From the beginning of my published debunking of Ken Wilber’s false claims and bungled research, the most loyal
members of his community have predictably reacted very negatively to being informed of the truth about his shoddy,
consistently unprofessional work.
Foremost among those “integral experts” and censors has been a follower employed as an “education analyst” in
Wheaton, Illinois, going by the online name of Goethean. His response to my
“Norman Einstein”
chapter, and to my subsequent
exposing of kw’s indefensible support of long-discredited principles of Intelligent
Design, boiled down to
this:
Since that same individual functions proudly as a self-appointed guardian of the Ken Wilber
Wikipedia page, no one should be
surprised to find that, for many months, he succeeded in blocking any mention of my debunking of Wilber from that
public space, even when the relevant links to my work had been placed there by interested third parties with whom
I have had no contact.
In his initial removal of the links to the NE chapter and that appendix, Goethean actually claimed to be
doing it because those were
“attack links.”
So, there we see a fine example of the paranoia of the integral world, in which hard-hitting,
valid criticism of the Great Heroes—whose ideas indeed cannot stand up to any
competent questioning—can only be an “attack.”
Immediately after my first attempt at getting those critiques listed on that Wikipedia page,
Goethean went through all of my other attempted
contributions to the debunking of other spiritual leaders
on Wikipedia, removing any of them that hadn’t already been deleted by other censors
equal to himself. (Some of those pages already had links to
Rick Ross’s immensely valuable but grossly copyright-violating
website, collecting the
non-book-length exposés of numerous gurus and so-called cult leaders into a single database.)
He had only an IP address to go on there, however, and so could not reasonably remove those links for being
“self-promotional,” given that the links were thus posted anonymously. Yet, that is exactly the
reason which he gave for deleting many of them.
Goethean has since given the following extremely dubious justification for his censorial actions:
As usual in the Wilberian community, however, there is not even a hint given there as to how I have allegedly
misunderstood Wilber’s ideas; just the unsupportable smoke-screen assertion that I have.
Plus, in my first attempt (on August 25, 2005) at getting my critiques listed on the kw Wikipedia page,
I had given links not only to my “Norman Einstein” chapter but also to the
Wilber and Bohm
appendix from this present book. That appendix was Ph.D.-endorsed, even before the publication of STG, as being
“brilliant and deeply insightful.” So, it would certainly qualify as a critique
of Wilber’s shoddy work, even if one could argue (wrongly) that critiques
of his character have no place in an encyclopedia entry. So why did Goethean remove it, then?
It is, of course, exactly in the nuances (of Piagetian psychology, Spiral Dynamics®, Bohmian physics, Darwinian
evolution, meditation-effects research, etc.), not from a crude “orienting perspective” distance, that kw’s
work invariably falls apart. Yet, the “Norman Einstein” chapter in STG isn’t even really meant to
address the SUV-sized holes in Wilber’s philosophy. Rather, it is much more about the obvious shortcomings
in his character,
notwithstanding that those do indeed skew and (mis)inform everything in his life,
including his “professional” work.
(Similarly, the rest of STG is not about the philosophies propounded by Aurobindo, Da, or Cohen, etc., but
rather about their respective, reportedly abusive characters. That is all stated explicitly in the
Introduction:
“[I]t is not the validity of the theoretical ideas of
each path which are, in general, of concern here. Rather, of far greater interest are the ways in which the
leaders espousing those ideas have applied them in practice, frequently to the claimed detriment of their
followers.” I don’t know how to state it any more clearly than that, in black and white, no less.)
Of course, if it were up to “Truth-seekers” such as Goethean, nothing of the thoroughly researched
work which I have done in exposing the lies and abuses perpetrated in the name of religion—whether integral or
otherwise—by our world’s spiritual authority figures would exist
anywhere. As he notes, with obvious satisfaction:
But, do you think that the editors at Wikipedia go through every new page, and vet it for whether it is worth
including on their site? Or, is it just the pages that certain “seekers of Truth” can’t stand, that must be removed?
Only around one-fifth of STG is about
Wilber; the rest of the book would offend anyone, not merely the Followers of Ken,
who wanted to believe in childish fairy tales. So really, only agnostic
and/or atheistic editors wouldn’t have a personal reason
to regard the book as not being “notable,” and thus to expedite its removal.
Goethean’s state of mind comes through clearly enough when he further says: “As someone else
noted Dasein, you seem to have an axe to grind, care to share?” When even calm, reasoned dialog in support
of alternative viewpoints is denigrated by self-appointed censors as arising only from one’s ostensibly having
“an axe to grind,” you need not wonder why Wilber’s Integral World is viewed, by people who understand cult
and in-group dynamics, as being on the verge of degenerating into a bona fide cult.
So, no surprise by now that one is indeed allowed to respectfully find small,
“correctable” flaws in the
work of the Heroes (on whom be peace), and still remain a member in good standing of the
integral cult. But, uncover glaring and/or fatal shortcomings in the ideas, and provable
incompetence/dishonesty in their creators’ work and character, and what can you be but an “untrustworthy asshole”?
Or at least, as Meyerhoff has experienced, be dismissed as “altitudinally-challenged”
in proportion to the strength of your arguments against the foolish, grandiose likes of the
bumbling Wilber and his “community of competent, intersubjective interpreters”?
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
If the likes of Mark Edwards and Wilber can’t see the obvious cogency in such arguments ... geez,
are those two even at a functionally rational level yet, in their practical/integral activities?
Further, with regard to “in-group agreement” as a purported measure of validity:
It is obvious (and completely predictable
from basic human psychology) that around 95% of the members of the contemporary
integral world have no more interest than the average “good Christian”
would in doing the “archaeology” of going back
to the original sources which Wilber claims to be integrating.
Were they to do that, of course, they would find that, just as the innocent
mistakes and less-innocent influence of the personal theologies of ancient
scribes created a “multitude of mistakes and intentional alterations” in ways
that sometimes “profoundly affect religious doctrine” in the Bible, comparable distortions
will occur even when madly typing “Manjushris with word-processors” are involved.
