Right next to our college in India stood a temple dedicated to Rani Sati, a woman who committed sati—ritual self-immolation—sometime between the 13th and 17th centuries. The vagueness of the date is telling: Indians—like much of the Third World—did not historically maintain systematic records. The British compiled much of what is known about India’s past, including the lives of its so-called great kings.
Civilizations such as Greece, Rome, and China preserved detailed historical records to extract moral lessons and maintain a sense of continuity. India, by contrast, relied on scattered oral traditions and myths, offering no stable chronology or critical framework.
Without the civilizational anchors of truth-seeking, introspection, and hence a shared moral vocabulary, society was fixated on short-term gain, blind to history’s causes and consequences. Change was viewed not as a moral necessity, but as a threat to the established order. It was Groundhog Day.
Avoiding Western terms—such as justice, truth, honor, fairness, honesty, and system—when explaining India is challenging. Yet, using these words clouds your understanding of its amorality. You are trying to judge an alien culture by Western standards—projecting rather than understanding. These Western concepts hold little meaning in the Indian context. Employing them traps the Western mind in dualities—good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice—while the Indian amoral mindset lacks such binary distinctions. It acts on what is expedient and what maximizes resource acquisition. There is no inner compass, only the shifting logic of the moment.
In such a culture, the abused does not seek redress but instead redirects the injury downward—toward someone weaker—to restore balance or secure advantage. Moral outrage is absent; in its place is a servile ingratiation. As Western ideals circulate today, this mindset stands in uneasy contradiction with imported, superficial notions of dignity and justice—values loudly professed but not internalized. The result is psychological fragmentation: the individual is unmoored, neither grounded in India’s past nor receptive to the ethical demands of the West. Whatever space once existed for moral growth, self-examination, or feedback has been buried beneath a polished, hollow modernity.
The amorality that characterizes Indian society can be traced to its religious landscape. Far from a coherent system of faith or values, Indian religiosity resists unified doctrine and clings to fragmented, local rituals and symbolic acts, divorced from introspection or ethical inquiry.
It is worth asking where Rani Sati fits within the so-called Hindu pantheon. Growing up, few people I knew identified as “Hindu.” Instead, they followed local deities, family gods, or regional traditions. The very idea of “Hinduism” as a unified religion was a colonial construction—an abstract category that was still slowly filtering into Indian consciousness. In reality, there was no singular pantheon, no coherent system. The transition to this manufactured identity met little resistance because Indian religions were not grounded in commandments, moral doctrines, or values comparable to those in the Abrahamic faiths or classical Western philosophy.
One casualty of this misguided fusion—based on the false assumption of a moral foundation—has been the widespread misunderstanding of Indian religiosity, both by outsiders and, increasingly, by Indians themselves. What remained became confused and performative: rituals were preserved, but their symbolic gestures were mistaken for signs of a moral system. Over time, people even projected a structure where none existed. Yet the defining feature of “Hinduism” has been precisely the absence of structure, consistency, or doctrine.
Every morning, at random intervals through the day, and again in the evening, the temple beside our college rang its high-pitched bells for hours, disrupting our studies. No one dared question the noise lest they offend the sanctity of Rani Sati. On the contrary, students regularly visited the temple to seek her blessings.
I urged my peers to report the disturbance, but none supported me. When I went to the police station alone, I was laughed at. This unquestioning reverence—untouched by moral reflection—reveals something deeper about Indian religiosity: a resistance to introspection, a total reliance on ritual, and a deliberate evasion of reason and ethical inquiry.
I bore no ill will toward Rani Sati, but I struggled to find virtue in worshipping someone whose defining act was self-immolation. It is hard to believe she acted out of love, for love, as an individual or moral sentiment, does not exist in India. Relationships are shaped not by emotional truth or duty but by transaction, hierarchy, and the pursuit of advantage. Devotion, in such a society, is not love but submission, driven by fear, conformity, and peer pressure.
This confusion between spirituality and cultural identity runs deep. What passes for religion in India is a tangled web of tribal loyalties, superstition, and spectacle. It does not elevate the soul or inquire into the good of society—it enforces obedience and chases personal, material reward. The temple is no sanctuary of truth but a stage for ego, display, and appeasement.
Spirituality requires stillness, solitude, and moral courage. But Indian religiosity, rooted in noise and fear, drowns out the possibility of self-examination. The divine is not encountered but outsourced to rituals, intermediaries, and idols that absolve the individual of responsibility.
