My rethinking of liberalism, and J. Sai Deepak's book

My twenties pulled me away in a direction which, at the time, I had no doubt was the single direction of progress. I surrounded myself with first-principle thinkers, ambitious and talented people with backgrounds in economics and the liberal arts. Over time, I discovered I had was most comfortable practicing and preaching the following values:

1. Equitable economic upliftment is the singular lens through which a government's performance must be evaluated - the economy must grow, and the disparity between the rich and poor must diminish. This alone, along with the development of public good such as health, sanitization and education - must be the focus of a government; other aspects such as religion, language, and culture are talking-points for elections, and are best avoided. 
2. We must understand the history of humanity as a power-struggle, where the people try to seize and retain power at the top while the masses try to throw off the yoke. There are no sides, no better characters or worse; there is only power and those trying to take hold of it. Therefore, if one is in a position of privilege at present, it probably owes to historical wrongs committed by their ancestors against other peoples and one must therefore be conscious of this privilege and atone for it
3. The world is moving towards a classless, global utopia where people can exercise their individual freedoms and extract the most benefit by selling their skills and ideas in an impartial global marketplace. This marketplace, since it is created by humans around the world, will ensure that the best and most interesting ideas, technologies and projects thrive (weaker/imperfect ideas and projects will perish). Additionally, it is beneficial to develop one's own personality to suit this global marketplace.
4. The individual has priority over any other social grouping - the individual's rights and desires are sacrosanct, and the individual can practice or believe as they wish, unless they intrude upon the liberties of another; other persons, social groups or orders may not comment or pass judgement on the individual's choices, practices or beliefs, as this would be tantamount to the reduction of the individual's freedoms.
5. First principle thinking is the basis of true knowledge - every system devised by human-beings must be questioned without the historical baggage using only essential axioms that are known to be true. The contrary is also valid: one must doubt every doubtable thing until one is left is pure truth (the Cartesian position).

In other words, I think of my 20s-self as a well-rounded liberal, which a penchant for solving problems like an engineer (move fast, break things if you must). Over the past few years, I find my momentum in this direction arrested. In some ways, I've even made a U-turn; a few things I valued earlier and some ideas I held true now seem childish, even laughable.

I attribute my 'change of heart' to the literature I read and the ideas I let myself be exposed to. Extracting myself from the modernist, materialist, liberal-capitalist heartland allowed me to question the truths I once thought axiomatic. They were my first-principles, until they were questioned.

The most interesting changes in my thinking have come from engaging with the histories of Western and Indian philosophy, and from familiarizing myself with various historical narratives. One such work that is now fresh in my mind is J. Sai Deepak's "India that is Bharat". As someone who has followed Sai Deepak extensively on social media for his well-articulated views, I recently found myself emotionally moved when he decimated Shashi Tharoor's Nehruvian idea of India in a popular debate. I thereafter proceeded to buy his book - which is the first book of a trilogy.

In his book, I found well-researched material and viewpoints that helped me further refine and develop my own views on various subjects. Going back to the philosophical U-turn I mentioned earlier, I believe my positions now can be articulated as follows:

1. An elected government has civilizational responsibilities also - Equitable economic development and the improvement of public goods are vital performance-metrics of any government, but its responsibilities do not end there. Adequately representation and the protection of the languages, culture, religions, artforms and the perspectives of its people are responsibilities of a government, in the interest of the continuity of a civilization.
2. Historical narratives are always ideologically driven, and one must grapple with particular facts and refrain from simplistic grand narratives (like "history of humanity is a power-struggle"). There are better and worse characters and institutions in our history, and we must learn about them. There are also better and worse form of oppression, which have different effects on our present day societies. One was most likely the oppressor as well as the oppressed simultaneously at various points in the past. Equating various privileges and/or disadvantages create false narratives that carry only political value.
3. The world is moving in a direction embedded with a particular ideology of power. This is no utopia. One must fight against this foreign ideology (that Sai Deepak terms coloniality) in order to create a respectful future with space for one's own worldview. As a corollary, it may be stated that the global marketplace is rigged. Unless the rules of the game are challenged, one's own place in the world is doomed.
4. The individual has certain inalienable rights, but there are places where societal (cultural) groupings must have priority over the individual. To view oneself as a family, tribe or nation is a human trait - and there are traditions and situations where these families, tribes and nations gain priority over the individual. Liberalism strives to make people autonomous and "free" (there is no choice to "not be free"). It aims to atomize individuals as "blank slates", free from all groupings and biases, so that they can be "rational independent actors". Liberalism claims that all bonds and ties (including one's family) must be freely chosen, and this allows corporations to have workers without any bonds, so that they can wage-slave away. It is Capitalism which thus profits from liberalism's end-game.
   Moreover, liberalism is premised on an abstract conception of individual selves as pure choosers, whose commitments, values and concerns are possessions of the self, but never constitute the self. Since our choices are never truly free (but shaped by our societal bonds) and because our choices and bonds shape the identity of our selves, the theory of the self must include room for cultural membership and for non-chosen attachments and commitments.
5. First principle thinking fails when you operate on the wrong level of abstraction, with incorrect base axioms, or without considering the practical side of problem-solving. This is especially important while solving problems at a societal scale, and creates a strong case to actually understand the prevailing worldviews and think about problems within these frameworks (e.g. immersing oneself in sampradayic schools and understanding why things are a certain way and proceeding to use tools within the system, may be a better problem-solving approach than reading a PDF summary of a philosophy and proceeding to challenge it from "first principles").

Apart from helping me develop on some of these ideas, J. Sai Deepak's book is an important work to understand the essence of Indian constitutional secularism as contrasted with Bharatiya civilizational acceptance of a plurality of views. It also explains the coloniality of English-language education in India, and the very reason why this blogpost is written in English and not in Tamil, Hindi or Sanskrit.

Notwithstanding the latter portion of the book which carries several essays, letters, minutes and speeches verbatim (as Sai Deepak goes out of his way to demonstrate primary sources, lest it be said that he is misquoting/misinterpreting evidence) making this book more tedious read than it should have been (this will, I'm afraid, come at the cost of some readership), "India that is Bharat" is an essential read for a 21st Century Indian.