. Unlike the Congress or Communist movements, this organization has weathered every storm. The same may be true of certain 'Jamaati' or Caste based organizations but the RSS alone is Nationalist.  

and yet, he has risen to the top of the country. He embraces his Indian, working-class origins, and is proud of being the Hindu he is. He carries himself with dignity. One doesn’t have to share all of KR’s positions, but reasonable people can sympathize with many of his sentiments.

No. Reasonable people ignore all sentiments whatsoever. The fact is the libtard hatred of Modi has led to a backlash in his favor. Even deracinated expats of high caste have come to see that attacking Hinduism and attacking elected Indian leaders is bad for us. The assumption will gain ground that we are beasts from a beastly country and religion. Having a confident Indian leader who is identified with Hinduism helps Hindus everywhere. 

If idealization of the leader is one leg, and odium for the current opposition is another, then his recently acquired suspicion of Muslims completes KR’s tripod of support for Modi.

In which country is there no 'suspicion of Muslims' of one stripe or another?  

This third leg is the elephant in the room, because politically-fuelled anti-Muslim sentiment is arguably what catapulted Modi to national office in the first place.

Actually, it was Congress doubling down on anti-Hindu sentiment which doomed them to be a fringe party losing its deposits in Delhi and Bengal etc.  

But it is complicated because KR comes from a family and a region of India that has not been marred by communal tensions, and he counts Muslims among his closest friends.

Look at Sri Lanka. They have had to become 'suspicious of Muslims' because of a terrorist attack meant to devastate their tourism industry. This does not affect personal friendships but it does mean that politicians must no longer play footsie with extreme Islamists so as to secure a few votes. 

Rather than give the topic short shrift, I’ll leave the Muslim question for another essay.

Which will be as shite as this one because it won't admit that Islamist terrorism is a global problem. 

Let me conclude here by saying that listening to KR has made me pessimistic that India’s current crisis spells Modi’s downfall.

An economist knows that choice is about opportunity cost. What is the next best alternative to Modi? We don't know. Rahul is still gun shy and no new national combine has emerged.  

Reverence breeds credulity, which means that Modi’s policy choices will not be questioned.

Nonsense! Policy choices will be questioned but if there is no alternative to Modi then he will remain in office or else, like Indira in 1980, return more firmly to power after a brief spell of anarchy.  

Disdain for Congress and the absence of another viable opposition party means that he will pay no electoral penalty. Suspicion of Muslims persists. In other words, the tripod of his support remains largely intact even as India burns.

India is not burning. Raji's pants are on fire, because she is a big fat liar.

India is a poor country where COVID will run its course. In 1919 there were 14 million deaths out of a population of 300 million. This had no political effects. The death toll may be smaller this time around. But it is India's poverty- not the evil doings of Raji's bete noire- which is responsible. Let us see whether Yogi can do labor reform in UP and whether he can generate jobs. If he can't then Modi has no real successor. Still, Modi has firmly established the idea that poor people can rise by their own efforts all the way to the top of the 'greasy pole'. That is a good thing. Democracy has become stronger in India. The question now is whether it can reform its foolish, paternalistic, laws and regulations. 

Matt Sebold's stupid Aeon article

Matt Sebold, a Professor of Literature, writes in Aeon 

Keynes believed that if businesses actually obeyed the prescriptions for rational behaviour upon which orthodox economic models are based, nobody would ever build, buy, barter or bankroll anything.

No. Keynes may have written bollocks from time to time. He wasn't stupid. The alternative to building and buying is to wander naked till you die of exposure. It is rational to do stuff which improves your chances of staying alive.  

The human propensities towards hope, faith, even reckless gambling, have far greater effects upon enterprise than estimations of potential profit, which, in most cases, prove comically inaccurate.

An enterprise may make a loss. It may go bankrupt. But till it does so everybody involved draws a salary. A pessimistic guy who never takes a risk still gets a job. When, as he predicted, it goes bankrupt, he moves on to another job.  

‘A large proportion of our positive activities depend upon spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation,’ Keynes wrote.

No. They depend on induction based expectations. If you have been getting paid for the last ten years to do a particular job, chances are you will get paid this month as well. True, your firm may go bankrupt but then you get on your bike and find another job. 

And if that optimism falters, ‘leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die’.

Lots of firms went bankrupt during the Great Depression, but more survived. Enterprise, quite obviously, didn't fade and die. 

The automation of capitalist accumulation is economic apocalypse.

Fuck off. It is us having lots more cool shiny stuff than our ancestors. 

For Keynes, the ‘state of confidence’ involves ‘assuming that the existing state of affairs will continue indefinitely’ even though ‘we know from extensive experience that this is most unlikely’.

