Tag egotism

Why nations go to war – Acharya Prashant

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Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump & Ali Khamenei

You cannot burn your neighbour’s house and rest in peace, not because of some mystical law, but because the act of burning changes the one who burns, and that changed person then returns to the home he imagined was safe and wonders why he cannot sleep. – Acharya Prashant

There is a question that goes unasked every time the world erupts in war, and its absence is more revealing than anything the analysts say. The question is not about which side is right, or which grievance is legitimate, or which alliance has been betrayed. Those questions get asked at great length, with great sophistication, by very worldly, credentialed people. The question that does not get asked is simpler and more dangerous: who is the one fighting? Not which nation, not which ideology, not which scripture, but who, actually, is doing this, what does this person want, and why does the wanting never stop?

That question is dangerous because it turns the lens around. All the other questions look outward, at the adversary, at the system, at the historical injustice. This one looks at the looker. And the looker, it turns out, has a very strong interest in not being looked at.

In the recent weeks, US and Israeli strikes on Iran have killed several top military and political figures, including senior leadership; Iran retaliated with strikes on Israeli positions and on American bases and allied targets in parts of the Gulf region; Pakistan launched strikes into Afghanistan; the Ukraine-Russia front continues its grinding attrition; and all this is happening while the devastating war in Gaza is still quite fresh in the collective memory. Across every editorial room and foreign ministry, the same machinery cranks into motion: geopolitical analysis, balance-of-power calculations, resource competition, historical grievance mapping. These explanations are not wrong, exactly. They describe the furniture of the room quite well. But what they do not explain is who is sitting in it, or why that person keeps setting the room on fire and then expressing surprise at the flames.

Nations Don’t Fight

There is no such thing as a nation as a conscious entity. A nation is a principle, and a principle has no agency of its own; it can only express the consciousness, or the unconsciousness, of the people who generate it. When a people is inwardly chaotic, driven by fear and the need for dominance, it produces a nation that is belligerent, exclusive, and always in search of an enemy to confirm its own identity. When a people is inwardly clear, the nation it generates can be genuinely civilising. But we do not speak this way. We say “the US attacked Iran” as though two abstract entities are in principled competition; the label launders the real actor, the human ego, into a flag, and the flag then takes the responsibility while the ego escapes into the applause.

Consider what a single historical fact does to the entire geopolitical narrative of the current US-Iran crisis. Until 1979, Iran and Israel were functional allies. Iran was an important oil supplier to Israel during the Shah’s era; Israeli and Iranian intelligence services collaborated closely; Iran extended de facto recognition to Israel in 1950 and maintained working relations with it throughout the Shah’s rule, at a time when every Arab neighbour had gone to war to prevent exactly that. Two countries that today describe each other in the language of surgical removal and satanic identity, “the cancerous tumour must be excised,” “the Little Satan must perish,” were, within living memory, strategic partners. No territory changed hands between them in 1979; no oil field was found or lost; no ancient wound was reopened. What changed decisively was the 1979 revolution that placed religious identity at the absolute centre of the Iranian state, and the same country that had been a partner became the enemy. The Islamic Republic made opposition to Israel a central ideological position of the new state, not because Israel had done anything new, but because a state founded entirely on theological identity requires its identity to be defined against something. A Jewish state served that purpose with theological precision.

This is not geopolitics wearing a religious costume. This is religion being worn by the ego as its most respectable armour, and it tells us everything we need to know about the nature of the conflict.

Religion exists to civilise the animal. Every great tradition, at its irreducible core, was attempting to do one thing: take the creature that emerges from the womb driven entirely by the biological logic of survival: consume, expand, eliminate the threat, secure the territory, and elevate it into something capable of clarity, compassion, and self-knowledge. That is the whole project. The animal, however, is remarkably resourceful. It can colonise the very force meant to tame it; it can drape itself in scripture, recite the holy verses with genuine feeling, and emerge looking not like a beast at all, but like a soldier of God. When that happens, religion does not merely fail at its purpose; it becomes the most potent accelerant the ego has ever discovered, because now the hunger for dominance carries the blessing of the divine, the violence is sanctified, and the enemy is not merely an adversary to be defeated but a heretic whose destruction is itself an act of devotion.

