One World

Adam Weishaupt once said, ‘Meritocracy is not a pass/fail system, but rather a system that allows each person to find their own highest attainment.’ Every word in that sentence was wrong. Meritocracy is precisely a pass/fail system. Meritocracy is exactly what prevents a person from finding their own highest attainment. Meritocracy provides us with the difference between what we get and what we deserve. A supposedly unbiased characteristic, determined solely by the ‘innate’ qualities of a person, their education and experience, merit has been the long-standing basis for capitalism. However omnipotent this golden ideal sounds, the idea of merit is explicitly the cause for inequality across the world. It only makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer. What is merit? Merit is a quality of every person based not on their wealth, social standing, race, gender, caste, creed, sexuality, political position, nationality, et cetera, rather on their innate talents, acquired skills, earned achiev...

  ‘The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality’ – Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian Poet. Dark plumes of smoke rose in the air, heralding a doom of unendurable potency. Widow and Widower, Orphan and Vilomah, all formed in an instant – as a missile crashes into their building. They are the unwilling victims of a war they are not part of. As children cry for their dead fathers, and vice versa, who really cares about the idea of Palestine if it comes at a cost which cannot and should not be borne. Except there is no alternative. Palestinians would not hesitate to live in Israel, but they are not allowed. Persecution, oppression, execution: that is the only fate which meets those who try to cross those imaginary lines which mark Israel from Palestine. And for those imaginary lines, wars are fought, homes are ravaged and people, precious people who are born with one and only life, are killed, mercilessly, causelessly, and inhumanely.  Although many people mark...

  Why is one plus one two? Why is anything into zero zero? Why is two to the power zero one? Any mathematician would categorically reply to you, sighing deeply, that these are axioms in math; that they’re obvious . But are they really that obvious? And what really are axioms? Most significantly, what even is math, using certainties in a world where only uncertainty is certain? Is the universe really just math, or are we being presumptuous of our talents? Was math invented, or discovered? What are axioms? Merriam-Webster defines an axiom as ‘a statement accepted as true as the basis for argument or inference/an established rule or principle or a self-evident truth/a maxim widely accepted on its intrinsic merit’. A common feature of any mathematics textbook, they are those statements which we commit to our memory without question and utilise for the rest of our lives. If you are reading this, it’s almost guaranteed that you have studied some level of mathematics (as you are literate)...