{"product_id":"the-tyranny-of-fictions-muhammad-taha-alam-9789356268722","title":"The Tyranny of Fictions: Civilization and the Eclipse of Being","description":"\u003cp\u003eFrom the author of \u003cem\u003ePain and Being\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eThe Ontology of Pain\u003c\/em\u003e returns a work of rare philosophical intensity: \u003cem\u003eThe Tyranny of Fictions: Civilization and the Eclipse of Being\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis book is not merely a critique of contemporary civilization. It is an ontological excavation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhere most philosophy begins with reason, politics, or culture, Alam begins with pain. In his earlier works, he advanced a radical thesis: that pain is not an accident within existence but its first form of awareness, that Being itself emerges through disturbance, tension, and vulnerability. Pain, in this vision, is not secondary to life; it is its original disclosure. From this insight arose a new philosophical framework, an ontology in which suffering is not a defect to be eliminated but the primordial condition through which consciousness, meaning, and structure come into being.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Tyranny of Fictions\u003c\/em\u003e carries this inquiry into the architecture of civilization itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAlam asks a devastating question: what happens when the structures created to contain pain forget why they exist?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHis answer is both sweeping and precise. Modern domination, he argues, does not originate in cruelty or conspiracy but in forgetting. The symbolic constructions humanity invented to survive vulnerability - order, progress, value, identity, representation - have hardened into autonomous systems. These fictions, once protective, now operate blindly. They reproduce themselves without reflection. They persist without remembrance of their origin in suffering.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCivilization, Alam shows, has entered \u003cstrong\u003ethe age of the autonomous structure.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDrawing together ontology, critical realism, political economy, and metaphysical analysis, the book traces how imagination becomes institution, how meaning solidifies into mechanism, and how human creations acquire causal power over their creators. The state, the market, bureaucracy, and technological networks emerge not simply as social arrangements but as metaphysical formations, structures that act without consciousness, perpetuating harm through function rather than intent.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt the heart of Alam's argument lies his most original contribution: the extension of the ontology of pain into a theory of civilization. Pain, once externalized and organized through symbolic systems, does not disappear. It becomes abstracted, distributed, and hidden. Ethics becomes administration. Meaning becomes data. Life becomes procedure. Humanity finds itself enclosed within its own creations, alienated not only socially but ontologically, separated from Being itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYet this is not a book of despair.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAgainst fatalism, Alam introduces the possibility of \u003cstrong\u003estructural consciousness\u003c\/strong\u003e: the recovery of reflection within function, the remembrance of origin within mechanism. Liberation, he argues, does not require the destruction of civilization but its recollection. To recognize that every structure was once a fiction is to reopen the space of freedom.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWritten in a distinctive philosophical literary style, precise, lyrical, and uncompromising, \u003cem\u003eThe Tyranny of Fictions\u003c\/em\u003e speaks to readers who sense that something fundamental has gone wrong with the modern world yet refuse shallow explanations.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is not merely a critique of power or technology. It is a meditation on existence itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA profound meditation on Being.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA daring ontology of pain.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA necessary reckoning with civilization.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis book does not offer comfort.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt offers clarity.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Muhammad Taha Alam\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 935626872X\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9789356268722\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Kingsman Press London\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 02\/27\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 372\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.73lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 8.00h x 5.00w x 0.93d","brand":"Muhammad Taha Alam","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":48874586439935,"sku":"9789356268722","price":21.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/the-tyranny-of-fictions-muhammad-taha-alam-9789356268722","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}