Do you really believe B Gates and W Buffet made their wealth without armed bloodshed? I find it hard to believe that we are supposed to solve problems simultaneously adopting high moral accountability while also turning a blind eye to those who invested in and profited from the defense industry.
I think he means direct armed bloodshed as he was comparing them to the kings of old who would conquor with armies.
The author directly says capitalism is bloodshed in general whether it's profiting off of the defense industry or just exploiting people in foreign countries for iphones.
I did not read the whole text. I will go back and take another look on a larger screen, or maybe even print it for the sake of ease of reading.
I did catch the mention of the trust fund kids hitting up ashrams and retreats and Burning Man. My instinct is to accept that this indeed has something to do with poor spiritual principles, however in the somewhat traditional teachings of Indian philosophies and religions couldn't we conclude these are people with generally good karma who are maintaining it somewhat (and burning it quite a bit) yet at least not eating meat, dealing drugs, beating their kids, etc.?
I am sensitive to the possibility that those individuals are indeed self-serving in some fashion, though I also am at least somewhat impressed with a subsection of those same individuals who truly are bright souls (in relation for instance to my poor life choices!)
What I see being examined here is the obvious enormous disparity between genuine altruistic service to humanity and the bizarre tendency for people to tourist-away their inner seeking by merely denying their own culture and escaping into a Disneyland version of someone else's (washed clean of the truth of its own exploitation.) I feel like that might be the frustration/ analysis here?
The feeling is that a false version of Asian spirituality (dodgy gurus in pleasure palace beach ashrams teaching "tantric yoga" in sarongs) has replaced the real asian spirituality, which (in most cases) displays a healthy respect for the value of feeding the hungry and housing the homeless.
Gandhi. We just sort of pretend he never happened.
I will add another comment that is about half a question:
My feeling is you are accelerating into the great ride of frustrated discovery that we all do as the working parts of society become clearer and the injustices of any one person being born into any one lifetime become obvious.
I have until recently been so intensely frustrated with the obvious disparities and glaring ugliness of human systems that I (literally) drove myself to madness and homelessness as a result.
As the smoke has cleared it did so presenting some beautiful insights into myself, others, and the longer-game realities that are not easily proven to exist beneath a materialist analysis.
So what I am admitting is that I had a bonafide spiritual awakening complete with utter destitution, hallucination, visions of beings and glimpses into those workings that great teachers assure us are very really, actually churning out reality.
It has brought me an extraordinary degree of peace with the exact same impassioned, treadmill-despising, revolting obvious inequalities you're riffing on in your writing.
My instinct is to believe you are on the way into a (hopefully less degrading) awakening similar to mine.
At a time when I had arguments similar to what it is you're sharing I was back from a war, doing Occupy Wall Street protests, anti-NSA and pro-openess animations, anti-corruption campaign finance reform marches.. I went crazy with effort to solve exactly what you're pointing out.
I think there was no other way. You can not unsee what you find unlivable. So my guess is you have to push through into whatever is next for you and I bet if you are able to find a workable value-base to hold to, you will emerge with evidence for yourself on how it is actually (now) livable.
8 years ago I was like: "no way, it's gotta change"
Now I'm like: "okay.. it IS changing.. just like it always has."
Yeah - I did that phase in the late 1990s - I've been enlightened nearly half my life due to a very early meditation practice and an absolutely ruthless guru.
A very slightly different version of me could sit on a cloud and spectate. This version of me got assigned the personal responsibility to do something about this mess, which I continue to work towards.
Not quite on the topic of the text but..
I often wonder about this is the context of pacific Island cultures. Christianity is a huge part of community and cultural life in many PI countries. As something that was originally imposed on their ancestors by colonisers, does the work of de-colonisation also have to include a re-evaluation of religion?
Bad there. 1000 times worse in India, relative to both Christianity and Islam, and with the great aggravating force of Yogi Adityanath pouring salt into those wounds.
I know of no framework to look at that question which isn't basically just a bunch more questions: in Scandinavia there are old pagan branches coming back up, Latvia too - but was the original tradition lost and they're neopagans, or was it alive on the farms and it's now coming back above the surface. It's like financial reparations: once you begin, where do you end?
I grew up in the West. I'm glad it's not my fight, I'd sweat hard finding a position!
Great article! What do you consider some simple things the average person can do on a day to day basis in addition to avoiding meat to improve the moral state of affairs?
1) Individual practical action - that's your standard "low carbon lifestyle" stuff, reduced meat, bicycles, insulated housing, minimal consumption, all of that.
