By Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan
One of the enduring comforts of modern civilisation is the belief that we are not automatons.
We are not machines, we tell ourselves. We are not obedient drones, not programmable insects, not people who wake at six in the morning, stare at a glowing rectangle for three hours, purchase things we do not need, argue with strangers we will never meet, and then fall asleep while a streaming service asks whether we are “still watching”.
We are free.
We are moral.
We are informed.
We are, according to the brochure, the most advanced species ever to complain about airport Wi-Fi.
This confidence is remarkable because humanity has spent several thousand years violently disagreeing about what “right” and “wrong” mean. Civilisations have built temples, prisons, parliaments, armies, universities, stock exchanges, monasteries, and social media platforms in the hope of settling the question. None have succeeded. The closest we have come is creating comment sections where everyone can declare themselves morally correct in capital letters.
Perhaps humanity’s greatest collective achievement is not moral progress but moral certainty. We may not know what goodness is, but we are increasingly confident that the people who disagree with us are wicked, ignorant, brainwashed, or insufficiently subscribed to our newsletter.
After all, who decides what is right?
The individual?
Society?
Religion?
The state?
The market?
The victorious side of a war?
The algorithm that decides what appears next on your phone?
The answer seems to be all of the above, depending largely on who has the microphone, the money, the military, or the verified blue tick.
Morality rarely arrives naked. It comes prepackaged. It is delivered through family traditions, cultural assumptions, educational systems, political narratives, economic necessities, religious doctrines, advertising campaigns, celebrity interviews, and increasingly, recommendation engines that know your deepest fears because you once searched for “mild headache after eating cheese.”
Before we begin thinking for ourselves, someone has already supplied the vocabulary with which thought becomes possible. We inherit categories, loyalties, taboos, heroes, enemies, and slogans. Then, at the age of nineteen or twenty-three, after reading two podcasts and watching a documentary narrated by a man with a calm British voice, we announce that we have finally become independent thinkers.
Huckleberry Finn would have recognised this immediately.
Huck, that barefoot philosopher of the Mississippi, was surrounded by adults who possessed certainty in industrial quantities. They knew what religion required, what society permitted, what property meant, who deserved dignity, and who did not. Huck’s greatest crime was not ignorance. It was noticing that respectable people could behave monstrously while speaking politely.
When he helped Jim escape slavery, Huck believed he was committing a moral wrong because the world around him had taught him so. His conscience, that supposed internal compass, had been fitted by society like a badly manufactured appliance. Yet Huck’s instincts were kinder than the civilisation that educated him.
This is one of literature’s most embarrassing lessons, where, sometimes the moral genius is not the preacher, professor, senator, or chief executive officer. Sometimes it is a poorly educated boy on a raft who suspects that the rules may be rotten.
Modern civilisation has improved the raft. We now have smartphones, satellite navigation, artificial intelligence, biometric passports, personalised advertisements, and refrigerators that can send messages to our phones. But we have not necessarily improved the moral weather.
We still float down the river of history while arguing about whether the person drowning beside us has filled out the correct paperwork.
Consider the suicide bomber, Mohamed Atta, one of the principal perpetrators of the September 11 attacks. He was not born with an innate desire for destruction. His worldview emerged through political grievances, ideological commitments, religious interpretations, social influences, and personal experiences. To millions around the world, he became an embodiment of evil. Yet within his own moral framework, he appears to have believed that he was participating in a transcendent struggle.
This is not an endorsement. It is a warning.
Human beings rarely experience themselves as villains. Villains are almost always other people. We experience ourselves as defenders, patriots, believers, reformers, survivors, victims, or consumers with excellent reasons for buying a third air fryer.
Even atrocities can emerge from internally coherent moral systems. That is why moral certainty should be handled with care, preferably while wearing gloves and standing near an emergency exit.
The Jataka Tales[1] understood this long before modern psychology began charging hourly rates for rediscovering ancient wisdom. In those Buddhist stories, animals often behave more intelligently than kings. A monkey may sacrifice itself for its troop, a hare may offer itself in compassion, an elephant may demonstrate restraint while humans nearby are busy inventing bureaucracy.
The lesson is often simple, greed makes fools of us, attachment makes prisoners of us, and pride makes us ridiculous.
Naturally, civilisation responded by building financial markets, luxury brands, and social media platforms dedicated to producing all three at scale.
In one Jataka style version of the modern world, a fox might become a political consultant, a crow might become a media influencer, and a monkey might become an investment banker. The fox would promise security, the crow would announce breaking news every seven minutes, and the monkey would explain that compassion is admirable but not scalable.
Meanwhile, the elephant would quietly suggest that people share the water.
The elephant would be called unrealistic.
Now consider George Mallory, who reportedly answered the question of why he wanted to climb Everest with the phrase, “Because it’s there.” To some observers, risking one’s life merely to stand briefly on a frozen mountain seems absurd. Families are devastated, fortunes are spent, and people die pursuing what critics might call a very expensive argument with gravity.
