Our duty to truth in the age of moral decay
Moral lessons from the Mahabharata epic applied to the Age of Kali
Welcome to my new readers. I aim to demolish the convenient fictions that have eroded our internal sovereignty. It’s uncomfortable but necessary in this age of moral relativism and fragmented reality. Truth is worth defending in an era of self-delusion.
Individual dharma versus the greater good
Bhīṣma, the elder statesman of the royal family, laid on a bed of arrows, still tethered to life because he had the boon of choosing when to die. He decided his contextual, personal dharma (svadharma) over the greater good. As a result, almost the entire Kuru clan was destroyed during the Mahābhārata war. Had Bhishma and the other elders not clung to their myopic version of dharma, millions needn’t have died.1
Today’s analogous dilemmas appear when we cling to our contextual roles and pledge loyalty to comfortable lies instead of acting for the greater good. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna advises Arjuna to fulfill his duty as a warrior by fighting his clan, and his side wins through trickery, which Krishna sanctioned to ensure that adharma doesn’t win; svadharma must be broken if it stands in conflict with the greater dharma (lōkasaṅgraha).
Our elites similarly cling to rules, procedures, and ‘being kind’ even as the world burns around them. Guarding their positions socially has become more important than accepting reality if it costs them standing. They assault truth and cry foul when other tribes do the same while hacking away at their institutions; is it any wonder we are here?
Law is now merely a narrative warfare tool, while institutions claiming to produce knowledge suppress ideologically inconvenient findings. Education has become a social engineering tool while the public is told noble lies for the social good. Vulnerability itself is weaponized such that true victims are viewed suspiciously while narcissists claim the moral high ground.
The Mahabharata isn’t a story about good versus evil but about what happens when society's moral order collapses. Many characters rolled over and let evil acts happen when they could have exercised free will and averted disaster. The three we explore today illustrate distinct types of moral failure.
Bhishma: the moral failure of principled inaction
The modern analogue for Bhishma is the bureaucrat who privileges process over outcomes. This is the modern Democratic party, as even Ezra Klein has observed: obsessed with following the proper process regardless of the outcomes. Dharmic failure is the DNC's disallowing challenges to Biden, even as we all saw his decline. It’s the White House gaslighting the public by destroying the reputation of the rare journalist who dared question Biden’s fitness.
The donors and rank-and-file refused to break ranks to protect their future position, knowing that they probably stood to benefit more under Trump because they could be part of resistance theater. May history never forgive Biden, his family, or his administration for denying the truth that we all saw. However, those who said nothing to preserve their social status are equally guilty. Process, optics, norms, and status became more important than the greater good.
Bhishma saw the perverse incentive structures taking root where humans should have acted virtuously. He was the most capable warrior of the time, but relinquished the ability to correct the king despite his prowess. He couldn’t because of his vows to always protect the throne, and ended up on the wrong side of the great war despite knowing that truth resided with the Pandava2 princes. The Democrats similarly claim to have had no choice but to let Biden and then Harris run in subversion of democratic principles they claim to champion. My blood is honestly boiling while writing these sentences.
Drona: the moral failure of myopic expertise
The sage Droṇa was made the princes’ guru and had one of the highest positions in the kingdom. His loyalty is to Duryodhana3 and the king because he was a poor Brahmin enticed by riches. Taking the position wasn’t a moral failing, but it determined his orientation toward truth. Instead of fighting with this prized pupil, Arjuna, for the greater good, he tries to walk a moral tightrope. Drona never meaningfully tries to deter the king because his situational duty is paramount over loyalty to a higher dharma. He rigs the game in Arjuna’s favor early on by removing potential rivals based on caste-based qualifications for his instruction.
The echo of Drona today is the academic who lets social media mobs destroy his colleagues for bucking leftist dogma. Another egregious example: the economists who prescribed austerity amid a global financial crisis were never accountable for their Excel formula error, indirectly leading to global untold suffering. Carmen Reinhart was later appointed to the World Bank (another body of corrupt expertise serving power), and Kenneth Rogoff remains at Harvard. Is it a wonder there’s no sympathy for academia in the age of Trump?
Drona is even worse than my other two examples because he didn’t meaningfully struggle with his decision to support evil. This shows how it often persists not because of true monsters but because the professional managerial class would rather not ask uncomfortable questions about our beliefs and motivations.
Karna: the moral failure of emotional loyalty
This is the most heartbreaking death because Karṇa’s mother set him up for failure. Kuntī also birthed Arjuna and his brothers, but sent her eldest, Karna, down the river. She immaturely ‘tested’ a mantra she was given to invoke any god and bear a child by him before she was married. Instead of bearing the consequences of her immature action, she hid this fact from the world until Arjuna killed Karna on the battlefield. The war itself might have been averted but for Kunti’s silence.