Look at the region, and the pattern is visible everywhere at once. The Shia-Sunni schism, a theological dispute over succession thirteen centuries old, continues to shape proxy wars across Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon; the hatred between those who share the same God, the same Prophet, and nearly the same scripture exceeds in ferocity the hatred between people who share nothing. In the United States, some influential evangelical constituencies hold a literal belief in Biblical prophecy that makes their support for Israeli military policy not a political position but an eschatological one; they believe the Second Coming is contingent on certain territorial arrangements in the Middle East, and no diplomatic argument reaches a conviction rooted in the Book of Revelation. Hamas frames every missile launch in the language of holy liberation. The Israeli state, forged in the trauma of the Holocaust and the genuine existential terror of being a country the size of a few Indian districts surrounded by populations that have repeatedly declared their wish to see it gone, responds with a hardness the world has rarely seen directed so openly at a civilian population, and does so while invoking its own theological entitlement to the land. Every party has its scripture and its God. Every party’s God appears to have personally endorsed that party’s military strategy. One must pause and ask with full seriousness: what kind of God is this, who sides so reliably with whoever happens to be invoking him at the moment of the airstrike?

The answer, of course, is that this God does not exist. What exists is the ego, which has been using the name of God since it first discovered that the name confers immunity from examination.

Not Resources, But Identity.

Strip away the theological dressing and the geopolitical framework, and what remains is something both simpler and more intractable: the ego’s bottomless hunger to feel complete. This is the actual engine beneath every war, and no diplomatic architecture has ever been built to address it, because the architects themselves are running the same engine.

The resource explanation for the US-Iran confrontation is the most persistent alibi and the most easily dismantled. The United States is among the world’s largest energy producers; it has no material need for Iranian oil that could justify the risks of direct military confrontation with a nation of ninety million people in one of the world’s most volatile regions. Iran, for its part, possesses no intercontinental missile capable of reaching American cities, and by several credible accounts a negotiated arrangement, with Omani mediation, was genuinely within reach: Iran would continue enriching fissile material but not stockpile it, making weaponisation impossible without abrupt and easily detectable reversal. None of this fits a resource or security conflict in the conventional sense. What it fits is the logic of an ego that requires dominance not as a strategy but as a psychological condition; an ego that cannot tolerate the existence of an entity that refuses to subordinate itself to the hierarchy. You cannot give it enough. Feed it every oil field in the Gulf and it will discover it needs recognition; give it recognition and it will discover it needs submission; give it submission and it will discover it needs the annihilation of any future possibility of challenge. The hunger has no floor because the hollowness it is trying to fill has no floor either.

This is also why every coercive attempt to prevent Iran’s nuclearisation produces the very outcome it claims to be preventing. The lesson that every capital in the world is drawing from watching a sovereign nation’s senior leadership eliminated by a foreign military strike is not “we should negotiate more sincerely.” It is: “We need a nuclear-tipped intercontinental missile, because that is the only thing that makes us genuinely untouchable.” North Korea understood this early and has not been subjected to the same treatment as Iraq, Libya, or now Iran; every government in the world has registered exactly why, and is drawing its own conclusions quietly. Pakistan articulated the logic with unusual candour in the 1990s when it was reported to describe its nuclear programme as the “Islamic bomb”; the theology was decoration, the calculation underneath is now a standard operating assumption in most strategic planning ministries on earth. You can prevent a country from manufacturing a weapon; you cannot prevent it from purchasing one, trading for one, or receiving one through channels that only appear in retrospective intelligence reports five years later. The ego will always find a route around the obstacle, because self-preservation is its oldest and deepest competence, and it will spend every gram of available intelligence in that service. What you cannot route around is the inner condition that makes the weapon feel necessary. Everything else: the sanctions, the strikes, the frameworks, the summits, is rearranging weapons into configurations that feel temporarily safer and calling the rearrangement peace.

The Fire Was Lit In Here

There is a temptation, particularly for citizens of the nations doing the striking, to watch all of this from a position of apparent safety: to feel either pride at a display of power or simple relief that the devastation is happening at a geographical distance comfortable enough to be consumed as news. The objects of the conflict are far away: Iran, Gaza, Afghanistan, Ukraine. The subject, the one who has authorised, funded, and often enough cheered for these operations, remains at home, apparently untouched. This is the ego’s most seductive illusion: that the fire it lights in the world stays in the world, that you can sanction the destruction of other people’s cities and return to your own life carrying none of that destruction inside you.

The fire does not stay outside. It never has.

The inner condition that produces belligerent foreign policy is the same inner condition that produces the epidemic of depression, anxiety, addiction, and inner purposelessness that has become the defining psychological signature of the most militarily powerful societies on earth. It feels counterintuitive to connect these; it feels like a category error to link America’s mental health catastrophe with decades of American military conduct across the world. And yet this is precisely what honest seeing reveals when it is applied without flinching. The violence directed outward, and the suffering experienced inward, are not two events happening in two different places; they are the same ego operating in two directions, and the ego that lights the fire and the ego that cannot sleep afterward are not two separate entities but a single disturbed centre. The ego believes it can cleanly separate the one who acts from the one who suffers. But the one who lights fires has already become a person who lights fires; the one who sanctions collective punishment has already become a person capable of sanctioning collective punishment; and that becoming does not halt at any border. You cannot burn your neighbour’s house and rest in peace, not because of some mystical law, but because the act of burning changes the one who burns, and that changed person then returns to the home he imagined was safe and wonders why he cannot sleep.

