Here’s a weird mashup for you: Dark Buddhism, one man’s attempt to fuse Buddhism with Randian Objectivism. To his credit, he’s quite clear on the flaws in the Cult of Ayn Rand, but it’s still strange to care so much about Rand’s bogus philosophy that you want to rescue it by stitching it up: building a hybrid of selflessness and selfishness is a contradiction sure to spawn deepities.
Buddhism supplied a necessary piece of the puzzle but, as an Objectivist, I simply could not accept the selflessness the Buddha taught. This is selflessness in both senses of the word: first a life of compassion toward others, and second a dissolution of the ego, becoming without self. The latter is the more familiar concept that “we are all one” or “everything in the universe is interconnected.” Buddhism is not supposed to have any particular moral codes or ethics, like a religion, yet the teachings regarding compassionate living seemed to be just that. In Dark Buddhism these are all personal choices, not morality as dictated by others. It slowly dawned on me that I could take what seemed rational and “right” from Zen Buddhism, excise the parts that were inconsistent with my values, and then do the same with Objectivist epistemology and merge the two together. The psychology of self-esteem is the glue that binds the two together, and the result is Dark Buddhism, a logically consistent whole.
I don’t know if I buy that. Redefining fundamental ideas in two philosophies either destroys the concepts in the name of logical consistency, or abandons logical consistency by gluing contradictions together. I don’t think Dark Buddhism is going to be found persuasive by very many people.
The Randian Philosophy, Objectivism, is simply: don’t tell others what to believe, and don’t believe something just because some person claims authority, and tells you to believe what THEY believe. Use your own mind to believe what your rational brain tells you to believe. You are the only authority over your self.
TL:Dr; cherry pick your beliefs.
So, mashing up Buddhism and Obj into “Dark Buddism” sounds perfectly Randian to me.
PZ, don’t you dare tell me that is wrong! I can think for myself! What ever I think is correct – IS correct, by definition, in that philosophy over there.
Eightfold Path.
Fail right out of the gate.
Also: I have a very hard time imagining how one could use Buddhism to justify greed and property fetishism.
This is a peculiar idea. It’s sort of the limit point of what I perceive as a certain Western idealization of Buddhism as somehow very different from other religions. It’s the “spiritual” person’s go to example of how to be “spiritual” and “enlightened” without being “religious”.
But if you look at it’s history, and how it is practitioners by ordinary believers around the world, it’s full of superstitions, rituals, and a clergy claiming unique moral authority, like every other religion.
The creator of Dark Buddhism is a physicist.
This is not only a poor characterization of its actual tenets, but the absolute polar opposite of how Rand actually exercised it in practice.
I can’t speak to this guys understanding of Randian Objectivism as I was only able to get through about half of The Virtue of Selfishness in my teens back in the ’70’s but his grasp of Buddhism seems pretty much nonexistent as the bulk of Buddhism revolves around morals and ethics and the teachings on the selflessness have nothing to do with the dissolution of self.
re 5:
good point. my rant @1 was just me, justifying my own cherry-picking of Obj philosophy, I totaly agree that Rand herself was the worst example of her own philosophy. She apparently contradicted everything she said. a perfect exemplar of “do what I say, not what I do”.
He seems to have found a way to mix the most self-centered parts of westernised buddhism with one of the most self-obsessed philosophies. I guess he really is a nice guy.
Also, this is his characterisation of objectivism: “Objectivism is a philosophy based upon thinking rationally and viewing the world objectively.”
So he is funny, at least.
How did Rand become A Thing, anyhow? Was it just that Nietzsche had gone out of style? At least he could write.
So much wrong.
However, in the defense of the creator, let me point out that
may have been more feature than bug to its creator.
Crip Dyke’s deepity denariumanitical:
I’ll be holding an intensive 2 day retreat at the Clayoquot Wilderness Resort in late August to explore this profound idea. Early registration is only $7000/person and includes transportation from either Vancouver or Victoria as well as accommodation and meals at the exclusive five-star resort.
@Marcus Ranum
Ouch!