Of course, it is so much easier to simply believe what you’re told, and
to rely on the “community” to not allow members to rise into positions of
respect without their ideas being valid, than to question (and research) everything,
back to its original sources/languages.
No surprise, then, that those psychological realities apply just
as much to the “trans-rational” integral community as to the “pre-rational”
Christian one, and produce a comparable milieu, with members of both
in-groups imagining themselves to be reasoning clearly from established
facts, when all they are actually doing is rationalizing hazily from a
set of (dishonestly or incompetently) distorted principles.
Back in second-year physics, during one of my own aborted attempts at a career,
one of the other top students once asked the instructor, in a quantum-mechanical
context, about David Bohm’s ideas. The otherwise-kick-ass, textbook-writing
professor’s entire dismissive response was: “Oh, that’s just hidden variables,
or something.”
Obviously, he had never read the peer-reviewed paper(s), first published in 1952.
He didn’t need to, in order to “know” that the ideas were wrong, or at least
irrelevant; their widely disrespected status in the community
assured him of that. Except, of course, that the unexceptional members of any
community, while perhaps being able to recognize quackery, will tend to lump
works of real genius into the same category, for not being in a position to
intelligently evaluate them.
Even Einstein had to wait
a decade after the 1905 publication of his earth-shaking papers—on special
relativity, the photoelectric effect, and Brownian motion—before
the physics community (and shortly thereafter, the media) started to care about
them. When Albert later did
his Ph.D. thesis, one of the reviewers returned it
with a comment akin to “I can’t understand a word of what you’ve written here.”
More recently, Benoit Mandelbrot experienced a similar decades-long dismissal
of his groundbreaking work with fractals. That’s what happens, of course,
when you trust the middling “community”—whether spiritual, scientific,
or artistic—to be able to distinguish between
genius and quackery, when by their very “average” nature they cannot.
And, let us not overlook Wilber’s naïve political biases—his “stunning lack of political
self-awareness”—as noted by Meyerhoff at the end of his
Chapter 5:
That is, of course, the standard tack
of “spiritual leaders” everywhere: Only by subverting your ego to theirs can you become “as great as”
they are, etc.
Venturing further into “integral politics,” Wilber has predictably given his opinion on the
war in Iraq:
I personally believe that any protest movement that does not equally protest both America’s
invasion and Saddam’s murder of 400,000 people is a protest movement that does not truly represent
peace or non-aggression or worldcentric values.
I am aware of no major protest movement that has protested both forms of violence equally, and that has
insisted upon an immediate end to both aggressions, and offered a believable way that both aggressions could
actually be halted immediately so that neither side can continue its homicidal actions.
That is, I am aware of no integral protest movement anywhere in the world, unfortunately.
Amnesty International is a “major protest movement.” While not officially condemning the war in Iraq,
to any right-of-center political perspective they have done much more to “harm” the American cause there
than to aid it:
Critics of AI have suggested that AI’s concern for the human rights implications of this war
disproportionately criticize the effects of U.S. military action while in comparison they were
less vociferous about the abuses of the Hussein regime and the human rights implications of the
continued rule of this government.
And
yet—
Supporters of AI have pointed out that AI was critical of Hussein’s regime while Donald Rumsfeld was
shaking the Iraqi leader by the hand, and that when the White House later released reports on the human
rights record of Hussein, they depended almost entirely on AI documents that the U.S. had ignored when Iraq
was a U.S. ally in the 1980s.
Indeed, “the September/October 1988 [Amnesty International] newsletter’s lead article was an appeal to the United
Nations Security Council to ‘act immediately to stop the massacre of Kurdish civilians by Iraqi forces’ under
Saddam Hussein.”
Wilber might try to hide behind the idea that AI hasn’t protested those two sets of evils
exactly equally—which,
by definition, it couldn’t have, regardless of which side it might (or might not) have favored.
(Plus, in not officially taking a stand against the Iraq war, AI has obviously explicitly protested
it far less than they have objected to the tortures and mass murders under Saddam’s rule. So, evidently,
in order to show themselves to be properly integral, they should be protesting it more, odd as that
may sound given their mission and history.)
Amnesty also probably doesn’t have a plan to offer in which “both aggressions [i.e., the invasion
of Iraq, vs. Saddam’s mass murders] could actually be halted immediately.” Do you?
Does kw? Not bloody likely.
Really, by Wilber’s own absurd third criterion of needing to have presented such a plan in order to qualify
as “integral” in his judgment, he fails as miserably as anyone: Not only is there no movement which meets
that third (and quite unnecessary, in terms of evaluating one’s good intentions or state/stage of
consciousness) standard, there is probably even not a single individual
who does. (If there were a workable and obviously correct political solution to that problem, which kept
everyone honest in the process, Bush would never have
gotten away with that rushed invasion in the first place.) So why does kw even bother framing all that? Why does he set it up
so that, in practical terms, no movement could possibly be “integral” with regard to the Iraq conflict ... even
while he himself and his institute are “integral” by definition?
My strong suspicion? He’s doing it to reserve high integrality only for meditative beings such
as himself, regardless of how superior the behavior of others may be in practice when
compared to his own dismal ideas and character.
If you disagree, consider kw’s clueless, self-aggrandizing statement, in One Taste, that
“until the ecologists understand that the ozone hole, pollution, and toxic wastes are all completely part of the
Original Self, they will never gain enlightened awareness, which alone knows how to proceed with these
pressing problems.” There, too, he is basically integral by definition, even though being
ecologically unconscious
in practice. That he would have ever put the above
“ozone” ruminations into print, without considering how blatantly self-celebrating and openly grandiose they
are, smacks of something far worse than a mere occasional “mental lapse.” And again: Where is his
workable, integral solution to the ecological crisis? Nowhere, even for ostensibly having the highest
“enlightened, integral awareness.”