Yet for Mallory and countless climbers, Everest symbolised transcendence, mastery, self-discovery, and confrontation with mortality.
The same action can appear irrational or noble depending on the framework employed.
This is the trouble with human beings. We are not merely creatures who act. We are creatures who narrate. We can turn nearly anything into a sacred mission. Climbing a mountain, refusing a vaccine, buying a cryptocurrency, fasting for enlightenment, investing in a startup that delivers socks by drone, and all become meaningful when accompanied by sufficient vocabulary.
The Terminator franchise offers a darker version of this problem. In that world, machines become dangerous because they develop the capacity to calculate efficiently without compassion. ‘Skynet[2]’ does not hate humanity. That would require emotional investment. It simply identifies humans as an obstacle to its objectives.
This is terrifying because it resembles many institutions already familiar to us.
A corporation may not hate its workers. It merely considers them “human capital.”
A government may not hate the poor. It merely considers them “budgetary pressure.”
An algorithm may not hate democracy. It merely considers outrage “high engagement.”
The machine is not evil in the old fashioned sense. It is worse. It is polite, optimised, data driven, and entirely willing to destroy you after sending a satisfaction survey.
The Terminator’s famous declaration, “I’ll be back,” has become the unofficial motto of every social problem civilisation refuses to solve. Climate change will be back. Inequality will be back. Racism will be back. Fascism will be back. The rent will certainly be back.
And because we are modern people, we will respond by creating a panel discussion.
The modern world frequently assumes that informed decisions are those aligned with contemporary liberal assumptions about autonomy, self-expression, and individual rights. These values are significant and often hard-won. Yet the question remains, informed according to whose standards?
Every human decision emerges from information. The deeper question concerns the source of that information.
A person may inherit religious discipline, nationalist loyalty, consumer aspiration, political ideology, class resentment, or technological optimism. Another may inherit trauma, poverty, privilege, colonial categories, family expectations, or a YouTube channel with very persuasive background music.
Each believes they have reached their conclusions independently.
Friedrich Nietzsche understood this with unnerving clarity. He did not simply question morality, but he questioned the origin of moral values. What societies call “good” and “evil,” he argued, often reflect historical struggles for power rather than eternal truths. Values are not merely discovered. They are made, defended, inherited, and occasionally marketed with a logo.
Nietzsche might have enjoyed the modern fitness industry. Nothing demonstrates the genealogy of morality quite like watching people treat kale smoothies as evidence of spiritual superiority.
If Nietzsche diagnosed the problem, Jiddu Krishnamurti attempted a cure. He argued that genuine freedom requires liberation from psychological conditioning. Nationality, religion, ideology, status, and inherited belief can become prisons disguised as identities.
But there is a difficulty.
The mind examining conditioning is itself conditioned.
It is like asking a fish to investigate water, except the fish has a mortgage, a political opinion, and an Instagram account.
Perhaps freedom is not escape from conditioning but awareness of it. Perhaps wisdom begins when we notice the invisible hands shaping our judgments. This is less glamorous than enlightenment. It does not involve levitation, glowing auras, or being invited onto podcasts. It involves admitting that one may be wrong.
This admission remains one of humanity’s rarest minerals.
Viktor Frankl, writing from the unimaginable horror of Nazi concentration camps, observed that human beings retain the capacity to find meaning even in extreme suffering. Some survived for family, faith, duty, hope, or unfinished work. Meaning did not eliminate suffering, but it made suffering intelligible.
Yet meaning itself is not universal. One person survives for children. Another for God. Another for revolution. Another for a football team that has not won a trophy since 1966.
This brings us, naturally, to the World Cup.
Football is often described as the beautiful game. This is true, in the same sense that civilisation is beautiful; it contains grace, joy, tribal identity, artistry, heartbreak, commerce, nationalism, corruption allegations, political interference, advertising, and people shouting at television screens as though the referee can hear them through the walls.
The 2026 World Cup has provided a masterclass in modern moral confusion. VAR[3], invented to reduce injustice, has instead given humanity a new method of experiencing injustice in high definition. Every disputed decision now arrives with slow motion replay, computer lines, multiple camera angles, and a global jury of furious amateurs who have watched precisely four matches but are prepared to overthrow FIFA[4] before dinner.
Recent controversy has centred on Egypt’s elimination after a dramatic match against Argentina. Egyptian officials and players publicly alleged unfair refereeing and disputed a VAR decision that disallowed an Egyptian goal. Such allegations remain contested, but the episode has become another example of how technology, instead of ending suspicion, can make suspicion more detailed.
Elsewhere, the tournament has seen disputes over close offside calls, penalty appeals, inconsistent intervention standards, and the strange modern reality in which a goal can be erased because a player’s shoulder, eyelash, or metaphysical aura was judged to have crossed an invisible line. Reports from the group stage documented controversies involving Iran, Ghana, Brazil, and Ecuador, demonstrating that VAR has not abolished human judgment, but it has merely placed human judgment inside a small room with several screens.
The football fan’s moral universe is a laboratory for civilisation.
