This is a fascinating video. At 7:00, Tom Rowsell (SurviveTheJive) reads out some excerpts of the Srimad Bhagvatam(an important hindu scripture) where many if not every single prophecy comes true. The higher values are replaced by lower ones. Ones only worth in society is based upon their level of affluence and sex, people have no loyalty to their own family, culture or values. The only thing people will satisfy will be their genitals and bellies.
Everything will decay but there is a glimmer of hope. Just taking the name of Krishna would help one escape life and attain moksha.
Tom makes references from other indo european religions as well, this is not a culture war or culture war adjacent thing, mostly just something I found super fascinating given that they all were faiths that were very similar for the most part and got many things about the future right. The issue with kaliyuga is that of values, we have seen astounding technological and economical growth, the truth in many places is that many have lost values that were considered important by those who appreciate antiquity (I do at least). Many will not agree but even then, would appreciate any thots on this.
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Notes -
I was a Hare Krishna for something like 20 years and would still consider myself a follower even though I have fallen behind in my practice. Maybe I wasn't a good follower because I never believed that Srimad Bhagavatam should be taken literally. I don't even believe that the sages who wrote it, believed it should be taken literally. Such kind of belief is for unsophisticated, they were smarter than that.
I would say that there is definitely a higher reality behind what we can perceive and understand but because it is so much above our experience and knowledge, we have no connection to it. But if we need to think about it, then why not in a way of beautiful myths? There are many things that ancient Indian thinkers had discovered about people and their psychology that are still relevant today. One aspect is about human sexuality, what motivates men and women and what problems they have and what are solutions. Surely, Bhagavatam wraps it all in Indian cultural layers which are not always easy to unwrap. But if you do, you find that it is close to red pill philosophy. It just seems modern societies have forgotten those things because we think that we have much better science and old traditions and knowledge are useless.
It is true about material science. Ayurveda is basically bunk, I didn't find anything useful there and modern evidence-based medicine is clearly superior. But in the areas of mental health and modern psychiatry it is clearly failing. In this regard Bhagavatam insights can still be useful.
As for Vedic cosmology and yugas and Kali-yuga, I believe it is just a poetic device to convince people to put serious effort into preventing society from decay. From one hand it is the inevitability of oncoming degradation, on the other hand Bhagavatam offers methods to delay the start of Kali-yuga. They call these methods religiosity but in the past religion was basically the same as moral and legal order. Not everything we need to do can have strict evidence basis that will be understood by all people. Sometimes we just need to follow the established order (stop at the red light for example, be kind to others even without immediate benefit, etc.) We shouldn't take the western economic stability and order as granted. It can disappear at any time like in the war between Ukraine and Russia. We just look at current stability from a very limited time period. If we extend this to a century or two, then even western countries have been involved in terrible wars and genocides. We should feel so lucky to have mostly peace and economic development in the west now.
And for stability I am not a fan of dictators (Putin, Orban, Xi, or whatever) either. We need real basis for stability, coming from people. Incidentally, Bhagavatam describes a situation of a strong dictator (King Venu) who gets killed and then the country is overrun by thieves and everything gets worse. We can prevent this, by ensuring that people learn and follow certain moral principles.
My own interpretation: human superorganisms have a lifecycle, and the kali yuga describes it.
I think a root cause here is that there is, indeed, a real thing called 'good', and it its core, it's the entropy-maximizing direction through the game called "physics". Organisms increase the total entropy of the universe faster, by decreasing the entropy locally (i.e. inside of their bodies). Humans, being elaborately evovled organisms, are really good at following that entropy gradient in part because we have can exert fine-grained control of our environments, and thus can reduce the entropy not just inside our bodies, but in our physical surroundings. The net result of this entropy reduction is EVEN FASTER entropy generation. The terms humans use to describe things as 'good' and 'bad' refer to our computational approximations of the true entropy maximizing step, because we mistake our approximations of good for good itself. (see: the finger pointing at the moon, the tree of knowledge of good and evil).
Our moral consciences help us sense and intuit the 'good' direction, but we continuously go astray from that direction because we end up conceptualizing it, and do so incorrectly. Correctly computing the 'good' direction requires essentially computing the entire tree of all possible future states of the world; i.e. infinite knowledge and computing power. But, being fearful and unwilling to trust our bodies to accurately compute the 'good' choice, and unwilling to trust others to do the same, we develop conceptualizations of the good, i.e. myths about how to live. Our conceptualizations of 'good' are, in a sense, computer programs. The programs are written in the 'narrative myth' executable format, run on the mental hardware of story telling primates. The stories about what 'good' is make the primates behave in certain ways that somewhat approximate the 'good' direction, at the time and place the stories were created.
Over time, however, the environment of the primates evolves and changes. The original stories no longer fit well with the environment. Lots of people convince themselves that good and bad are meaningless, rather than merely 'very hard to compute in all purposes but not too hard to intuit in most real life situations you find yourself in'. The story-telling primates executing the older versions of the stories often seem hilariously out of touch with reality. On top of this, the stupid-horse phenomenon means that poor approximations of the original myths are simpler to spread, and still kind of work, so they outcompete the more complex approximations of Good that work better but require more intelligence to understand and operate.
So lots of people convince themselves that good and bad don't exist, the complex stories die off, the stupid horse versions become more dominant, and a feedback loop ensues until dramatic, horrific consequences convince people that good and bad are, indeed, a thing. The seeds of the new golden age are planted in the minds of idealistic young people who grow up in Kali Yuga, sensing something wasn't right, and spent their adolescence searching for answers to the questions that are considered 'big and important' for most of history, and 'naive and stupid' for the periods right before the collapse.
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