Sikh Ethics on Netanyahu

Israeli state officials met on August 7, 2025 to debate Prime Minister Netanyahu’s plan to expand the presence of the IDF, Israel’s military, to include all of the territory in Gaza, which had been under Israeli occupation anyway for many decades. With Gaza already under Israeli occupation, characterizing Netanyahu’s plan as being “to conquer all or parts of Gaza not yet under Israeli control” is strange.[1] Similarly, mischaracterizing the E.U. as a bloc even though that union has the three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial is odd. The media’s artful way of reporting is without doubt superficial relative to Netanyahu’s unvirtuous decisions and their respective consequences to which the labels of genocide and holocaust have justifiably been applied around the world. Behind the relevant vice lies an extreme egocentricity that the ethical theory of Sikhism describes quite well, even to the level of ontology or metaphysics.

The full essay is at "Sikh Ethics on Netanyahu."

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1. Gavin Blackburn, “Israel’s Security Cabinet Debates Expanding Gaza Operation Despite Opposition,” Euronews.com, August 7, 2025.

On the Arrogance of Self-Entitlement during a Pandemic

In the midst of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, libertarians in San Francisco, California objected to wearing face masks. Other people there were simply fed up with wearing masks by late 1918. The libertarians, who objected on the basis of rights, actually prevented the Board of Health from renewing a mandate to wear masks.[1] In early 1919, another spike in influenza cases there led the board to put a mandate in place. So in March of 2020, the failure of mass transits and retail stores to enforce physical distancing and the failures a few months later to enforce mandates on wearing face masks to reduce the spread of the coronavirus can be seen as recklessness (and fecklessness) that could have been prevented by looking back a hundred years. But could the willful disregard of store policies and local law both by customers and store managers have been prevented had business had heeded history? I contend that human nature, which had not changed in such a short time by evolutionary standards, played the heavy, or anchor.
The selfishness of business managers can be regarded as the obstacle to historical progress in dealing with pandemics. As against history and even “organizational learning,” the current profit-motive wins over managers. God forbid that a customer be offended by being confronted by a store employee for not wearing a mask even though mask-wearing was “required” not only by store policy, but also by local law! Of course, a store or business policy barring enforcement of a requirement nullifies it, even if managers could not grasp this simple point. Also, allowing customers to break a local law is itself criminal, even if managers could not grasp this simple point. Ignoring a company policy and even local law could somehow be justified by the interests of profit-seeking.  
The selfishness and inconsiderateness of customers came with a presumptiveness or sense of entitlement to break not only store policies but local law as well. The mantra by the individual that that individual is above store requirements and the law rings with a shallow arrogance. The presumptuousness of the weak of being self-justified brings with it a bad odor, Nietzsche would say. This pathology was especially prevalent in places such as Arizona in the United States.
According to Jeremy Brown, an expert on the 2020 pandemic, it showed how strident selfishness can be. Such selfishness, joined by the related lack of consideration and empathy for other people, was perhaps greater than expected among American business managers and customers. “I think that the message we’ve seen is that people are selfish to a remarkable degree that I don’t think we’ve seen before,” Brown said.[2] That is, the refusal of retail managers to enforce a company requirement because doing so might turn some customers away, and thus their money, is steeped in short-sighted selfishness that recognizes no business responsibility in society. Similarly, the refusal of customers to wear masks, which put other people at risk, can show us just how much of a force selfishness can have in certain people. “The selfishness of people and their inability to have empathy for others who aren’t like themselves is one of the very, very worrying aspects that the disease has highlighted, Brown suggests. “I think this is a deeply rooted part of American society.”[3]
I submit that it is a gross overgeneralization to gloss American society, as there are many, just as many exist in Europe. In having lived in several of those in America, I was stunned in 2020 by just how much aggressive selfishness and stubborn weakness I witnessed in Arizona by how people reacted to the pandemic. Many bus drivers, for instance, refused to wear masks even though they were required by company policy and the local law. Many retail stores had policies forbidding employees from even approaching customers who were not wearing masks. Many light rail, bus passengers, and store customers went maskless with impunity. Light rail security guards were not allowed even to ask passengers to put masks on, and bus drivers rarely did even though they could have at least informed violators of the company policy mandating the wearing of masks. The local police department managers unilaterally decided not to go after organizations allowing customers or riders to break the law. Apparently some laws, especially if they are important to public health, are not worth enforcing.
In short, in some places more than others, just as the extent and depth of selfishness became more apparent with the coronavirus pandemic, so too did human weakness and the related organizational corruption. That these defects had the gall to defend themselves aggressively rather than recognize themselves are faults is perhaps another stunning realization that was made possible by the coronavirus pandemic. This can easily account for the fact that lessons learned in 1918 were so easily dismissed in 2020.