The senses are made to face outward, and therefore the ego, using only the senses, sees only what is outside, never what is within. This is the structural predicament of the geopolitically entranced ego: it looks outward at the adversary, at the threat, at the historical injustice, and it never pauses to notice that what it keeps finding out there, the hunger, the fear, the need for enemies, the certainty of its own righteousness, is a precise mirror of what has never been examined within. Nations go to war for the same reason individuals destroy their own relationships: something hurts, something feels insufficient, and the instinct is to locate the source of that pain outside oneself. The nation blames the enemy state; the individual blames the partner; and in both cases the real author of the suffering, the unexamined centre that requires enemies in order to know what it is, goes untouched, free to generate the next crisis with the same efficient reliability.

Ask yourself what genuinely disturbs you when you read the news from that region. If you find that a missile strike produces something that feels uncomfortably close to satisfaction, a sense that the right people are being punished, that your side is winning, that the world is being corrected, sit with that feeling for a moment before moving to the next headline. Ask what it is fed by. Ask what it would mean for your sense of identity if the world stopped arranging itself into enemies you could feel righteous about. These wars are not aberrations in an otherwise rational world order; they are the outward expression of an inward condition that is universal and ancient, that operates identically in the head of state and in the citizen consuming the coverage, differing only in the scale of damage each has access to.

The ego that requires enemies to sustain its own sense of coherence does not disappear when the missiles stop. It waits until it finds the next available occasion. And the wheel turns again.

The wheel will not be stopped from the outside. There is no treaty elegant enough, no balance of power stable enough, no diplomatic architecture sophisticated enough to address what keeps turning it. The wheel is turned from within, by the unexamined centre that has been given every instrument of analysis and statecraft except the one that could actually change something: the willingness to look at itself with the same ruthlessness it has always reserved for its enemies.

That is the only disarmament that lasts. Not a new agreement, not a new government, not a new ideology dressed in the vocabulary of the old one, but just a human being, finally willing to ask: what in me is producing this world, and what would remain of my sense of who I am if I could no longer find an enemy to confirm it?

That question, honestly pursued, is the beginning of the only peace that has ever been real. It will need to be asked again tomorrow. And the day after. Because the ego that found the question will, by the next headline, have found a new enemy. But each asking weakens the wheel by a fraction, and a fraction, repeated across enough human beings, is the only force that has ever slowed it. – The Pioneer, 7 March 2026

› Acharya Prashant is a teacher and author whose work centres on self-inquiry and its application to contemporary life.

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Without self-enquiry, rationalism is just another superstition – Acharya Prashant

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Self-enquiry in practice.

Without self-enquiry, rationalism turns outward-only. It scrutinizes religion, superstition, tradition, politics, and the beliefs of others, but it never pauses to examine the psychological centre doing the scrutinizing. The ego remains untouched, and rationality becomes its armour. – Acharya Prashant

Rationalism was meant to be a method, not an identity. It was to be the discipline of honest seeing, not another tribe of the like-minded. You question, you examine, you see clearly. You hold no belief sacred, no authority exempt, including your own. Every conclusion must justify itself, and if it cannot, you let it go: that is the original promise. From the Greek sceptics to the Enlightenment philosophers to the modern scientific temper, this is what rationalism has always claimed as its essence: the courage to ask, the willingness to discard, the refusal to bow before any idea simply because it is old or revered or comfortable.

This inheritance has served humanity well: superstition loosened its grip, the tyranny of priests and kings could be challenged, and questions forbidden for centuries could finally be asked. Science, medicine, law, and political freedom all owe something to this spirit of inquiry. The courage to question rather than blindly obey, to examine rather than merely accept: this is what allows the mind to mature and society to remain free.

None of this is an argument against rationalism as method. The method works. Peer review catches errors, replication weeds out fraud, falsification disciplines speculation. The institution of science corrects what the individual scientist cannot. But the method’s virtue does not automatically transfer to the practitioner. A system can be self-correcting while the people within it remain thoroughly self-deceived. It is this gap, between what rationalism promises and what the rationalist practices, that concerns us here. Yes, there are rationalists who already practice what this essay calls for: who hold conclusions lightly, who examine their own motivations, who do not need the identity of “rational person” to feel secure. This essay is not addressed to them. It is addressed to those who have made reason into a fortress rather than a discipline.

