Category: Buddhism
Kevin MacDonald
I am a huge supporter of free speech, both in public and in private. I mention this because I am dismayed at how little can be said in private even among close friends, while even less can be said in public.
I am also terrified at the idea that the USA may eventually enact hate speech laws. As a linguist, I know from study and practice that limiting speech to pre-approved topics and emotions is the bane of social and intellectual progress.
As a Buddhist, my main complaint against the Dharma as we have received it is its emphasis on “right speech” with no mention of right listening. Over-emphasizing speech while ignoring the importance of good listening gives all power to the listener to interpret what they hear without analyzing it.
Having grown up in a community that was about 40% Jewish and having spent many years in China and East Asia, I am very used to how these groups speak about themselves and others. Editorials that would be deemed “racist” in the USA or Europe are common in East Asia where discussions of race and racial/ethnic interests are normal.
Kevin MacDonald is a scholar of Jewish history and Jewish “group strategies” as interpreted from the point of view of evolutionary psychology. It is refreshing to read MacDonald’s work because it is clearly referenced and argued and because he is not Jewish.
Not being Jewish gives him an objective point of view that frees him from some bias. One bias that affects the way many Americans perceive Jews today is the great prominence of the Holocaust in our understanding of Jewish history coupled with almost complete ignorance of the prominent role played by Jews in the Great Famine (Holodomor 1932-33) in Ukraine. Here is a piece by MacDonald on that subject: Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a hostile elite in the USSR.
Here is an essay posted by MacDonald just today: Žižek, Group Selection, and the Western Culture of Guilt. In this piece, he defends and explains himself better that I can. I highly recommend both of his linked essays.
When he is not being completely ignored, MacDonald is often called a racist or even a neo-Nazi, words strong enough to scare most listeners away. What is conspicuously absent is reasoned refutation of his well-argued ideas. Either he is right or wrong or partly right and partly wrong. But no one who has read his Culture of Critique could in good conscience dismiss it out of hand or conclude that MacDonald is racist or anti-Semitic.
I admire MacDonald for his scholarship, much of which I accept as adding to our understanding of the past and present. And I also admire him for his courage to speak publicly and to make his views known to a wider audience through The Occidental Observer, which promotes “white identity, interests, and culture.”
If those last few words make you shiver, go live in China where the promotion of Chinese identity, interests, and culture is the rule, not the exception. Or read any of scores of Jewish publications that do the same. Or Japanese, or Korean, or Mongolian, or pretty much anywhere in the world.
But white. Why white? Why not Irish, or French, or Polish, or Italian? Why white? The reason is the genes and culture(s) of European-derived peoples are mixed together. So if you want to preserve or promote the interests or culture(s) of those people you probably should use a simple word like white.
I have spent much of my life supporting civil rights, first for blacks, then for women, then for everyone. Then I became involved in promoting the interests of Chinese immigrants, followed by the interests of Tibetans in Tibet (now a largely lost cause, I fear). But only recently did it ever even occur to me to support the interests of white culture.
I got this way due to time and growth but also due to my painfully slow realization that the non-white groups I was supporting virtually never supported my group, the white people group. Yes, they sometimes supported me, but only if I were supporting them, often against real or imagined white oppression.
I don’t for a second deny that white people have done horrible things, but so have all the other groups, including Jews. When we don’t have free speech and we allow the listener to decide what can be said or not, we tend always to emphasize one side of things while leaving out other facts and interpretations.
Speech is always suppressed by those with the power to do it. There is much truth in the saying that you can tell who rules over you by what you are not allowed to say. This is as true in a Chinese Buddhist monastery, as it is in a Japanese classroom, as it is in American media.
I do not believe this is good for anyone. We should be open and free in what we say, how we reason, and how we think. Open discussion promotes a safer and better world for everyone. Kevin MacDonald is either right or wrong or partly right and partly wrong. He should be read and discussed widely and not simply ignored or dismissed with ad hominem attacks.
