Harsha Perera

Q. If you knew the atom bomb was about to fall, what would you do? A. I should go right on eating dinner. Q. Do you think mankind is going to blow itself off the earth with atom bombs in the near future? A. No. I think there would be a very serious danger if real do-gooders came to power in the United States or Russia, but since Khrushchev is a gangster and Ike a representative of American business, this won't happen. It's just in the self-interest of both sides not to do it. Q. Do you think mankind is going to blow itself off the earth with atom bombs in the near future? A. No. I think there would be a very serious danger if real do-gooders came to power in the United States or Russia, but since Khrushchev [Putin] is a gangster and Ike [Trump] a representative of American business, this won't happen. It's just in the self-interest of both sides not to do it. Q. Why do you vote at all? As you said before, "The world might change, but not because you're trying to change it." And isn't that merely fatalism? A. Why do I vote? Because if there were a tie and the casting vote might have been mine, I'd feel such a fool. But, seriously, the question shows you're not getting my point. The problem is not whether to act or not to aet, what to do or what not to do. The Chinese saying goes, "When the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way." Thus, what I am saying is that the world cannot be changed by the "wrong" people, however right their doing or not-doing. And, by the "wrong" people, I mean those who act from the feeling that man is separate from the natural universe — either pushing it around or being pushed around by it. The ideas of individual freedom and fatalism rest on the same assumption — that man is separate, the boss or the puppet. In my view, he cannot act with wisdom unless he feels that what he does and what nature does are one and the same.

Whenever I am asked for self-help book recommendations, I struggle — because self-help is largely a bogus industry that's unable to even properly investigate what the 'self' is. Instead, I find myself recommending some Alan Watts.

I often think that societies that have evolved out of cultural systems such as Confucianism that *did not rely on divine authority* are more stable — being more robust to modern epistemic scrutiny, and therefore les likely to abandon positive traditional values and norms