OK, you all know the joke about the buddhist and the hot dog stand (“make me one with everything”)
What about the objectivist and the hot dog stand? There has to be a good joke that can be mined out of that one.
Of course you can mash-up Objectivism with Buddhism. It’s another version of the popular modern pop spiritual approach of Sheilaism. “Take what you need and leave the rest.” Distort concepts like an apologist and you’re there.
It works the way it always works. When the success of a philosophy is measured against personal satisfaction as the gold standard, then internal coherence or historical accuracy means little to nothing. Sheilaism itself seems rather libertarian: “Look, I know what’s right for ME.”
“In Dark Buddhism these are all personal choices, not morality as dictated by others.”
He doesn’t get it. True morals aren’t dictated at you. They are the precepts you find in yourself through reason and empathy to become a decent human being rather than a selfish Randian jerk.
Why don’t we just give it a more appropriate name: Dark Bullshit. This is just the same rationalized indifference and blind selfishness that libertarianism/Randism always was, with an extra veneer of (grossly misunderstood and misrepresented) Eastern spirituality.
It slowly dawned on me that I could take what seemed rational and “right” from Zen Buddhism, excise the parts that were inconsistent with my values, and then do the same with Objectivist epistemology and merge the two together.
So he’s pretty much admitting he’s taking someone else’s belief system, and cherry-picking the parts he likes. Just like our typical right-wing Christian does with the Bible. Anyone still think libertarianism isn’t really a backward religion?
This guy doesn’t know anything at all about Buddhism. To start with, it most certainly does have an ethical code which is contained in the 8-fold way. In the second place, the idea that the self is an illusion does not mean that “we are all one.” I could go on. This is ridiculous.
Fuck You, I Got Mine Two: Geek Guru
Featuring The Bling Sutra, Ice Cream Koans, Mu Money Mo Problems, The Boddhisatva of Wall Street, and Zen and the Art of Off-Shore Account Maintenance.
Coming to a clueless neo-reactionary near you.
In Dark Buddhism these are all personal choices, not morality as dictated by others.
Morality isn’t “dictated by others,” it’s dictated by THE REAL WORLD, where actions have observable consequences. This is something libertarians refuse to accept: there are real circumstances, and real people near us, that we have to accommodate, whether or not we feel like it on any given day.
In Dark Buddhism these are all personal choices, not morality as dictated by others.
*Yawn* Nietzsche. “Slave Morality” see figure 1.
I like the idea of the buddhist ubermensch. It’s so self-contradictory it makes me want to slap a zen master.
Wait… of those two sides it’s the former that is personally troublesome and difficult for him?
Raging Bee @ 15;
Agreed – a more accurate description of ‘Dark Buddhism’ would be ‘Buddhism as fig leaf’. This is about keeping the nasty, self-obsessed core of the kind of Randian arsehattery that claims that altruism is morally repugnant, but hiding it behind an unconvincing veneer of a spiritualist movement that most Westerners dismally fail to understand but vaguely think of as being nebulously ‘nice’. It is image management, nothing more.
When I read Rosenberg’s blather I was somewhat put in mind of a philosophical Dr Frankenstein feverishly stitching together conflicting philosphies in a Victorian era lab periodically bathed in the actinic illumination of lightning flashes. Having completed his masterwork, he steps away from the monstrous intellectual chimera and gazes up to the heavens, waiting and listening to the storm raging over head. After some minutes, a particularly potent lightning bolt spears down to strike the elaborate copper conductor, causing baroque capacitiors to hum with charge. With a flourish, the good Doctor throwes an almost commically oversized breaker switch, and the current pours into his now twitching creation, while he screams into the tumult of the tempest it’s alive!
Unfortunately, the analogy breaks down comprehensively soon after that, if only because Boris Karloff’s famous interpretation of the monster is so much more sympathetic than the inconsistent mess Rosenberg has vomited into existence here.
…
I should probably avoid watching Penny Dreadful before I post here in future, shouldn’t I…?
