Article 118

“The Empire of Faith Against the Republic of Reason”


History does not reward truth; it rewards power. The men and women who sought truth—whether monks in monasteries, philosophers in academies, or scientists in laboratories—could explain the nature of reality, but they rarely ruled it. They pursued subtlety, paradox, and evidence, and if they were lucky, they earned a university salary, a circle of disciples, or the satisfaction of insight. But they did not command armies. They did not build empires. They did not organize societies in their own image. That privilege belonged to another breed entirely: those who scorned reason and exalted obedience, those who built worlds not out of arguments but out of myths enforced by violence.

The great paradox of civilization is that irrationality, which is false, has again and again proven stronger than reason, which is true. The philosopher may persuade a few, but the prophet commands nations. The rationalist knows that every claim must be tested and every argument revised; the prophet knows that certainty, no matter how absurd, is more powerful than truth. And so history belongs less to Socrates than to Moses, less to Nāgārjuna than to Muhammad, less to Galileo than to the popes who silenced him. From antiquity to the present, the desert prophets who declared one God and one law shaped the world far more than the philosophers who doubted them.

It is fashionable to think that monotheism was an advance in rationality, that one God is simpler than many, that one source of truth is clearer than a multitude of quarrelling deities. But this is to misunderstand its essence. The declaration of one God was not a metaphysical discovery but a political weapon. One God means one law, one ruler, one hierarchy, one people, one army. Polytheism tolerates difference, invites contradiction, allows debate. Monotheism annihilates it. To declare that the infinite speaks in one voice is to silence all others. That is why monotheism is violence not only in its practice but in its very structure. It abolishes dissent by branding it blasphemy, abolishes debate by branding it heresy, abolishes freedom by demanding obedience to an absolute that cannot be questioned. This was its genius: by enthroning irrationality, it produced the cohesion that rationality could never achieve.

The contrast is brutal. In India, monks debated the nature of the self, the emptiness of phenomena, the logic of inference. In Greece, philosophers dissected politics, metaphysics, and ethics. In the modern West, empiricists and scientists reduced superstition to rubble, demanding evidence for every claim. Each of these traditions produced insights of immense sophistication. They were right about reality in ways the desert prophets never were. But they fractured into schools, argued among themselves, and admitted doubt. Their very brilliance created divisions. And division is fatal in the struggle for power. Nuance does not raise armies; paradox does not organize empires. People do not die for hypotheses. They die for certainties.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam understood this from the beginning. They did not aim to refine truth; they aimed to discipline populations. The Torah was not a philosophy but a constitution, regulating everything from diet to contracts, from purity to punishment. The absurdity of imagining the infinite Creator concerned with the boiling of goats or the cutting of beards is precisely the point: such absurdity cannot be rationally contested, only obeyed. By turning daily life into a theater of compliance, Judaism bound its people together across exile and persecution. The irrational claim of chosenness, unprovable and exclusive, made survival possible. The philosopher Spinoza saw through it, argued that God was nature itself, that miracles were illusions. He was cursed and excommunicated, his name damned day and night. Spinoza was right, but powerless. The community was wrong, but it endured.

Christianity magnified the formula. To proclaim that a crucified criminal was the eternal Son of God and the only path to salvation is, rationally, madness. Yet this madness conquered Europe. Martyrs turned persecution into strength, the resurrection turned death into victory, and Constantine’s conversion turned absurdity into empire. Councils voted on dogma, emperors enforced it, armies marched under it. Heresy was not argued against but annihilated. The Nicene Creed prevailed not because it was true but because it was enforced. The Inquisition institutionalized this contempt for reason, burning books and bodies alike. Galileo’s telescope showed the heavens to be other than scripture taught; the church silenced him, preferring obedience to truth. Bruno imagined infinite worlds and was burned alive. The lesson was clear: reason may illuminate, but obedience rules.

Islam carried the same structure with ferocity. Muhammad declared himself the final prophet, the Qur’an the uncreated word of God, the shari‘a the eternal law. With this, debate became treason. Within a century of his death, Arab armies conquered from Spain to India, not by technology or numbers but by cohesion. The doctrine of jihad turned conquest into duty, unbelief into war, obedience into paradise. For a brief moment, rationalists like the Mu‘tazilites tried to subordinate revelation to reason, insisting the Qur’an was created and God’s justice rational. They were crushed. The slogan “no reasoning in matters of faith” became orthodoxy. Philosophers like Averroes were exiled, their books burned. Monasteries like Nalanda in India, with their centuries of rational debate, were annihilated by Muslim armies. The pattern was relentless: wherever reason flourished, irrationality struck it down.