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Edit 11/03/15: Just discovered this answer to MacDonald from 2009 by Paul Gottfried: In Search of Anti-Semitism.
Edit 04/16/16: Here is one from 2003 by
Always important to read both/all sides of any argument. I find none of these answers to MacDonald strong enough to convince me that he is not mostly right. Derbyshire, in particular, seems to be viewing Jewish behavior from an abstract distance that does not recognize the strength, even violence, of Jewish networking and ethnic nepotism. He reminds me of Western sojourners to China or Japan who enter those societies at high levels (academic, diplomatic, or business) and thus fail to perceive the intense ethnocentrism that prevails outside of the well-mannered (and often phony) venues they frequent. The kinds of things MacDonald says are utterly normal topics of public and private discussion in East Asia and throughout the world, with the focus, of course, changed to whichever country one is in. ABN
Alison Weir
This talk was given on March 7, 2014 and applies to events today in Gaza as if she were foretelling them.
I am putting the video up for that reason and also because something she said grabbed my attention. Her claim begins around 1:22. She says, in part, of the Israeli strategy that it is designed “…to keep deaths below the level that would trigger world outrage, while maiming as many as possible.”
I hope she is wrong, though I doubt it. A strategy of this sort is particularly gruesome as maimed individuals can cause more problems than dead ones. If there are many of them, they can hobble an entire society. A maimed individual still has a place in society. If they were leaders, no matter how small, those who looked to them for direction will still look to them though now they will learn a lesson of despair.
Having been deliberately maimed myself (in the USA), I am acutely aware of how effective this strategy can be. Social bonds can be weak and even deep interpersonal bonds can be degraded overnight when one party is maimed, especially if others don’t know what has happened. Maiming can take many forms, including war wounds, poisoning, psycho-surgery, beatings, infection, deliberate medical malpractice, false arrest, and so on.
I hope Weir is wrong about Israeli strategy, but I am certain that strategies of that type have been and are used in many parts of the world, including the USA. If the level of maiming within any particular society is kept largely secret—“below the level that would trigger [societal] outrage”—narrow, partisan aims can be ruthlessly pursued without fear of ever meeting significant opposition.
Empathy’s evil twin and our need to understand it
Empathy literally means the capacity to recognize the emotions being experienced by another sentient being.
It is almost always bound up with sympathy and compassion. Empathy as we normally think of it is a good thing, a liberal thing, a Buddhist thing, a kindly thing. But is that a good thing?
When I first read William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience in my late teens, I adored the poems and illustrations of the Songs of Innocence and largely disliked or ignored the Songs of Experience. I liked the joy, innocence, and passion of the Songs of Innocence but not the sober truths of the Songs of Experience.
Culturally, as far as I can tell, America is infatuated with the innocence of empathy, but not the sober truths that should go hand in hand with it.
If all people were nice and kind and never did bad things, it would be good to be innocent about empathy. But not all people are good. Indeed, most of us are only good sometimes and some of us are really bad a lot of the time.
Do you have the capacity to recognize the emotions being experienced by a person intent on doing harm? Doesn’t our current sense of what empathy entails leave out empathy’s evil twin, the bad emotions and intentions of other sentient beings?
I don’t know if it is still true today, but Japanese tourists visiting the USA used to get mugged and raped at levels well above their percentage of the population. The reason was, and maybe still is, they were too innocent and could not perceive the evil intent of their new “friend” or the cool dude asking them for the time.
This happened because Japan has less violent crime than the USA and because Japanese tourists were not able to imagine or read American situational exchanges. And this shows that empathy for evil is based both on expectation and culture, which are close in nature.
The Buddha said that we can only really know another human being after long association. Even he cautioned about being innocent and empathizing only with the good we see in others while failing to recognize the bad.
Psychedelics and life/Buddhism
As mass fear of psychedelics subsides and more researchers dare to study them (used to be a career-ending move to even show an interest), more good things are discovered about them.
This recent article from the Washington Post describes, without even hinting that the researchers might be crazy, why psychedelic mushrooms might be good for you: Psychedelic mushrooms put your brain in a “waking dream,” study finds.