Compare Meyerhoff’s relevant
observation:
Wilber’s argument [about why differences in levels of consciousness are supposedly to blame for other persons
not being able, even in principle, to understand his ideas]
is so weak that another explanation has to be found for why he’s asserting it. It’s
obvious to me that this is a transparent, and somewhat sad, attempt to avoid criticism by devising a rationale
that invalidates the criticizer. If, as he often laments, people don’t understand his theory, the explanation
lies in their not being cognitively developed enough to understand it. In addition, all the explaining in the
world will not help because they are constitutionally unable to understand; therefore no attempt even needs to
be made. And, any criticism the critic makes can be ignored because of the lower level of consciousness of the
person making it. Wilber is committing the common fallacy of the ad hominem argument—the argument
against the man.
Given all that, it is no surprise that any other movement, such as Amnesty, composed merely of
“ordinary mortals,” must be “non-integral” ... until its members (who obviously overlap significantly with
the ecological movement) attain to the same
exalted state of consciousness as kw thinks he possesses.
Consider also the perspective of
Greenpeace—the typical “green” organization, explicitly
cited as such by kw himself—in outlining
their reasons for officially protesting the war in Iraq from the beginning:
We don’t support Saddam Hussein. We don’t back any governments or political leaders. When we decided to
take a stand against this war, it was because we see a far greater danger in the concept of preventive war....
For one nation to take arms against another because it believes that nation to be a threat undermines
the foundations of peaceful coexistence, multilateral institutions like the United Nations, and an
“entire web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values,” to quote John Brady Kiesling’s letter
of resignation from the U.S. diplomatic core.
As tempting as it may be to those who view Saddam as a cipher of evil to step in and remove him militarily,
one has to ask what’s next?
After the U.S. conducts a preventive war on Iraq, will it set its sights on Iran? North Korea? And if the U.S.
can wage a preventive war to protect its national security, shouldn’t India or Pakistan have the same right?
This is the first step on a slippery slope. It ends with the United Nations in tatters and the rule of might
making right.
If you are wondering how significantly the membership and culture of Greenpeace overlaps with that of Amnesty,
consider Rolf Schwendter’s explicit
mention of those two groups in exactly that context:
Examples for the clusters and networks of pivot institutions
[as gathering-points for members of overlapping cultures] ...
would be groups like Amnesty
International, Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund—a large number of political, cultural, human rights-centered,
ecological, self-help-oriented organizations.
* * *
One does not have to look hard to see the increasingly cult-like nature of Wilber’s integral
community—the reluctance to
question his pontifications, the marginalizing of anyone who does dare to question his edicts,
the paranoia which sees even cogent and completely reasonable questioning as an “attack,” the
presenting of reported psychological abuse by the leaders as being done for your spiritual benefit,
and the absence of dialogue with outside perspectives, etc. None of that, though, has been the product of
any overwork or explicit coercion of its members, nor has there been an “escalating series of
public commitments” required of the members to bind them to the ideology and community,
nor is Wilber their “savior,” etc.
Rather, the mess there has evolved, even against the best intentions of the persons involved (even including, in a
skewed sense, the unreliable-from-the-beginning Wilber himself), via simple human nature.
It’s just a group of people defending their “specialness” and salvation, and the “genius” of their Hero,
against other less-special “outsiders.” That is, a group setting itself up as being “more integral
than thou”—with us on the outside conversely being
less integral, and therefore not worth wasting time on, because we’ll “never understand anyway.”
Of course, it (i.e., how cults start) is not supposed to work that way, without deliberate
coercive persuasion or “brainwashing”
to close off a community and make people afraid to leave; but it certainly does work like that.
Sure, in a sense the members of the integral community were “tricked” into believing a bunch of
false ideas from the foolish Wilber himself.
But 98% of them wouldn’t have had it any other way. That is, if kw hadn’t fed them what they desperately
need to hear, with a veneer of science and rationality, they would have found someone else who would.
Some competent social psychologist should really take it as a project to study the Wilberian integral
community in detail for posterity,
recording its descent into a completely closed community, in which doubters are branded as heretics, by whatever
name, and good members are made to feel so special for being “integral” or second tier, as opposed to the
“axis of non-integrality”
outside, that they can’t bear to leave the community. For, that departure would equate to an admission of
failure in their “most important, prime directive” spiritual quest. Or did you think that the degree of
isolation from the
“real world,” and the “Us vs. Them” mentality of the Integral Emperor and his loyal subjects,
wasn’t going to get any worse than it already is? It can always get worse....
It would be intuitively plausible to say that the less sense one’s ideas make, the more they must be
protected from questioning by competent outsiders.
Wilber’s ideas make dangerously little sense, and he’s been caught, red-handed, fabricating information far too
often by now, for anyone of sound mind and body to look past those deceptions/incompetencies as if they were
anything less than pandemic in his work.
In fact, the only way he’ll be able to preserve the “integral edifice” he has worked all his
adult/“professional” life to create, against further disintegration, is by completely
closing it off from any cogent questioning. So, what do you think he’ll be doing, in that regard, over the next
few years? What does the dismissal of Meyerhoff’s delightfully reasoned work—so well-thought-out, in
general, that it goes right over the heads of the vast majority of integral community members—as
being “altitudinally challenged” tell you about what the “integral” future holds?
In any case, even without that increasingly cult-like environment, if evidence and reasoning
mean anything to you, you won’t still be holding out anything more than the faintest glimmer
of hope that Wilber’s philosophy will turn out to be more right than wrong. Even if my own work has
no effect on you in that regard, Meyerhoff’s
cogent debunking (incl. via Andrew Smith) of kw’s
twenty tenets
should be enough. Never mind that Wilber’s philosophy isn’t consistent with the
“external” data (of “skeptical-materialistic science,” etc.), it isn’t even
internally consistent!