What these faiths understood is that absurdity unifies more than truth. To claim the infinite speaks in human words, to claim that eternity cares about circumcision, to claim that paradise awaits the suicide bomber—none of this is rational. But it is powerful. It cannot be refuted because it cannot be tested. It cannot be corrected because it brands correction heresy. It demands obedience, and obedience mobilizes. That is why irrationality has ruled the world, while reason survives only in enclaves.

The Enlightenment seemed to promise reversal. Science, empiricism, and skepticism dethroned superstition. Voltaire mocked the church, Newton discovered laws of nature, Kant redefined reason itself. For a moment, truth appeared victorious. But even then irrationality adapted. Nationalism, fascism, communism—secular religions without gods—mimicked the structure of faith. They demanded obedience, punished heresy, glorified violence. The twentieth century slaughtered more in the name of race and class than Christianity and Islam had killed in the name of God. Once again, reason was powerless against irrational loyalty.This is the tragedy of history: that the philosopher has always been right, but the prophet has always been victorious. The Buddha was right that all is impermanent; Śaṅkara was right that self and world are one; Socrates was right that unexamined faith is dangerous; Galileo was right that the earth moves; Spinoza was right that nature is God. But none of them ruled. Their truths survive in books, while the lies of prophets rule in laws, armies, and empires. History rewards obedience, not truth. That is why the world is as it is.

The durability of irrationality lies in its capacity to turn weakness into strength. A rational claim must justify itself constantly; an irrational claim need only be repeated. The philosopher revises, retracts, concedes; the prophet commands, condemns, declares. Rationality is fragile because it admits error, fragile because it welcomes diversity, fragile because it knows no claim can be absolute. Irrationality is strong precisely because it is absurd. It cannot be corrected, and therefore it cannot be weakened. “I believe because it is absurd,” Tertullian boasted, and in that boast lies the key to two millennia of conquest.

Judaism mastered survival by walling itself off with law. The chosen people endured empire after empire, surviving not by reasoned persuasion but by ritual that bound them tighter the more the world pressed against them. Christianity universalized the formula, converting absurdity into empire. Islam weaponized it with terrifying speed, spreading across continents with an idea so irrational it could not be questioned: that the Qur’an was uncreated and Muhammad the last prophet. Each of these faiths built not merely communities but civilizations that subordinated all other loyalties—tribe, city, family, philosophy—beneath the demand for obedience. They created civilizations immune to doubt. And doubt, the philosopher’s noblest tool, is poison to power.

Where reason flourished—in Athens, in Nalanda, in Alexandria—it produced splendor but not sovereignty. Socrates was executed for his questions; Nalanda was burned for its libraries; the Alexandrian scrolls fed bonfires. Everywhere, the philosopher’s lamp was extinguished by the prophet’s torch. Why? Because the philosopher multiplies voices. One school disputes another, one thinker revises another. This plurality is the glory of reason, but plurality is weakness when matched against the singular command of faith. When a people must fight, plurality scatters; singularity rallies. When a people must obey, plurality delays; singularity demands. Thus irrationality forged armies, while reason fostered arguments. The outcome was inevitable: armies defeat arguments.

Even in its moments of resurgence, reason has struggled to rule. The Enlightenment was dazzling, yet it remained an elite project. Newton, Voltaire, Kant, and Locke wrote for readers who could afford libraries. The peasantry did not march for rationalism. They marched for churches and kings. When revolutions came, they did not march for nuance but for slogans—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—absolutes dressed in secular clothes. And when reason tried to mobilize through ideology, it had to disguise itself as faith. Marx claimed to be scientific, but Lenin and Stalin turned him into scripture, complete with catechism, prophets, heretics, and holy wars. Mao read dialectical materialism as though it were divine revelation, unleashing fanaticism on a scale that rivaled crusades and jihads. Rational systems, to command power, were forced to adopt the irrational structures they despised.

