Surfin on a Rocket

Listen:
It all comes down to personal definitions of Good and Evil.
In my opinion, for example, fundamentalist Mormon polygamists who fuck fourteen years olds are Evil. But to them, it gets them closer to their God. I, however, have law, common sense and moral decency on my side. Thankfully, that's more powerful than their religion. Theirs is no more crazier than any of the other ones, just more offensive now. Next up (with any luck) Catholicism. That's beside the point really. But whatever.

Look:
Gandhi had some cool ideas but he also had some fucking weird ones. His rejection of modernity is not necessarily hypocritical. In fact, his decisions to live the way he did are much more powerful if they are informed, as they were, by his life as a lawyer and scholar in London. His perspective gains momentum simply by having lived the life he now so fervently rails against. He was a revolutionary and a glorious one, having avoided spilling blood and that's not anything anyone can argue against. What we can argue against, and what we should argue against is his belief as I understand it, that India should wholly reject Britain. I can understand that he's angry, but passion should not negate rationality. If he was being an extremist simply for the sake of being extreme than he wasn't being honest to his principles. He was an extraordinarily intelligent man and I reject the notion that he believed Britain and her influence could be dissolved from India. I cannot and will not agree with the idea that we should all be weavers. I'm sincerely glad that we have antiseptics and anesthesia now. That's progress and that's modernity and yes, it's Western, but so fucking what, last time I checked we're on one little round planet. It makes no difference where it came from or for that matter where our parents fucked (which is my argument against patriotism in general) Gandhi certainly expedited a free India, but you're kidding yourself if you think it wasn't gonna happen eventually. We can either be conservative or progressive, and as much as Gandhi's personal philosophies of pacifism seemed to be progressive his other philosophies regarding the practices and traditions of his fellow Indians is intensely conservative. That is the conflation of his contradictory views.

We hold the concept that modern life is the best life because it simply is. As we define knowledge, we now have the most of it. We have the most access to that knowledge than we ever have. If equality and social justice could be somehow quantified, the numbers now would be higher than ever. And Photosynthesis is real because it's testable. Repeatedly. The parameters for our interpretation of evidence are fulfilled by experimentation. Which is why I reject the idea of a God controlling everything, and why the majority of rational thinkers do too.

So:
If you want to go live in a forest in a log cabin and read, go do it. Ted Kaczynski did. Nobody stopped him till he started blowing people up.