The Death of Zarathustra: Notes on Truth for the Risk-Taker - Paperback

by Graeme Donald Snooks (Author)

This book explores truth in human society - its nature, role, and future. But it does so in an unorthodox way, by employing a fictional framework. Truth conveyed within a lie. It is an exploration that ranges from Greek rationalism (truth told to outsiders and lies to insiders) in the West and Zoroastrianism (Truth versus the Lie) in the East, to the pragmatism of today, and beyond. It is the year 2044 in a world reeling from the devastating effects of a radical experiment by governments to impose a draconian global climate-mitigation program. After decades of oppression, right-wing forces in Metropolis, the world's leading society, have thrown off these shackles, taken political control, invaded the devastated oil-rich countries, and are advancing on China after a limited nuclear exchange. In the turmoil, a determined scholar is editing the unpublished essays of an obscure thinker, active between the 1960s and 2010s, who had predicted these events using his revolutionary general dynamic theory of life. A voice from the underground that had been ignored in its own time. The edited essays focus on the role played by truth in the dealings of the state, the people, the intellectuals, the businesspeople, and the clergy of Metropolis in the early years of the twenty-first century. A role that led to the chaos of 2044. Arguing from the grave, our thinker shows there is no general "will to truth", even among philosophers; there is no societal demand for truth in the struggle to survive and prosper; and that truth-seeking is the most extreme of extreme sports - a form of self-vivisection - pursued by deviants who often end mentally disturbed or taking their own lives.

Author Biography

Graeme Donald Snooks is Executive Director of the Institute of Global Dynamic Systems (IGDS) in Canberra. Formerly he was the Coghlan Research Professor in the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University. Dr Snooks is an accomplished author at the cutting edge of research on social and biological dynamics. He has published more than twenty books and many scholarly articles.