The tragedy of modernity is that even when reason seemed victorious, it was never secure. Science gave humanity extraordinary power, yet that power was placed in the hands of states that justified themselves with irrational myths. The bomb was built by reason, but its use was decided by men who claimed destiny, providence, or manifest mission. Climate science measures the future with precision, yet politicians dismiss it with sermons or slogans. Medicine eradicates disease, yet billions still turn to prayer or quackery when faced with mortality. The irrational still rules hearts even as the rational sustains bodies.

The truth is that irrationality has always understood power better than reason. It understands that humans crave certainty, not complexity; unity, not nuance; absolutes, not arguments. The masses do not want provisional truths that may be revised tomorrow; they want eternal truths, even if false. The philosopher offers hypotheses, the prophet offers commandments. The philosopher invites dissent, the prophet condemns it. The philosopher admits ignorance, the prophet claims revelation. And in politics, in war, in history, revelation always triumphs over ignorance admitted.

Look at the record. Judaism survives while Babylon, Rome, and countless empires lie in ruins. Christianity ruled Europe for a thousand years, through crusades and inquisitions, crushing every rationalist who dared to speak too freely. Islam stormed across continents, built caliphates, and still commands the loyalty of over a billion souls. Meanwhile, the rationalist traditions remain scattered. Vedānta survives in monasteries, Buddhism in pockets, logical empiricism in classrooms, dialectical materialism in books few read outside political sects. They illuminate, but they do not dominate. They explain the world, but they do not rule it. Their truths are enduring, but their power is negligible.

And now, in the twenty-first century, the price of this imbalance has become catastrophic. Irrationality, once the engine of empire, is now the engine of destruction. It fuels terrorism, where men kill and die for paradise. It fuels populism, where nations vote for slogans over solutions. It fuels ecological denial, where leaders reject science for myths as the planet burns. It fuels nuclear brinkmanship, where leaders invoke destiny as they gamble with annihilation. Irrationality was once the cement of civilizations; now it is the acid corroding them. The same structures that gave cohesion in antiquity now produce chaos in modernity. The prophet’s certainty, once a weapon of conquest, is now a recipe for extinction.

The philosopher sees this and despairs. How can arguments defeat armies? How can evidence defeat faith? How can complexity defeat certainty? The philosopher knows humanity cannot survive without reason, yet history shows humanity does not survive with reason alone. The problem is not that reason is false—it is more true than any scripture—but that truth is weak, and irrationality is strong. The unfinished struggle between the two is the central drama of history. The question now is whether reason can finally learn the lesson of its defeats, whether it can grasp power without becoming its opposite, whether it can inspire loyalty without demanding blindness. For if it cannot, then once again the prophets will triumph, and this time their triumph may be humanity’s last.

The philosopher’s defeat is not an accident but the logic of history itself. Those who honor doubt, inquiry, and multiplicity are always at a disadvantage against those who weaponize certainty. That is why empires rose not where reason flowered but where obedience was enforced. India could produce Śaṅkara’s dazzling vision of nondualism and Nāgārjuna’s devastating dialectics, but when Muslim armies crossed the Hindu Kush, it was not monks and logicians who resisted but fractured kings who were quickly crushed. Nalanda’s libraries, filled with centuries of inquiry, were put to the torch by Bakhtiyar Khilji’s soldiers. The books burned for months, according to later accounts, while the monks were slaughtered or driven into exile. That was the end of one of the world’s great experiments in reason, and it was destroyed not by superior arguments but by the irrational faith of men who believed paradise awaited them for burning paper and blood.

Greece, too, proves the same lesson. Athens gave the world Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, yet it could not defend itself against Macedon or Rome. Socrates was condemned by his own city because reason destabilized obedience. Plato dreamed of philosopher-kings but ended up tutoring tyrants. Aristotle taught Alexander, who built an empire on conquest, not contemplation. Once Rome adopted Christianity, Greek philosophy was absorbed only insofar as it could be chained to dogma. Aristotle was baptized by Aquinas, but his independence was neutered. The Academy and the Lyceum became footnotes in a world ruled by bishops and popes.

