It kind of reminds me of this riff I heard by one of my favorite local comedians Eddie Pepitone. He talks about how there are world leaders out there torturing babies and he feels like a bad person when he has a pudding at three in the morning (he gets to it towards the end of this video). It’s a funny bit that shows how we humans work. Some of us don’t have it together to see that the most heinous things we do are wrong while others are sensitive to the most innocuous of offenses.
That sensitivity is a generally good thing. But it can be taken too far. Religious leader types are very much aware that “spiritual” people tend to be very sensitive to the notion of being a “bad person” for even the most minor transgressions. And many of these religious leaders prey upon that, knowing that feelings of guilt among their followers ultimately increase their own power over those followers. Since each member of the congregation has his or her own secret transgressions, it’s not even necessary to spell them out. But sometimes it helps to goose the crowd by defining even the most universal of human cravings or transgressions as “evil” in the eyes of the deity, or, in the case of wanna-be Buddhists, as desires that need to be stamped out. Desire and the desire to be free of desire arise simultaneously.
Try as you might you can’t fight desire with itself. The only way out is to see what’s going on from a completely different angle.
| — |
I’m not convinced desire is so bad, especially after reading some Iain M. Banks. I like the Culture’s hedonistic attitude, especially as it doesn’t seem to impinge on others. Ah, Sci-Fi. But still, desire must form the genesis of much improvement in society. An investor’s desire to see higher returns on his investment transfers capital to companies which provide others the services and products they demand. And I do not believe all we produce, books for example, and serve, legal advice, is necessarily sating pernicious desire. This is not the only way a society can press forwards, certainly. Command economies, or systems of democratic socialism, whatever you want to call them, can also forge a society forwards. But leaving investment and consumption choices to individuals is certainly more liberal and just, far more than majority, or even proportional, systems of decision making. Still, the argument that desire causes suffering does have some weight, even if desire does help a society fulfil its needs, temporarily anyway. I’m not really sure where I’m going with this. I like this man’s blog and his point about the mistake of using desire to fight desire, anyway. Pity I don’t live near his zazen stuff, whatever that is. |