Indian religions distract the individual with hierarchy and ritual. This externalized obedience bleeds into all domains of life. Cultural identity, mistaken for faith, creates an illusion of depth: one feels devout without honesty, righteous without wrestling with right and wrong. Belonging replaces belief. Ritual replaces revelation. To preserve itself, the system breaks the individual and infuses him—through the social process—with a deep and enduring inferiority complex.
By contrast, Western religious traditions—especially the Judeo-Christian legacy—emphasized moral accountability, truth, and the sanctity of individual conscience. Sin was internal, demanding confession, repentance, and reform, not mere performance. God was obeyed, not bribed. Prayer was a striving for alignment with the good, the true, and the just, not a transactional plea for worldly gain.
Regardless of belief, these traditions cultivated habits of self-reflection, ethical consistency, and justice. The Western individual, though imperfect, was trained to ask: Am I right? A mind shaped by expedience and shielded by relativism asks instead: Am I successful? Am I secure within my herd? This is not to deny Western failings, but their sins were, at least, subject to frameworks of truth and justice.
Without a metaphysical anchor, Indian religiosity is entirely instrumental and focused on outcomes, rather than ethics. And if one avoids projecting Western standards of objectivity or moral duality, it becomes clear that ethics is not even part of the framework. Education and careers are entangled with superstition and divine bargaining. Without a concept of sin, personal growth is impossible—only compliance, fear, and endless cycles of blame and appeasement.
Human beings need anchors. When the inner structure of reason, conscience, and moral imagination is absent, they reach for substitutes—idols, babas, celebrities, and rituals. But these are unstable external props. Lacking the stillness required for introspection, they drown in noise, distraction, chaos, and even overpowering smells and colors. There is no pause, no silence, no integration of experience.
The psyche is slippery—nothing sticks. He cannot process memory, reflect on meaning, or make principled decisions. He can only “learn” dos and don’ts—rules that, shaped by his subjective mental framework, are fleeting and must be continually reinforced through fear.
Identity clings to whatever is near: caste, crowd, religion, or trend. But these are themselves unstable, volatile, impersonal, and ever-shifting. The result is chronic instability, a kind of mass neurosis. What passes for religious fervor or national pride is only fear and disorientation in disguise.
Without inner substance, the human being is the perfect subject for manipulation by superstition, politics, and mass culture. He lives in a state of low-grade psychological panic yet lacks the language, tools, or quietude to name it. He suffers from chronic anxiety—and yet, having never examined causality or consequence, and shaped by fatalism, he can appear strangely confident, unbothered, even indifferent in situations that would drive future-oriented people to paranoia.
At a civilizational level, this absence of inner anchoring creates a gravitational pull toward the lowest common denominator. In the absence of a rational and moral fabric, nothing is sustainable. Financial and intellectual capital dissipate rather than accumulate. Forget building, inventing, or improving—what is received, even on a silver platter, cannot be maintained. Entropy becomes the only law.
But the irrationality of belief was only part of the decay. The social environment offered no refuge; it was a crucible of cruelty. In a culture governed by ritual and hierarchy, cruelty becomes casual—a way to assert dominance in a system that rewards submission and punishes integrity. This moral incoherence seeps into interpersonal life, where violence is not an aberration but a rite of passage, repeated without shame or memory of its origin.
I saw this most vividly at university.
Freshers were routinely subjected to physical and sexual abuse by senior students. They were forced to keep their eyes fixed on the ground in the presence of seniors and treated as subhuman. Often woken late at night and summoned to common areas, they endured humiliation and violence under the guise of “ragging.” The abusers—once victims themselves—perpetuated the violence without guilt. No internal compass told them they were wrong; only tradition assured them they were entitled.
The acts were degrading and brutal: some were made to urinate on live electric wires, fondle each other, or masturbate publicly. Forced anal sex was not unheard of. Many suffered lasting physical harm—one student lost an eye; others sustained permanent damage to their eardrums. Yet this cruelty was rationalized as a method of “mentally strengthening” the victims.
These were not isolated incidents of youthful sadism. They revealed something deeper: how violence, if normalized, is self-sustaining. When those same individuals became seniors, I appealed to them to break the cycle. I reminded them of their own humiliation and urged them not to inflict the same pain on others. They responded with blank stares—and the chilling rationale that they needed “an outlet” for their rage. When I suggested directing that rage toward the seniors who had once violated them, they couldn’t comprehend the idea.
Retaliation was never upward—it was always downward. Those who suffered did not seek justice, truth, or moral redress; they redirected the harm. Victims of scams or theft did not express righteous indignation. Instead, they focused on recouping their losses by scamming someone else. Being wronged was not a call to conscience but a cue to find someone weaker to exploit.
