Article59

History rewards the Irrational.

History rewards the irrational. That is the lesson one must draw from the strange and often tragic triumph of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They did not conquer the world because their doctrines were reasonable, but precisely because they were not. They were militant in their rejection of ambiguity, unbending in their refusal of doubt, and ruthless in turning irrational faith into political cohesion. To scoff at their illogic is to miss the point. Their power lay in their very disdain for reason.

Consider the alternative traditions. India’s Advaita Vedāntins explored the primacy of consciousness; Buddhists in the Mahāyāna lineage mapped the emptiness of all phenomena; modern logical empiricists dissect the criteria of meaning; dialectical materialists insist on history as the field of contradiction; quantum physicists uncover indeterminacy at the very heart of matter. Each in its way points toward subtlety, paradox, and correction. They accept the provisional. They welcome complexity. They cultivate what Karl Popper called falsifiability: the willingness to let even the most sacred claim be tested against experience. If they are lucky, they secure university posts or gather small circles of disciples. But the monasteries and classrooms they inhabit are not seats of empire. They are islands of inquiry, not capitals of command.

The Semitic religions took the opposite road. Monotheism was not a discovery of divinity but an invention of discipline. To declare one God was to declare war on every rival god, every competing priesthood, every philosophy that dared question. One God meant one law, one scripture, one prophet, one hierarchy. The psychology was simple: dissent became rebellion against heaven, doubt became a crime against the universe. Such a system is not only coercive; it is brilliant in its coercion. It transforms irrationality into cohesion. An absurdity repeated in chorus becomes an anthem. A myth enforced by sword becomes a constitution.

History bears this out. The Crusades were not rational calculations of interest but irrational eruptions of apocalyptic faith, yet they mobilized entire societies for generations. The early Islamic conquests were fueled by belief in the absolute unity of God, a doctrine that made compromise impossible and war inevitable; by the eighth century they stretched from Spain to India. Christian Europe turned irrationality into a system: inquisitions, witch trials, forced conversions. Spinoza was excommunicated, Galileo silenced, Averroes exiled. Whenever reason threatened to dilute authority, it was stamped out. Irrationality was not a flaw in the system but its operating principle.

And yet, one cannot deny the genius of this design. People do not march for dialectics. They do not sacrifice for epistemology. They march for certainties. They die for absolutes. The great philosophers could persuade a few students in the agora; the prophets could compel entire nations. The irrationality that repels the intellectual is exactly what rallies the multitude. Where the philosopher hesitates, the prophet commands. Where the logician doubts, the priest executes. Where the empiricist admits error, the believer enforces dogma. The result is predictable: philosophers produce libraries; monotheists produce armies.

The suppression of reason was systematic. In Judaism, rationalist movements such as those of Maimonides were tolerated only insofar as they remained within the bounds of halakha; the moment philosophy exceeded law, it was curtailed. In Christianity, scholasticism itself was policed; heresy trials were designed to keep reason subordinate to doctrine. In Islam, the Mu‘tazilites—rational theologians who tried to reconcile revelation with reason—were crushed, and the slogan “there is no reasoning in matters of faith” became the orthodoxy. It was always the same pattern: reason may serve faith, but never govern it. Thus irrationality became institutionalized.

This explains why the Semitic religions did not only survive but expanded, while more rational traditions receded. Nalanda University was burned to the ground by Muslim invaders; its libraries, which held centuries of subtle reasoning, turned to ash. The intellectual traditions of India and Greece became the heritage of scattered elites, while the monotheisms produced enduring empires. Their deliberate irrationality was a weapon: it made them impervious to critique, immune to contradiction, and relentless in their will to conquer.

But what looked like strength in one age looks like danger in another. The same disdain for reason that built crusades and caliphates now fuels endless conflict. The twentieth century saw genocides and sectarian wars justified by absolute certainties. The twenty-first is already marked by religious terrorism, culture wars, and ideological rigidity that makes compromise impossible. The irrationality that once conquered has become the irrationality that threatens survival. If one God is violence, then one God is also nuclear violence, ecological violence, civilizational violence. The price of empire is now planetary.

And yet the lesson remains bitter: those who sought truth lost the world; those who scorned truth won it. Dialectical materialists, logical empiricists, Buddhists, Vedāntins, physicists—they may have been right about reality. They may even hold the keys to human survival, since only reason can confront climate, technology, and global justice. But they never learned to wield irrationality as an instrument of power. The Semites did. That is why they rule. That is why we live under their laws, currencies, and myths. Correctness is no guarantee of victory. In history, power belongs to those who can transform irrationality into discipline, violence, and empire.

History has never been a court of truth; it has always been a theater of power. Those who pursued truth—the philosophers, the skeptics, the contemplatives—built monasteries, libraries, and laboratories. Those who pursued power—the prophets, priests, and conquerors—built armies, empires, and laws. The irony is as bitter as it is consistent: the ones who saw reality more clearly lost the world, while those who deliberately scorned reason ruled it. For centuries, dialectical materialists, logical empiricists, quantum physicists, Advaita Vedantins, and Mahāyāna Buddhists have refined the tools of logic, debate, experiment, and meditation. They sought reality in paradoxes and proofs, in equations and sutras, in dialectics and emptiness. If fortune smiled, they found a place in the cloister or the university. But no matter how accurate their insight, their reward was obscurity. By contrast, the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam mastered not the nature of reality but the mechanics of obedience. They understood that power does not require truth, it requires unity, and unity requires the suppression of reason. Their triumph lay in enthroning irrationality itself as the highest principle, turning blind faith into discipline and violence into destiny.

The core of monotheism is not theology but psychology. To say there is one God is to say there must be one law, one ruler, one book, one truth, one hierarchy, one army. Polytheism breeds debate, contradiction, and pluralism; philosophy thrives in that space. Monotheism annihilates it. One God is not a discovery of metaphysics but an invention of politics. It is a declaration that dissent is treason not only against the state but against the cosmos. From that moment onward, all alternative gods, all rival truths, all competing voices are not merely mistaken but blasphemous, intolerable, to be exterminated. This is why monotheism was violent in its very birth. It is not a revelation of heaven but a strategy of earth, a program for conquest. Its genius lies in its capacity to weaponize irrationality, to turn absurdity into cohesion and superstition into empire.

