why is every rich tech capitalist invariably into buddhism?

is it because they can access it from outside any real-world cultural attachment and create their own disneyland of self-righteousness and guilt assuagement?

makes complete sense

(have been following @jack saw his lengthy thread)

THE WORST

yes

some of the ideas were good, but the whole thing seemed lacking in any real-world grounding

I want to think well of these guys, but...

ultimately I don't

I want to think well of these guys

why

https://tricycle.org/magazine/hitler-and-himalayas-ss-mission-tibet-1938-39/

The Schaefer mission left Germany in April 1938. The fact that Schaefer himself had accidentally shot and killed his wife while hunting wild boar just six weeks earlier was not seen as reason to delay.

this is a bit off topic but an excellent piece here that covers some of the roots of the deranged eugenicist + occultist tendencies of early 20th c Europe and the '38 Nazi SS mission to Tibet (that later embarrassed the Dalai Lama in the 90's), a possible staging post for attacking British India, but also ppl from the batshit occultist wing of the nazis (hitler, himmler, hess) believed the Tibetans might be related to or know the whereabouts of a mythical lost aryan tribe!

personally, I think full-of-shit rich westerners who become buddhists are savages who should be mercilessly pilloried + thrown into the pit etc.. but no offence intended to any resident enlightened ppl!

there's a whole cult of "biohacking" and "consciousness hacking" that's huge among rich silicon valley types and has been probably forever in one guise or another

my off-the-cuff theory about why this is so prevalent is that it's basically the lone cultural trait held over from Bay Area tech's hippie/counterculture phase in the 70s. There's also a strain of permissive nihilism in Buddhism that is ripe for exploitation by deluded egomaniacs, the ancient asian tradition angle gives their general behavior a patina of intellectual ballast.

feel like Silicon Valley portrayed this real well when it came to Gavin Belson and his spiritual advisor/trip to tibet etc

is it because they can access it from outside any real-world cultural attachment and create their own disneyland of self-righteousness and guilt assuagement?

or, to put it another way, this is otm

what sort of abberrant behavior would such a permissive nihilism justify?

presumably being a rich asshole

exploitation

racism / sexism too.

my off-the-cuff theory about why this is so prevalent is that it's basically the lone cultural trait held over from Bay Area tech's hippie/counterculture phase in the 70s.

yeah i guess there's nothing inherently bad or good about buddhism, it's just the tradition that's easiest to access for this type of person, and they need some sort of tradition to make the dumb fascist shit they embody look more legit.

right, none of these "disruptors" are going to go in for any mainstream American spiritual tradition like xtianity (or, I suppose, Judaism)

it seems like it's sold in the US as a kind of blank slate religion, completely free of guilt or obligation, so it makes sense to me in a way

Free of guilt or obligation or religion.

It's also somewhat easy to read Buddhism's pitch as having something to do with performance optimization: like, this is going to turn you into a hyper-productive problem-solver who doesn't get held back by normal human anxieties.

yup - liberate yourself from fear, suffering, emotional baggage, etc. all while just focusing on yourself!

buddhism is the perfect religion for the capitalist ruling class, evangelicalism is the perfect religion for the capitalist middle class.

American capitalist ruling and middle class I should say. Both religions are liberated from tradition, ritual and history. One of them also liberates you from morality while the other imposes it.

idk the Eightfold Path has a morality embedded in it, but that's not usually the part of Buddhism these clowns tend to focus on ime

and there's definitely religious traditions, rituals and history *in Asia* - much less so once in its American exported version, to be fair.

yeah, tbc I mean the american version of buddhism

Isn't the simple answer that Jobs set the example for what one of these jagoffs is supposed to be like, and he was into Buddhism? I do find the weird connection between 60s subculture (& its attendant interest in eastern religion/mysticism) & the nascent tech culture fascinating.

tbf tech culture was way more interesting when it was stoned hippies in their garages with a soldering iron and a circuitboard

I would guess that many American practitioners of Buddhism would be shocked to travel abroad and see how abusive, heierarchical and patriarchal old-school Asian Buddhist monasteries can be. Buddhist monks aren't all the dalai lama.

It's also somewhat easy to read Buddhism's pitch as having something to do with performance optimization: like, this is going to turn you into a hyper-productive problem-solver who doesn't get held back by normal human anxieties.