This was a civilizational absence of moral causality. Wrongdoing did not awaken the conscience; suffering did not lead to reflection. Pain taught nothing. It simply repeated itself.
This pattern—harm without introspection, pain without principle—permeated every stratum of Indian society. Injustice persisted not despite education and wealth, but often because of them. Trauma did not soften—it brutalized. Lacking moral frameworks, suffering did not ennoble; it degraded.
What remains is tribalism. In the university, the workplace, the village, or the slum—the same logic prevails: protect yourself, crush the weak, conform, or be cast out. Relationships are not governed by conscience but by group identity and fear. The dynamics I witnessed among elite students were indistinguishable from those in the most desperate corners of the country. Privilege did not civilize; it merely weaponized cruelty with greater sophistication.
People often define “karma” in poetic terms. But what I witnessed was a mechanical continuation of abuse, zero-sum thinking, and a complete absence of justice or fairness. It was the life of an automaton—reactive, unconscious, and morally vacant. Consciousness itself seemed to be missing.
The colonial institutions—bureaucracy, courts, police—meant to restrain such decay and structured to enforce the rule of law had been upended, hollowed out, and repurposed for ends precisely opposed to their original design. Shaped by and dependent on the same unjust, irrational, and amoral culture, they functioned not to deliver justice but to preserve appearances. Their goal was not resolution but equilibrium. Bribes replaced law; silence replaced accountability. Atomized and mistrustful, each person was left to fend for themselves in a society that rewarded conformity over conscience and cunning over truth.
Even in school, the rot was evident. If one student erred, the entire class was punished. Authority served not justice but domination. Teachers routinely abused their power, coercing students into taking private tuition or openly demanding bribes. This wasn’t in some obscure rural school, but my prestigious missionary institution. One teacher, whose home I visited for tuition, casually assigned us household chores. Trapped in her house, I would be asked to fetch her shoes.
Did the priests of the school—some of whom were decent men—truly not know? Or did they, like many others in India, turn away from the corruption beneath their roof?
In India, one quickly learns a harsh truth: anyone who can steal will. It doesn’t matter how much they are paid—or perhaps it does, since higher salaries often fuel greater greed. Bureaucrats began demanding larger bribes as their compensation increased. Dismissing someone for theft is rarely considered; doing so would make daily functioning impossible. In households and institutions alike, theft is not regarded as a moral failure—it is simply another cost of doing business.
By degrees, an image began to form in me: India as an amoral, materialistic society devoid of virtue. Immediate desire was all that mattered. The harm one’s actions caused others was irrelevant. No shared ethical language existed—no sense of justice, fairness, or moral repair. Animalistic instincts reigned, thinly veiled by a crumbling veneer of British formality and borrowed civility.
Living in the UK, I encountered a culture where institutions—however imperfectly—tried to protect the weak, where religion demanded personal transformation, and where truth was not a luxury but a duty. There was often someone, somewhere, who stood for what was right, anchored in fairness, truth, and a shared moral compass.
It became clear that without sane, rational, and ethical leadership, India would not merely stagnate—it would regress. Its institutions and society were already unraveling, slipping back into a pre-colonial wilderness where brute force and superstition replaced reason and law. India’s tragedy is not primarily economic or political but spiritual and moral. What haunts the country is not poverty but the normalization of vice: the ability to witness cruelty without protest, to steal without guilt, to obey without reflection, and to worship without love.
There is no shortage of temples, rituals, or gods, but the inner life is absent. Without a concept of sin, there is no redemption. Without truth, no justice. Without the courage to stand alone, no conscience. In such a society, neither reform nor revolution is possible—only repetition.
India’s thinkers and leaders often invoke the past with pride, but it is precisely the past they must be freed from. What is needed is not a return to some imagined cultural greatness but a civilizational break: a turn toward reason, truth, and moral introspection. India does not, for now, need more scientists or engineers; it requires an education in the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of truth, and the discipline of moral courage.
Alas, no one has yet found a path to this awakening—only a roulette wheel of centuries spinning in vain hope that suffering will, eventually, give rise to conscience. Perhaps India is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be accepted—a society shaped by the absence of inner anchors. It is what it is.
Contrary to what Christian missionaries once believed, nothing may be done. What the West often projects as dysfunction is, more precisely, the absence of the moral architecture it unconsciously takes for granted. When it ceases to project, it may begin to see more clearly—and recognize that India cannot be changed by top-down means. It may even begin to ask whether India needs to change at all.
To expect self-correction where no introspective mechanism exists or to demand progress where entropy reigns is to misread both India and the limits of cultural universality. Without inner transformation—without conscience, reason, and courage—even the systems cannot hold, however inherited or imposed.
