A GLOBAL ICON FOR COMPASSIONATE LEADERSHIP

Studying and later teaching economics and development at the University of Cambridge, I soon came to question neoclassical economics, with its central hypothesis of selfish individualism, and neoliberal orthodoxy, with its worship of the market.

- BY KAVERI GILL

A heterodox political economy approach appealed far more, but over time it, too, did not yield completely satisfactory answers as to why we continue to remain asymptotically far from the goal of greater equality. I came to observe that in reality, the left—both liberals and radicals—often mirror the right in their lived structural prejudices and the ends-justify-any-means methods.

Joining an international relations department, it became impossible to deny the dominance of realism, with a multipolar and unstable world order dominated by isolationist and expansionist great powers. Keynesian economics, the concept of the welfare state and the liberal, rules-based post World War II Bretton Woods alliances and institutions, which formed the backbone of my graduate study, teaching and worldview, lie in ruins today. We have highly transactional, authoritarian populist leaders in many parts of the globe, who are ever ready to bend facts to serve their ends in a post-truth truly dystopian reality.

The question that increasingly came to my mind is whether such a state of affairs is inevitable. Could fallibility rather be traced to a lack of probity in public life? To what degree is it true that if we do not ourselves practice and embody ethics, it is impossible to change the outer world? To then come across the embodiment of Nalanda philosophy in the personhood of the Dalai Lama was a revelation.