The philosopher knows that reason divides. Socrates asked questions until the city condemned him. The Buddha taught that all things are empty and impermanent, a truth that dissolved identities rather than forged armies. The Vedantin taught that self and world were one, a claim profound but politically useless. The logical empiricist insists that meaning must be testable; the dialectical materialist insists that history unfolds through contradictions. All of these positions are rational, critical, and in many respects closer to reality than the myths of prophets. But they fracture communities. They multiply schools and sects, each correcting the other, each doubting the other, each pursuing nuance. And nuance does not raise taxes. Doubt does not win wars. Skepticism does not build an empire.

The prophet, by contrast, scorns reason. He declares, he commands, he demands belief. He offers not a hypothesis but a revelation. He tolerates no rivals, no debates, no doubts. The absurdity of his claim—that the infinite speaks in human words, that one tribe has been chosen above all others, that one desert god rules the whole cosmos—is not a weakness but a strength. It cannot be refuted, because it cannot be tested. It resists correction, because it brands correction itself as heresy. It is irrationality raised to the level of absolute. And irrationality, precisely because it cannot be broken by reason, produces cohesion. People march for such absolutes. They die for such certainties. They kill for them too.

The structural genius of Semitic religions lies in this inversion: what is weak in philosophy becomes strong in politics, and what is strong in philosophy becomes weak in politics. The rationalist tradition produces brilliance but dispersion. It generates thinkers who correct each other into irrelevance, monks who debate subtle metaphysics while empires collapse around them. The irrationalist tradition produces cohesion. It generates armies of believers willing to enforce absurdities as law, to stamp out heresy with fire, to fight to the death for illusions. In politics, it is the latter that wins.

This is why the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is not one of intellectual refinement but of institutional domination. Judaism survived exile and dispersion not by reason but by the irrational claim of chosenness, reinforced by law and ritual. Christianity conquered Europe not by subtle theology but by the cross imposed by Constantine and the sword of Charlemagne. Islam erupted from Arabia not by philosophy but by jihad, a faith that declared itself final and absolute, brooking no rivals. Each system built its empire not on reasoned persuasion but on the machinery of obedience: law codes, inquisitions, shari‘a, canon, halakha, tithes, jihad, crusade. The philosopher was exiled, the heretic burned, the skeptic silenced, the rationalist outlawed. In the contest between truth and obedience, obedience always won.

To call this irrational is not to insult it but to describe its strength. Rationality doubts itself; irrationality commands. Rationality hesitates; irrationality acts. Rationality accepts multiplicity; irrationality enforces unity. Rationality opens space for debate; irrationality closes it in the name of purity. From Moses to Muhammad, from the Crusades to the Inquisition, the record is clear: irrationality was the engine of conquest. What began as theology became politics, and what began as politics became empire.

This is the true scandal of history: that irrationality, once enthroned, is harder to uproot than reason is to plant. A rational claim must constantly justify itself; an irrational claim just repeats itself. “There is no God but God,” “Hear O Israel, the Lord is One,” “There is no salvation outside the Church”—such slogans require no proof, only obedience. They lodge themselves in the psyche like commands. They shape laws, armies, and economies. They define who is insider and outsider, who is saved and damned, who lives and who dies. And because they are immune to critique, they endure where reason falters.

So we live in a world shaped less by those who sought truth than by those who scorned it. The legacy of reason survives in fragments: in universities, in laboratories, in books few read. The legacy of irrationality survives in nations, armies, currencies, and myths billions still obey. If we want to understand why this is so, we must recognize the structural genius of irrationality. It unifies the masses, sanctifies violence, and enshrines power. Truth may belong to the philosophers, but history belongs to the prophets.

Judaism, the oldest of the three Semitic religions, shows in its very birth the genius of irrationality. It did not spread by converting strangers, as Buddhism did across Asia or Christianity later across Europe; it survived by building a wall around itself, a legal and ritual fortress that made its members into a people apart. The claim of chosenness was not a philosophical proposition but a political device. To insist that one tribe had been chosen by the Creator of the universe was not rational, nor could it ever be proved. But it bound that tribe together in the face of exile, conquest, and dispersion. The absurdity of the claim became its strength: it was non-negotiable, immune to evidence, impervious to reason. A Jew could not reason his way out of being chosen any more than an outsider could reason his way into it. The exclusivity was absolute. Philosophy divides; chosenness unites.

The Torah itself functions less as theology than as constitution. Its endless regulations about food, clothing, ritual purity, contracts, and punishments are the glue of a people under siege. They turn everyday life into a theater of obedience. Every bite of food, every Sabbath step, every business transaction is framed as compliance with the will of God. This is not about truth; it is about control. By sacralizing the minutiae of life, the system makes law into destiny. One may debate whether God exists, but one cannot escape the binding force of law if one belongs to the community. The irrational claim—that the infinite cares about how you boil a goat or cut your beard—becomes the cement of identity. The philosopher may sneer at the triviality, but the community survives.

When philosophy did enter Judaism, it was treated with suspicion, and rightly so from the standpoint of power. Maimonides in the twelfth century tried to reconcile Aristotelian reason with Torah, but even his project was seen as dangerous. In Montpellier, his works were burned by fellow Jews; in other communities, rabbis issued bans against philosophical study. The pattern is clear: reason is tolerated only if it bows to revelation. The moment it threatens to dissolve the authority of law, it is cast out. Spinoza in the seventeenth century pushed the logic further. He dared to suggest that scripture was a human product, that God was identical with nature, that miracles were impossible. For this, he was excommunicated in the harshest terms, cursed “by day and by night,” cast into exile. The community understood instinctively that if reason triumphed, cohesion would dissolve. Spinoza was right, but the synagogue survived and Spinoza became an outcast. Again the pattern: truth loses, power wins.

The genius of Judaism lay in making irrationality into endurance. Scattered across continents, stripped of land, denied political sovereignty, Jews survived because their irrationality was portable. A temple can be destroyed; a law carried in the heart cannot. Rome crushed Judea, but could not crush the Torah. Christianity converted pagans by force; Judaism survived by refusing to convert, by holding itself apart. It was not interested in persuasion but in preservation. In that refusal to dilute itself lay its extraordinary resilience. Rationally speaking, a religion that discourages converts should vanish. Irrationally, Judaism endured.

This survival came at a cost. The same exclusivity that preserved identity also generated hostility. To claim chosenness is to invite resentment. To declare one law above all others is to court conflict. Jewish history is littered with persecutions, expulsions, pogroms. Yet the very irrationality that provoked hatred also sustained cohesion. The irrational claim was unassailable. No argument could shake it. No evidence could refute it. No suffering could dissolve it. This is why, even after centuries of exile, Jews could return to the idea of a promised land with the same fervor. Irrationality has memory; reason forgets.