The article notes that the mushrooms can make people happier and more optimistic, while also curing depression and anxiety. It further claims that psilocybin produces brain “activity that could help unlock permanent shifts in perspective.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” a chorus of old hippies intones.
More on the study can be found here: New study discovers biological basis for magic mushroom ‘mind expansion’.
I have written several times about the fifth precept of Buddhism, which says: “I undertake the training rule to abstain from fermented and distilled intoxicants which are the basis for heedlessness.” (See Are We Misunderstanding The Fifth Precept? for more.)
I have gotten a fair amount of grief from some Buddhists for pointing out that the Buddha, who was an exceptionally careful speaker, mentions only booze in the fifth. Conspicuously absent from the five precepts, which are guidelines for lay followers, is any mention of psychedelics, which definitely were available in the Buddha’s day.
Many of those same Buddhists accept the use of dubious psychoactive drugs if they have been prescribed by a medical doctor. So, will they change their tunes when doctors start prescribing psychedelics?
My interest in this subject is not to encourage the use of psychedelics or any other drug. I just want us to be clear about what the Buddha actually said and meant. Should our understanding of the Dharma be based on one of the most reliable and widely agreed upon texts we have or regressive drug laws and timid science?
Morality in groups versus individuals
When people strongly identify with a group, they will also tend to strongly base their moral decisions on the norms of that group.
In this respect, group identity can dull moral sensibilities. At its worst, this sort of moral deference to group norms can take the form of “my country right or wrong” or “whatever is best for us is the right thing to do.”
When people do not strongly identify with a group but rather view themselves as autonomous individuals, they will tend to be more responsible and thorough when making moral decisions, assuming they are concerned with morality at all.
By providing general, ready-made answers to moral questions, groups remove the need for their members to think for themselves. Indeed, most groups stifle conversations and thoughts that go beyond group norms.
Most Americans, for example, do not question the sources of their news or the biases of the people presenting it to them. Similarly, most conversations in so-called polite society do not stray far from established values and interpretations.
When change happens in groups it usually comes from the top down or is due to a concerted efforts of single-issue activists. Both sorts of change reveal the hierarchical nature of virtually all groups. Top-down change is by definition hierarchical, while activist change generally always succeeds because it threatens a hierarchy or forces it to accept a new moral idea.
Gay marriage is an example of this phenomenon as activism caused the hierarchy of standard US moral culture to change and much of that change was also brought about by changes at the top of the hierarchy.
Of course, all people need groups. We learn from them and they support us in matters we don’t know much about. But groups also hinder us after we have learned what they have to teach us. This is especially true of large groups with many members who do not know each other personally.
Standard American culture, even with its many subgroups, is such a group. So is Christianity, academia, rural culture, etc. When we cede moral decision-making to the group(s) we identify with, we weaken our moral sense, and in weakening that we also weaken our intellectual and emotional responsiveness to the world around us.
In traditional Chinese Buddhism, most monks were expected to spend their formative years studying at one monastery until they were ordained at around the age of twenty. Then they were expected to travel alone or in pairs to see the world, teach, learn, and visit other monasteries. Sometimes they stayed for long periods of time in a particular monastery and sometimes they traveled for years, sojourning in a variety of temples. The underlying idea was to not become attached to a single group’s view of the world, but rather to explore and learn to rely on one’s own senses and sensibilities for the moral and intellectual decisions that lead to mental clarity and enlightenment.
Some depressing thoughts about the evolution of human intelligence
Firstly, human evolution is typically not survival of the fittest, but rather survival of the average. Outliers are misunderstood, envied, feared, killed or harmed. This happens to the less intelligent as well as the more intelligent.
The reason this happens to the intelligent is humans are envious and violent and prone to misunderstanding people who are smarter than them. This leads to violence toward, obstruction of, or not helping those who seem more intelligent.
