It is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today.
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
I've always been curious about how much of our cultural baggage we bring to what and how we read. I suspect we bring a lot, although we like to think we don't.
But ultimately what I was impressed by during my years in government was how much the intellectual climate and the prevailing intellectual notions constrained and represented the universe within which the discourse took place.
Our culture reflects back what is true. It doesn't always reflect it back reliably. It can distort things.
We need to get away from labels. That's the way people talk in Washington, D.C. - through labels, through ideological frames, through partisan frames.
The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.
While ideological blinkers blind one to change that one does not wish to see, statistics and opinion surveys, too, have their limitations in a complex polity like India.
Nobody dares to solve the problems-because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to beliefs is more important than succeeding in the world.
The people in Washington spend too much time in Washington, so they think Washington-centric thoughts.
We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean.
