In the same way, somewhat later, Marx, a Jew-turned-Protestant, a hippie-turned-bourgeois in marriage (having married an aristocrat, Jenny von Westphalen) reasoning through excessive zeal amdist organized numbers, his common sense gave him, he thought—and through Hegel’s dialectics—insights into the prime destiny of the proletariat—the common man of Descartes now become a slave of the machines, and for the reign of reason to be, common sense had to be activated, the chains had to be broken. And just as the slut had been dragged through the streets of Paris, reason began to be shouted over the barricades of the Western world, the proletariat became king. And in the name of the same common sense Lenin and Trotsky chopped off a few hundred thousand people’s heads, truth having been proclaimed a bourgeois concept, and Stalin of course, found reason, that is common sense, a means for social hygiene. He killed another fifteen million people, more or less. Mao has added a few millions lately to it all, Mao the emperor of the rediscovered Middle Kingdom, China the country of reason’s universe.

Of course every one has equal value in terms of the Absolute or Truth or God. You have to go up towards the highest reason or God—up the Calvary, the symbol of ascent. In the eyes of God, or if you will, of the Absolute, everybody has equal status at the terminal point, there being no status there. You have to be sacrificed, that is you have to lose your ego entity, then of course in the undifferentiated we are all identical, and so one. In non-duality we are really free, because there, there is none other than oneself. ‘Truth shall ye know,’ said one of the founding fathers of America, ‘Truth shall ye know, and Truth shall set you free.’ That is where reason leading to truth rules, for only truth reigns. That, in St Augustine’s language, is the City of God.

In Rousseau’s republic all men are born free, that is they must live in the City of God. (But to make reason function at any other level is to be irrational, that is to say, as Marx did, to use reason for less reasonable purposes.) To use divine arguments for ego-centred ends, however generous and inspired these ends may be, is heresy, is betrayal. And it leads one to death. Divine generosity sent Joan of Arc to the stake. And Beckett to the tower. And Godse, based on his reason, killed Mahatma Gandhi himself.