We know we will die. So what? Tomorrow will be much like yesterday- till some virus gets you.  

Confidence is what makes you continue to bet on black, even when you know you will inevitably see red.

But very few of us are gamblers. If you are constantly betting on black- you have an addiction. Get help.  

It spurs an irrational appetite for risk-taking.

That's a pathological condition. Some people have an irrational appetite for their own boogers. Others may like eating dog turds. But that aint normal.  

The ‘state of confidence’ aggregates many highly subjective and often only semi-conscious projections of the future.

The business confidence index is based on opinion surveys and information about order books and inventories.  

It is an amorphous variable, impossible to quantify

yet it is quantified. People earn money by doing so and other people pay money for what they produce because they find it useful. 

or reliably account for, but liable to be the determining factor in the success of any investment decision, since abrupt and unpredictable shifts in the state of confidence can unsettle any sector of the economy, or even the economy as a whole, almost instantaneously.

This is equally true of every aspect of life. Indeed, it is true of the type of tosh Professors of Eng Lit can get to publish on subjects- like economics- about which they know nothing. 

What fascinates me about this enigma at the centre of economics

which this dude has not bothered to study 

is that it is called confidence. It stands, simultaneously, as a synonym for certainty and uncertainty;

No it doesn't. Knightian uncertainty obtains. The business confidence index tells us whether firms think they should expand or contract. There is also a consumer confidence index which tells us whether people are going to put off buying cool stuff or if they are ready to splurge.  

and, I’d argue, every invocation of confidence, in economics, politics or literature, should be read with this paradox in mind.

only if you have shit inside your head.  

Proclamations of confidence are frequently used as substitutes for substantive action

no they aren't because guys who don't fix problems quickly go bust. A substitute has to be fit for purpose otherwise the guy using it dies. That's why eating your own shit is not a substitute for eating chocolate cake.  

and healthy self-reflection by financiers such as Fuld,

whose firm went bust 

who are incapable of disinterestedly evaluating any alternative to the outcomes they ask others to be confident in.

The guy failed to get a bailout. The truth is Bernanke, Paulson & Geithner underestimated the impact of Lehmans going under. They fucked up.   

Their expertise relies on access to supposedly more, and better, information but in any given moment that information can be made irrelevant by public opinion.

Fuck had 'public opinion' to do with Bernanke fucking up? Once people understood that the Government would make a profit on the loans it made to companies like Lehmans they'd have been all for it. Still, there had to be a correction on house prices etc.  

As the actions of Lehman executives testify, the experts know this, which creates an incentives problem, since managing public confidence with misinformation might be more effective than taking substantive action based on proprietary knowledge.

There is no incentive problem provided regulators and external auditors and ratings agencies aren't incompetent or corrupt. 

This explains why the characters in Melville’s novel have been conditioned to believe that, merely by asking for confidence, you admit you don’t deserve it.

This fool doesn't get that 'confidence men' are cheating you. They are selling you something which doesn't actually exist. The stuff Lehman sold was genuine enough. The problem was that they had become insolvent because the price of some assets they owned had collapsed. Had they been bailed out, they'd probably have repaid with interest the loan they received. 

Confidence becomes an essential consideration because prices respond to even the smallest changes in perception

But perceptions are based on the real determinants of supply and demand. 

Keynes acknowledges the term’s peculiar malleability by regularly placing its technical and colloquial invocations in close proximity. He wants to make clear that confidence cannot be quantified, reliably controlled, or pinned down with equations.

So what? We have confidence indices which are good enough for practical purposes. Literature professors have no way of quantifying literary quality but they would agree that Shakespeare was a greater playwright than Francis Beaumont.  

Econometrics, he insists, is blind to the ‘animal spirits’.

No it isn't. It has confidence indices. 

It would seem that Keynes’s contribution to this discussion is mainly to confuse it and confound his successors who, on this matter, have elected mostly to ignore him.

Unlike this ignorant fool, Keynes's 'successors' knew him and worked with him or knew people who knew him &c. There is still a big Keynesian school of economics- indeed it has many variants.

But Keynes does clarify how the disruptive effects of swings in the state of confidence are magnified in economies dominated by large, concentrated financial centres – as was the case in the US in 1929, or 2008, or now.

No he doesn't. Like most economists he thought the Big Crash was a blip. What he hadn't counted on- because he was British, not American- was that there would be a big monetary contraction in the US and then that FDR would do crazy shit like forbid gold ownership or  pay farmers to not sow crops while plenty of people were going hungry.  