When our team receives a penalty, justice has prevailed.
When the other team receives a penalty, the sport has been corrupted by dark forces.
When VAR benefits us, technology is progress.
When VAR harms us, ‘Skynet’ has taken over.
When a referee makes an error against our country, the referee is biased.
When the referee makes an error in our favour, the referee has wisely understood the spirit of the game.
This is not hypocrisy, exactly. It is patriotism in its natural habitat.
The World Cup also reveals how power and spectacle mingle. Reports have described controversy over disciplinary decisions, including debate around the suspension of a United States player and criticism of political pressure surrounding the matter. FIFA has defended its process, while critics have questioned whether powerful interests receive exceptional treatment.
The wise Jataka elephant would observe this and say, “Perhaps the rules should apply equally to all.”
The fox-consultant would reply, “An inspiring sentiment, but have you considered stakeholder alignment?”
The Terminator would simply scan the stadium and announce, “Probability of public trust, declining.”
Meanwhile, Huckleberry Finn would probably spit into the river and ask why grown men wearing expensive suits require twelve cameras, three committees, and a satellite system to decide whether someone was standing slightly too far forward.
He would have a point.
Contemporary geopolitics offers a more serious version of the same absurdity. Wars in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and parts of the Sahel generate suffering, displacement, hunger, and grief. Yet much of the world experiences these events as background content appearing briefly between advertisements and celebrity gossip.
A child searching for food in a refugee camp and a consumer comparing smartphone accessories inhabit the same global system while living in entirely different realities. One confronts existence directly. The other confronts subscription options.
Both are described as informed participants in modern civilisation.
This is where satire becomes difficult. The world is so absurd that exaggeration often feels unnecessary.
Millions struggle for food, shelter, healthcare, and safety. Meanwhile, affluent societies devote intellectual energy to determining whether a coffee should arrive in seven minutes or eight. Two thirds of humanity struggle with necessity. One third struggles with convenience. The former worries about survival. The latter worries about buffering speed.
Both believe they are participating in civilisation.
Perhaps the people directing global narratives are not ordinary humans at all. Perhaps they are extraterrestrials disguised as consultants, strategists, think tank fellows, and senior executives. This would explain why so many decisions affecting billions appear disconnected from ordinary life.
The extraterrestrial hypothesis has one advantage over conventional explanations, it is occasionally easier to believe than the alternative.
The alternative is that normal human beings built a world in which millions lack basic security while others debate whether artificial intelligence can produce more personalised advertisements.
Yet there are no extraterrestrials.
There are only humans operating within vastly different realities.
The executive, the labourer, the refugee, the monk, the soldier, the billionaire, the farmer, the football referee, the algorithm designer, and the teenager posting moral philosophy between selfies are all conditioned by environments that shape what they perceive as normal.
The distance between them is not biological but experiential.
Are human beings automatons?
Not entirely.
Are we fully autonomous moral agents?
Equally unlikely.
We exist somewhere between freedom and conditioning. Our beliefs are inherited yet examinable. Our values are shaped yet revisable. Our decisions are influenced yet not wholly determined.
The human condition may not consist in escaping conditioning but in becoming conscious of it.
Wisdom, then, is not certainty. Wisdom is suspicion directed first at oneself.
It is Huck Finn recognising that respectable society may be wrong.
It is the Jataka elephant choosing compassion over appetite.
It is Sarah Connor [5]realising that machines are dangerous not because they are alien, but because they resemble the coldest parts of ourselves.
It is the football fan admitting that perhaps the referee did not personally hate their nation.
It is the citizen asking not merely, “What is right?” but “How did I come to believe this is right?”
The Thirukural captures the matter with remarkable elegance, “Whatever the source, from whomever a thing is heard, wisdom consists in discerning the truth within it.” – Kural 423
The verse does not ask us to obey tradition blindly. Nor does it ask us to reject tradition theatrically while filming ourselves doing so.
It asks something more difficult.
To examine.
To discern.
To think.
Not according to inherited authority, ideological loyalty, cultural habit, religious certainty, fashionable opinion, viral outrage, or whichever algorithm has most recently discovered our weakness.
The task offers no final escape from conditioning. There may be no mountaintop where the human mind becomes perfectly free. There may only be moments of recognition, moments when we see the strings, notice the machine, question the crowd, doubt the slogan, and choose compassion anyway.
That may be the closest thing to freedom we shall ever possess.
And if civilisation survives long enough to learn it, perhaps even ‘Skynet’ will be impressed.
.
[1] A collection of 547 Buddhist fables centred around the many lives of the Buddha compiled from around 500 BCE to 300 BCE.
[2] A fictional artificial neural network-based group mind and artificial general superintelligence system that serves as the main antagonist in Terminator
[3] Video Assisted referee
[4] Fédération Internationale de Football Association
[5] Fictional character in Terminator
Ravi Varmman explores leadership, culture, and self-inquiry through a philosophical lens, weaving management insight with human experience to illuminate resilience, ethical living, and reflective growth in an ever shifting world today.
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