Even in the West’s Renaissance and Enlightenment, when reason seemed to burst free, irrationality remained the arbiter of power. Galileo’s telescope showed truths that shattered scripture, yet he was forced to kneel before inquisitors. Bruno imagined infinite worlds and was burned alive in Rome. Descartes fled for fear of the church. Spinoza was cursed by his own community. Voltaire, Kant, Hume—all flourished only because secular rulers tolerated them, not because the masses rallied to their ideas. The peasants did not rise for empiricism; they rose for prophets and kings. The French Revolution, in theory a rational uprising, quickly degenerated into irrational violence. Liberty, equality, fraternity gave way to guillotines and cults of personality. Rational slogans could mobilize only when stripped of nuance and turned into absolutes. Even revolutions that proclaimed reason descended into faith.

The Enlightenment’s great gift was science, but even science, in practice, was powerless to govern. Newton gave laws of nature, but kings still ruled by divine right. Darwin explained evolution, but pulpits thundered against him and continue to do so. The logical positivists of the twentieth century demanded verifiability, but churches filled with worshippers who demanded nothing but faith. Quantum physics explained the indeterminacy of reality, but prophets still claimed certainty about eternity. Science illuminated, but politics remained in darkness. The irrational mind knew what power required, and the rational mind did not.

The irony is cruel. Even secular ideologies that claimed to be rational—Marxism, socialism, liberalism—discovered that to seize power, they had to mimic religion. Lenin transformed Marx into a prophet, the Communist Manifesto into scripture, dialectical materialism into dogma. Stalin purged heretics and enforced orthodoxy with inquisitorial terror. Mao turned the Little Red Book into a holy text, his portrait into an icon. These regimes murdered millions in the name of rational history, but their structures were as irrational as any church or mosque. They demanded faith in the party, obedience to the leader, sacrifice for the cause. Rational ideas only gained power by becoming irrational dogmas. Reason, to mobilize, betrayed itself.

The same is true of nationalism and fascism. Germany, the most educated nation in Europe, with Goethe and Kant in its heritage, embraced Hitler’s myth of blood and soil. Irrationality turned a modern industrial society into a cult of race, complete with its own scripture in Mein Kampf and its rituals of obedience at Nuremberg rallies. Millions followed him not because of reasoned arguments but because of irrational faith in destiny. The most rational achievements of humanity—railways, industry, chemistry—were harnessed to the most irrational goals: extermination, conquest, apocalypse. Irrationality devoured reason, and reason built the tools of its own destruction.

This is the story repeated across centuries: reason explains, irrationality commands. Reason questions, irrationality kills. Reason doubts, irrationality conquers. The philosopher hesitates before the abyss; the prophet leaps and drags nations with him. Rational traditions survive in fragments—books, footnotes, classrooms—while irrational traditions build empires, write laws, and send armies to die. This is not because irrationality is truer, but because it is stronger where strength matters most: in forging obedience.

And now, in our age of science, irrationality has not disappeared but metastasized. Terrorists kill themselves and others for paradise; populists win elections with slogans devoid of logic; leaders gamble with nuclear weapons as though destiny shields them from miscalculation. The climate warms, seas rise, ecosystems collapse, yet masses prefer denial to evidence, myth to measurement, certainty to complexity. Irrationality has not withered in the age of reason; it has adapted, infecting every new technology with the same old hunger for obedience. The smartphone spreads conspiracy faster than philosophy, the internet amplifies lies more than truths. The very tools of reason are hijacked by irrationality to entrench its power.

The philosopher might hope that truth, in the end, will prevail—that evidence will accumulate until even the blind must see. But history mocks this hope. Truth is fragile. It can be ignored, silenced, burned, exiled. It requires patience, debate, correction. Irrationality requires none of these. It only requires repetition and violence. It can endure in caves and deserts, in pulpits and parliaments, indifferent to disproof. That is why irrationality has outlasted every empire and every philosophy. It may be wrong about the cosmos, but it is right about power, and history rewards power.The stakes now are no longer empires but the planet itself. Irrationality once built civilizations; now it risks destroying civilization altogether. One God may have unified tribes in the desert, but one God, armed with nuclear missiles, can annihilate humanity. The irrational loyalty that built armies now blocks the action required to prevent ecological collapse. The irrational obedience that preserved nations now fuels sectarian wars that bleed across borders. Irrationality, once the secret of survival, is now the recipe for extinction. And yet it still rules, while reason whispers from the margins.