“I’m too selfish for Buddhism”. K. At least he’s honest. I couldn’t devote my life entirely to compassion, though I try and throw as much of it into the mix as possible.
Buddhism is a religion. Religions are not necessarily theistic. The fuck is this guy on about?
Say it with me: “We are all individuals”. Why do you even need to name such a philosophy? This is how everyone lives their life, whether they recognize it or not. Morality may be dictated in most religions, but people pick and choose which rules to follow based on their own conscience. So do the non-religious, we just don’t necessarily need a shed-load of cognitive dissonance in order to pull it off.
Presumably resulting in the sort of incoherent mish-mash that normally results from attempting to merge two completely opposing philosophies.
What the hell does that even mean?
I seriously fucking doubt that.
@ Gergory Greenwood #21
Wow. That really was very poetic.
“The psychology of self-esteem is the glue that binds the two together…” What the hell does that even mean?
It means his self-esteem (or rather, his self-regard and self-importance) is the driving force behind his franken-rationalizaions. (HT to Greenwood @21 there..)
#14, kirklarson
Are you assuming that there are things that a randian can find within themselves? I’ve a sneaking suspicion that they may be entirely vacuous.
This philosophical movement seems to have been anticipated in the brilliant script of “A Fish Called Wanda, written by John Cleese and Charles Crichton:
Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened @ 23;
That is nice to hear, but Mary Shelley did all the heavy lifting. I just noted the similarity between Rosenberg trying to fuse ideological body parts from Objectivism and Buddhism into something vaguely approximating a worldview (I am pretty sure the lightning here would be his own overweening ego and inflated sense of perspicacity), and the famous fictional Doctor trying to use science (psuedo-science as we now know, but it was not necessarily universally believed to be so when the story was first written – that is the self-correcting nature of the scientific method and its always provisonal, evidence based conclusions for you) to breath life into his patchwork golem.
Or better yet, skip the excising and reassembly of preachy moral codes altogether and just go with reason for your morals, which is kind of what you were doing with all that remoulding-to-fit crap anyway.
Or, for a shorter me @ 27, see Raging Bee @ 24.
If you meet John Galt on the road, kill him.
I assume the headgear of choice for his High Priests will be fedoras.
The Four Ignoble Truths:
1. Life is suffering. Unless you look out for #1 and pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
2. Craving causes suffering. For the plebs. Hedonism is fine for you, you ubermensch, you.
3. To cease suffering you must end your end your craving. Or choose other cravings. Like instead of smoking, collect piles of gold to sleep on.
4. The way leading to the cessation of suffering is the ignoble eightfold path.
The Ignoble Eightfold Path.
1. Right-wing view.
2. Right-wing thought
3. Right-wing speech.
4. Right-wing political action committee
5. Right-wing business.
6. Right-wing endeavors.
7. Right-wing focus.
8. Right-wing meditation.
Do this and you will attain Nerdvana.
:applause emoticon:
I think the Letter K wins the thread at #30
So instead of enlightenment he seeks…endarkenment?
Marcus Ranum @9
“How did Rand become A Thing, anyhow? Was it just that Nietzsche had gone out of style? At least he could write.”
It’s just an impression but I think red scares, both proto and full blown. I’m no expert on her writing but the impression I get is the philosophy took some time to really develop to a complete ideology. The thing that struck me about her early stuff in particular is that it wasn’t so much a philosophy as a series of statements in flat contradiction of Marx. Really little more than opposite statements to historical materialism, collective action, you name it. (I don;t think she directly addresses Marxist philosophy, that would give him too much respect. But the core tenets she always banged on about seem so on point to me)
Communism was clearly terrifying voodoo whose very utterances could poison minds to the overthrow of government. So what America needed was a philosophy of its own to fight back with. And lo’, said the moguls of Wall Street, here was a woman, a refugee from Communism no less, with a Truly American philosophy (we just won’t push the atheist parts too hard. Just gets the books into schools a lot).
Did this person come in second place in the contest for who gets to call themselves the “dark enlightenment”? “Dark Buddhism” just doesn’t have much of a ring to it.
