Teortaxes▶️ (DeepSeek 推特🐋铁粉 2023 – ∞)@teortaxesTex
More to the point
I think Indians have some civilizational achievements, a fraction of the stuff they kang about counts as that. But bluntly – they have historically had less state capacity, less ability to coordinate and to diffuse tech, just less tech. Now that they're a giant nation state, it matters.
I also find loathsome their addiction to kanging about purely introspective achievements (like their philosophy and Dharmic religion being more profound than Chinese analogies). I don't even disagree, Advaita alone > Daoism as an intellectual exercise. It took *me* a lot of time to understand that Confucianism, which the Chinese are really about and which they exported widely and deliberately tried to teach others, is not merely a systematization of rites and rules of conduct but a people-cultivation program.
I think that fundamentally, religious philosophy is as much a means of coordinating people as an ontological research program. And socially, these philosophies are infrastructures and eugenic programs: they introduce inductive biases to gene-culture coevolution, govern reproduction of ideas, forms of relationship and types of human being. Confucians, with the entire infrastructure from filial piety to imperial exams to concubinage and rules of inheritance, were in effect seeking to breed a particular high type of a human, the Junzi, and they had largely succeeded, such that they no longer need to practice it – they and the rest of Sinosphere do have an extraordinarily studious, industrious, intelligent population with abnormal impulse control. Vedas are preoccupied with maintaining varnas, in effect providing reproductive DEI via guaranteed arranged marriages and tiered izzat UBI to everyone. And I can't see this more charitably as just a program of defending post-Aryan invasion power ranking from dissolution, keeping a small minority exalted wordcels with ritual purity and profoundly beautiful takes or certain warrior ethos, and the rest some kind of domestic staff pool in a largely subhuman condition and the carrot of reincarnating into a higher varna without actual genetic transmission if they play ball. They, too, have succeeded.
Confucians are on par with Catholics with their Church and West European Marriage Pattern and Ashkenazi Jews with their Talmud and communal support for scholars, in their functional achievement of building a population that's excellent in some important ways relative to global starting point 3-8 thousand years ago, and above them due to the sheer size of the program. Indians had succeeded to create a few great lineages, a few million people total, and on the broad population level had been, at best, treading water. There's not much ancient DNA to be studied, due to the climate, but I predict that if we find enough useful samples, we'll see that the ancient Subcontinentals were about as good as modern ones. So while I grant that Indians had really cool ideas about the nature of reality or consciousness, I feel that they'd be better off today if they never had any.
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