It is not an accident that the great Jewish rationalists were either silenced or exiled. Spinoza is the clearest case, but not the only one. Every attempt to let philosophy dominate scripture threatened the fabric of obedience. The community instinctively understood that truth was less valuable than survival. Better to expel a thinker than to weaken the fortress. Better to curse Spinoza than to risk unraveling law. In this sense, Judaism demonstrates in miniature the broader principle: irrationality, precisely because it is false, is stronger than reason when survival is at stake.

Modernity has not erased this pattern. Even today, the cohesion of Jewish identity rests not on philosophical argument but on the irrationality of tradition and chosenness. One may be secular, atheist, critical, yet still Jewish by birth, bound by a law that no longer even requires belief. That is the triumph of irrationality: it does not ask for conviction, it imposes identity. It cares nothing for reasoned assent; it survives by ritual, law, and memory. Rational philosophies must be learned and chosen; irrational identities are inherited and enforced.

This is why Judaism, though small in numbers, wields influence far beyond its size. Its power is not demographic but structural. The law creates cohesion; cohesion creates resilience; resilience translates into disproportionate presence in finance, politics, and culture. Critics may point to “Jewish influence” in conspiratorial tones, but the explanation is simpler: a people bound by irrational law and chosenness outlasted every empire that sought to annihilate them. Babylon fell, Rome fell, Christendom fractured, Islam splintered—Judaism endured. The philosopher may shake his head at the absurdity of dietary laws or Sabbath rules, but the empire of reason has crumbled again and again. The empire of irrationality has outlasted them all.

This lesson would be inherited and amplified by Christianity and Islam. Where Judaism perfected cohesion through exclusion, Christianity and Islam perfected cohesion through inclusion—by making irrationality universal. Instead of one tribe chosen, all tribes must bow to one God, one prophet, one book. What Judaism practiced inwardly, Christianity and Islam projected outwardly. The result was conquest on a scale the world had never seen.

Christianity inherited the Jewish genius for irrational cohesion and amplified it into a program for empire. Where Judaism bound one people together through chosenness, Christianity universalized the formula: all people must submit to one God through one savior, one church, one creed. It was an audacious leap. What had been the exclusive law of a tribe became the exclusive law of mankind. And that audacity was irrational in the extreme. To claim that a crucified provincial, executed as a common criminal under Roman law, was the eternal son of God and the sole path to salvation is absurd in every rational sense. Yet it was precisely this absurdity that gave Christianity its strength. The scandal of the cross became the rallying point of an empire.

For the first three centuries, Christianity survived on the margins, persecuted by Rome, mocked by philosophers, dismissed by elites. But its very irrationality gave it resilience. It turned suffering into glory, martyrdom into victory. No philosopher could match that alchemy. The Stoics could counsel endurance, the Epicureans could promise tranquility, but the Christians proclaimed that death itself had been defeated in Christ’s resurrection. Reason could not compete with such irrational certainty. When Constantine converted in the fourth century, the irrational became imperial. What had been sectarian doctrine became state law. And with that marriage of throne and altar, Christianity became the organizing principle of Europe for a millennium.

The empire of the cross was not built on persuasion but on power. Councils defined dogma by vote and anathema, not by argument. The Nicene Creed did not win because it was more rational but because it was enforced by the emperor’s sword. Heresies were crushed not in debate halls but in battlefields—Arians, Nestorians, Cathars, all declared outside the fold and exterminated. The church father Tertullian famously proclaimed, “I believe because it is absurd.” He captured the essence of the strategy. Rationality was not an ally but a threat. The more irrational the claim, the more absolute the obedience it demanded. To question was to sin. To reason was to rebel.

The Inquisition institutionalized this logic. Heresy was not treated as an error to be corrected but as a crime to be punished. Books were banned, thinkers silenced, bodies burned. Galileo’s telescope showed that the earth was not the center of the cosmos, but reason had to be silenced because obedience mattered more than truth. Bruno was burned for daring to imagine infinite worlds. Origen, one of the earliest Christian intellectuals, was posthumously condemned. Thomas Aquinas, who tried to integrate Aristotle with Christian faith, was tolerated only because his rationality ultimately bowed before dogma. The pattern repeated endlessly: reason may serve as handmaiden, but revelation must rule as queen. The church understood that its strength lay in irrationality, and it defended that foundation with violence whenever necessary.

The Crusades made the irrationality explicit. To march thousands of miles to kill and die in a foreign land, under the promise that one’s sins would be forgiven, is not rational. It is madness. Yet that madness mobilized whole societies, emptied treasuries, built armies, and reshaped continents. Ordinary peasants who could barely feed themselves marched under the cross to slaughter Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem, convinced they were serving eternal truth. The rationality of survival gave way to the irrationality of faith. That irrationality proved more powerful than any argument of philosophers.

Even the intellectual achievements of Christian Europe were filtered through this prism. Scholasticism, which at first glance looks like a triumph of reason, was in reality a domestication of reason under revelation. The endless debates about angels on pinheads, the labyrinths of logic that circled endlessly around dogma, were not philosophy in the free sense but philosophy shackled to faith. They did not produce independent truth but reinforced obedience. The rare moments when reason threatened to break free—the Renaissance humanists, the early scientists—were swiftly disciplined by the church. Power was never surrendered willingly.

The irrationality of Christianity also produced extraordinary cohesion. Unlike Judaism, which survived as a minority, Christianity aimed for totality. Its genius was to make irrationality into universality. Baptism erased tribal boundaries. The blood of Christ was declared available to all, but only under the condition of absolute submission. This gave Christianity both a missionary zeal and a political unity unprecedented in history. Europe, fragmented into tribes and kingdoms, was knit together by one church, one pope, one creed. Even when fractured in the Reformation, the logic remained the same: absolute truth, absolute obedience, absolute rejection of pluralism. Protestants fought Catholics not over whether truth was absolute but over whose absolute truth would prevail.

The philosopher had no place in this empire of the cross except at the margins or under suspicion. Rationalists like Erasmus, skeptics like Montaigne, scientists like Copernicus, all had to navigate the dangerous waters of irrational faith. Some succeeded by disguising their doubts, others perished. The lesson was clear: reason could exist only insofar as it served obedience. The moment it demanded autonomy, it was crushed.