The volatility of the US economy, which has been rocked by financial crisis with disconcerting regularity since the founding of the New York Stock Exchange, is directly attributable to the taste, and talent, in the US for securitisation and speculation.

In the same sense that the fact that Americans have hands is directly attributable to the taste and talent Americans have for wanking. Does this cretin not get that all market economies have Financial Securities. Speculation, however, exists even in non-market economies. People acquire things on the off chance that it might turn out to be valuable.  

As Keynes put it: ‘Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be; and this national weakness find its nemesis in the stock market.’

Like other British toffs, Keynes thought Americans were far too democratic. They respected a guy who worked for a living more than a fucking parasite. Henry James took pains to explain to his British audience, that an American who had inherited great wealth gained even more prestige by becoming the top surgeon or top engineer or top pork packer or whatever.  

Confidence enters macroeconomics through the Stock Exchange.

No. It enters it through investment and consumption decisions which affect the capital value of enterprises and impact on the rate of interest (if everybody wants to borrow so as to invest and consume, then savers get a bigger reward) and thus on the price of gilts (if the interest rate rises, then price you will pay for a given stream of future income falls)  

‘In the absence of securities markets,’ Keynes explained, ‘there is no object in frequently attempting to revalue an investment to which we are committed.’

Nonsense! There is always a 'market maker'- e.g. a pawn broker or the wealthy guy everybody in the village goes to when they need to find out how much they can get for their assets at a pinch. 3  

The farmer cannot ‘remove his capital from the farming business’ on a whim, then ‘reconsider whether he should return to it later in the week’.

Yes he can. He can sell his land and buy it back again. Obviously he loses out on the stamp duty and commission etc. Land is less 'fungible' than publicly traded stocks and shares. Still, you do lose a little money when you sell and buy back a security 'on a whim'.  

Before securities trading was common practice, the farmer’s confidence, the shipper’s confidence and the realtor’s confidence had no impact on the simple supply-and-demand logic that set the prices for their goods.

No. It had a much bigger impact. Farmers didn't want to take a chance that they would be left with a crop it was uneconomic to harvest. Once there was a futures market, they could hedge on it and 'lock in' a price. Similarly, shipping could burgeon because there was greater certainty as to the outcome. This meant cheaper shipping and cheaper food. 

Financial markets are about pooling risk so that more productive activity is possible. Stupid cunts who think Stock Exchanges are evil coz money is the devil's dung can, it is true, cause Society to do crazy shit that destroys the economy. But then people get tired of listening to stupid cunts and tell them to fuck off. 

‘But the Stock Exchange revalues many investments every day, and the revaluations give a frequent opportunity to the individual … to revise his commitments.’

But a guy who keeps buying and selling the same stock will lose money. Smart peeps buy and hold based on fundamentals. That's why Warren Buffet is rich while skittish investors end up in the poor-house.  

At the Exchange, one can buy corn, even when corn is not in season, or a stake in a building, even when no tenants are moving in or out.

You can do that anyway. People have been buying corn out of season- coz granaries exist- for thousands of years. Similarly, there has never been a problem with buying a stake in a building or an enterprise. What a well developed financial market does is pool associated risks and bring down the cost of transactions and increase transparency so you can see the 'spread'- i.e. the commission taken by the market maker.  

Securities can be invented, amalgamated, contracted or split.

Because contracts have those properties. Securities are just a very cheap and fungible type of contract. This cretin thinks they are some sort of evil magic.  

Under the pressure of constant negotiation, confidence becomes an essential consideration because prices respond to even the smallest changes in perception, changes that can be based on reliable information, compelling narratives or abject rumours about specific companies, whole industries or the entire economy.

This fool doesn't get that market makers profit by the skittish behavior of fools. But similar behavior can be found in any field.  

When corporations are motivated by and reliant upon stockholders, small changes in the state of confidence towards a single company can produce butterfly effects through the whole economy.

No they can't. Politicians can fuck up the economy by telling people they should keep buying property or keep getting university degrees even if that property, those degrees, are over-priced shite. 

Eighty years before Keynes published The General Theory, Melville stated plainly: ‘Confidence is the indispensable basis of all sorts of business transactions. Without it, commerce between man and man, as between country and country, would, like a watch, run down and stop.’

But we all know better. An effective legal system which enforces contracts and punishes fraud is the basis of business transactions. Without such a legal system, there may still be transactions between a small ethnic or religious group but the rest of the population will be at the subsistence level.  

The Confidence-Man was equal parts experimental fiction, political economy and prophecy. Via a series of loosely connected vignettes set aboard a Mississippi steamboat, Melville, at the height of his powers, demonstrated how confidence could be made to mean everything and nothing. It could lubricate the gears of commerce or grind them to a halt; sweep up the individual in the ‘cosmopolitan and confident tide’ of ‘that multiform pilgrim species, man’ or leave him ‘in the dark’ with nothing but his own doubts, and possibly the devil, for company.