2) Individual mental action - this is actually getting to know what the goals of yoga are, if you're doing yoga, and Buddhism, if you're doing mindfulness etc. Actually understanding the goals and objectives is key.
3) Collective practical action - how do we actually build things which we can ethically use? I've been banging on about the Fair Trade Laptop for years, but if we had a lot of demonstrated collective willingness to buy such a thing, maybe Fairphone or System 76 or somebody would be willing to manufacture one for us. Demand aggregation is a thing the internet is good at.
4) Collective mental action - where is our objective map of the risks to the human species, and list of efforts to mitigate those risks, ideally with drill down to budget line items so we know how our money is being spent?
Third time's the charm.. I found your definition repeated and I want to dissect it:
"Spiritual colonialism is the appropriation of the methods of indigenous spiritualities for the goals of capitalism."
Reselling anything gotten from one culture into another is definitely what you're describing. My impression of this is that it has always been going on and it has worked extraordinarily well for everyone involved.
When the Phyrgian cult of the Magna Mater became popular during a crisis period for the Roman Empire, what resulted appears to be the earliest merging of that Asiatic tradition into Roman religion. There was a governing body eventually called the Quindecimviri. It literally oversaw the absorption of once foreign religions into the lives of Romans. Why was this done? Well.. people from that region were becoming Romans! Some Romans started practicing Phyrgian religion and many Phyrgians defended Rome and became Roman and benefited from citizenship/inclusion for about a thousand years.
So although it most certainly is a great catastrophe for traditionalists defending their authentic practices, it would appear this has been going on for a very very long time.
All those people sojourning in India seeking nirvana and samara are there because they are really seeking. All those landing in Western nations endeavoring to be a part of the (currently, things change fast!) predominant political economy participate and have added inclusion benefits because a bunch of foreigners are now no longer suspicious but worshipful of their indigenous practices.
Sure! Cash rich spoiled kids seeking after a person's culture while that individual has to labor in their imperial connect is certainly frustrating. The alternative seems MUCH MUCH WORSE.
If those same kids think that the nation they're going to are morally and spiritually backwards (and want that the original real colonialism problem nearly everywhere? ) then those self-described superior people will attempt to subject those people to their culture.
Of course you're already familiar with that.
Somewhere along the line, probably due to convenient geography and necessity the Roman Empire realized that:
1) their client kingdoms had brilliant traditions and thinkers to go with the trade goods e.t.c.
2) the sociology of inclusion meant a thriving empire with a composite cultural and military defense
3)??
The cult of the Magna Mater is still present in the world in Roman Catholicism. Some great Anatolian mother goddess culture operates successfully in South America now.
Its appropriation and so on, yes. From a dialectical materialist analysis it looks like pure oppression.
To a realpolitik melting pot planet it seems like trial and error. All those people are visiting India because about two hundred years of ignorance finally bore the fruitful and appropriate realization that Indians have a undeniably deep and ancient series of useful insights into the workings of existence. I would feel inclined to believe the hoards of white interlopers are a sign that India invested its few thousands of years wisely!
My interest is in a more complete export: the world-destroying nonsense of industrial society as it is currently practiced needs reining in, and the mental / philosophical toolkit of asia does seem to have a lot to offer (AT ITS BEST) in terms of producing people who don't fall into that kind of limited thinking. If Steve Jobs had been 20% more Ashoka, or Bill Gates meditated and people imitated him, we might be starting to build some of the Right Action toolkit necessary to build the spiritual backbone necessary to make environmental action work properly in western society (which is where all the power and money are right now.)
The half-baked hippie efforts aren't cutting it. We need something fully baked, and I think we could get it: a comprehensive overhaul of Buddhist and Hindu concepts of Right Action / Dharma for the modern situation of ecological and existential risks.
That's what I want. I don't give a crap about appropriation in most cases, but I despartely want better governance of the West, and that means ingesting all of the Asian trip, not just the convenient 5%.
I've read a variety of reports. I've come to the conclusion that a bunch of weird shit went down, but that he did not have sex with anybody. The weird shit is well documented, and not that far from his claim of "testing his celibacy."
If I find 14 year old girls willing to sleep naked in my bed, I’m going to get arrested. Apparently Gandhi never considered whether someone is old enough to consent to his “experiments”.
This was an interesting read. I kinda knew all these things already, but it was articulated in a very precise way, which helps to understand your own thoughts in a deeper way.