This history explains why Europe, despite producing extraordinary thinkers, remained in the grip of irrational faith for so long. The philosophers of Greece had been eclipsed by the prophets of Israel. The temples of reason had been replaced by cathedrals of obedience. The library of Alexandria was burned; the university of Paris was built to train clerics, not free thinkers. Even the Renaissance and Enlightenment, which finally reasserted reason, had to struggle against centuries of institutional irrationality. And when they finally broke free, they discovered that irrationality was not dead but merely waiting to return in new forms—nationalism, fascism, even certain secular dogmas that mimicked the structure of faith.

Christianity’s empire of irrationality left a legacy that continues to shape the modern world. Its institutions—churches, universities, laws, calendars—still define much of global culture. Its capacity to transform absurdities into cohesion, violence into virtue, obedience into destiny, remains one of the most successful strategies of power in human history. The crucified criminal became a king of kings not because reason demanded it but because irrationality made it unassailable. That is the paradox at the heart of the West: its greatness in science and philosophy came despite Christianity, not because of it. But its political power, its cohesion, its empires, were forged in the furnace of irrational faith.

The philosopher may insist that absurdity cannot endure, that reason must ultimately prevail. But history shows otherwise. For nearly two millennia, Christianity reigned by enthroning irrationality. And when reason finally did reemerge, it was scarred and cautious, never forgetting how easily it could be crushed.

If Christianity universalized irrationality in Europe, Islam perfected it in the deserts of Arabia and projected it outward with a velocity the world had never seen. In less than a century after Muhammad’s death, Arab armies, carrying the banner of one God and one book, conquered lands from Spain in the west to the Indus in the east. No rational calculation explains such an explosion. The Arabs were not the most numerous, nor the most technologically advanced, nor the wealthiest. What they possessed was the ferocious cohesion of absolute belief. The irrational claim—that one man in Mecca had received the final revelation of the eternal God, superseding every prophet and every scripture before him—was unassailable to those who embraced it. It gave them unity, discipline, and the will to fight to the death.

The early caliphate illustrates the political genius of irrationality. Islam took the Jewish claim of chosenness and the Christian claim of universality and fused them into a single machine of conquest. The Qur’an was not presented as philosophy or poetry but as the direct speech of God, uncreated and eternal, beyond critique. To question it was not to err but to blaspheme. To resist it was not to dissent but to wage war against God. In such a system, debate is impossible, compromise is treason, and tolerance is temporary at best. The doctrine of jihad, far from being a marginal idea, became the logic of expansion: the world divided into the house of Islam and the house of war. With such a worldview, every frontier became a battlefield, every unbeliever a potential subject, every rival god an idol to be smashed.

The irrationality of Islam was codified early in its refusal to separate politics from faith. The caliph was both political ruler and religious successor. Law was not human legislation but shari‘a, divine command. This collapse of distinction between temporal and spiritual authority gave the system immense power. No philosopher, no critic, no rationalist could ever be sovereign, because sovereignty itself was defined as obedience to revelation. The jurists who built the vast edifice of Islamic law were not legislators but interpreters of God’s will, and interpretation itself was bounded by the unassailable irrationality of the Qur’an. A society so organized could expand without hesitation, because every act of war, every tax, every treaty, every punishment was sanctified by heaven.

And expand it did. The Umayyads and Abbasids oversaw an empire that stretched across continents. But at its core was always the same logic: irrationality as cohesion. When rationalists within Islam attempted to assert themselves, the backlash was swift and decisive. The Mu‘tazilites in the ninth century argued that the Qur’an was created, that reason must govern faith, that God’s justice must be rationally understood. For a brief moment, under Caliph al-Ma’mun, rational theology flourished. Scholars translated Greek texts, debated metaphysics, and flirted with the dangerous idea that revelation could be subordinate to reason. But this moment was crushed. Later caliphs reversed course, persecuted the Mu‘tazilites, and enthroned the doctrine that the Qur’an was uncreated, eternal, and beyond questioning. From then on, the slogan “there is no reasoning in matters of faith” became the orthodoxy. Irrationality had reasserted itself as the core of power.

The fate of philosophers under Islam mirrors the fate of rationalists everywhere in the Semitic tradition. Al-Farabi speculated on the harmony of philosophy and prophecy but remained suspect. Avicenna dared to place Aristotle alongside revelation and was accused of heresy. Averroes, the great commentator on Aristotle, was exiled, his books burned in Cordoba, his rationalism driven underground. These men were brilliant, but brilliance was irrelevant when set against the machinery of obedience. The masses rallied not to their arguments but to the jurists who condemned them. Philosophy was allowed to exist only in the shadows, never at the center of power.

The destruction of Nalanda University in India by Muslim invaders in the twelfth century stands as a symbol of this pattern. Nalanda had been one of the greatest centers of Buddhist learning in the world, housing libraries, monasteries, and scholars from across Asia. It represented centuries of rational and contemplative tradition, the very opposite of Semitic irrationality. Its annihilation was deliberate: an empire built on irrational faith could not tolerate a rival empire built on reason and debate. Thousands of monks were slaughtered, the libraries burned, the tradition extinguished. That act was not a deviation but the logical outcome of Islam’s structure. Rationality divides; irrationality conquers.

Nor did Islam restrain its violence to external enemies. Internal dissent was policed with the same fervor. Shi‘a and Sunni slaughtered each other over rival claims to absolute truth. Sufis, who sought mystical union beyond the rigidities of law, were often persecuted, some executed as heretics. The great mystic al-Hallaj was crucified for proclaiming “I am the Truth.” Rationality, mysticism, philosophy—all were subordinated to the same iron rule: obedience to revelation. Anything that threatened the cohesion of irrationality was crushed.

Yet the genius of Islam, like that of Christianity, was that irrationality became not a weakness but a source of cohesion and strength. It mobilized armies across deserts, held together vast territories, and unified diverse peoples under one banner. Rationally, such empires should have fractured quickly under their own weight. Irrationally, they endured for centuries, because they were bound not by reasoned consent but by absolute submission.

Even when Islam encountered modernity, it clung to this structure. Reformers who sought to reconcile Islam with reason—whether in the Ottoman Empire, Iran, or India—found themselves resisted by clerics and masses alike. The deeper the crisis, the stronger the appeal of irrational purity. Fundamentalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is not a deviation but a return to the core. Suicide bombers who kill in the name of God, terrorists who proclaim paradise through slaughter, clerics who deny science and denounce philosophy—they are not aberrations. They are the logical heirs of a system whose strength has always lain in its embrace of irrationality, violence, and obedience.