The unfinished struggle between reason and irrationality defines not only our past but our present. It is tempting to think the Enlightenment solved the problem, that once Europe rediscovered skepticism and science, irrationality was permanently dethroned. But history did not end in the eighteenth century. The old gods have not retreated; they have simply changed their costumes. Billions still bow to scriptures written in deserts, millions still vote for leaders who invoke destiny, countless citizens still organize their lives around rituals that defy evidence. Even in the secular West, irrationality returns under new banners—nationalism, conspiracy, populism—demanding the same obedience, offering the same certainties, promising the same violence.

What reason has never understood is that truth is not enough. Truth explains but does not compel. Evidence convinces but does not mobilize. Science proves, philosophy clarifies, logic refines, but none of these inspire the masses to march or die. For that, one needs myth. One needs certainty. One needs the irrational promise of absolutes. People crave to be told not merely what is, but what must be, and to obey without question. The philosopher doubts; the prophet demands. And in politics, it is demand, not doubt, that wins.

This is why every rational tradition has lived under siege. Socrates was executed, not celebrated. Galileo was silenced, not honored. Spinoza was cursed, not embraced. Bruno was burned alive. The rationalists of Islam were crushed, their books consigned to fire. Buddhist monks of Nalanda were slaughtered. Everywhere the same pattern: rationality survives in exile, irrationality rules on the throne. And yet, despite persecution, rationality never dies. It smolders in manuscripts, in monasteries, in laboratories, waiting for crises that prove its necessity. The fact that we still have Socrates’ dialogues, that Spinoza’s works are read, that Newton’s laws endure, shows that irrationality can suppress reason but never eliminate it.

Still, survival is not victory. The philosopher’s endurance has not translated into power. The masses do not pledge allegiance to reason, nor swear oaths on empiricism, nor fight wars for dialectics. They remain loyal to prophets, priests, parties, and leaders who give them certainty, however false. The Enlightenment was a spark, but sparks die when storms of irrationality sweep over them. And storms keep coming. Fascism, communism, jihadism, fundamentalism—the names change, but the structure remains: absolute truth enforced by violence. Reason, meanwhile, hesitates. It refuses absolutes, and therefore refuses the very foundation of mass power.

But in the twenty-first century, the old balance can no longer hold. Humanity faces crises that cannot be solved by myth. Climate collapse does not listen to prayers. Nuclear arsenals cannot be disarmed by slogans. Pandemics will not be healed by sermons. These are problems that yield only to evidence, to science, to rational cooperation. For the first time, survival itself requires reason to prevail, not merely to persist. Irrationality may have built empires, but it will destroy the planet if left in command. The irony is merciless: the very force that once ensured survival now ensures extinction.

And yet, irrationality still rules. Politicians deny climate science to appease voters. Preachers rail against vaccines while viruses spread. Leaders gamble with nuclear weapons while invoking providence. Populists spread conspiracies that poison democracy. Terrorists kill in the name of paradise. The tools of reason—computers, airplanes, the internet—are hijacked by irrationality to spread lies, to drop bombs, to inflame obedience. The smartphone, built by rational engineers, becomes the pulpit of every false prophet with Wi-Fi. The internet, humanity’s greatest library, is flooded with superstition and delusion. Irrationality adapts faster than reason, because irrationality has no rules, no standards, no limits.

The philosopher sees this with despair. He knows truth is on his side, but he has seen truth lose for centuries. He knows evidence is irrefutable, but he has watched evidence ignored. He knows doubt is noble, but he has seen doubt punished as heresy. He knows reason must win if humanity is to live, yet history tells him reason never wins. And so he asks: what must change? The answer is terrifying: reason must learn power. It must learn to organize, to inspire, to mobilize. It must learn to create communities that can rival churches and mosques, nations that can rival empires, myths that can rival revelations. It must build loyalty without demanding blindness, discipline without demanding dogma, unity without demanding violence.

Perhaps this seems impossible. Reason resists myth, resists dogma, resists obedience. It thrives in questions, not commandments. Yet if it refuses to learn, it will lose again, and this time the loss will be final. The planet cannot endure another millennium of irrationality in power. There is no room left for inquisitions, crusades, jihads, or cults of race and nation. The stakes are no longer empires but extinction. Either reason seizes power or irrationality drags humanity into the abyss.

