It has been a long time since I last posted, that too with the promise of an article*, and I thought I should account for this prolonged absence – at least for those few who I can see check this blog regularly for updates.
I have realized that although Permanent Settlement was a loose platform for me to write weekly about things that most concerned me – rationalism, neoliberalism, and energy policy – there was no coherent thread running through the articles. Things I wanted to investigate in detail would be shelved for later so I could focus on a new interesting thing that I wanted to write about.
If there is an underlying theme to this blog, it is to unravel how the world that I hitherto took for granted (and I believe many others do too) was intentionally constructed and marketed as the most superior option available to us to exist and participate in. I have explored in some articles how its claim to bettering our lives can only sustained by a deliberate obscuring of the true costs of this system, which given its immense complexity and size, aren’t obvious to the average individual.
This is an incredibly stimulating subject for me, but I have realized that I need a deeper, more fundamental understanding of key events and topics to take up one strand and
pursue it doggedly to the very logical end or to place my misgivings in a self-generating, coherent context. It is encouraging that ad-hoc pieces such as India’s Energy Policy and To Hell with Environmental Neoliberalism were picked up by Naked Capitalism and subsequently, circulated widely – pushing my readership to more than a hundred times the average. This has made me want to learn as much as I can about specific topics like economic theory and 21st century politics so these analyses become part of an ongoing critique of ideas, both present and past, that affect us profoundly in ways we might be unaware of.
Tl;dr: This hiatus is a phase of learning and grounding myself better in political, historical, and economic context so that posts on this site are analytically richer and part of a more coherent whole.
*I have more than 2000 words written of the article in question, but as events have shifted, so have my interests (which, as I wrote above, is the problem). I intend on posting it in the future, but for now, learning is priority.
Permanent Settlement 