Greetings Reader,

Next Saturday is “No Kings Day” here in the United States. Again.

Technically, every day here is “No Kings Day,” but it's painfully clear that some people need to be reminded that the legitimacy of our government is still supposed to be derived from the consent of the governed.

As opposed to being derived from the consent of the spiritually-enlightened intellectuals, which is what the yoga wisdom tradition recommends.

It may sound anachronistic, but you can make a reasonable case for it.

As it stands, representative democracy appears to be the best system available, but its weaknesses are clearly starting to show.

One obvious problem with government derived from the consent of the governed is that the governed aren’t always that bright. This isn’t elitism; it’s statistics: 49.99% of all the people in the world are endowed with below average intelligence.

And a significant portion of the other 49.99%, while blessed with quantitatively higher intelligence, are afflicted with a low quality of intelligence that renders them deceitful, arrogant, self-centered, angry, cruel, and ignorant.

There’s also the curious point of agreement between right-wing anti-intellectualism and left-wing postmodernism, both of which believe that subjective, ideological, or interest-driven beliefs aren’t just opinions; they're valid truths. This unfortunate agreement between otherwise adversarial ideologies denies the existence of an objective measure of factuality, eliminates the possibility of a shared sense of reality, and elevates cluelessness and delusion to the same level as comprehension and expertise:

Which brings us back to yoga philosophy’s proposition that the legitimacy of a government should be derived from the consent of the spiritually-enlightened intellectuals.

There are two obvious problems with this idea:

1. People who actually have this qualification are few and far between, and
2. History has shown us that people who claim to have this qualification often turn out to be the worst people on earth.

The system of governance we find in the ancient stories of the yoga wisdom tradition also have a flashing red caveat: aside from being emphatically monarchical, it’s conspicuously patriarchal.

To top it off, the overarching social organization within which these patriarchal monarchies reside looks suspiciously like the caste system, a deservedly disreputable system of social immobility and exploitation.

Taking all of this into account, it’s tempting to dismiss the entire Vedic system as anachronistic.

There are two reasons why this would be a bad idea:

1. The caste system is a corrupted deviation from the original system described in yoga wisdom texts, and
2. The benefits of yoga wisdom’s spiritual culture and social function can be actuated by renovating the tradition’s structures according to the needs of time, place, and circumstance.

My parama-guru, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, was a brilliant innovator who preserved the spiritual culture he personally embodied while simultaneously making appropriate adjustments according to time, place, and circumstance to ensure that the culture he was transplanting could be transmitted to future generations.

He was especially emphatic about how one feature of that culture, the fourfold system of social organization based on people’s natural aptitudes and inclinations, known in Sanskrit as varṇa, could deliver material prosperity and spiritual upliftment for future generations in ways that contemporary socio-political systems couldn’t.

The odds that we'll be able to go back to a rules-based world order or tolerate going back to pretensions of democracy that don’t really serve most people's interests are pretty thin, which means we will have a rare and wonderful opportunity after the current catastrophe comes crashing down: the chance to create something new

The new nation that the founding fathers of the United States established was conceived, in large part, by looking back to ancient Rome and asking, “how can we form a government that won’t collapse into tyranny the way the Roman Republic did?”

Similarly, we can look back to yoga wisdom’s ancient literature and ask, “can the principles of varṇa be practically applied to produce a modern system of government that supports individual and collective peace and well-being?”

To find out, we can ask the same kinds of questions that the founding fathers asked about how to maintain civic virtue, limit partisan gridlock, prevent the kind of corruption caused by vast wealth inequality, and preclude the concentration of power that allowed military and political leaders like Caesar to subvert the Roman Republic.

I’m going to take a stab at . . . (DOH: I should have written this last Wednesday!) answering these questions in next Sunday's email.

For now, I'll leave you with three different, but related questions based on this passage from the Bhagavad Gita:

Why would a king need to understand the science of yoga? What qualifies a monarch as being “visionary?” What purposes are served by transmitting and receiving knowledge about the science of yoga “through a chain of disciplic succession?”

Do you have any thoughts about these questions — or questions about how yoga’s ancient social system can be re-imagined to fit the needs of the modern world?

If you do, please share them with me.

Wishing you all good fortune,

- Hari-k