So, Melville- even at the 'height of his powers' could achieve nothing. Whatever he showed wasn't worth seeing then or now.  

The novel drove Melville to the brink of madness. Upon its completion, he told his friend, the fellow American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, that he had ‘made up his mind to be annihilated’, and he abandoned his craft. The author of Moby-Dick lived another 34 years, but never published another novel.

Hopefully, this cretin will never publish another article. The problem with getting hold of the wrong end of the stick and writing bollocks is that the next step is either madness or silence.  

He contracted the crisis of confidence that his novel was designed to discourage and, soon thereafter, so did the nation. Six months later, Melville’s publisher was bankrupted in the Panic of 1857, and its warehouse burned to the ground with the unsold copies of his novel inside. For close to a century, almost nobody read it.

Then cretins started getting jobs as Professors of Literature and felt obliged to talk bollocks about shite texts.  

The increasing centrality of finance

which represents about 7 or 8 percent of GDP. Tech is ten percent or lower because its price keeps going down 

to the US economy in recent decades, just as during Melville’s lifetime, coincides with an explosion of accessible, inexpensive publications.

This cretin hasn't noticed that the internet has fundamentally changed how we get and disseminate information. 

Following Keynes’s logic, I do not view this as a coincidence.

An evil confidence-man is behind all this. Also, the Post Office is a front for an elite pedophile ring and Biden is actually a shape shifting lizard from Planet X.  

The greater the proportion of macroeconomic activity that depends on securitisation, the more the volatility (incumbent to securities markets) permeates the larger economy.

Financial markets smooth volatility. There can be asset bubbles without financial markets- e.g. the Dutch tulip boom  

Under these conditions, any person or institution with the capacity to persuade the populace to alter their economic behaviour has the power to radically unsettle the marketplace.

So, it is important that we have proper economists who can explain why that person or institution shouldn't be trusted so much. It is better than there is a lot of competition in this respect.  

When Fuld proposed a publicity barrage with the intention of ‘restoring confidence’ in Lehman Brothers, he was conceding that a persuasive fiction, widely disseminated via the media, could relieve the firm of pressures from creditors, regulators, analysts, hedge funds and investors more effectively than substantive strategies to reorganise and raise liquidity.

The guy should have been lobbying Bernanke & Co. The firm was insolvent. There was no other 'substantive strategy'. 

A century and a half earlier, Melville had recognised confidence as a shorthand for the emerging codependence of finance and mass media in antebellum America.

But there was also a codependence between crazy Commie shite and the mass media they controlled in the Soviet Union. Why does this cretin not mention the codependence between eating and talking shite?

He thinks he has learnt something from Keynes which much smarter people than him have forgotten. 

The forgotten lesson of Keynes’s General Theory is that movements of metrics such as securities indexes, interest rates and GDP ­– presented in periods of stability as the very substance of the economy (Wow! Look at the Dow!) – are really only symptoms of the ‘animal spirits’ and, especially, their expressions.

Fuck off! Either these indices are in line with fundamentals or they are over or undervaluing things. Keynes didn't foresee the coming War. Smart people should have been buying property in neutral countries- like Brazil. On the other hand, a lot of people were patriots. They preferred to die or get poor with the rest of their nation rather than run away to live in luxury.  

Levels of consumption, investment and employment depend on the contagion of ‘spontaneous optimism’.

This simply isn't true. Keynes did exaggerate things but then he was writing for economists- not Literature professors.  

While it remains hard to predict how individuals will interpret ‘what average opinion believes average opinion to be’,

this is the Keynesian Beauty Contest. But research shows we all have a biological reason to prefer certain traits- e.g. facial symmetry. Indeed, the Keynesian Beauty Contest is likely to, by the Condorcet Jury theorem, produce better results then a panel of Judges some of whom have been promised beejays by the sluttier contestants. Anyway, that's how P. Chidambaram got his start. Not that he isn't naturally gorgeous. 

we can be certain that those interpretations will be disproportionately driven by viral media.

But guys who bother with viral media don't have a pot to piss in. Finance is now globalized, even if locals get skittish, global money will flow in or out on the basis of fundamentals.  

Studying television trends, political messaging, pop music, internet memes, video games, advertising, bestsellers, social-media influencers, core curriculums and demographics is now as productive an approach to economic analysis as tracking prices, wages and unemployment.

No it isn't. That's why guys with degrees in Media Studies aint pulling in big bucks on Wall Street.  