Somewhere along the way, the rationalist method itself became an identity. Rationalism stopped being something you do and became something you are. To call oneself rational became a badge, a tribe, a source of pride and belonging. And the moment rationalism became identity, it could no longer examine itself, for the ego does not question its own hiding places.

When the questioner himself is never questioned, rationalism quietly shifts its role. It stops being an instrument of truth and becomes an instrument of the ego. What was meant to liberate becomes a fortress; what was meant to clarify becomes a tribal flag. The very capacity that could have set you free becomes a new bondage, subtler and therefore more dangerous than the old.

The Outward Gaze

Without self-enquiry, rationalism turns outward-only. It scrutinizes religion, superstition, tradition, politics, and the beliefs of others, but it never pauses to examine the psychological centre doing the scrutinizing. The ego remains untouched, and rationality becomes its armour.

Watch the rationalist in action. He will tell you precisely why the pilgrim is wasting his time at the temple, but he cannot tell you why he himself spent three hours last night arguing with strangers on the internet. He will explain the cognitive biases that make people believe in astrology, yet he has never once examined the compulsion that makes him need to correct them. He writes essays on why people cling to tradition. Still, he cannot see that his own identity as “the one who sees through tradition” is just as clung to, just as defended, just as psychologically necessary to him as any ritual is to the devotee.

Pause and ask: What were you really protecting in that argument? Truth, or self-image? What did you get from being right? What did you fear would happen if you were seen as wrong? If nobody applauded your correctness, would the compulsion still be there?

This is the fatal flaw. Reason directed only outward is not complete reason; it is half-reason, and half-reason is often more dangerous than no reason at all, because it comes with the illusion of completeness.

The religious believer at least knows he believes. The rationalist who has made reason into identity does not know he believes; he thinks he merely sees. And so his beliefs operate unchecked, unexamined, all the more powerful for being invisible to himself.

Here, rationalism becomes belief in reason, not the use of reason. The distinction is crucial. The use of reason is alive, flexible, self-correcting; it holds conclusions lightly, knowing that new evidence or deeper insight may require revision. It is comfortable with uncertainty, because it does not need conclusions to provide identity. It can say, “I do not know,” without feeling diminished.

Belief in reason is something else entirely. It is reason frozen into dogma, producing certainty rather than clarity, positions rather than understanding, debates rather than insight. The believer in reason has made rationality into a flag, and he will defend that flag as fiercely as any religious zealot defends his scripture. His positions are not held because they are true but because they are his; his arguments are not aimed at understanding but at victory. His rationalism has become, in everything but name, a faith.

This is why so many rationalist spaces feel like battlegrounds, not laboratories. The atmosphere is not shared inquiry but competing certainties. People do not come to learn; they come to win. They do not listen to understand; they listen to rebut. The form is rational, but the substance is tribal.

The Psychology Beneath the Logic

Such rationalism is often loud, combative, and moralistic; it seeks victory, not truth. The vocabulary has changed: we now speak of “evidence-based” and “peer-reviewed” instead of “revealed” and “ordained.” But the psychological posture is identical.

It replaces gods with data, scriptures with graphs, priests with experts. The structure remains the same; only the vocabulary has been updated.

Rationalism without self-enquiry cannot see its own motivations. Fear, insecurity, superiority, the need to be right: these operate freely beneath the language of logic. The rationalist believes he is defending truth, but he does not see that he is defending himself. He believes he is exposing others’ irrationality, but he does not see the irrationality of his own emotional investment in being the one who exposes.

Reason is then used to justify psychological compulsions rather than dissolve them. The ego learns to speak in syllogisms; it marshals data the way a lawyer marshals precedents, not to find truth but to win the case. And the case is always the same: I am right, I am rational, I am superior to those who are not.

This is why the most aggressive rationalists so often resemble the fundamentalists they oppose. The content differs: God versus no God, scripture versus science, tradition versus progress. But the structure is the same. Both need certainty, both need enemies, both cannot tolerate ambiguity, and both derive identity from their conclusions. In this condition, rationalism becomes collective prejudice in modern dress.It calls itself progressive, but it is deeply conformist; any community that prides itself on rational thinking quickly develops orthodoxies as rigid as any religious sect.