This explains why Islam, like Christianity and Judaism before it, has proven so durable as a political and social force. Rationality is fragile; it requires debate, patience, evidence, correction. Irrationality is robust; it demands only obedience and violence. In the deserts of Arabia, that robustness became the engine of conquest. From Damascus to Baghdad to Cairo, it became the cement of empire. Even today, in a world saturated with science and technology, the irrationality of Islam commands the loyalty of over a billion souls. That is not an accident. It is the triumph of irrationality over reason, of obedience over truth.

The philosopher may look at this record with despair. What hope can reason have against such power? The answer, if history is a guide, is none—unless reason learns to organize itself with the same discipline, the same cohesion, the same ferocity. For as long as it remains content to be correct while others are content to be powerful, it will remain a spectator while irrationality rules the world.

If the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam demonstrates the triumph of irrationality, the history of India and Greece reveals the defeat of reason. Here the contrast is stark. India produced philosophies of staggering subtlety: the dialectics of Nāgārjuna, the nondualism of Śaṅkara, the atomism of the Vaiśeṣikas, the logic of the Nyāya school. Greece birthed Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, thinkers who dissected the very nature of being, knowledge, and politics. Nowhere else in the ancient world did rational inquiry reach such heights. Yet neither India nor Greece translated that brilliance into lasting political dominance. Their philosophers won the argument but lost the world. Their monasteries and academies flourished for centuries, but they could not withstand the organized violence of irrational faith.

Consider India under Ashoka. In the third century BCE, the Mauryan emperor, horrified by the carnage of his own conquests, embraced Buddhism and proclaimed dharma as the principle of his rule. He renounced further expansion, sent missionaries of compassion across Asia, built stupas instead of fortresses. Rationally, it was a noble experiment: an empire grounded not in violence but in tolerance, persuasion, and non-violence. But in the brutal logic of history, it was a disaster. Ashoka’s successors could not hold the empire together. The missionary religion he championed spread abroad but left India vulnerable. Centuries later, Buddhist monasteries, those great storehouses of reason and debate, were destroyed by Islamic invaders. Nalanda, the Oxford of the East, went up in flames. A thousand years of philosophy could not resist a single century of jihad. Ashoka’s compassion was vindicated morally, but politically it was suicide.

Greece tells the same story. Socrates questioned the gods of the city, demanded rational justification for belief, and was executed for corrupting the youth. Plato founded the Academy, Aristotle the Lyceum. Their ideas shaped philosophy for millennia. Yet when Rome rose, Greece fell. Athens became a province, its philosophers tutors to emperors rather than rulers themselves. Philosophy remained alive in books but not in power. Even within its own borders, reason was fragile. The execution of Socrates was a warning: rational inquiry destabilizes obedience, and obedience is what the state requires. Philosophy survived in Greece only as long as it stayed politically irrelevant. When Christianity absorbed the empire, Greek rationalism was tolerated only insofar as it could be baptized. Aristotle was made safe for the church by Aquinas, but the independence of reason was gone.

The defeat of reason in these civilizations was not due to lack of brilliance. India and Greece surpassed almost every culture in intellectual achievement. But brilliance divides. Every school produced rivals. The Vedāntins debated the Buddhists, who debated the Jainas, who debated the Cārvākas. Each corrected the other, refuted the other, mocked the other. The very vitality of reason led to fragmentation. And fragmentation is weakness in politics. A society that exalts debate cannot enforce obedience. A community that tolerates contradiction cannot raise armies with absolute discipline. In the contest between the monastery and the mosque, the academy and the church, the monastery and academy lost.

The tragedy of the philosopher is precisely this: he is right too soon. Socrates saw that unexamined faith leads to tyranny; he was condemned. Nāgārjuna saw that all phenomena are empty, dependent, contingent; his insight remains profound but politically impotent. Śaṅkara taught that the self is identical with the absolute; his disciples built monastic orders but not armies. These truths were too subtle for mass mobilization, too paradoxical to command obedience. Meanwhile, the prophets of the desert offered blunt certainties: one God, one book, one law. Absurd as these certainties were, they were irresistible to masses who wanted cohesion, not nuance. The philosopher could persuade a few; the prophet could command nations.

This is why the centers of rational inquiry were always vulnerable. Taxila, another great university of India, was repeatedly sacked. The Alexandrian library, repository of Greek learning, was burned. Athens itself became a school for Roman elites, not a sovereign power. The lesson is brutal: reason produces brilliance but not resilience. Irrationality produces obedience, and obedience survives.

Even when philosophers tried to seize power, they failed. Plato dreamed of philosopher-kings but ended up tutoring tyrants. Aristotle tutored Alexander, whose conquests spread Greek culture but not Greek rationality. Alexander built an empire on violence, not on philosophy; when he died, it fractured instantly. The philosophers returned to their academies while generals carved kingdoms. The pattern is universal: whenever philosophy meets power, philosophy bends or breaks.

It is tempting to imagine a counterfactual history where India’s philosophers or Greece’s thinkers built empires of reason. But every attempt at rational rule crumbled. Ashoka’s non-violence, the Stoics’ cosmopolitanism, Marcus Aurelius’s meditations—all noble, all rational, all politically weak. Against them stood prophets who demanded obedience to irrational absolutes, and it was they who built lasting empires.

The defeat of reason is not only ancient history. It is the recurring pattern of human civilization. Whenever rationality flourishes, it produces division and subtlety. Whenever irrationality reigns, it produces unity and violence. The first generates truth; the second generates power. And power always wins.

This does not mean reason vanishes. It lingers in monasteries, universities, libraries. It whispers through centuries, waiting for its moment. But when confronted with organized irrationality, it collapses. That is why the greatest achievements of human thought are often preserved not by the societies that produced them but by accident, exile, or enemies. Greek philosophy survived in the manuscripts of Islamic scholars who themselves suppressed philosophy. Indian philosophy survived in fragments carried abroad after its monasteries were burned. Rationalism in Europe had to be resurrected during the Renaissance, scavenging from texts preserved in monasteries. Reason survives like an ember, not a fire. Irrationality survives like a torch, burning everything in its path.

The philosopher’s defeat is not a single event but the structure of history. From Athens to Nalanda, reason has always been fragile. Its brilliance dazzles, but its fragility condemns it. Meanwhile, irrationality, absurd as it is, proves stronger than empires, more durable than armies, more lasting than truth. This is the tragedy we inherit: the world we live in was built by prophets, not philosophers; by priests, not logicians; by those who exalted irrational obedience, not those who pursued rational truth.