So instead of enlightenment he seeks…endarkenment?
Pretty much, yes — libertarianism is, in many ways, a flat rejection of certain key principles of the Enlightenment, much as libertarians try to pretend otherwise.
Muz@#36 – I agree with that, though I take your meaning “American” as in line with American corporate oligarchism and not literally domestic. She sounded foreign and alien but said things that made the elites and the bootlickers of the elite happy. And, perhaps, she was easier to read and less German than Friedrich :)
I’m no expert on her writing but the impression I get is the philosophy took some time to really develop to a complete ideology.
More precisely, it took MONEY, which was used to buy up all sorts of right-wing organizations and pundits, Rand included, and craft them all into an all-encompassing, multifaceted, manipulative ad-campaign, dressed up as a philosophy, while pandering to just about all of the worst instincts of human nature.
I’m curious about why he chose the adjective “Dark” when naming his worldview. It immediately makes me think of Mitchell and Webb’s “Are we the baddies?” sketch.
Pfft, “Dark Buddhism,” “Dark Enlightenment,” it’s all an object lesson in self-sabotage. Do they really think mainstream society will take them seriously if they call their
cultsmovements like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon?But then, it worked for the “social justice warrior” epithet.
Doyle Harken @ 42:
I would hope that you are aware that is was not those concerned with social justice and SJ activism who came up with that warrior nonsense.
anteprepro
OK, you made me snort my coffee —
Nice work. Neez nu keebrd. . .
In response to #34.
I agree that the letter K found the perfect bon mot, but I’ve got to respect Anteprepros effort…
I have inspired been inspired by Dark Buddhism to create my own new ideological systems:
Zoroastrian Marxism – There are two destructive forces in the universe, the god of Communism and the god of Capitalism.
Vegetarian cannibalism – Some people don’t consider humans animals, so it is okay for us to eat them.
Rastafarian fascism – authoritarian nationalism with plenty of pot smoking.
Communist capitalism( Soviet Union and China beat me to it.)Wiccan Utilitarianism – something about witchcraft and maximizing utility. Still a work in progress.
I urge you all to create your own hybrid of clashing ideologies!
@19
With one hand?
Not even.
Atlas Shrugged is a turgid, needlessly verbose work of fiction which glorifies selfishness, encourages narcissism and promotes an unsustainable, unstable economic structure. Objectivism is a flawed system invented by a sheltered, ignorant hack who never had to struggle a day in her life. For anything.
A Buddhist monk goes to an Objectivist hot dog stand. He smiles and says, “Make me one with everything.”
The hot dog stand owner closes up the stand in a huff and writes a 3000 page screed on the internet about it.
@Holms #28: Exactly what I was thinking, and stated better than my attempt.
Read the link after nearly bailing at the first paragraph (wherein the young genius was too advanced for his age with too superior of a mind to be accepted by his peers). That was fun.
Pretty much the only substantive thing I could find, beyond a general appeal to only deal with “objective” things (which is repeated to semantic saturation and used basically as a synonym for “correct”) is this:
So an “objective” philosophy is based on a “personal choice” (subjective) based on the answer to a question about the self (subjective). Oh, but the answer needs to be answered from an objective view. Of the self. An objective view of a subjective experience. What?
Not to mention that a moral system concerned only with the self is useless. If your actions only affect you, who could possibly complain except the person in control of those actions? If your moral system refuses to acknowledge or consider those around you, save in a roundabout way where the way you treat others affects the way they treat you, then your moral system is practically amoral.
Alternative: The hot dog stand owner replies that he can’t make a hot dog with everything on it, that’s objectively impossible. The Buddhist monk replies that it was just a little joke. The hot dog stand owner frowns, and replies that it was not a joke, as it was objectively not funny.
Azykroth@#49 – that got a chuckle!!
I have failed in my attempts, though. Most of mine involve something silly about The Invisible Hand of the Market or other anarcho-capitalist tropes. I.e.:
An Objectivist walks up to a hot dog stand, and takes one. As he walks away, the buddhist hot dog vendor says, “You forgot the condiments.”
