Gaul Atreides (@gaulatreides)

An Indian warns that India is a low trust shithole, and that the British colonial effort to civilize India to Western norms has failed spectacularly. The written laws and superficial structures left behind by the British—checks and balances, common law, procedure, and the rule of law—remain largely in place. But once these institutions passed into Indian hands, the spirit animating them was inverted. What was designed to restrain power became a machinery of exploitation and expropriation. The institutions have not vanished. Their outer shells—offices, uniforms, seals, procedures—remain, but their function has been grotesquely reversed. This was not an accident. It was inevitable in a culture still ruled by the iron law of “might makes right,” where expediency is the governing principle and reason, morality, and self-responsibility never took root. Had Indian society remained in smaller, localized units, a crude but immediate tribal justice might have preserved a minimal order more aligned with its nature. The terrible possibility is that, when the hollowed-out Western scaffolding finally collapses, what rises from the ruins may prove more functional precisely because it is more primitive—however nightmarish it appears to civilized eyes. This is the slow, inexorable apocalypse of second-hand modernity: imported institutions rotting from the inside until nothing remains but predation wearing the mask of civilization. The forms survive. The soul has already died. https://www.unz.com/article/predation-wearing-the-mask-of-civilization/