I think this is it, especially since it hinges on an especially prevalent tendency to misread Buddhism as a path to self-mastery. It's the Protestant Ethic given a makeover with less cultural baggage (in the US). Jack himself was really keen to note that the Buddha's discovery was "scientific" as a way to deflect any genuine religious, spiritual, or metaphysical narratives that might displace the self from the center.

but here it has a much fuzzier, easily accessible vibe, all you need is some incense and droning music and a mandala wall hanging...

xp

Sloterdijk is quite good on this in his way!

https://www.amazon.com/You-Must-Change-Your-Life/dp/074564922X/

They're also super into Marcus Aurelius/Stoicism to feed another vein of selfishness.

paging lagoon

There's this cranky looking book I saw on Amazon written to westerners that was like "if you're into meditation for relaxation, just get a massage instead, meditation is about truth and envisioning hell"

that one was written by lagoon

a hoos and lagoon should def be chiming in here with their diagnoses of this phenomenon

Sloterdijk is quite good on this in his way!

https://www.amazon.com/You-Must-Change-Your-Life/dp/074564922X/

― ryan, Tuesday, December 11, 2018 1:54 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This looks good! I like him.

"this is going to turn you into a hyper-productive problem-solver who doesn't get held back by normal human anxieties"

yeah i buy this, esp as it turns buddhism into something very similar to the sales pitch for scientology / "going clear" (which appeals to a slightly more new-agey type of california rich people). the version of buddhism being peddled is a self-help book: lower your stress and anxiety, feel no guilt, increase your productivity, feel superior to others, and no supernatural-type stuff that makes you feel goofy! it's catnip for these guys.

Surely the basic reason is if you are enormously rich and successful, it's incredibly rewarding to believe in karma and thus KNOW THAT YOU DESERVE IT

because once you reach the top of the mountain and there's nothing there you look for something higher, zen

xp: And if you *did* step on anyone on your way up, they probably deserved it for some cosmic reason beyond your understanding.

(OT, but I'm kind of interested in the reports that Jeff Bezos dwells on the idea of Amazon failing at some future date. I want to picture him having A Christmas Carol-type visitations by the ghosts of companies and industries that Amazon so thoroughly "disrupted.")

alvah roebuck, ghost of disrupters past

surely a non-nefarious reason is related to the cultural history of the bay area, which has been a home to american buddhism since what like the mid-1800s w/ the first wave of chinese and other asian immigrants? don't want to meddle w/ the dunking on these dudes itt but buddhism has been a cultural presence in the bay area for a long long time, beyond even what shakey mentions with the 60s counterculture overlap w/ tech

yeah people forget about the whole 90s cyberdelia thing

point well taken now let's get back to dunking

jack sucks so bad

surely buddhism leads to better dressing

https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/58e7c4d477bb70b90c8b674d-750-562.jpg

i def have thoughts about this but

the lone cultural trait held over from Bay Area tech's hippie/counterculture phase in the 70s

easy to read Buddhism's pitch as having something to do with performance optimization: like, this is going to turn you into a hyper-productive problem-solver who doesn't get held back by normal human anxieties

both nail this phenomenon really well imo and

liberate yourself from fear, suffering, emotional baggage, etc. all while just focusing on yourself!

is so otm that other buddhists have been salty about this orientation in the theravada schools for a thousand plus years

jack wanted to "go to the source" in burma to really get the local flavor of these particular vipassana teachings, now available in free 10-day courses around the world, but he definitely was not given & did not seek an up front take on the peculiarly early 20th century burmese nationalist origins of this particular pedagogical format -- which makes his promotion of it alongside his glossing over of the ongoing genocide 10x a problem imo. "hey everybody check out this cool meditation retreat i did that was invented by a burmese nationalist trying to unite the country against imperialism, also don't pay attention to what current buddhist burmese nationalists are doing"

noticing that a lot of the old hippies where i live are basically just libertarians

Joe Carducci rightly pegs companies like Apple as the last evolution of "hippie shopkeep"

I think hippie's libertarian edge was always there, the Dead, communes, MC5's gun toting drunk revolution, esp after the original SF era died and everyone decamped to the country

tbh the flip side is that enterprising buddhist gurus were canny businessmen and knew who to pull into the fold

cf, ”Toxic Bob” Friedland. Kicked out Bowdoin in an acid bust, met Steve Jobs at Reed and then Jobs followed him when he set up a commune. Now he’s in mining, and when the mining industry dubs you “Toxic Bob,” you know you’re a bad guy.