As previously announced, I have completed a new book:
EPISTEMIKA Prima: What the Outside Eye Sees
The book explores questions of democracy, decision-making, institutional reasoning, political culture, and the epistemic foundations of modern society.
Written from the perspective of an interested outsider, it examines whether some of the deepest challenges facing contemporary America are, at their core, failures of reasoning rather than failures of policy alone.
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Below is the Publisher's Description of the book.
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EPISTEMIKA Prima
Publisher's Description
What happens when a superpower stops thinking clearly?
In EPISTEMIKA Prima, a latter-day Tocqueville—an Indian academic, an alumnus of prestigious institutions including IIT Madras, Stanford University, and Harvard Business School, a former editor of Termite magazine, and a proud member of the global Esperanto community—turns the outside eye on the most consequential democracy in human history and asks the question that few inside the American epistemic bubble are positioned to ask clearly:
Is the crisis of American democracy, at its deepest level, a crisis of how its leaders think?
This book argues that the answer is yes.
From the catastrophic reasoning failures surrounding the Iraq War to the Strait of Hormuz impasse; from the collapse of trusted intermediaries to the rise of the outrage machine; from the psychology of confirmation bias to the sociology of de-industrialisation, EPISTEMIKA Prima builds a rigorous, cross-domain, and deeply readable case that the political crisis America is living through is, at its root, an epistemic one.
It is a failure of the structured, humble, cross-domain reasoning that democratic self-government requires—and that the modern information environment is systematically eroding.
Written in the tradition of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and published initially in English with a later Esperanto edition planned, EPISTEMIKA Prima is the first volume of a larger work of political analysis bringing together insights from:
The result is an ambitious examination of one of the defining questions of our age.
This is not a partisan book.
It is an epistemic one.
Its argument is as uncomfortable for the left as it is for the right, because the failure it diagnoses belongs to neither side alone.
It belongs to a culture.
And cultures, this book argues, can change.
But, as the old joke about psychologists and light bulbs reminds us:
La alia afero devas voli ŝanĝiĝi.
(The other thing must want to change.)
EPISTEMIKA Prima is a timely book for our time.
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EPISTEMIKA Prima
What the Outside Eye Sees
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