This is not prophecy; it is necessity. The past was written by prophets who understood that violence and obedience build empires. The future, if it is to exist, must be written by philosophers who understand that evidence and cooperation build survival. The irrationality of one God once forged civilizations, but in the nuclear age one God is annihilation. The philosopher may not crave power, but if he does not seize it, the prophet will, and the prophet’s victory will mean humanity’s end.

The tragedy of civilization is that the wrong side of history has always won. Those who doubted, those who questioned, those who searched for truth with patience and humility—they spoke more clearly about the nature of reality than any prophet ever did. But they did not command loyalty. They did not inspire crusades or jihads. They did not build nations with hymns and flags. They asked people to think, and people preferred to believe. And so the world we inherited is not the world of Socrates, the Buddha, or Spinoza, but the world of Moses, Paul, and Muhammad. We live in societies constructed by prophets of obedience, not philosophers of doubt.

This is why the arc of history has been bloody and relentless. Crusades were not fought for nuance, inquisitions were not staged for complexity, jihads were not declared for paradox. They were fought, staged, and declared for certainty. Irrationality, however false, has the power of cohesion. Rationality, however true, has the weakness of division. That is the core lesson of history, and it is a lesson philosophers too often ignore. They imagine truth will triumph by virtue of being truth. But truth does not march. Truth does not chant. Truth does not kill. And in history, it is marching, chanting, and killing that carve borders and build empires.

Yet the philosopher’s defeat has never been total. Reason survives in manuscripts smuggled through persecutions, in monasteries that outlasted wars, in laboratories hidden from inquisitors. It survives because even the prophets of obedience need the tools of reason. They need astronomers to navigate, engineers to build, physicians to heal. They need philosophers when it suits them, and burn them when it does not. Reason is tolerated only as long as it serves obedience, but tolerated it is, and thus it survives like an ember under ashes. That ember has flared before—in Athens, in the Indian universities, in the Enlightenment—and it can flare again.

The question is whether this time the ember can become a fire. The old balance—irrationality ruling, reason retreating—cannot endure in a world where irrationality now wields weapons of extinction. The prophets of the desert once promised paradise; now they promise apocalypse. They once built empires; now they risk destroying civilization altogether. To continue this pattern is suicide. Humanity no longer has the luxury of letting irrationality rule while reason survives in exile. Either reason learns to govern, or there will be nothing left to govern.

What would it mean for reason to rule? It would not mean turning rationality into another dogma. It would not mean building inquisitions in the name of science, or gulags in the name of dialectics. That would be to repeat the failures of the twentieth century, when even rational ideologies became irrational cults. No, it would mean something harder: building institutions of power that are loyal to evidence, to debate, to correction. It would mean societies where truth is provisional but binding, where laws are grounded in facts not fantasies, where leaders are accountable to evidence not to revelation. It would mean replacing the myth of destiny with the discipline of doubt. It would mean training masses not to obey but to think—and that is the hardest revolution of all.

Skeptics will say this is impossible. Humanity, they argue, craves myth, craves obedience, craves absolutes. Without them, societies dissolve. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps the prophets will always return, draped in new robes, armed with new certainties. But if so, then humanity’s fate is sealed. For in the age of nuclear weapons, climate collapse, pandemics, and artificial intelligence, obedience to myth is death. We can no longer afford the luxury of irrationality. The deserts that once gave gods to tribes now give fire to the whole planet. One God was once a slogan of unity; now it is a recipe for extinction.

The only hope is that reason, humbled by centuries of defeat, learns to fight differently. It must stop being content with exile, stop retreating into footnotes and classrooms, stop accepting marginality as its destiny. It must seize the language of power without becoming power’s slave. It must learn to inspire loyalty without demanding blindness. It must forge myths of truth, symbols of evidence, rituals of inquiry that can rally societies as effectively as scriptures and sermons once did. It must make doubt sacred and correction honorable. Only then can reason step onto the stage of history not as a spectator but as a ruler.

This is the demand of our age: that truth finally learn power. For if it does not, irrationality will triumph once more, and this time its triumph will be final. There will be no philosophers left to mourn the ruins, no monks left to preserve the scrolls, no scientists left to whisper of what might have been. The prophets will have their victory, and humanity will have its extinction. That is the choice before us: to live under reason or to die under faith. The future belongs either to the philosopher who seizes power or to the prophet who destroys it. History has always chosen the prophet. For the sake of survival, it must now choose the philosopher.

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