The Enlightenment is often hailed as the great comeback of reason, the moment when philosophy, science, and empiricism finally shook off the shackles of irrational faith. Europe, after a millennium under the empire of the cross, rediscovered Greece, rediscovered experiment, rediscovered skepticism. Galileo’s telescope, Newton’s calculus, Descartes’ doubt, Locke’s empiricism, Kant’s critique—all proclaimed that reason was back on the throne. But to imagine that rationality had finally conquered is to misunderstand both history and power. The Enlightenment was not the victory of reason over irrationality, but the brief resurgence of reason within a world still dominated by irrational structures. It was a rebellion, not a regime. And even in its moment of triumph, it carried within it the seeds of its own fragility.

What was the Enlightenment but a small elite turning their backs on centuries of Christian dogma? They questioned revelation, mocked superstition, dismantled miracles, dethroned priests. Voltaire ridiculed the church; Diderot dreamed of strangling kings with priests’ entrails; Hume demolished the rationality of belief in miracles. These were acts of intellectual courage, and they changed the trajectory of the West. Science exploded, technology advanced, economies transformed. Rational inquiry delivered results that even the irrational masses could not ignore: medicine, industry, navigation, printing, weapons. Irrationality could no longer monopolize truth, because rationality had become visibly useful.

Yet even here, irrationality never disappeared. It adapted. Churches denounced the Enlightenment but also learned to coexist with science when necessary. Absolutist monarchies fell, but nationalism arose—a new irrationality clothed in secular colors. The very revolutions that proclaimed liberty, equality, fraternity also built guillotines and cults of personality. The French Revolution murdered in the name of reason, proving once more that when rational ideals seek mass power, they often mimic the absolutism of the prophets. Napoleon crowned himself emperor, a secular prophet who demanded the same obedience as any pope. The Enlightenment unshackled reason, but the masses still craved irrational certainty.

Modern science did not escape this tension. The logical empiricists of the twentieth century demanded that only verifiable statements had meaning, stripping metaphysics bare. Dialectical materialists argued that history itself was governed by rational laws. Quantum physicists uncovered the deep indeterminacy of matter, paradoxical but still within the realm of rational explanation. These were extraordinary achievements of human thought. But none of them built empires. They produced universities, journals, laboratories, conferences—but not armies, not masses chanting in the streets. A few scientists might advise kings, a few Marxists might lead revolutions, but as systems of thought, they lacked the irrational glue that binds millions together.

Indeed, even Marxism, which claimed to be scientific, succeeded politically only by adopting the structure of faith. Lenin and Stalin were not professors but prophets. The Soviet Union resembled a secular church, complete with catechism, heresy trials, sacred texts, and rituals. Its irrationalities—blind belief in the Party, the cult of personality, the denial of evidence that contradicted doctrine—mirrored the very structures it claimed to have overthrown. Mao in China wielded dialectical materialism like scripture, sending millions to labor camps in the name of truth. Rational philosophy had to be turned into irrational dogma before it could mobilize power. This is the irony: even the most rational system, when it seizes political control, must disguise itself as revelation.

The Enlightenment also produced its shadow in fascism. Here was irrationality at its most naked: cult of the leader, worship of blood and soil, myth of national destiny. Yet millions rallied to it, preferring the certainties of myth over the subtleties of reason. Nazi Germany was a modern, industrial society, yet it embraced a paganized monotheism of race, demanding absolute obedience and unleashing apocalyptic violence. Once again, irrationality proved more powerful than rational critique. Philosophers fled; the prophets of blood conquered.

In the modern era, reason appears to flourish because technology has triumphed. Smartphones, vaccines, rockets, artificial intelligence—these are the children of rational inquiry. But politically and socially, irrationality still reigns. Billions still submit to ancient religions, obey laws written in the desert, chant creeds forged in councils centuries ago. Even in secular societies, irrational faith reappears in new forms: conspiracy theories, cults of personality, ideological fanaticisms. The human hunger for certainty overwhelms the rational tolerance for ambiguity. People will take a comforting absurdity over a troubling truth, and politicians know it. The demagogue, like the prophet before him, thrives on irrational slogans. The philosopher cannot compete.

This is why the Enlightenment, for all its brilliance, was never secure. It was a revolt, not a replacement. It dethroned the church in some places but never eradicated the structure of obedience. Universities flourished, but churches still filled. Constitutions were written, but irrational loyalties to race, tribe, and nation persisted. The rational mind knows that truth is provisional, that science changes with evidence, that politics requires compromise. The irrational mind rejects all that, demanding absolutes. And when crisis comes—war, famine, plague—it is the irrational promise of certainty that mobilizes masses, not the rational promise of complexity.

The limits of reason in modernity are visible everywhere. Secular states claim neutrality, but religious blocs still dictate policy. Science explains the cosmos, but creation myths still command classrooms. Philosophers publish books, but televangelists command millions. Even in the supposedly rational West, irrationality wins elections. Rational inquiry builds machines; irrational obedience decides how they are used. That is why nuclear weapons, the most rationally engineered devices, are entrusted to leaders who justify their rule with irrational myths of destiny.

To speak of the Enlightenment as the triumph of reason is comforting but false. It was a fragile experiment, remarkable but precarious. Its achievements are undeniable, but they survive only because irrationality tolerates them, not because irrationality has been conquered. The university may teach physics, but the courtroom still swears oaths on holy books. The laboratory may prove evolution, but millions deny it with fervor. The philosopher may write of justice, but the masses still demand prophets.

Thus modernity reveals the paradox: rationality can discover truth but cannot command loyalty. Irrationality can command loyalty but need not care about truth. When the two collide, loyalty usually wins. The Enlightenment gave humanity tools of unprecedented power, but whether those tools serve survival or destruction remains in the hands of irrational structures. That is the true limit of reason in modernity. It can build the bomb, but it cannot prevent its use.

If irrationality was once the engine of empire, today it is the engine of catastrophe. The very structures that allowed Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to dominate the ancient and medieval worlds—absolute obedience, disdain for reason, glorification of violence—have become existential threats in the modern age. What once gave cohesion now produces conflict. What once forged empires now tears nations apart. The price of irrationality today is not merely oppression; it is annihilation.

Consider terrorism, the most visible form of modern irrationality. Young men strap explosives to their bodies, convinced that paradise awaits on the other side of murder. No rational calculation can explain this. Rationality would measure costs and benefits, survival and success. Irrationality abolishes calculation by promising eternal reward. Suicide becomes victory, slaughter becomes sacrifice. The philosopher is helpless before such madness. Debate cannot dissuade it, evidence cannot refute it, compassion cannot soften it. Only power confronts power. Yet every drone strike, every prison, every execution only confirms for the faithful that their irrationality is stronger than reason.