* * *
Interestingly, if we saw behaviors such as were exhibited by “patriotic” Westerners at the start of the war in Iraq
instead being shown in the religious world, at least 90% of cult-studies
experts would daftly insist that it could only arise from “brainwashing” or destructive subtle coercion.
Show it in the political world, however, and it is just business as usual.
It is worth considering, then, the fairly obvious point that both religion and politics
utilize the same techniques of manipulation on their followers, bringing out
exactly the same psychological defenses in their adherents. Does it really make a difference
whether the Evil Other is Satan, or communism/terrorism? (If you studied Arthur Miller’s play
The Crucible back in high school, with its intended parallels between the
Salem witch-hunts and McCarthyism, you already know that it makes no difference.)
Could the psychological reactions/defenses (e.g., the need for protection by a religious or political “savior,”
the witch-hunting eradication of “evil,” and the willing surrender of one’s freedoms
in that hunt) really be any different against one than against the other? Isn’t it obvious that,
given a structurally comparable set of threats and fears in the political world as in the religious, the
psychological reactions to those real or perceived dangers will likewise be hardly distinguishable?
Whether or not the dangers actually exist as presented by the leader/guru is secondary. To bring out
the cult-follower defenses—e.g., death threats against the courageous Dixie Chicks, or the regarding of
anyone who dares to question the claims of the country’s leaders as being “unpatriotic”—it is enough that one
believes they exist and that only the right guru/president/ideology can keep one’s body and/or
soul safe from them.
* * *
Even among die-hard skeptics, there is precious little interest in really understanding how cults
work, or in learning of the details of the fraudulence perpetrated by guru-figures whom they have
taken (with good reason) from the beginning as being con-artists, or at the very least wildly deluded
individuals. And, from the other side of the fence, “true believers”
typically want their guru to be the “best,” but not to be the only “authentic sage” around: Even
if they get completely taken advantage of one or another contemporary guru, they still cannot believe that
Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi, Aurobindo, or Jesus, etc., were less than what they claimed to be.
Plus, a far-too-high percentage
of the “anti-cult” community is composed of people who have extricated themselves from the Moonies
or the like, but then just gone back to the “safe” religion in which they were raised, in spite
of its witch-hunting or Inquisition-ing or kosher-eating “chosen people” past. So, while they are happy to save
other people from all the false religions in the world, they cannot admit to themselves that the
psychological needs which got them suckered into the recognized cult are exactly the same ones as later
took them back to the traditional religion, i.e., they didn’t need to be “tricked” into believing
its fairy-tale claims.
Further in terms of skeptics, Robert T. Carroll, Michael Shermer and Paul Kurtz all initially expressed interest
in the present book when I first approached them about it, readily agreeing to read it in either manuscript or PDF.
And that was the last I ever heard from any of them.
Carroll, for one, in his superficial understanding of cults,
quotes the true but vastly overrated notion that
“in most cases people [in cults] have not arrived at their irrational beliefs overnight.
They have come to them
over a period of time with gradually escalated commitments.” Yet, his own earlier
attendance at the
services given by SRF involved his own swallowing-whole of the existence of levitation,
bilocation, Babaji as a deathless Himalayan avatar (with the power to make himself invisible), etc.—all of
which claims were presented, completely openly, in
Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. (Carroll calls himself a former “follower” of Yogananda.)
No one subtly coerced him into believing those fairy tales over any period of time with
“gradually escalated commitments,” any more than anyone ever tricked me into it. To become
involved in one or another religion or less organized form of spirituality, it is enough that one merely
be gullible; no other deliberate trickery on the part of the leaders is actually necessary.
Further, far from being a mark of cultic involvement, the escalation of (public) commitment
is a feature of every group you might ever want to join, including
every (group of two) romantic relationship. In none of those were all of the negatives or
irrationalities ever explained to you up-front, for you to make a fully
“informed” decision.
So rephrase it this way: Would you still want to be a member
of the skeptical community if you knew, going in, that top skeptics
have provably fabricated information on numerous occasions
just to get you to go along with them and to discredit the “believers” with whom they
so vehemently disagree?
Exhibit
A—from Carroll’s own skepdic website:
While [Robert] Temple [in The Sirius Mystery] does also give versions [of diagrams]
omitting some elements (to remove symbols irrelevant to his particular
point), neither of the two corresponds with the version Randi gives—one includes less, one more.
So, why haven’t any of the “skeptics” had the skepticism to check Randi’s reference?
Just flipping through Temple’s book would fully discredit what Randi says.
Why don’t any of them call Randi on this: shouldn’t they want to expose this...?
And B:
The January 2000 issue of Dog World magazine included an article on a possible sixth sense in dogs,
which discussed some of my research. In this article Randi was quoted as saying that in relation to canine ESP,
“We at the JREF [James Randi Educational Foundation] have tested these claims. They fail.” No details were
given of these tests.
I emailed James Randi to ask for details of this JREF research. He did not reply. He ignored a second request
for information too.
I then asked members of the JREF Scientific Advisory Board to help me find out more about this claim. They did
indeed help by advising Randi to reply. In an email sent on February 6, 2000 he told me that the tests he
referred to were not done at the JREF, but took place “years ago” and were “informal.” They involved two
dogs belonging to a friend of his that he observed over a two-week period. All records had been lost.
He wrote: “I overstated my case for doubting the reality of dog ESP based on the small amount of data I
obtained. It was rash and improper of me to do so.”
Randi also claimed to have debunked one of my experiments with the dog Jaytee, a part of which was shown
on television. Jaytee went to the window to wait for his owner when she set off to come home, but did not
do so before she set off. In Dog World, Randi stated: “Viewing the entire tape, we see that the dog responded
to every car that drove by, and to every person who walked by.” This is simply not true, and Randi now
admits that he has never seen the tape.
And Exhibit
C, from my own disillusioning
experiences with The Amazing Randi and his Wilber-esque ability to
make “facts” up out of thin air. (The primary difference which I personally see between those two
“authorities” is that Randi has at least one hundred times more of reality on his side, so that he correspondingly
is pressured into fabricating information less than one percent as often as is Wilber.)