It’s hard to escape a black ghetto because you will be perceived as “acting white” and attacked for that. It’s not very different in white “rural ghettos” (or urban) where intelligence is perceived as a threat. In many societies, average people cannot or will not lend support to their more intelligent members because they know, or imagine, that such behaviors will eventually lead to them being “lorded over” by the person(s) they helped.
Just a few generations ago, Italian American communities were famous for discouraging higher education among their children because it threatened the social structure if sons, let alone daughters, attained better careers than their fathers.
I am sure there are many other subcultures within the USA and throughout the world that have similar attitudes. Siblings often envy and decline helping each other, to say the least.
In the more distant past, violent death at the hands of other humans was a very common way for people to leave this vale of tears. Today the killing is less, but I doubt the harming is all that much less. Nowadays people use rumors, lies, poison, and many sorts of hindrance to prevent intelligent people from rising above them.
In a gruesome but very realistic way, this all makes sense because, evolutionarily, why should an individual help a genotype that is different from their own? This is probably why so much extant human intelligence, such that it is, is devoted to deceiving other humans, outsmarting them, out-competing them, getting ahead of them. Humans do better in a capitalist system because capitalism allows them to compete by virtually any means they can get away with.
Some strongly hierarchical societies, like China, do tend to help intelligent people if they are well-connected or have already risen to the top of a hierarchy. On the way to the top, though, the internecine fighting can be as bitter as anywhere else in the world.
In times of war or perceived threat, many groups will help the smarter ones of their own, but compensate by harming other groups even more viciously that usual. You can see this behavior in some cults, cliques, and secret societies within the USA today. Sometimes they help their genotype and sometimes they help their ideological types by that sort of behavior. In a sense, groups like that are just acting like individuals on a larger stage; they are selfish and violent as a group, but not too bad to themselves.
Having spent so much time with FIML practice and its considerable social and psychological implications, I don’t feel sanguine about the statements above. Isaac Newton helped the whole human race because somehow he was both left alone and helped. Had he spent time in public houses just being himself, he probably would have been beaten, and thus returned through brain damage to the common lot. Had he not been helped, he probably would have done nothing, and certainly much less. My guess is England probably had hundreds of potential Newtons, but just that one survived to produce great science.
Archimedes was murdered by a Roman soldier. Socrates was poisoned. Newton survived. These are the few we know about. I am sure there are many thousands more who were destroyed before they ever did anything to cause us to know about them.
My guess is the Buddha meant something like the above when he described the Four Noble Truths. Notice, that his formula provides no way for societies (large groups) to escape suffering en masse, but only a way for individuals or small groups.
Large groups can become more comfortable but, it seems, always at the expensive of even larger groups that are exploited by them. Maybe computers and machines will fix this problem in the future, but there doesn’t seem to be much hope today. Multiculturalism will very likely make things even worse, except for the few groups that dominate the others. Not much different, except in scale, from a normal bad neighborhood today.
Humans are fractals of their societies
words 709
The microcosm of the individual human is made of the same stuff as the macrocosm of the society to which it belongs. The two are a fractal set displaying similar patterns.
This makes sense since both individuals and their societies use the same networks of semiotics to communicate.
In many ways, societies are less complex than individuals. In the sense that a society is an assemblage of many individuals, society is more complex. But in the sense that a society is held together by a network of communicable ideas, or semiotics, society is frequently less complex than many of the individuals living within it.
For example, most societies have very simple “biographies” (their always slanted histories), while many individuals have nuanced biographies that encompass change, growth, and contradiction.
A recent study of people’s attitudes towards atrocities points to this truth by showing that “…the way people’s memories are shaped by selective discussions of atrocities depends on group-membership status.” (Source)
In-groups forget bad things they have done—or “morally disengage” from them—while clearly remembering bad things that out-groups have done. This is a major element of all group stories.
I bet you cannot name a single society that has anything even approaching a fully nuanced view of itself on almost any matter, let alone its history. Individuals often “morally disengage” from their past acts, but it is not common for them to do so to the same extent as the societies they live in.