In other words, in the spirit of Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism, the media is the market.

But it isn't really. Literature aint Economics anymore than it is Theoretical Physics. Would Aeon publish an essay by this cretin about how Jules Verne's forgotten lesson is keeping us from vacationing on the moon?  

Emperor Ashoka v Mahatma Gandhi

Manmohan Singh's daughter, Upinder  Singh- a History Professor- has written an essay comparing Ashoka and Gandhi.

I can hear the protests about the exercise. On their own, Ashoka and Gandhi would make it to any list of famous proponents of non-violence. But an attempt to connect them, even through comparison, could be summarily dismissed as anachronistic and pointless.

Surely, the story of Ashoka influenced Gandhi? The British had rediscovered and popularized the story of the Emperor whose Ahimsa could do what incessant war could not- viz unify the country and give the 'kshatriya' ruling class an alternative means of establishing hegemony through the renunciation of violence and material possessions and the use of moral suasion rather than the threat of punishment, thus spreading an 'isonomia'- a universal normative body of law. Since the British in India faced little military opposition save on the North West and North East frontier, and since they ruled through the 'Heaven born' ICS, whose members were supposed to be incorruptible and sternly attached to their duty, they may have thought of themselves as being like Ashoka. 

Gandhi would have been aware, through Gujarati stories of Jain origin, of other Mauryan Emperors but, by the end of the Nineteenth Century, it was Ashoka who was being built up as the greatest 'Chakravartin'- or Universal Emperor. Theosophy, drawing on Sri Lankan Buddhist texts, played a role in this.  Gandhi's fascination with the 'chakri' (spinning wheel) caused it to be the emblem used on the INC flag. However, in 1947, it was replaced by the Ashoka chakra.

Why compare two men who were separated from each other by over two millennia?

I think Nehru was more enamoured of Ashoka whereas Gandhi would have retained the Gujarati Jain distaste for him. (Ashoka had slaughtered Jain monks till, by mistake, a Buddhist monk he was attached to was killed by his soldiers at which point Ashoka called off the pogrom.)

Why compare an ancient emperor with a person who, many centuries later, devoted himself to dismantling an empire?

Gandhi wanted the INC to inherit the entire Indian Empire- save Burma which went its own way in 1937. However, the Muslims voted overwhelmingly for the Muslim League in 1946 and thus the Muslim majority areas became Pakistan. 

Unlike Burma, India, Pakistan & Ceylon remained part of the British Commonwealth. 

Is it meaningful to compare an individual whose ideas are compressed into a few sets of monologues inscribed on pillars and rocks with one who has left to posterity a copious record of his thoughts and actions, his collected works running into almost a hundred published volumes?

No. But one could ask whether an ancient King influenced the thinking of a later politician. I should mention that Kautilya's Arthashastra was rediscovered in 1905 and published in 1915. Thus it could influence Nehru and temper his idealism with its realistic description of Statecraft. Indeed, he once signed an article he wrote criticizing himself, with the nom de plume, 'Chanakya'.

 However, Gandhi would have found it distasteful. Consider, for example, Kautilya's prescriptions for the regulation of drinking establishments. Kautilya sees them as places which generate revenue but which should be sensibly regulated. Gandhi sees them as an evil which must be abolished. The American adoption of Prohibition suggested the wind was blowing in Gandhi's direction in the early Twenties. 

We do not know what Ashoka looked like.

He is spoken of as ugly and having a pumpkin like face. 

Gandhi’s face and figure are well known within India, indeed, all over the world. Ashoka is the only ancient Indian king who speaks in the first person in his inscriptions; yet his biographical details are few.

But they weren't 'few' in his own time. We know a lot about Gandhi because he died only recently. Ashoka's people probably knew a lot about him. 

He lived in the third century BCE. Inscriptions and Sri Lankan texts call him Devanampiya (“beloved of the gods”) and Piyadasi (“of gracious mien”). Four of his inscriptions give the name Asoka (Ashoka is the Sanskritised form), “free from sorrow”. This may have been a name he chose after seeking refuge in the Buddha’s teaching, whose core deals with suffering and its elimination.

Which isn't really a big problem for most people. You may say that I am suffering terribly because of the emptiness of my life. But I like watching Netflix and eating Pizza. You may say 'but you will die!'  So what? Everybody dies. Why get worked up about it?  

Ashoka tells us – and there is no reason to disbelieve him – that the Kalinga war was a life-transforming experience. But, apart from this, we know little about his inner demons

He was a fucking Emperor! Everybody was trying to kill him so as to grab the throne. Why worry about 'inner demons' when it's your brothers or cousins or sons you have to watch out for?  

and much more about the resolve that emerged from his struggles with them. Ashoka lives on through his inscriptions, but he lives on even more strongly in legend, as a paradigmatic king in the Asian Buddhist world.

