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February 1, 2024

People who believe in reincarnation, whether of the Hindu or non-Hindu variety, tell us the following.

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A human being is composed of two essential elements: body and spirit (or soul).  The two are intimately connected, the spirit controlling much of the behavior of the body, while the body shapes many of the feelings and attitudes of the spirit.  So intimate is the connection that you might think they are a single thing, not two things.  But you’d be wrong.  They are two.  The body is material, hence impermanent.  The spirit is immaterial, hence immortal. 

When the body dies, the spirit lives on.  But in time, the spirit becomes incarnate once again, this time in a new body.  The interval between liberation from the old body and reincarnation in a new may be a few minutes or a few years or many centuries.  It doesn’t really matter; the principle is the same.

Now, I don’t know if this theory is true or not.  But I do know that something very like reincarnation happens in the political world.

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I am thinking of the “spirit” of world-revolution.  When I speak of this spirit I mean that it aims at a total revolution, probably bloody, that will so transform the world as to produce, at least in the long run, a kind of Heaven-on-Earth — a global society marked by personal freedom, social and economic equality, and limitless prosperity.  In short, Utopia.

The first incarnation of this spirit in modern times took place during the French Revolution.  This revolution failed to achieve its Utopian goal.  But its spirit, being immortal, lived on and awaited reincarnation.

The second incarnation took place in the Bolshevik Revolution in early 20th-century Russia — a more powerful, and far bloodier, revolution than the earlier one.  Again, the revolution failed to produce Utopia; if anything, it produced just the opposite.  But once again, the spirit lived on.

The third incarnation of this revolutionary spirit is taking place at this moment — an uprising of the world’s persons “of color” against the whites who have for centuries dominated the world.

There is a basic “script” followed by each of these revolutions, a melodramatic script.  According to this script, there is always a conflict between a powerful villain and the “good guy” victim of this villain, a victim who has hitherto been powerless but is now gathering strength.

In the French Revolution, the villain was the nobility, the aroused victim the people.  In the Communist Revolution, the villain was the class of capitalists, the aroused victim the workers of the world.  In the current revolution, the villain is the white people of the world, the victim the aroused non-whites of the world.