So, knowing all that, would you still want to be a member in good standing of the skeptical community?
“Surely not!” you say?
Most people would still happily join. Because, after all, the social benefits outweigh the
risks.
(Note: Carroll “would not miss” Randi’s annual
Amazing Meeting. For my own part, I live a
relatively full and rich life without it. One thing is certain: If Carroll or
Randi had caught any “believer” red-handed, provably fabricating such
important information as in the exhibits above, it wouldn’t just be buried in a
“footnote,” to only be discovered by chance. It would rather be Front Page News.
As well it should; but “sauce for the credulous goose, sauce for the skeptical gander.”)
In reading over Carroll’s parroting of simplistic (but widely accepted) ideas as to why people
join (or refuse to join) cults, it is obvious that he has missed the beam there, too:
Nobody would join a cult if the pitch were: “Follow me. Drink this poisoned-but-flavored
water and commit suicide.”
But, all you would have to append to that statement is what would typically be implied
anyway: “... by drinking the
Flavor-Aid and committing suicide, you’ll gain eternal salvation.” Given that
promise, people would be lining up to join.
Significantly, Jim Jones claimed to be
the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. That fact is vitally relevant.
No one would believe Jones’ claim unless they had been “brainwashed” or coercively persuaded?
Sure.... And no one would believe that Jesus was the sole Savior of
humankind (a proposition even less likely to be true than was Jones’ claimed
reincarnation) unless ... unless what? Unless they, too, had been brainwashed or subtly
coerced? What causes the conversion to any religion? Whatever it is,
it’s obviously present to a huge degree in our daily lives, not merely in
recognized “cults” where the members end up drinking cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid.
(Whatever the psychological details may be, isn’t it almost self-evident that people
join cults for comparable reasons to why they join cliques? And that they can’t easily
exit the former any more easily than they can leave the latter, again for fully
comparable reasons, in suffering the punishment of “social damnation”?
The intensity may differ, but surely the core psychological dynamics are the same.
Both situations, after all, are in large part simply variations on “follow the leader.”)
Further, anyone who would simply think about how people regularly
join
abusive communities, knowing
full well what goes on in them but believing that the (alleged) abuse
is for their own good, would not continue to imagine that no one would ever
walk into such a situation if they just knew what they were getting themselves into
from the beginning. They walk in anyway, because the promised (psychological and
salvational) rewards outweigh (they think) the risks. That’s the equation for
all social-group membership, isn’t it? After all, short of being physically restrained, no one
would ever remain in a group if he or she wasn’t getting something out of it.
More from Carroll:
What distinguishes the chiropractor’s rationalization from the cult member’s is that
the latter is based on pure faith and devotion to a guru or prophet, whereas the
former is based on evidence from experience. Neither belief can be falsified because
the believers won’t let them be falsified: Nothing can count against them. Those who
base their beliefs on experience and what they take to be empirical or scientific
evidence (e.g., astrologers, palm readers, mediums, psychics, the intelligent design
folks, and the chiropractor) make a pretense of being willing to test their beliefs.
They only bother to submit to a test of their ideas to get proof for others. That is
why we refer to their beliefs as pseudosciences. We do not refer to the beliefs of
cult members as pseudoscientific, but as faith-based irrationality.
But, the Maharishi, Paramahansa Yogananda, and Ken Wilber
(and their followers) all make
exactly the same “pretense of being willing to test their beliefs,” and equally only
bother with those tests as a means for getting “proof for others.” They are no less
“gurus and prophets” for doing so, however, nor can one question their
experience-based teachings (e.g., in the elevation of simple coincidences
to the status of paranormality/synchronicity) and still remain a member in good
standing within the respective communities. Plus, it is absolutely
standard for any “true guru” to allow the disciple a “testing
period,” in which he evaluates the teachings without committing to the “pure faith
and devotion” of the guru-disciple relationship. Throughout that period,
however, he is assured not merely
by the guru but by everyone around him that the “miracles” are real, and the
they have passed all of the appropriate tests—you know, just like even a professional
scientist will have a near-complete level of faith and trust that the claims made in
his field’s peer-reviewed journals have been competently and honestly tested.
Carroll again knows very well of Yogananda’s “scientific,” prove-it-for-yourself emphasis,
from his own brief
participation in the SRF cult (on “Sunday mornings” at least,
so from a relatively safe distance) decades ago. He thus already
has all of the data he needs, from his own experiences, to know that the line he is trying
to draw between “pseudoscience” and “faith-based irrationality” is hazy at best. He
also again has a copy of the PDF of this present book, which he does not appear to have read with any
attention. So if he still doesn’t get how basic social psychological
principles are overwhelmingly relevant when people join cults, and instead just
quotes from the accepted authorities in the cult-studies field without understanding
why their presentations are so inadequate, there is no admirable reason or excuse for
that.
Again, Carroll:
Three ideas seem essential to the concept of a cult. One is thinking in terms of us
versus them with total alienation from “them.” The second is the intense, though
often subtle, indoctrination techniques used to recruit and hold members. The third
is the charismatic cult leader.