The same pattern plays out in politics. Populist demagogues rise not by offering rational policies but by chanting irrational slogans. They promise to restore lost greatness, to punish outsiders, to purify the nation. Their followers do not care whether these promises are possible. They crave certainty, not truth. Rational economists may explain that trade wars damage economies, rational scientists may prove that climate change is real, rational philosophers may argue for justice—but the crowd prefers the prophet who says “Believe me.” Irrationality, once again, overwhelms reason.

The ecological crisis illustrates this most starkly. Rationality tells us with overwhelming evidence that the planet is warming, that sea levels are rising, that fossil fuels are choking the atmosphere. Irrationality shrugs. Politicians deny the science, preachers proclaim that God controls the weather, masses cling to the comfort of denial. Here the price of irrationality is not only political but planetary. The very survival of humanity depends on reason, yet the structures of power are built on obedience to irrational myths. A society that cannot listen to reason in the face of extinction is not merely irrational; it is suicidal.

Nuclear weapons expose the same danger. Rationally, their existence is madness: a single miscalculation could end civilization. Yet irrationality sustains them. Nations cling to them as symbols of destiny, leaders boast of their power, populations rally behind them as totems of greatness. The philosopher may insist that mutually assured destruction is absurd; the prophet-politician insists it is necessary. Irrationality turns the most dangerous invention of reason into a sacrament of power. Humanity lives under the shadow of annihilation not because reason failed to understand physics but because irrationality refuses to surrender authority.

Religion itself, though softened in some places, remains a colossal force of irrationality. Billions still bow to creeds that deny evidence, obey scriptures that sanction violence, and worship gods whose existence cannot be proved. They vote, they legislate, they fight wars in the name of these absurdities. The fact that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism still dominate global politics is itself a testament to the resilience of irrationality. Philosophy could never command such loyalty. A Buddhist monk may meditate on emptiness, a physicist may explain quantum mechanics, but it is the priest and the preacher who fill stadiums and dictate policy. The price is endless conflict: sectarian wars in the Middle East, religious nationalism in India, fundamentalist politics in America. Irrationality poisons democracy because it demands obedience, not compromise.

Even secular ideologies, stripped of gods, mimic the same structure. Communism, fascism, nationalism, racial supremacism—all function as religions without revelation. They offer absolutes, demand obedience, punish heresy, glorify violence. The cult of Hitler, the cult of Stalin, the cult of Mao—these were modern prophets commanding modern empires of death. Their irrationality killed more in a century than ancient faiths did in a millennium. The price of irrationality today is measured not only in crusades and jihads but in gulags and concentration camps. Humanity has learned to kill in the name of race and class with the same fervor it once killed in the name of God.

The irony is that the tools of reason amplify the damage of irrationality. In the ancient world, irrational faith armed men with swords and spears. Today, irrational faith arms them with assault rifles, drones, nuclear bombs. Science has given irrationality more efficient instruments of destruction. The very success of reason in understanding nature becomes a liability when irrationality controls its fruits. This is the ultimate price: reason builds, irrationality destroys, and history rewards destruction.

The philosopher may still hope that reason will prevail, that evidence will triumph, that truth will win in the end. But history gives no comfort. Reason has survived only in enclaves, tolerated so long as it does not threaten obedience. The masses prefer certainties to complexities, prophets to philosophers, absolutes to arguments. And so irrationality continues to dominate, even as it drags humanity toward catastrophe. The empires of God that once conquered the world have become engines of endless conflict, their logic of obedience and violence now threatening the survival of civilization itself.

To recognize this is not to despair but to diagnose. The price of irrationality today is visible everywhere: terrorism, populism, ecological collapse, nuclear brinkmanship, sectarian war. It is the same price humanity has paid for millennia, but with stakes unimaginably higher. If irrationality once reshaped empires, it now reshapes the planet. If once it killed nations, it now endangers species. The irony of history is that what once gave power now gives peril. The prophets won the past, but if they win the future, there may be no future to inherit.

The struggle between reason and irrationality is not ancient history; it is the condition of our present and the wager of our future. It is unfinished because reason has never decisively triumphed. It flares up in brief, brilliant moments—the Athens of Socrates, the India of Nāgārjuna, the Europe of the Enlightenment—only to be drowned again in tides of faith, myth, and violence. The irrational does not merely resist reason; it hunts it, suppresses it, drives it into exile. That is why every rational tradition is scarred by stories of martyrs: Socrates with his hemlock, Bruno at the stake, Galileo under house arrest, Nalanda in flames. The philosopher, the empiricist, the monk—these figures are always on the defensive, their truths tolerated only until the prophet decides otherwise.

And yet, reason persists. It is never eradicated, only marginalized. The ember glows even when the torch of irrationality blazes. In laboratories, in libraries, in small circles of thinkers, rational inquiry continues. It produces insights too powerful to ignore: antibiotics, electricity, quantum mechanics, the internet. Even those who despise reason rely on its fruits. The priest tweets his sermons on a smartphone built by rational engineers; the fundamentalist flies to jihad in an airplane lifted by the laws of physics; the populist denounces climate science on television powered by science. Irrationality may rule politically, but reason underwrites its very tools of power. This paradox is what keeps the struggle unfinished: irrationality dominates the masses, but reason makes the modern world possible.

The question is whether reason can ever do more than provide tools. Can it organize power? Can it build not just laboratories but loyalties, not just arguments but armies, not just truths but traditions? So far, the answer is bleak. Rationality, by its very nature, resists absolutism. It doubts itself, accepts complexity, tolerates dissent. These qualities make it noble but also fragile. Irrationality, by contrast, thrives on absolutes. It does not hesitate, it does not fracture, it does not debate. That is why irrational movements can mobilize millions while rational philosophies barely mobilize classrooms. The challenge of our time is whether reason can find a way to wield power without betraying itself—whether it can learn discipline without descending into dogma, build unity without crushing dissent, inspire loyalty without demanding blindness.

History offers few models. The Enlightenment was brilliant but elite; it shaped constitutions and institutions but never captured mass devotion. Scientific revolutions have transformed economies and technology but have not produced political cohesion. Even secular ideologies that claimed to be rational—Marxism, liberalism, secular humanism—either devolved into irrational cults or remained too abstract to command masses. The difficulty is structural: the very qualities that make reason truthful make it poor at power, while the qualities that make irrationality false make it superb at power. Unless this imbalance is addressed, the struggle will remain unfinished—and the outcome tilted toward irrationality.

