American Tribal Wars: The Mind Sciences Hindu Civilization Refined for Millennia are the Tools This Moment Requires

E. O. Wilson liked to put the human predicament in one sentence: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. That is a recipe for disaster.

Hindu civilization began with the first of those three — the mind-body complex. The rishis studied it, trained it, refined it, learned to govern it, and then released its bondage. They codified methods anyone could follow. Institutions and technology were downstream from that work.

Two people can watch the same event and reach opposite conclusions because their starting frame decides what counts as evidence. Varied frames can coexist only when each person knows which one they are standing in. That is why, in the humanities, a writer should declare a framework before making a case. Before I name mine, ask yourself what yours is. Do you see the world through a humanistic secular frame, a purely scientific or materialist one, a globalist one-world frame that holds despite personal difference, a religious one, or a convenient one that suits the moment and changes with the weather? Do you have a consistent framework at all?

The Indian knowledge system is my framework. It is not ancient history. It is a living tool.

What follows is what happens when institutions and technology arrive before an untrained mind — when the order is reversed. Every example points to the same conclusion. Without governing the senses and the mind, and without some freedom from them, nothing else holds. Policy, activism, alliances, and institutions become surface dressings on an untrained mind.

Technology, AI, and Psyops

Leaked internal documents from the Chinese firm GoLaxy, reviewed by Vanderbilt researchers and reported in 2025, describe dossiers on more than two thousand U.S. political figures, including more than a hundred members of Congress. The same files outline AI systems built to profile targets and generate influence content. Separately, Chinese researchers have published a framework, Light Society, capable of simulating societies of more than a billion AI agents in order to study trust, rumor, and opinion spread at planetary scale. Some industry forecasts still place artificial general intelligence as early as the end of this decade.

We already know what happens when high-velocity information systems are loosed on an unprepared public. After the October 7 attacks in Israel, campus and street protests spread worldwide with a speed that social media both organized and distorted. Many participants could not state what they were fighting for and did not check primary sources. Covid-era panic — in some cases justified, in many cases inflated — followed the same pattern: fear traveling faster than verification.

Contrast that with students of the old gurukuls and of institutions such as Nalanda. The mind was to be mastered before speech and before civic action.

Now we train algorithms, feed a distracted crowd, hand out slogans, signal moral superiority, appear engaged, and call it democracy. Social media captures the senses. That is precisely what the Gita warned about. Teen depression, anxiety, self-harm, and chronic distraction are among the outcomes. Vital energy is spent on outrage and reflex when technology is aimed at an untrained mind. The algorithm does not need to convince you. It needs you distracted, angry, and certain all at once. The mind that cannot stop reaching now has a keyboard and a potential audience of millions.

Outrage, anxiety, and talk of takeover are not, by themselves, a moral failure. They are material for observation: is the resentment arising in a trained mind that can still govern itself, or in an untrained mind that only reacts? The same fear and reflex run inside every community, not only between them. The pattern appears across countries.

Within Islam the fractures are old and public. Arabs of the Middle East have often looked down on darker-skinned Muslims elsewhere and, in some strands of history and preaching, defended slavery even while seeking converts. Sunnis and Shias have slaughtered each other for centuries. Ahmadis are treated as outside the fold by communities they claim as their own. The most revealing recent case is unfolding now. In August 2026, days after Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement — an attack on one to be treated as an attack on all — Houthi drones struck Saudi infrastructure, including an Aramco facility at Jazan. In September, Saudi air defenses intercepted a drone south of Mecca. Turkey and Pakistan condemned the threat; officials also said Riyadh had not issued a formal request and that the pact was not yet fully operational. No Muslim army arrived to defend the haramain. Reporting since then has described intelligence and air-defense contacts between Saudi Arabia and Israel through U.S. Central Command. Whether that is a failure of a political franchise or a betrayal of faith is for Muslims to answer. It is evidence that ummah solidarity is not the simple story its slogans suggest.

Within African societies, tribal killing and discrimination have run deep — Rwanda, Sudan, the Horn of Africa. Within white America, nativism has eaten its own. In March 1891 a New Orleans mob lynched eleven Italian immigrants after a police chief’s murder; it remains among the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history. Poles were called Polacks and treated as disposable labor. The Irish faced riots, job bans, and pulpit slander a generation earlier. The same reflex is now aimed at white Americans themselves. For several years, DEI rhetoric and a strain of woke ideology painted whiteness as racist by birth. Young white Americans were berated, labeled, and taught to feel stained. Repeated accusation does not vanish. It hardens. Some of that internalization is now returning as anger. At the party level, both Republicans and Democrats are fracturing from within.

Ninety percent of first-year seats at UT Austin are reserved for Texans. A photograph of brown faces in burnt orange is not proof that foreigners displaced Texans.