It hardly matters if the social story is about atrocities or trivia. I have actually witnessed fairly heated arguments over who first invented pasta, the Chinese or the Italians. And another one on who first invented dumplings, Poles, Jews, or Chinese. The origin of beer is another subject that can get people going.
It makes sense that societies’ stories about themselves be as simple as they are false because they serve as lowest-common-denominator social bonds. Indeed, it probably even helps that these stories be knowingly false as the bond will then require an even deeper level of commitment.
Of course, some of the energy for falsification and simplification comes from one group’s story needing to counter another group’s story. Yes, we did that to you, but you did this to us first.
In that, societies further resemble individuals because that’s what we do as individuals, too. Only individuals who are very well disposed toward each other and who try hard ever overcome the need for false stories between them.
FIML practice provides individuals with a means to observe the smallest fractal details of their individual stories and correct them where they are wrong. FIML partners would do well to take what they have learned as individuals and apply it to the stories told by the society in which they live. You will surely find a macrocosm of yourself in the absurdities of whichever group you “identify” with.
Maybe people in the future will be better able to see how ridiculous our stories are and better able to deal with the complexities that lie beyond them. For now, maybe we can at least start getting a fuller, truer view of what is happening in and around us.
I doubt we can do this on a societal level any time soon because the LCD stories will always reassert, but as individuals with a good partner I believe we can. This is probably a main reason that monastic and reclusive traditions have been practiced all over the world. Groups are ignorant, violent, stifling, and crazy. Individuals simply have a better chance at going beyond their simple patterns by acting on their own.
The fractal of the individual is generated by society but it is prone to being trapped by it as well.
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Edit 6/13/14: When good people do bad things. We all know that people in groups can behave badly. This article is about a study that uses a plausible fMRI method to measure some of the basic processes underlying immoral behavior. In my view, the situation is not much different when the group is a large culture, rather than a small number of participants in a laboratory experiment. Cultures not only permit bad behavior toward out-groups, but they also numb us to what our in-group is doing.
All ideologies are prone to extremes
The prevalence of mistakes about people and mice
A statistical analysis on death-row prisoners indicates that roughly 4% were/are not guilty of their crimes or would be “exonerated” if there were more time to investigate their cases.
The study can be found here: Rate of false conviction of criminal defendants who are sentenced to death.
An article about the study can be found here: Death-penalty analysis reveals extent of wrongful convictions.
Besides contemplating the horror of being executed for a crime you did not commit, consider also how flawed we humans are about our judgements.
I do think that we can assume that in most cases, people engaged in the court system—prosecutors, judges, juries—are being as reasonable and fair as they know how. But even still, and even with all those people looking at the evidence, wrongful convictions happen with alarming frequency.
Here is another study that shows how prone to error we humans are: Lab mice fear men but not women, and that’s a big problem for science.
That headline may not sound like much, but it has been a huge mistake to do studies on mice without taking into account that they react very differently to male and female researchers.
Now that is many decades of expensive scientific research that has been compromised. My understanding of the problem is that the gender-difference issue is only one of many very serious problems with mice studies. Some of the others involve the lighting of the mouse environments, failing to account for their diurnal cycles, failure to account for how they are treated, what they can smell, and so on.
How much good research has been lost because it could not be replicated due to one or more of those mistakes?
So, if courts of law can err significantly in their most serious criminal cases and if bio-medical research can include numerous serious errors (many of which have been know about for many years), how can we possibly claim to know what other people are thinking or even what they really mean when they speak even very simple sentences?
The answer is in most cases we cannot be sure at all about what anyone really means in almost all cases. If you do FIML, you will be able to know with vastly greater accuracy what your FIML partner is saying, but if you don’t do FIML you cannot even be sure of the person(s) closest to you.
Yes, the world functions, sort of, and things get done, somewhat. But we function and get things done by basing our thoughts and behaviors on standard intuitions and stereotypes (of situations as well as people).