What would it mean for reason to learn power? It would mean that rational traditions must stop hiding in cloisters and universities and start shaping institutions. It would mean that empiricism, dialectical materialism, Buddhism, Vedānta, and even quantum physics must not only produce ideas but also build communities. It would mean that reason must create its own rituals, symbols, loyalties—forms of belonging that can rival the cohesion of irrational faith. Without this, the masses will continue to turn to prophets while philosophers lecture empty halls.

Some argue that reason cannot and should not imitate irrationality. That to do so would be to betray its very essence. But history suggests otherwise: without organization, without discipline, without a politics of its own, reason will always lose. To survive, truth must learn to wield power, not just whisper it. This does not mean embracing dogma, but it does mean embracing strategy. Irrationality has always known the meaning of power; reason must finally learn it.

The struggle is unfinished also because irrationality itself is fractured. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do not coexist peacefully but war against each other, each claiming absolute truth. The history of Europe is the history of Christian sects slaughtering one another. The history of the Middle East is the history of Sunni and Shia wars. The very absolutism that gives irrationality its power also makes it perpetually unstable. This is an opportunity for reason, if it can recognize it. Irrationalities devour one another; rationality can outlast them if it builds resilience. But resilience requires more than being correct; it requires institutions, communities, even politics.

In the twenty-first century, the unfinished struggle is visible everywhere. In classrooms, scientists teach evolution while preachers denounce it. In courts, constitutions promise secular law while politicians swear on holy books. In parliaments, rational debates are drowned out by irrational slogans. On the internet, conspiracy theories spread faster than scientific facts. The unfinished struggle is not abstract; it is the daily reality of societies torn between the demands of truth and the seductions of myth. Every election, every war, every cultural battle is another chapter in this contest.

The danger is that reason, content with being correct, continues to retreat into enclaves. Academics publish papers no one reads, scientists work in laboratories cut off from politics, philosophers debate in conferences invisible to the masses. Meanwhile, irrationality dominates airwaves, pulpits, and parliaments. The imbalance grows sharper, the struggle more unequal. Unless reason steps out of its refuge and learns to fight on the terrain of power, the outcome is foreordained. The prophets will once again triumph over the philosophers.

And yet, the very survival of humanity depends on reason winning this time. Climate collapse cannot be solved by scripture. Nuclear war cannot be prevented by myth. Pandemics cannot be cured by prayer. Only reason has the tools to address these crises. If irrationality continues to rule, humanity will pay the ultimate price. That is why the struggle is unfinished: because the stakes are no longer merely empires or nations, but the survival of civilization itself.

The lesson of history is brutal in its simplicity: those who sought truth lost, those who scorned truth won. The philosopher may be right about reality, but the prophet is right about power. Rationality produces clarity, but irrationality produces cohesion. The laboratory discovers the laws of nature, but the pulpit commands the laws of society. From Moses to Muhammad, from Constantine to the caliphs, from inquisitors to jihadists, the record is relentless: irrationality mobilizes, organizes, and conquers, while reason hesitates, doubts, and retreats.

This is why Judaism, Christianity, and Islam succeeded where India and Greece faltered. The Jews bound themselves in the fortress of law and chosenness, surviving empires that should have obliterated them. The Christians universalized irrationality, turning absurdity into empire, obedience into salvation. The Muslims perfected obedience, fusing law and politics into a single engine of conquest that spanned continents. Against this, the philosophers of Athens, the monks of Nalanda, the logicians of India offered nuance, paradox, debate. They sought truth, but they could not command loyalty. They refined arguments, but they could not raise armies. They produced insight, but they could not produce obedience. And history rewards obedience, not insight.

The Enlightenment briefly seemed to break the pattern, but even then irrationality reasserted itself in new forms. Nationalism, fascism, communism—all secular religions mimicking the structure of the Semitic faiths—showed that the human hunger for absolutes does not die with the decline of gods. The twentieth century was proof enough: millions marched, killed, and died not for rational policies but for irrational myths of blood, race, class, destiny. The philosopher’s pen was no match for the prophet’s sword, whether the prophet invoked God or History, Scripture or Party.

Today, the stakes are higher than ever. Irrationality fuels terrorism, populism, sectarian war. It blocks action on climate, arms nuclear arsenals, poisons democracy. Its structures of obedience are global and enduring, while reason remains fragmented, retreating to classrooms and conferences. Humanity faces crises that only reason can solve, yet power remains in the hands of prophets and demagogues who thrive on irrationality. The irony is bitter: the very survival of civilization requires reason to triumph, yet history suggests reason never triumphs.

Does this mean despair is inevitable? Not necessarily. The struggle is unfinished. Irrationality, though powerful, is also self-destructive. Its absolutism turns inward, fragmenting into sects, warring against itself. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have spent as much energy fighting one another as ruling others. Fascism burned itself out in two decades, communism collapsed under its own contradictions. Irrationality conquers, but it cannot sustain indefinitely. Rationality, though fragile, endures in enclaves, preserving knowledge across centuries, waiting for crises that make its necessity undeniable. That endurance, weak as it seems, has allowed humanity to retain the tools of survival. The question is whether those tools will be deployed in time.

For reason to prevail, it must learn from its enemy. It must understand that truth alone is not enough; power requires organization, discipline, even myth. Reason must develop a politics, not just a philosophy. It must build institutions that can inspire loyalty, not just admiration. It must learn to speak to masses, not just elites. Without this, it will remain a perennial outsider, correct but powerless, while irrationality continues to rule. The challenge of the twenty-first century is nothing less than the transformation of reason into power without the corruption of reason into dogma.

Perhaps this is possible. Perhaps science can be sacralized not as dogma but as wonder, perhaps philosophy can inspire not as authority but as liberation, perhaps rational traditions like Buddhism and Vedānta can offer symbols of unity without coercion. Perhaps humanity, facing crises of planetary scale, will finally learn that survival depends not on prophets of irrationality but on philosophers of truth. But if it does not, the outcome is clear. One God may once have been the engine of conquest, but in the nuclear age, one God is the engine of extinction.

The irony of history is cruel: irrationality triumphed because it scorned reason, but now irrationality must perish if humanity is to live. The prophets built empires by weaponizing absurdities; the philosophers must now build survival by weaponizing truths. The old balance—irrationality ruling, rationality retreating—cannot continue, for the stakes are no longer empires but existence itself. Either reason learns to wield power, or irrationality drags the species into the abyss. That is the final lesson, the final warning, the final demand of history.