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TULSI-PRAJÑA
cannot be so easily brushed aside as happens in the socalled Unipolar new world order.
36
The third historical cycle of collective human liberation was achieved by the Western civilisation in the course of its Modern Period. The West took an opposing direction. First it liberated itself from the meta-cosmos held together by the ethos of the Middle Ages and Christianity. The meso-cosmos of the senses and its empirical reality was affirmed, Ego was declared the Subject and ruler of this empirical world, which was to be subdued in the pursuit of human happiness. The idea of liberation came to be identified with that of Reason, and possesssion of wealth and power. Violence was admitted as legitimate means for their acquisition of this wealth and power. In a continuous process of bloody struggle and compromise, the power and wealth monopolised by the feudal aristocracy was then shared with the rising bourgeois, whose power base was the rising towns and cities of the late Middle Ages, which then percolated futher down through the educated and professional elite produced by Renaissance Humanism and its Enlightenment to the lower levels of the social pyramid-the vassals, the serfs and bondmen, the entirety of the industrial proletariat in this century.
This generous distribution was possible because colonialism brought in the extra capital and market needed for the industrialisation process and imperialism enabled the migration of the extra European population towards the open horizons of the New World. Now it is the turn of the other non-Western civilisations to achieve the same external liberation which the West has achieved in the course of the modern period. But in view of their over-population and the closed nature of earth's space, they are simply doomed in their collective liberational goal. Here is the mighty world historical question-the collective liberation of Civilisations-and of mankind at large, symbolised by the birth of the New Man at the Omega Point of creation.
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