Karna was adopted by low-caste parents (the king’s charioteer). He was as good or a superior warrior to Arjuna, but the sages Drona and Kripa kept him from competing with Arjuna on merit. Drona favored Arjuna over all his pupils and even had another low-caste would-be competitor, Eklavya, cut off his thumb to repay his debt4 for covertly watching as Drona instructed the princes. He used the dharma of a guru to suppress meritorious competition from two men who might have challenged Arjuna. Karna was a victim of credentialism, but that’s not even the whole tragedy.
Karna didn’t know he was born a warrior until the eve of battle. Duryodhana saw Karna’s exclusion from warrior society early on and gifted him a kingdom to make him the equal of the Pandavas, thus buying himself an ally. Karna knew this, but still vowed to repay Duryodhana’s debt with his life. Karna is loyal to his friend above any dharma because he couldn’t betray the man who gave him position and power. Karna is the modern loyal foot soldier who will never betray the person who pulled him up. He’s the class climber who clings to loyalty among thieves and doesn’t break ranks from the owners of capital. I could easily be him.
Moral courage in Kali Yuga
According to ancient Indian cosmology, time is cyclical. We live in the Age of Kali, or Kali Yuga5, the fourth of the cycle, and thousands of such cycles occur in a single day of the gods. Eventually, all of creation is destroyed and begins anew. In this yuga, morality has decayed so much that the truth is obscured by māyā, which roughly translates to ‘illusion.’6 Maya, incidentally, is ontologically feminine because it’s the entropy that erodes shared reality. In Kali Yuga, power is exercised under the guise of virtue, and morality becomes relative.
Kali Yuga is a psychological condition with which we’re all afflicted. The demon Kali resides in us and gets stronger whenever we act out of moral cowardice. Moral courage requires a willingness to lose something, especially social standing. In 2025, status is even more precious than actual money—we reward vulnerability more than helping the truly materially deprived. Identity is a greater source of moral currency than one’s actions and character.
Dharma doesn’t have an easy translation. It’s not exactly duty, law, or justice, or virtue. It encompasses all these ideas but is contextual and relational, mediating our relationship with reality. It’s the scaffold of society, within which we all have individual duties. It is the cosmic moral architecture that the gods incarnate on earth to protect. Behaving per dharma means protecting and amplifying truth, especially when everyone would prefer you keep your mouth shut.
We see this in society today as people often support causes myopically without attention to the perverse incentive structures littering our social fabric. We also frequently chase our liberation and satisfaction of the five senses at the expense of our long-term outcomes. We’re in an age that knows no end to selfishness. We also pay heavy social costs for defending uncomfortable truths; most are too afraid of losing their status to defend what most others are invested in denying.
The Mahabharata is, above all, a cautionary tale about what happens when the greater good is sacrificed for a myopic version of individual dharma.7 The very nature of dharma is contested: Can you say you’ve behaved virtuously if your actions hurt others? How responsible are you for the collective harm your actions cause? Individual duty can become a race to the bottom.
The core conflict of our age is between individual duty and the higher cosmic duty to defend truth and the greater good. The greater dharma requires the discernment to break from what you ‘should’ do, but this will cost you social status. Without shared reality, there is no shared morality. You can feel the decay around you. We must recognize where to act instead of feigning helplessness. I had to fight the same helplessness to seize control of my life’s outcomes.
My life’s animating force is clinging to reality even as it’s denied all around me with convenient fictions about ourselves and others. Truth is impolite and necessarily post-ideological; they cannot coexist. As such, my project here is to encourage you all to live beyond these tribal sands in our eyes. A strong internal scaffold can repel the external decay that threatens to overwhelm the psyche. Living with integrity means looking the ugly truth in the eye and acting from moral courage.
If you’re a free subscriber and consider this quality writing, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription (for less than half the price of the topical Substacks you probably pay for). My reach is naturally limited in comparison to most of what you see because, let’s be real, my conclusions are socially radioactive. I sincerely appreciate your support.
My earliest memories are of this epic. Before I learned English, I watched the 1980s TV series Mahabharat with my grandmother, with its Sanskritized Hindi and evocative score. This story is in my bones. This and the Ramayan series in the late 1980s were two dueling interpretations of nationhood and patriotic duty in then-socialist India. Further reading: Aravind Rajagopal, Politics after Television; Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics.
Arjuna’s clan.
The principal antagonist.
Gurudakṣiṇā is the payment to one’s teacher upon completing formal education, and need not be strictly monetary.
Not to be confused with the goddess Kālī.
According to textual interpretations of when Kali Yuga started, we’re less than 1% of the way through.
A list of translations, including a downloadable text.
I've been reading your work for some time and I just wanted to say this might be the best thing you've written. I, too, grew up watching the BR Chopra series, and the Mahabharata contains very deep truths about the human condition and society. But you've made it relevant to us moderns in a way I haven't seen before. I hope you continue to expand on this.
What a great piece, brining the Mahabharata to our current day reality. 👏🏽