I think Gandhi was influenced by the legend of Raja Harishchandra but much less so by Ashoka against whom, like most Gujeratis influenced by Jainism, he would have had a prejudice.  

In sharp contrast, the factual details of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s life are minutely documented. Apart from the year, month, and date of his birth and death, a great deal is known about what happened in between. Gandhi’s experiments with truth are revealed in his autobiography, diaries, articles, letters, and speeches, as well as through the records maintained by his close associates, admirers, and others with whom he interacted.

We also know a lot about other politicians of the period. This is because they belong to our recent past. 

He too had his transformative moment, not on the battlefield but when he was thrown out of a train in South Africa.

He had previously been ejected from the office of a British official in his native State. 

It was one of many personal and political crises that he described meticulously in his own words.

E.M Forster describes an incident where some Britisher tried to eject Syed Ross Massood out of a first class carriage. Apparently such incidents were common at the time.  

Despite the immense chronological distance and the asymmetry in information, a case can be made for comparing Ashoka and Gandhi, and it does not rest on the desire to say something new and startling.

Ashoka unified territory. Gandhi was part of the reason India broke up on confessional lines. Gandhi's mistake was to insist that the INC speak for all Indians though he conceded that the party was a high caste Hindu affair.  

Their writings (let us consider Ashoka’s inscriptions as his writings, even though he may have dictated them orally), marked by a unique kind of reflection, introspection, honesty, and frankness, allow an exploration of the ways in which two very different men, living in very different times, struggled with the problem of violence.

Ashoka killed a lot of people. But sooner of later, if not he himself then his son or grandson, would meet a like fate. As a matter of fact, the Jain King of Kalinga did inflict a defeat on Magadha about a century later. For a while, he prosed on about non-violence but other Buddhist or Jain Kings did so as well. 

Gandhi served in the Ambulance Corps in two South African Wars and volunteered to do the same in the First World War. He tried to recruit soldiers for the British. Later he became more of a Pacifist. However, he died witnessing the terrible blood-letting of Partition.  It seemed Pax Britannica did have its merits.

A comparison reveals many surprising similarities, as well as many striking differences...

Ashoka and Gandhi were political beings who sought to connect the political, social, and moral spheres, asserting the supremacy of the moral.

Ashoka had sovereign power. Gandhi did not. Anyone can assert the supremacy of anything they like but without power, those assertions are but words lost to the wind. 

Both were political and moral activists who at a certain point in their lives, began to consciously, consistently, persistently, and passionately practice and propagate non-violence as an essential basis for a good life.

What violence could Gandhi have practiced? The Brits were hanging people like Bhagat Singh. Gandhi led, if not a good, then a long life. This was because he stayed away from violence. This was his chief appeal. The young Ghanshyam Das Birla had to go into hiding as a youth because he might have been implicated in the Roda cartridge case. By becoming a Gandhian he acquired an immunity from suspicion of revolutionary conspiracy.  

In Ashoka’s case, this commitment to non-violence emerged primarily, but not exclusively, from a creative, idiosyncratic engagement with Buddhism, and in Gandhi’s case, from a creative, idiosyncratic engagement with a variety of philosophical and religious traditions, including Hinduism, Jainism, Christianity, and Islam.

But none of these religions- including Jainism- say that a State ought not to use coercive violence. However for Jains and Hindus, abstaining from violence, meat, alcohol, sex etc could get you reborn in Paradise or an age when a 'Tirthankar' was active such that you attained ultimate liberation.  

Both men believed in persuasion and saw their persuasive skills as having a profound social impact.

Everybody, from childhood onwards, believes in persuasion. But they also believe in using coercive means to safeguard their vital interests- if it is safe to do so.  

Both adopted a dialogic approach based on communication and direct mass contact.

Ashoka set up massive machinery to spread dhamma (goodness, virtue), including a special cadre of dhamma officials whose responsibility was to go around spreading goodness. The emperor himself was involved in a marathon 265-day mass contact dhamma campaign. 

But it may have been more like peripatetic Imperial durbars where local magnates offered fealty and monks and priests received alms. No doubt, ordinary people were treated to some fine sermons and got a glimpse of pomp and pageantry. 

Since Gandhi lived in the locomotive era, the extent of his travels and public outreach far exceeded those of Ashoka. And yet he wrote to Kasturba, “One cannot propagate dharma by travelling in trains or cars, nor in bullock carts. That can be done only on foot.” Ashoka would have agreed.