That makes for a very muddled psychology where inaccuracy contributes to suffering and semiotic “instincts” rule. When the Buddha spoke about everyone being deluded, I think he meant mainly something like this. We are sloppy, stupid, ignorant, emotional, foolish creatures and most of us are so far gone we cannot even recognize that.
So we condemn innocents to death and waste important resources doing shitty science when pretty much everyone in that business knows the results will stink as much as the mice cages.
Please, learn FIML and do it with your SO. You will remain a foolish human, but your evidence will be better and your cognition and emotions will be closer to whatever “truth” is.
Standoff in Nevada resolved nonviolently
This short clip is a great lesson in semiotics. Readers can make of it what they want. So many American elements are there—land rights, grazing rights, gun rights, civil rights, individual freedom, heavy-handed federal agents, and peaceful resolution following courageous citizen action.
My understanding is the situation is far more complex than Bundy simply not paying grazing fees, but I am not an expert so please make up your own mind (after doing some research).
The discussion at 1:24 is priceless.
As a Buddhist, I am not at all ashamed to say I support full Second Amendment rights and, for me, this video shows an important reason why.
Second Amendment rights are “fundamental rights” that “…exist philosophically and legally at the individual level and are not dependent upon the existence of government.” (Source)
Notice that by having and exercising their fundamental rights to protest and carry weapons, the people in the video resolved a potentially dangerous conflict nonviolently.
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Update (4/15/14): Below are a few more pieces of recent news on the Bundy ranch issue. I am not completely sure of the veracity of these videos, but am providing them for readers who are interested. As mentioned above, this issue is replete with American semiotics. It even has cows, horses, cowboys, and a quintessential American plot-line—big bad guys messing with little people’s land.
To be clear, I support the BLM managing public lands for long-term environmental and wild animal protection, and even support more of it, but that should never be a cover for political corruption and cronyism, which may very well be what is happening at Bundy’s. Politics and semiotics are complex, almost always.
Exclusive: Sources Inside The BLM and Las Vegas Metro Say Feds Are Planning A Raid On Bundy Home
More on personality problems
I discussed some of my problems with the word personality and how it is used in an earlier post.
This morning, I found an wonderful post by Robert Priddy that put the matter well. He says:
Against the belief in a ‘hard core’ of self it is held that we do not have – or experience – any stable, single, united self. We have no permanent identity because our entire psycho-physical personal existence is a dynamic and changing flow of bodily growth and decay, mental perceptions and memories. According to this, the belief in an ‘unchanging’ self – one always having the same identity – is a conception that has been developed and embodied in culture and languages and taken over during the socialization process. The interactive physical and social environments influence both body and mind, while the perception of oneself is also variable. People behave in different ways according to situations, not always showing the same character traits or responses. One who is truthful to most people may be deceptive or untruthful in other circumstances, so there is no unvarying self involved.
The way in which the mind construes a fixed identity (or ego) was described phenomenologically and convincingly by Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1940s essay ‘The Transcendence of the Ego’. Wittgenstein is also illumining on the subject, also pointing out that – because we have substantive words (nouns) for self, ego etc., we are bewitched into the false notion that these (an many other such) words also represent something substantial. The self is a construction of the mind, and when one looks at the concept and our experience most carefully, one finds that the idea of an eternal self is just as false as that of an earth-centered universe and all that mental baggage handed down without due critical examination from such as Aristotle, Plato and others before them. (Source)
I very much agree with Priddy’s analysis. And also, I want to say a bit more. Priddy’s words describe the general problem with terms like personality, ego, self, or identity.
What I think gets missed in general descriptions of the problem is a clear micro-analysis of how these problem concepts (and many others) actually function within human cognition.
I accept, or posit, that human cognition can be fairly well-described as a network of associated semiotics. Single semiotics are the basic units of this cognitive network. How they are associated in different individuals will differ, sometimes greatly.
When someone speaks of their “personality,” I believe they often are reifying a cluster of mutually referential semiotics. Priddy’s description says it well—they are “bewitched into the false notion that these…words…represent something substantial.”
