Prof. Manindra Nath Thakur is a faculty member at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he teaches courses such as Indian Intellectual Traditions, Modern Indian Political Thought, and Radical Movements in India. He is also a Trustee of the Foundation for Creative Social Research (FCSR), which serves as a platform to promote the evolving intellectual movement of Creative Theory. Through this initiative, the Foundation supports research groups working on critical themes—including Religion, Spirituality, and Consciousness—with the goal of building scholarly networks rooted in Indian and Asian intellectual experiences.

He is the co-author of two significant books: Wounded History: Religion, Conflict, Psyche and Social Healing, and Politics on the Move. His Hindi book, Gyan Ki Rajniti: Samaj Adhyayan aur Bhartiya Chintan, aims to spark a deeper conversation between Indian philosophical traditions and contemporary social sciences.

As the principal coordinator of the Mapping Knowledge and Practice Project in India and Asia, he is leading efforts to document and engage with diverse regional knowledge systems and lived practices.

Currently, he is working on several manuscripts, including: Human Nature and Social Sciences, Marxism and Religion: From the Opium Thesis to the Reflex Theory, Gandhi’s Ethical Realism His recent publications include the article “Mapping Religious Movements in India” in a volume on Indian Politics, and “Is Capitalism Facing a Philosophical Crisis?” in the Journal of Social Change (SAGE). He is also the lead editor of the forthcoming volume titled Indian Knowledge System: A Creative Dialogue with Indian Intellectual Traditions.

ABSTRACT

This keynote advances a simple but urgent proposition: the defining crisis of our era is a crisis of cognition—what and how we come to know—and therefore a crisis of conscience—how we judge and act. The accelerating manipulation of attention, the commodification of information, and the weaponisation of affect have narrowed human awareness to the point where cognitive freedom—the ability to think, feel, and will autonomously with ethical clarity—is under systematic assault. Distorted cognition does not merely mislead public debate; it corrodes the very faculties that make humane civilisation possible. If left unaddressed, this drift will render humanity increasingly governable by spectacle, polarisation, and automated desire—conditions inimical to democratic life and planetary survival.

I argue that the usual remedies—more data, faster computation, tighter regulation—are necessary but insufficient. Our economics treats humans as preference-maximisers; our politics often instrumentalises fear and hope; both inherit an implicit anthropology that sidelines inner life. What is missing is a serious engagement with spirituality as a domain of knowledge and practice concerned with attention, discernment, self-regulation, compassion, and meaning. Spirituality, in this sense, is not dogma but disciplined inquiry into the unity of consciousness (how we know) and conscience (how we ought to live). Without this axis, technical fixes simply optimise the machinery of manipulation.

Drawing on Indian philosophical resources—Purushartha (ethical ends), Vikāra (distortions), dialogical Samvāda, layered accounts of selfhood—and on my recent work in Creative Theory and the Inner Grammar of Liberation, I outline a framework for cognitive liberation. This framework treats attention as a public good, truth-seeking as a civic virtue, and character formation as a societal task. It reframes “knowledge” away from extractive accumulation toward transformative praxis, linking inner development with social responsibility.

To move from argument to embodiment, the keynote turns to living models. The Dayalbagh experiment in Agra—and, in a different register, the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque Country—demonstrate that religious and spiritual, as well as ethical, commitments can inform material life without retreating from science or modernity. Dayalbagh’s blend of spiritual discipline, scientific education, cooperative economics, and ecological care shows how communities can protect attention, cultivate conscience, and organise production around dignity rather than domination. Mondragon’s democratic governance and solidarity economics display complementary virtues of shared agency and distributive justice. Both models contest the false binary between competitive capitalism and ethically hollow statism, offering institutional pathways where cognition is clarified by practice and conscience is scaffolded by community.

Finally, I address a widening fracture: the distance between the knowledge community and everyday life. Where this gap persists, commercial and ideological intermediaries thrive, mediating reality for citizens while extracting value from their confusion. Bridging this divide requires reciprocal translation—scholars apprenticing themselves to lived contexts; communities co-creating inquiry agendas; schools and cooperatives becoming sites of dialogical learning where science, ethics, and spirituality are taught together as mutually illuminating practices.

The lecture thus issues a call: defend cognitive freedom as a cornerstone of human dignity; restore spirituality to the architecture of economics and politics; and cultivate institutions that integrate consciousness with conscience. Reclaiming the humanity of human beings is not a metaphor but a program—beginning with attention, sustained by dialogue, and realised in communities that live what they know.