Upinder Singh believes that Ashoka wandered around his kingdom like a Buddhist bhikku. It is more likely that his was a Royal tour. 

Ashoka and Gandhi believed in the connection between the inner and outer worlds and between the personal and the social.

Who does not? 

They led through example, energy, and commitment.

Most leaders do. 

Both believed in human imperfection and perfectibility, and the need to live in accordance with a transcendent, higher dharma.

All religious people have pretty similar beliefs. 

They believed in grounding action in ethics and were obsessed with non-violence, truth, and controlling the passions.

Those with such obsessions seldom command power but it can happen. However, that power tends to melt away or to have disastrous consequences. Pragmatism, not obsessional behaviour, better befits the leader of a Nation. 

Although Ashoka talks about controlling the passions, we do not know about his personal attitude towards sexuality;

he seems to have had a lot of wives 

Gandhi’s obsession with brahmacharya is well known, as are his unorthodox experiments to test his commitment to complete and true celibacy. Ashoka’s dhamma included individual virtues such as self-control, truthfulness, purity of thought, liberality, and gratitude. The idea of duty is central to how he thought of his role as a king and in the code of ethics he propounded to his subjects.

This ethical quality does distinguish Ashoka from other great conquerors of the period. In this matter, he exceeds Alexander and Cyrus and Caesar. 

Proper social conduct comprised obedience to mother and father; respect for elders; courtesy and liberality towards Brahmins and renunciants; courtesy to slaves and servants; liberality towards friends, acquaintances, and relatives; moderation in expenditure and possessions; and guarding one’s speech. The appropriate behaviour towards all living beings – humans and animals – included gentleness, compassion, and abstention from injuring and from killing.

Sadly, this obsession with not killing tended to reinforce caste prejudice such that Buddhism became a vector for the spread of the notion of untouchability to distant countries. 

Gandhi would have agreed with all of this, especially the emphasis on non-violence, self-control, and frugality as part of the definition of the good. He would have agreed with Ashoka’s view that a life lived according to the dictates of goodness, virtue, and duty was the foundation for happiness in this life and the next.

Ashoka's reign probably saw increased security, if not prosperity, for the people of India. Gandhi's epoch saw the reverse. First famine returned and then ghastly ethnic cleansing on an industrial scale. Ashoka succeeded, at least while he lived. Gandhi failed. Thus the chakri was replaced in the Indian flag with the Ashoka chakra.  

Ashoka and Gandhi practised non-violence personally and sought to create non-violent societies.

But Ashoka kept his army and would use cruel and unusual punishments to deter crime. Ashoka, it seems, largely succeeded. Gandhi failed.  

Both had a strong sense of self and mission; they saw themselves as important, innovative figures within the longer-term politico-intellectual tradition. Both engaged with the world in order to change it.

No. Ashoka may have known as much as was known at the time. Gandhi did not know most of what had been learned over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In particular, he did not know- or refused to believe- the findings of modern economics and political science. The result was that India pursued very foolish policies which left it weaker and hungrier than before. 

Ashoka and Gandhi’s obsession with ethics was combined with shrewd political pragmatism.

But Gandhi's shrewdness was self-defeating. Allying with the Muslims on the Khilafat issue seemed shrewd. But leaving them in the lurch was not shrewd at all. In March of 1922, the Muslims realized that the Viceroy had been quietly lobbying Westminster on their behalf. Meanwhile Gandhi had broken his word and unilaterally surrendered. Why? Gandhi had thrown open INC membership to the riff raff. In Chauri Chaura some of these new Congress members, protesting high meat prices, ran riot and killed native policemen. This meant, from the legal point of view, there was prima facie evidence that Congress, as an organization, was involved in seditious violence. Gandhi could have fought the matter out in the Courts. He chose to unilaterally surrender. He conceded the die-hard Tory claim that India was not ready for self-government. Thus India did not get what Ireland and Egypt and Afghanistan all got at around this time. 

Gandhi’s calling off of the Non-cooperation Movement due to the violence at Chauri Chaura displayed a stubborn unwillingness to compromise on the issue of non-violence,

Gandhi had written to the Viceroy saying he wouldn't call of his agitation even if there was violence. Then he did a U-turn- probably because some of his members were running scared. So off to Jail he went like a good little lamb.  

but in many other situations, his strong political instincts led him towards pragmatic compromise.