In certain Western rationalist circles, approved conclusions function as membership tests. Deviate, even carefully and with evidence, and you are not refuted but reclassified: you become a denialist, a bigot, someone who has “revealed their true colors.” The argument is not answered; the arguer is diagnosed. Among several Indian rationalists, the pattern mirrors. One must hold the correct contempt for all religion and the “correct” suspicion of all tradition. Suggest that an ancient text contains genuine philosophical insight, and you risk being treated as a communal apologist; question whether one particular civilizational model is the only path to human flourishing, and you become intellectually untouchable.In both cases, the permitted conclusions are known in advance, and argument no longer exists to discover truth but to police boundaries. This is not reason at work; it is the ego defending its shelter, now speaking the language of rationality.

It calls itself free, but it is bound to identity, group approval, and intellectual fashion. The rationalist who prides himself on thinking independently often thinks exactly what his intellectual community thinks. He reads the same sources, reaches the same conclusions, expresses the same outrage, and dismisses the same enemies. He has not escaped the herd; he has joined a different herd, one that flatters itself as a gathering of independent minds.

This is not the failure of rationalism; it is the predictable outcome of rationalism that refuses to examine the rationalist. When the ego is never questioned, it will use any tool, including reason, to do what the ego always does: seek security, belong to a group, feel superior, and avoid the terror of standing alone.

The Inward Turn

True rationality is inseparable from self-enquiry.

This is what separates genuine reason from its counterfeit. The moment reason turns inward and asks, “Why do I need this conclusion? What does this belief give me psychologically?”, rationalism regains its original power.The question is not merely “Is this true?” but “Why do I want it to be true? What fear would arise if it were false? What image of myself depends on this position? What would remain of me if I surrendered this certainty?”

Try it now. Pick a position you hold dear, one you have defended publicly, one that feels obviously correct. Ask: what do I get from holding this? Not what is true about it, but what does it give me? Watch what arises. If the mind rushes to justify the position, that rush is the answer. If irritation arises at the question itself, that irritation is the answer. Self-enquiry does not require you to abandon your conclusions; it only asks you to see who is clinging to them, and why.

This is the questioning the ego cannot survive. It can survive any external argument; it can change positions, update beliefs, switch tribes, and remain fundamentally intact. What it cannot survive is being seen. The moment awareness turns on the one who argues, the game is exposed: the certainties are revealed as defences, the positions as props for identity. The rationalism that seemed so solid turns out to be a house built on the shifting sand of psychological need.

This is why self-enquiry is so rare, and why it is so essential. The rationalist who has never asked, “What am I really doing when I argue?”, who has never noticed the pleasure in being right, the fear of being wrong, the satisfaction of superiority, has never used reason fully. He has used reason the way a child uses a stick: to hit things, defend territory, feel powerful. He has not yet used reason the way a surgeon uses a scalpel: to cut through illusion, beginning with his own.

When self-enquiry accompanies rationalism, everything changes. Positions become lighter and can be revised without trauma. Disagreement becomes information rather than attack. Uncertainty becomes tolerable, even interesting, because identity no longer depends on knowing. The rationalist stops performing and starts inquiring, stops defending and starts seeing, stops winning and starts learning.

This is reason restored to its original purpose: not a weapon for victory but a light for seeing. And that light must fall on the one who holds it, not only on the objects he chooses to examine.

Without that inward turn, rationalism is not liberation; it is merely a sophisticated cage.

The bars are elegant, the locks are logical, and the prisoner is convinced he is free because he can critique the cages of others. But he remains inside, for he has never questioned the one who built the cage, who maintains the cage, who is terrified of life outside the cage. His cage has a sign on it that says “No Cage,” and he believes the sign.

This is the final irony: the one who prides himself on questioning becomes the one who cannot be questioned. The identity of “questioner” becomes the most protected possession of all.

Liberation is not a change of content; it is freedom from the need to cling to any content. The liberated mind can hold positions without being held by them, can use reason without being used by the ego’s need for reason, can think without needing thought to tell it who it is.

This liberation is not achieved by abandoning rationalism; it is achieved by completing it, by turning the light that has illuminated so much of the external world, finally, uncompromisingly, on the one who holds the light.

The question is not whether you can question religion, tradition, politics, or superstition; you have already demonstrated that capacity. The question is whether you can question the questioner. Can you ask, with genuine not-knowing: What am I defending? What am I afraid of? Who would I be if I could no longer call myself rational?

You have spent years examining everything except the examiner. That exemption is the source of your bondage. The rationalist who cannot examine his own rationalism is no different from the believer who cannot examine his own belief; both are prisoners, and one is simply more articulate about the prison walls.

Begin there. That is the only beginning worth the name. Refuse, and you remain what you have always been: an ego armed with arguments, a prisoner who has memorised every book on liberation but never bothered to look at his own chains. – The Pioneer, 24 january 2026

› Acharya Prashant is a teacher, author, and founder of the PrashantAdvait Foundation. 
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