Intellectually bankrupt

Poland is like every other third world country today: intellectually bankrupt. It has no original ideas of its own. It’s economic policies are western; but its opposition – whether it be the gender based movements, or the health food freaks, or the yoga practitioners are also copying the west. Yoga is an especially revealing case: it isn’t Indian yoga, it is a Californian yoga; the very same, which regurgitated in America, is being fed back to the Indian middle classes who now gather in force to hear American rather than Indian gurus expand the yoga-lite, Calif-version. (After all, what can an Indian guru possibly say that is worth hearing: he does not even own a blackberry!)

Everyone is complaining about globalization – in Poland, in India – but even the opposition to globalization – the arguments used, the forms of opposition proposed, why, the very nature of the complaint – is globalized; it emanates from the same centers, from California, New York, Paris. There is no original thought here, in the third world at all, at any level.

Which is why it will remain third world for the foreseeable future: until it learns to think again.