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1. Kristen Rogers, “What the 1918 Flu Pandemic Can Teach Us about Coronavirus,” CNN.com, September 25, 2020.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Do You Believe in Global Warming?

On September 16, 2012, “Arctic ice covered just 1.32 million square miles—the lowest extent ever recorded. ‘The loss of summer sea ice has led to unusual warming of the Arctic atmosphere, that in turn impacts weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, that can result in persistent extreme weather such as droughts, heat waves and flooding,’ NSIDC scientist Dr. Julienne Stroeve noted in a press release. ‘There's a huge gap between what is understood by the scientific community and what is known by the public,’ NASA scientist James Hansen said, adding that he believed, ‘unfortunately, that gap is not being closed.’ What the scientific community understands is that Arctic ice is melting at an accelerated rate -- and that humans play a role in these changes. According to the panel, humans are ‘really running out of time’ to prevent atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from reaching levels that would precipitate runaway climate change. Hansen warned that even maintaining current concentrations of approximately 390 parts per million for several centuries ‘guarantees disaster.’”[1] Nevertheless, record amounts of carbon dioxide were emitted into the atmosphere in 2016 to at least 2018, and 2016 was the hottest year on the planet as of 2019.[2] What makes an intelligent species, homo sapiens, go in the wrong direction even from the outset of an announced, guaranteed disaster? Timing and mentality have a lot to do with it. 
I suspect the non-scientist public, including the people with vested economic interests in continued pollution, dismissed the warning of disaster in 2012 in part by erroneously considering the scientific knowledge to be belief. Had news of an astroid due to hit the planet in seven years been announced in 2012, I suspect the astronomical knowledge would have been considered as such, rather than mere belief. It is interesting that the timeliness of a disaster, specifically whether it will hit the people living or those yet unborn, bears on whether knowledge is viewed as knowledge or just belief. 

 Ice melting in Greenland.   NYT

The mentality that sustains the gulf between what the scientists know and what the public believes includes the odd belief (held nonetheless as knowledge!) that scentistics only have beliefs regarding the climate might say, “I don’t believe in God,” or “I don’t believe it is going to rain today,” but people don’t usually say, “I don’t believe in math,” or "I don't believe in chemistry." That is to say, belief is not typically applied to replace the appelation of knowledge in fields of knowledge! In effect, the mentality contains a refusal to respect the enterprise of science. This is not only ignorance that can’t be wrong. How can ignorance make such a claim? Anti-foundationalism knows no better example than the arrogance of ignorance that cannot be wrong. The mentality assumes that recognizing knowledge in science would undercut a cherished political ideology. This assumption is an over-reach, as is the application of belief itself.
So the ice has kept melting as our scientific community has been relegated epistemologically into mere opinion or politics by too many people. The astounding implication is that this has occurred even though we as a species do not have the luxury of such a mentality. Even the possibility of “guaranteeing disaster” suggests that we as a society or species cannot afford to ignore the scientific consensus even though science is not perfect. That is to say, science does not prove a hypothesis; rather, successive null hypotheses are rejected, giving us added confidence but not certainty that the remaining hypothesis is valid.

Generally speaking, when even the survival of our species is flagged, or at the very least continued human habitation on Earth is to come with disasters, the rational self-preservation motivated recourse is to err on the side of what the scientific data is telling scientists.  To presume an overarching hegemony of political ideology may in retrospect look reckless. The choice of such a priority may even look pathological. Perhaps this is an element in human nature that could bring the species itself down. It should come as no surprise that the human mind can be a double-edged instrument capable of achievement and self-destruction even of the species itself. Even ideology may be viewed as a double-edged instument capable of giving people something to believe in yet also capable of embellishing arrogance and beligerance. Both the ignorance and ideological tartuffery seem to enjoy presumption when the disater is guaranteed for far-off generations. The basic instinct for self-preservation is more easily subdued or drugged. It would only be just, therefore, for the currently-living to suffer at least some of the effects of the guaranteed disaster themselves. Greed, selfishness, arrogance, and ignorance, which may all be hardwired into human nature, are to blame. Flying so high to the sun on the supposition that man is divine, a human being is bound to fall to the ground in a fiery mass of self-conceit that takes itself to be a falling star but is actually just a confused mess. 

1. Joanna Zelman and James Gerken, “Arctic Sea IceLevels Hit Record Low, Scientists Say We’re ‘Running Out Of Time,” The Huffington Post, September 19, 2012. 
2. Kelly Levin, "New Global CO2 Emissions Numbers Are In. They're Not Good," World Resources Institute, December 5, 2018 (accessed October 21, 2019).