In America’s open market, institutions permit social shifts for economic and political reasons. Many people game the system and work the fault lines. A recent example is the uproar after a University of Texas football game. Texas law still sends a large share of UT Austin’s resident freshman seats to students at the top of their own high-school classes — currently the top five percent for automatic admission — without a racial or religious screen. That is a meritocratic rule, and it is one reason many people still love America. When the downstream face of that rule is called “replacement,” the audience is often watching without clarity. Ninety percent of first-year seats at UT Austin are reserved for Texans. A photograph of brown faces in burnt orange is not proof that foreigners displaced Texans.

Commentators such as Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas railroad commissioner, looked at South Asian students celebrating a Longhorn comeback and saw invasion. The anxiety underneath the post is real for many voters. The error is the frame. People who demand assimilation cannot treat the sight of immigrants’ children — or Indian-American Texans — cheering a state university team as evidence that assimilation failed. The ailment is confusion about what assimilation was supposed to produce.

The pattern has not changed. Only the target has. Tribalism is not only a skin-color problem or a religious problem. It is a threatened-micro-tribe problem. Every group does it when jolted. The untrained mind cannot tell a real threat from a manufactured one, and that confusion feeds the passion. Condemnation that merely shames the anxiety will not dissolve it. Buried anxiety does not disappear. It changes costume and will pull a country apart in pieces.

Caste, Reservation, and Exported Confusion

India’s caste and reservation system is a live wound, but it is only one thread in a wider tangle. The Indian government says little about the killing and targeting of Hindus, and when it does speak the policy is often incoherent. It wants the language of equality while practicing group preference. The caste census keeps expanding into more subcastes. The driver is electoral arithmetic and appeasement. The result is confusion with no visible spine. That confusion is exported for the diaspora to manage, and it is further stirred by foreign interests, NGOs, and opportunistic players. The senses run the person. It is the mind that cannot stop reaching.

This web is hard for an untrained mind to map. Citizens in India are confused. The global diaspora is confused. The governments that host that diaspora are confused.

Religious and Ideological Destruction: The Hindu Dilemma

Hindus are caught between two traps. Parts of the far right are turning openly racial. Parts of the far left are turning openly coercive, in an alignment often described as a red-green alliance. The danger for the public — and here, for Hindus — is to answer hurt with passionate rebuttal and then let that passion choose a side. The right is racist, so the Hindu says, “I’ll show them,” and votes left. That is the trap. Both sides use pain as a lever. The left offers belonging but often demands that you abandon your people and your culture and take up a potion of victimhood. The right may offer protection but ask you to hate. The Hindu should be careful. Neither camp wants you free in this environment. Both want you useful.

The trained mind’s choice is not to be drawn in and not to let hurt cast the ballot. The only ground that holds is the one you stand on yourself, with clarity.

The Chariot: Controlling the Senses

Every system described here is a failure of mastery. The oldest answer was never “fix the state first.” It was “master the self, then act.” Arjuna did not receive a policy brief. He received a philosophical frame from the Gita and a command to live and act — his svadharma and svabhava — with vairagya, without clinging to the fruit.

The Hindu framework was built for one person. The open question is whether it can be taken up by a critical mass, at a scale that changes a society. That is where the Indian knowledge system still shines, and that is what has been forgotten. The mind sciences that Hindu civilization refined for millennia are the tools this moment requires — not as heritage display, but as a living technology for the untrained mind.

The Container

America is the container. The tribes inside hold a delicate peace. Do you owe allegiance to the container, or to the tribe as one of its contents? Is that even a choice a citizen should have to make, or does the burden fall on the politicians who run the container and the tribes that demand to be contained?

We need dialogue, clarity, and courage. Dialogue without clarity is noise with better manners. Courage without clarity is noise with a louder voice. The container holds only if the people inside can tell the difference.

The Doors, Earned

So yes: show up at the HOA, the school board, the city council, a rally, a meeting. That is where decisions that touch your life are made. Bring the discipline you bring to work into the room where your children’s future is decided. Choose the institutions and issues that are yours, then participate with vigor, focus, and attention. Think about your tribe. Also think about how that tribe will defend, protect, and preserve the container.

Numbers without clarity are a mob. Clarity without numbers is a monastery. The country needs people who mastered themselves before they entered the room.

The Message

In a world of make-believe, confusion, distraction, and propaganda aimed at the senses and the emotions at once, the mind sciences of Hindu civilization are not a museum piece. They are a way out — and the way out is inward. Attend to the mind. Loosen the grip of the senses. Control the horses, the indriyas. In this noisy world, that remains the most precious possession a human being can have.

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Shashi Kusuma M.D. is a practicing Plastic surgeon in Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton, FL.  He is an active member of the Hindu American Foundation and a co-founder of the Hindu American PAC of Florida.