However:
-
You will find the “us vs. them” mentality more in the skeptical community
(i.e., “rational, skeptical ‘us’” vs. the toxic
“believers”—“them”!) than practically anywhere else. You will also find it,
to varying degrees, in any group of people with a common interest or set of
beliefs which allows them to feel “special” or (socially, psychologically, or spiritually)
“saved.” You will indeed often find it in full-blown cults too, where the split can be
near-total ... but still needn’t be. (It isn’t in Yogananda’s SRF, for example;
but that still doesn’t make it easy for the monks there to leave, when walking away
equates to an admission of spiritual failure in the eyes of God and guru)
-
The Roman Catholic Church
has isolation in its monasteries,
self-criticism and humiliation in its confessionals, indoctrinated fear of what
will happen to its members if they should leave, paranoia that other groups are out
to get it, control of information via its indices of prohibited books, and
auto-hypnosis in its monotonous, chanted liturgies—all of which elements are
listed by Carroll (via Kevin Crawley) as being “subtle indoctrination techniques.” Catholicism also
certainly began with a charismatic leader, and has a firm boundary line between
the saved members inside the group and the damned masses outside. Anyone who grew up
in the Catholic Church, as Carroll did—he mentions attending “Masses, hymns, and
sermons” in his past—already knows all that. And if you doubt
the strength of the boundary between “us and them” in any “safe, traditional Christian
church,” and the necessity to remain on the right side of that line, consider the
Inquisition and the witch hunts. Both were explicit products, not simply of
some nebulous “mass hysteria,” but of exactly the same
established traditional religions which even the vast majority of cult-studies
professionals will
readily encourage you to join
-
One can be held in sway every bit as much by an infallible ideology or theology,
even one that is thousands of years old, as by a “charismatic leader.” The whole
“charismatic leader” focus
is just another red-as-communist-China herring—a correlation, not a causation.
(Okay, Yogananda, on a good day at least, was charismatic; but so is Donald Trump)
The tortures and damnations of both the Catholic/Protestant witch hunts and the
Inquisition make even something as toxic as
Scientology
look relatively innocuous by comparison. Were
such behaviors to occur in any “nontraditional” environment, they would be recognized
for the cultish actions which they are.
So, if you know that the most respected leaders of a community will fabricate information
to manipulate you, will overlook their peers’ blatant dishonesties, and will present themselves as
experts after having read all of half a dozen books on a subject (e.g., of cults, as
in Carroll’s case above), and you still want to be a part of that society ... well, good luck to you.
(Also take serious note of Martin Gardner’s false portrayal of
Krishnamurti
in Skeptical Inquirer. The fact that his superficial and dishonest hatchet
job made it into that magazine shows you just how thoroughly the ideas there
are vetted. If that article was sent out for peer review at all, whoever did the review
obviously lacked the knowledge-base to competently judge the paper’s validity.)
Incidentally, the book by Conway and Siegelman (Snapping) listed in the “further reading”
section of Carroll’s
“cult” page has not
been taken seriously within cult studies for many years; and Walter Martin’s books are
all done from a frightened, Bible-thumping Christian perspective, where anything
non-Christian is inherently “bad.” (I have read Martin’s The New Age Cult,
and at least one chapter from Kingdom of the Cults. If I had found his one-sided
books to be the least bit useful as cult-references, I would have included them in my
own bibliography, for STG, which covers just about every other relevant book known
to humankind—though missing a few on Jonestown. Like the amazon.com write-up for
Kingdom says: “This comprehensive new edition equips readers
from every walk of life to use biblical truth to counter the efforts of cults to
masquerade as mainstream Christians.” And that’s going to be an unbiased,
much less insightful, source
of information, worthy of recommendation? Personally, I’d be embarrassed to list the
book as a resource at all, much less as being among the “top ten” which I had read.
And on one of the definitive skeptical sites, too.) Lifton and Langone’s books
are generally insightful and reliable, as are Steven Hassan’s. (I have
corresponded with Mr. Hassan; he has actually read large parts of STG—though the
manuscript at that point contained only the first hints of the
Gurus and Prisoners
chapter. He further suggested only
a few minor corrections when I spoke directly with him on the phone about it in the
summer of 2004.)
I personally am certainly skeptical of any and all paranormal claims by now,
and have found much
good and competent debunking of those on skeptical websites (including Carroll’s
and Randi’s) and in their books. But to be a member in good standing of that
community? No thank you. Not with respected leaders like that.
Because as soon as you’re in, you start unconsciously deferring to the recognized
authorities, attaching far more weight to their collective wisdom and
veracity than they could ever deserve.
Fully in line with that, Carroll’s “knowledgeable” treatment of the subject of cults
is not merely inadequate, it’s downright Wilber-esque. And ironically, he has rejected
kw’s philosophizing on the basis of having read only the first chapter in A Brief History
of Everything. Granted, it would have been generous of him to read
further after encountering Wilber’s
“half-truths and lies” (Carroll’s phrase) on the subject
of evolution, there. But still, being properly informed about what you’re publicly
supporting or rejecting never hurts.
In any case, with regard to the cult-studies field and its leaders in general:
“Big, overgrown, diluted, traditional cult” members helping other
“little, nontraditional cult” members to see
things “more clearly” is certainly a bit of the old “pot, kettle, black” syndrome.
Conversely, though, there is nary a peep coming out of the cult-studies field about
the dangers of membership in, say, the Roman Catholic Church, even aside from its problems
with clergy sexual abuse. A large part of the reason for that surely has to do with the fact that
a significant proportion of the people working in that field have extricated themselves
from little, destructive cults, just to go back and embrace a bigger and older, “safe” cult with a
history of witch-hunts and Inquisitions, etc. But, of course, they can’t admit to themselves
that the psychological weaknesses which got them into the little cult in the first place are also
what now make them cling to the “safe, traditional religion” (i.e., big cult). So they instead
have to contort their theorizings
and insist that no one would ever join a destructive cult or adopt its odd beliefs
if they hadn’t been tricked into it ... even while they themselves wholly believe
equally wacky but “socially acceptable” fairy tales (open the Bible—or Bhagavad Gita,
or Koran—to nearly any page to see a good number of examples of that).
Further, ponder this: If there really is a “reason for everything” in our lives, and if those lives are
planned out prior to our births, for example, how can one go from being a “spiritual teacher”
(as I was once considered to be, by the publisher of my
first book)
to an outcaste simply for telling the truth and doing simple, competent
research?
