The acronym GOAT – Greatest of All Time – is everywhere. What it usually signals is that the speaker has no grasp of time at all. When someone declares A to be the GOAT, the meaning is best rendered thus:
“I am a fan of A, who is currently trending. I know little of history, even less of time, and nothing of substance. But proclaiming A makes me feel clever and may fool other halfwits on social media into thinking I know something. In truth I am just another echo in the idiot chorus.”
That may sound droll, but it happens to be true.
Thinking in large time scales does not come naturally to humans. That is why many recoil from biological evolution, and why every passing cultural hiccup is mistaken for history in the making.
In the long arc of human civilisation, what survives is not personality or pageantry. It is ideas.
MAGA faithful may chant that Trump is the greatest this or that. I voted for that degenerate 3 times, not out of conviction, but because politics is usually a choice between failures. Trump remains what he always was – ill-bred, illiterate, and deeply stupid – a pile of verbal litter soon to be swept aside. In a few decades, if not sooner, he will be a trivia question. History remembers signal and forgets noise.
What about Elon Musk? He is signal. Measured across time, he may merit a paragraph or two, perhaps more, if he helped shift humanity’s path. But even his finest technological feats are susceptible to obsolescence. Each generation overwrites the last and what was cutting-edge becomes quaint in the blink of a century.
What endures, what history truly sanctifies, are ideas that pierce the matrix of reality.
As a young student of electromagnetism, I came across a passage from Feynman that burned itself into memory. He was speaking of James Clerk Maxwell’s synthesis of electricity and magnetism, a feat of intellect so singular it redefined the world. Feynman said:
“From a long view of the history of mankind, seen from, say, ten thousand years from now, there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade.”
Those lines underscored what it meant to think not in decades or lifetimes, but in epochs.
Ideas are the true architecture of civilisation. They endure while monuments rot and regimes collapse. That is why Newton’s Principia, Maxwell’s equations, and Ramanujan’s otherworldly mathematics still course through our intellectual culture, while the tycoons and emperors lie buried under layers of dust.
Musk’s name may survive, but only if it anchors an idea large enough. Multiplanetary life, perhaps, or a reinvention of energy itself. Otherwise, he risks being remembered like Ford, a revolutionary capitalist, but not a thinker who shaped human destiny.
30 years ago, I stood in the Bristlecone Pine forest in California’s White Mountains, among trees over 4,000 years old, the oldest living individual beings on the planet. They have withstood millennia of wind, drought, and stillness. It struck me then that these trees were alive when, on the other side of the world, the Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi Tree and attained to awakening.
How fitting. In the Dharmic vision, trees are jivas: beings, not objects. They participate in the vast wheel of samsara, possessing a consciousness of another kind. To the Buddha or a rishi of the Upanishads, these trees would not be mute things but sage sentinels of stillness, beings who have perhaps understood time more deeply than any human ever will.
Let me end with a final testament to the power of ideas, one the average Westerner is unlikely ever to have considered.
China, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia. Each speaks a language from a wholly different linguistic family.* And yet, the ideas of Hindu and Buddhist India entered them, reconfigured their inner lives, and left fingerprints on everything from metaphysics to art, from architecture to ethics. No force of arms, no coercion, no bloodshed. Only monks, mystics, merchants, and the sublime seduction of ideas.
Imagine peoples who could not understand a word of Sanskrit or Prakrit, whose native languages were tonal and structurally alien, yet who absorbed and re-expressed the vision of Dharmic thought. They transmuted it, recasting it in their own imagery and cultural frameworks. But the substratum remained unambiguously Indic. This is a whole subject unto itself, for another day.
This civilisational permeation tells us something essential. Truly potent ideas transcend language, race, and nation. They outlast everything else. No armies overran them. Yet whole inner worlds were rearranged, from the Mekong to Mount Fuji.
Ideas alone outlive everything.
*Vietnamese and Khmer are both Austroasiatic languages, but mutually unintelligible.
– RP, July 2025