The problem with Gandhi's compromises was that nobody believed he, or his party, would stick to their letter and spirit once they got the upper hand. Moreover Gandhi would keep saying- 'only the INC can represent India. Power- including control of the Army- must be transferred to the INC'. If any minority or weaker group asked for safeguards he would first say 'I myself am a Muslim- because I read Quran and keep fasts' or 'I myself am a Harijan- because I clean toilets' or 'I myself am a woman- because I sleep naked with little girls' etc etc. Gandhi was the INC and the INC was India. This was Fascism. Govind Vallabh Pant said 'Italy has its Il Duce, Germany has its Fuhrer, India has the Mahatma'. By 1946, it was obvious that Fuhrers and Il Duces were shit. But then so was the Maha-crank. By contrast Ashoka died ruling over a great and reasonably secure Empire. He may have had his little crochets and obsessions but they hadn't done the commonweal any grave harm. 

In his thirteenth rock edict, where Ashoka gave a strong, reasoned critique of war, he also struck a pragmatic note when he warned the forest tribes that he would not hesitate to use force against them, if required.

Whereas Gandhi, during the Second World War, was saying that India would not lift a finger to defend itself. The Brits were welcome to quit the country and abandon it to the fate that had overtaken Japanese held South East Asia.  

There is a similarity in Ashoka and Gandhi’s attitude towards religion.

No there isn't. Ashoka promoted Buddhism though no doubt he was kind to Brahmins. Gandhi promoted his own brand of stupidity.  

Both were deeply religious but rejected institutional religious authority.

No. Ashoka strengthened institutional Buddhism.  

Ashoka’s personal religion included a faith in Buddhism combined with a belief in the gods, heaven and hell, karma, ethics, punya (merit), and papa (demerit).

These beliefs were and are common in India. 

Although Gandhi did not believe in the outer trappings of religion, he was a devout Hindu; at the same time, he had an intense curiosity about other religions.

But this childish curiosity wasn't helpful at all. The country was divided on the basis of religion. Had the Sikhs been a majority in an economically viable area they would have got Khalistan. Since they were a minority in every district of the Punjab it took a long time for them to get a Sikh majority State. But the demand for Khalistan has not gone away- as Upinder Singh well knows.  

Ashoka and Gandhi recognised the existence of religious conflict and struggled to foster interaction and harmony between religious communities. Ashoka’s plea for concord (samavaya, similar in meaning to the Hindi word samvad) between the various pasandas (religious sects) was a plea for mutual respect and dialogue, much more than what is conveyed in the bland and rather negative phrase “religious tolerance”.

The Brits had got Indians of various castes and creeds and languages and ethnicities working well together. India was able to project force into Europe and China and the MENA. Gandhi helped undo that. He and his successor left India unable to feed or defend itself.  

Religious concord was close to Gandhi’s heart too.

But the shit inside his head was one cause for violent religious discord and the partition of the country causing a big refugee problem which encompassed Upinder's own family. 

Of course the magnitude of religious conflict and violence that he dealt with,

which he provoked. He said in 1939 that Hindus- apart from Punjabis and Gurkhas- were non-violent and thus should control the Army so as to be protected from Muslims allied with Punjabi and Gurkha Hindus. Since Muslims knew that plenty of Hindus were martial- e.g. Marathas, Garwalhis, Dogras, Coorgis, Madrasis, Bhumihars, Rajputs, Jats etc, etc- they considered Gandhi to be a big fat liar.  

especially during the prelude to and aftermath of the Partition, were much more frightening in scale and intensity than anything that Ashoka might have faced or even imagined.

Ashoka secured power and then used it in a way pleasing to himself and not too damaging to the country. Of course, had he instituted a proper Imperial Army and bureaucracy instead of wasting his time promoting Buddhism, India would have been better off. Still, since no other Indian King achieved much in that direction- preferring to let the Caste system burgeon- we can't single out Ashoka for blame.

Gandhi, however can be blamed for betraying the Khilafat-Congress combine by unilaterally surrendering in 1922. It may be argued that British rule was preferable to Indians squabbling over how to rule the country. But if that argument is valid then Gandhi's entire political program misconceived. India should have chosen the path of cooperation, not non cooperation. It should have become more and more Anglo Saxon in its institutions. It should have spent the Twenties and Thirties building up an indigenous Naval and Military capacity so as to better contribute to Imperial defence. Instead of burning foreign cloth, the Indians should have ensured that the handloom sector had access to the finest foreign yarn. The textile industry should have grown by responding to competition. Instead of 'Nai Talim', Indians should have backed good schools teaching Maths and English and Science. It should have set up Research Universities and specialist Institutes, not more and more Degree mills. It should have knocked the whole Urdu vs Hindi conflict on its head by pursuing Romanization like Kemal Pasha's Turkey. 

India should simply have imitated what other poor countries had done so as to get ahead. It should not have listened to a crack-pot. But then, I suppose you will argue, it wouldn't have been India. Shame, but there it is.