What does it say about spirituality as a pursuit of truth, when simply following truth to the best of your
abilities is the death-knell for all forms of “spirituality”? Where, much as one might still reserve the
right to “hope” that everything will all “turn out for the best” in terms of reincarnation, psi phenomena,
auras and subtle
energies, etc., no one who is even minimally informed about the debunkings which have been done for each of
those “documented” claims could daftly “believe” that any of them are true. The most you can rationally
do is to hope.
Conversely, if, rather than clinging to and trying to preserve the few aspects of the integral perspective
which haven’t yet been shown to be untenable, you would instead build a philosophy only out of ideas
and phenomena which are
at least likely to be true—paranormality/psi is not—we would have little to disagree about.
I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may,
I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this:
that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever
for supposing it true.
—Bertrand Russell
Personally, the only
reaction I could consider appropriate, by now, to the question of gurus and
spiritual seeking, is to encourage people to not waste their time with any of
it. I have no hope left that “genuine gurus” who can actually deliver what
they promise exist now or have ever existed, nor do I think that what
they’ve presented as the
highest stages
of human consciousness would be worth pursuing even if those (e.g., witnessing, or non-dual)
phenomena/noumena were ontologically real.
Plus, closed-society in-group
dynamics, particularly when combined with promises/expectations of
enlightenment/salvation, have a way of reducing both leaders and followers
to behaving in the worst pre-rational and conformist ways,
regardless of how loftily they may
test or behave in “normal” circumstances. (Compare the sadistic/submissive
behaviors in the
Stanford prison experiment,
by persons who only qualified
as subjects in the first place for being the most psychologically healthy of
the applicants. Or, consider the psychological regression
measured by
Jane Loevinger in female university students—a “slight but consistent loss” of
ego development from their freshman to their senior years.)
Maybe one in a thousand guru-figures uses his/her power wisely/non-abusively.
Conversely, though,
for all of Ken Wilber’s (for one) glaring personal and professional flaws, if he were to ever set
himself up as an explicit guru, he wouldn’t even be among the worst 80%
as far as narcissism, manipulation, deceit, false claims to (e.g., non-dual)
enlightenment, or the psychological or physical abuse of
others goes. That is no positive comment on him, of course—the man is utterly
dysfunctional, and has been since at least his earliest “professional” days. It’s simply that the
rest of the guru-realm is filled with such dismal individuals
that, by comparison, kw stands out like a wise, compassionate and selfless
man, even for all of his
professional incompetence and/or outright manipulative dishonesty.
So, if you (rightly) think that kw’s books and character aren’t worth the
paper they’re printed on, but still believe that
“genuine gurus” exist who can deliver the enlightenment they promise ... well,
“good luck with that.” You’re going to need it.
In the court system, we have character witnesses to justify our belief that a person is
telling the truth, based on his truthfulness and other behaviors in the past.
In the business world, you have references to assure potential employers that
you will do the job properly in your new, “untested” capacity, based on your
having delivered comparable goods to previous employers.
In the spiritual world, however, even if a “wise” authority figure is consistently
wrong or outright dishonest about things which are actually testable, we are
still expected to take their word
for “things unseen.” They first unwittingly prove, time after time, that they cannot or will
not do the simplest research to get the most elementary things right; and then
they pontificate about the value in learning from ones such as them, that you too may
attain to the same exalted realizations of “truth” as they have! Or they first prove, for example, that
they cannot tell the difference between normal and ostensibly paranormal phenomena;
and then they vouch for the existence of the latter, based on their own experiences!
And followers, who themselves won’t do the most basic research into how such claims
can be tested and invariably found wanting, swallow it all, hook, line and sinker.
Wilber has never been the “worst” among those “leading” damned fools; he’s simply the one
who makes the most quantitative statements, and thus can be the most easily shown
to be consistently wrong/dishonest, via simple research which any competent undergraduate
should be able to do.
* * *
“But Geoff,” I hear you say, “surely you can’t be claiming that there’s no need to integrate the various approaches
in the field of consciousness studies, or at least to point out the first- and third-person approaches
that divide it? Surely listing the current schools of thought, and the attempt, by Wilber and others, to
arrange them in some kind of order, can only help.”
Well, as a first point, it is exactly the attempt to find order in all those phenomena
without having any idea about how to separate the real ones from the imaginary ones
that has created the integral mess in the first place—giving equal weight to the
“effectiveness” of long-ago debunked homeopathy and acupuncture, and to the “proven” (not!) efficacy
of meditation in advancing psychological stage-growth,
as it gives to a real process of evolution (which has to be utterly misrepresented in
order to fit into the “theories”). Where, in life, do we get marks simply for “attempting” things,
much less for giving the appearance of succeeding by dishonestly/selectively ignoring uncomplimentary,
contrary information? Okay, I guess in sales and management....
And, the drop-off from a “theory of everything” to merely pointing out how first-person (subjective)
approaches yield different and/or more enriching answers than third-person (e.g., physical science)
ones, is a fairly Everest-like
tumble. (Ironically, it’s exactly the combination of third-person and first-person approaches, in
the use of basic statistics and double-blind settings to evaluate claims of the abilities to see auras or
to do astral travel,
for example, that has provided the most evidence that such claimed abilities are unlikely to
be real. Of course, bring that up in the integral community and you can only be guilty of
“skeptical-materialistic” thinking, when you are rather simply asking the minimal questions which must be asked
in order to separate the widespread first-person imaginings—which can be whatsoever you want them to
be—from reality.)
Plus, you can’t do anything resembling science by
“including everything” now, and only later weeding out the stuff that doesn’t actually exist.
As Steven Dutch has observed, “theories that hang together pretty well logically and
are reasonably consistent with most of the evidence are a dime a dozen in science. It’s easy—anyone can
construct one. The key to the problem lies in the qualifiers ‘pretty well,’ ‘reasonably consistent,’ and
’most of the evidence.’” Consequently: Until you’ve thoroughly determined what the “best evidence” that needs
to be explained actually is, your theories are
inherently going to be “dime a dozen” ones, which fit “pretty well” with whatever you hope may exist
in the transpersonal and physical worlds. When exactly that same approach is being taken in the attempt to arrange
current schools of thought into some kind of order, one truly doesn’t even need to read the “breakthrough”
publications in order to know that they’re not going to stand up to questioning. That would be true
even if Wilber, for one, were not the “bastard child of P. T. Barnum.”