Instead of saying words, I generally prefer semiotics because it is a more inclusive term, encompassing words and all other signs that communicate.
When someone reifies the semiotics of “personality” or “self,” they are in a very significant way making a “fetish” of those semiotics. They are turning them into a “thing” that seems to have a life of its own, that can be referenced in ways that are essentially false (or fetishized) and misleading.
I believe this process can be glimpsed in a hazy way from afar in general terms, but that it cannot be clearly seen unless we are able to observe its micro-functionality. That is, we can vaguely know that we are using terms like personality in misleading ways, but we will not fully grasp how this is happening until we have a method to observe those semiotics as they actually functions in real-time in a real “moment” (short period of time up to 10 seconds or so).
The only way I know of to do this is FIML practice because only FIML allows one mind to stop and query another mind in the “moment.” Only FIML forces us to see the network of cognitive semiotics as they actually function in real time.
FIML cannot be done alone exclusively because there is no way to check your work when you are alone. Semiotics communicate. You can and do use semiotics to communicate with yourself and you can gain insight into them while you are alone, but you will never be able to see large parts of your semiotic network as it actually functions in real-life without the help of a FIML partner.
Fetishized semiotics part two
In a previous post, we discussed how semiotics can become fetishized and why that matters. In today’s post, I want to continue that discussion.
A fetishized semiotic(s) provides symbolic focus to the person who entertains it. It provides coherence within their semiotic networks of thought and communication.
Fetishized semiotics also generate or provide motivation for those who entertain them.
Since semiotics are fundamental to all communication, fetishized semiotics often serve to bond people into easily understood groups.
A person with a fetish for prostitutes, for example, will generally find it easy to get what they want while also bonding with others who have similar desires.
The same can be said for people who want a lot of money or status. Ethnic groups and religions often fetishize the semiotics of their cultures and histories.
A scientist might fetishize the semiotics of being a scientist.
A human ego, in most senses of the word and certainly in the Buddhist sense, can be described as the “fetishized semiotic(s) of ‘self’.” Or more precisely, as the “fetishized agglomeration of the semiotics of ‘self’ of an entity that lives in this world primarily within semiotic networks.”
When small “selves” (small in the Buddhist sense) become fetishized egos, or big selves, the entity in question will often feel that life has a focus or energy it did not have before. This is especially true if the person is part of a group that communicates about that ego and supports it through ceremonies, shared beliefs, values, etc.
Big selves, or egos, supported by groups are usually semiotically quite simple. This is a place where we can see the value of thinking in terms of semiotics.
The big self is simple—it wants one or two things and will marshal all of its (often considerable) mental powers to attain it. Other behaviors surrounding the core of the big self may be complex, but the basic big self is usually pretty simple. It wants respect, or power, or some ideal that often is a pretense for getting respect and power.
The formula can be different, but basically that is how it is.
Early communists in Russia and China, for example, all professed high ideals, and some of them meant it, but in both countries the revolutions were seized by the most ruthless actors and the high ideals were replaced with mass murder.
I am convinced that many of those most ruthless communists—who definitely had fetishized what they were doing—actually believed that their high ideals might one day come to be. But that first it was necessary to liquidate millions of “bad elements” and terrorize the remaining population into complete submission.
This all too human mix of idealism deferred to the future blended with extreme cruelty in the present illustrates another aspect of the fetishized self, or fetishized semiotics—the big self diminishes others, even becomes blind to them.
The fetishized ego sees itself with its own peculiar clarity and also it completely fails to see others except as aspects of its own fetish. Thus Bolsheviks and Red Guards murdered and terrorized tens of millions of people, often with very little feeling and always with massive self-delusion.
Is the Universe a Simulation?
Many mathematicians, when pressed, admit to being Platonists. The great logician Kurt Gödel argued that mathematical concepts and ideas “form an objective reality of their own, which we cannot create or change, but only perceive and describe.” But if this is true, how do humans manage to access this hidden reality?
The Known Universe
American Buddhist Net 