THE PRISONERS OF IDEAS

THE PRISONERS OF IDEAS
Men tend to be prisoners of their ideas, and women of their emotions ... Speaking historically, and generally, with due apologies to all exceptions...
Modern life and education have inflated the role and place of the intellect. Modern intellectuals suffer from an overdominance of intellect, irrespective of their gender ... For this reason, the walls of their prisons are very strong, and difficult to breach ...
Many westernised and cosmopolitan Indians are prisoners of their ideology. They cannot see anything outside of their ideological prison, and therefore imagine that they are actually free and not prisoners.
Even if native social reality gives them a hard knock on their head, and tells them that there is another life outside their prison of ideas: vital, living, and throbbing, they cannot wake up.
This is what happened in the last elections, this is what happens in every terror strike. But they refuse to see what is before their nose.
Why is this so difficult? Why cannot otherwise bright people recognise, what a common man in the street senses, almost intuitively, without the trappings of sophisticated philosophies and ideologies?
This happens because of the doctrine of false consciousness. The intellectuals do recognise the knock on their head. But they think that the people who are giving them the knock are "misled". This simple idea is given the grand clothes of the emperor, and is called "false consciousness".
There is none so blind as he who will not see.