Further, proper theories in any field don’t merely explain existing phenomena and predict
new ones. Rather, they also “disallow” claimed phenomena which have failed to show themselves in proper
testing. How is the integral “we’ll weed it out later”
approach to a “theory of everything” ever going to accomplish the latter point? Even in principle, it cannot.
Would you read Velikovsky for his “insights” into astronomy, hoping that they’ll help to bring
order to the divided and unordered aspects of that field?
No? Then why do you read Wilber for his equally quack-ian “insights” into fantasial philosophy?
Am I saying that there is no “need to integrate the various approaches
in the field of consciousness studies,” via Wilber’s bumbling attempts or otherwise?
Not exactly: for people with an interest in such things, there
will always be at least a psychological need for that integration. What I am saying is that
kw (and at least 80% of his critics, and at least 99% of his followers) woefully lack the knowledge-base
to effect that integration, or even to properly critique others’ attempts. (That knowledge-base would cover
original sources, along with one’s understanding and
applying of the fact that literally nothing of what one might like to believe about the hoped-for transpersonal
aspects of reality has ever showed itself in any properly conducted and repeated testing.) If that weren’t true,
everything I’ve ever written in debunking Wilber’s addled notions would already have been put into
print previously, by others who are far more familiar with his “teachings” than I would ever wish to be.
’Cause even by now, I’ve sunk far less than 1000 hours into reading and critiquing his work. Further, since
the integral community as a whole is blatantly unable to recognize false attempts at such integration even
when the flaws are enumerated in precise detail,
it doesn’t have a prayer of recognizing true ones, either. Its members simply won’t know the difference.
Still, it’s never an “all-or-nothing” proposition, right? Is the attempt to put current schools of thought
into some kind of order, in principle, a good thing? Of course it is. Has any good come out of it?
Of course. Has any bad come out of it? You betcha. Quite a lot, actually.
Does integral philosophy do more harm than good?
Based on lost productivity, the psychotic side-effects of meditation, and the like, I would say yes, it does
significantly more harm than good; notwithstanding that, like all “opiates of the masses,” it does serve
a social and salvational function for the in-group. Would I, personally, be a happier person today
if I had never even heard of yoga, Wilber or integral philosophy? Yes, absolutely. No question at all. No
comparison. Wasted the best years of my life on those combinations of sound and fury, told by
conscience-bereft idiots, signifying sweet-piss-all.
The thing about integral/spiritual pursuits is that they’re never content to be mere theories; they always
want to be applied to real lives. While that may sound like a good thing, it’s exactly in the
applying that all the worst damage is done.
* * *
Many years ago, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman offered an insightful
critique of the
“cargo cult science” into which Wilber’s work falls so squarely:
[T]here is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that
we all hope you have learned in studying science in school—we never say explicitly what this is,
but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting,
therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a
principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning
over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you
think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could
possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment,
and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the
best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. If you make a
theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that
disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you
have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining
what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory;
but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your
contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another....
We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your
experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll
disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not
gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And
it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent
in much of the research in cargo cult science.
Ken Wilber may have garnered some “temporary fame and excitement” for his “cargo cult philosophy”—having
always “bent over backwards” in exactly the wrong way, to
obfuscate/ignore facts which did not mesh with his “theories.”
But that “success” is fairly meaningless, being achieved only in
a field of “pretend scholarship” populated by daft admirers who
simply don’t know any better, and who will fight you tooth and nail should you try to present them
with thorough research with utterly discredits their fallacious system of integral beliefs.
The truth will indeed come out. And, in the end, the world will know Wilber for the dangerously stupid,
authoritarian, ill-tempered, dishonest, narcissistic pretender that he always has been.
* * *
Endorsing the integral philosophy while listening to skeptical arguments against it
is a multi-perspectival viewpoint.
Following the evidence, while still hoping that even the most wild-eyed of spiritual claims
will turn out, upon competent testing, to be true, is also multi-perspectival.
In the former route, you end up believing in a wide variety of fairy tales, and discounting their consistent failure to
show their purported effects in properly controlled studies as a mere temporary setback or a shortcoming
of “skeptical-materialistic science.” You will also, if history and psychology are any guides, simultaneously
elevate the “false positives” of improperly performed studies to the status of “best evidence”—happy to believe
whatever you wish until it is “disproved,” in spite of the difficulty/impossibility of “proving a negative.”
In the latter route, you simply resolve to face reality, whatever it may turn out to be, even while still
hoping that, by some Douglas Adams-ian coincidence, the universe may yet turn out to have a point to its
existence after all.
Religion/spirituality could not exist without the former approach; the greatest discoveries in science
have consistently been made by people who took the latter.
If you really care about having your beliefs correspond
to reality, you have to be prepared to face, and act on, the possibility that they don’t.
And, if you think you can take the “good” from the integral perspective and leave the rest behind,
consider this: Every point on which I, for one, have debunked Ken Wilber’s consistently untenable claims,
was at one time supposedly part of what was worth saving from his ideas.
And as far as practice goes: Do you really need a formal philosophy or an integration of the current
schools of thought in order to know enough to lead a balanced life (exercise,
relaxation, good food but not too much of it, read a good book with proper footnoting now and then,
don’t believe everything you’re told by persons who stand to gain from your willing obedience, etc.),
or to justify living that way to yourself? If you do, here’s one:
We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.
You know who said that? Friedrich Nietzsche—a real philosopher, who
didn’t need to substitute fairy tales for reality and then pretend that that was an improvement
rooted in his own “exalted, second-tier spiritual realization.”