Marcus @53, I liked that one.
Mine all foundered on ending up sounding like Rand wrote them, or John Norman:
An Objectivist walks up and says, “Give me that, for I am a maker of things, and thus objectively more important than your puerile retail peon self, blinded as you are by your compassion and emasculated, madam, I do say emasculated by your disgusting weak empathy. Objectively, this tube of cow offal is mine, as befits a maker, in the process of furthering my own needs I have objectively enriched society, so no, I will not pay you. Your weakness in surrendering the offal so quickly just provides a metric by which we can assess, free from gods or emotions, the best outcome, which entirely coincidentally results in my becoming marginally more filled with awful than I was before I logically destroyed your weakness.”
There are no jokes in Objectivism, it is vry srs bznss!
Meh. To me, this guy just sounds like another cafeteria Buddhectivist.
An Australian broadcaster tried that “one with everything” joke with the Dalai Lama. However, because of language/cultural barriers, it did not go well:
In Buddhism, at least as I understand it, the attempt to “destroy the ego” is seen as pointless and futile.
Buddhism thinks that “ego” is just a concept and doesn’t refer to any actual reality. If you think you are an “ego” Buddhists think you are mistaken, and your attempt to destroy what actually doesn’t exist except as an idea is just a way of postponing what they think of as “enlightenment”, which is simply seeing that “ego” is just an idea and was never actually there in the first place.
‘Dark’ is neutral when used to describe colour or light (dark blue, dark skin, dark room)… but if you’re describing concepts, it pretty much universally implies unpleasantness, maliciousness or outright evil (dark thoughts, dark deeds, Dark Arts etc).
There seems to be a running theme of people with certain political persuasions, consciously or unconsciously, aligning themselves with villainy. You only have to look at the sorts of fictional characters different online groups choose to adopt as mascots, or prefer to quote from, to see this trend in action.
@#46, firstapproximation
Wiccan Utilitarianism: “Do as you will, an it be expedient.”
CaitieCat@#54 – that DOES sound like John Norman. I always thought he was parodying Hemingway but maybe he was parodying Rand! LOL!
Marcus Ranum @60, I doubt he’d parody Ayn Rand; he’s an earnest libertarian.
His “tough guy” Mary Sues read like parody, but I think he actually admires them.
remove this now fuckers!!!
[CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. Bye. –pzm]
@ polishsalami
… no?
Somehow I think Siddhartha Gautama would have sneered at Dark Galt or whatever he’s calling himself.
Wow.
What a weenie.
I will be happy when Westerners’ Orientalist orgasms about are a thing of the past. Particularly since so much of it is based on something like the fundamental attribution error — every religion (or irreligion) is in favor of peace and against oppression in a time and place where it doesn’t have hedgemony.
firstapproximation @ 46:
I once facetiously referred to myself as an “anarcho-totalitarian” but apparently that’s actually a thing.
Chris J @ 51
Yeah, that’s one reason I stopped reading LessWrong
Kagato @ 58:
When it’s conscious I guess it’s an attempt to rehabilitate these characters, as a dog-Nietzschean critique of consensus values (or as they would put it, )
Oh thank Dog. And the great poopyhead, of course.
Why?
@Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y:
Why did I nearly bail after the first paragraph? Because in my experience, the people who tout their own genius like that tend to be the biggest, smuggest, and most self-important assholes that tell their “genius” because they can’t show it on the topic they’re talking about. It grates on me. Keep in mind that the words I used like “superior mind” were used in that paragraph. Perhaps I should have used “self-described young genius” to make it clearer…
Certainly I don’t think it applies here, but unless drooling middle-schoolers have suddenly stopped calling anyone who uses complete sentences or words with more than two syllables, understands and expresses any concern for nuance, expresses compassion for anyone or anything, or is ever seen reading a book (or talking like they’ve at any point in their lives opened one) a “faggot” and threatening them with violence on a daily basis, I don’t think it’s a characterization that should be rejected out of hand.
Or is it just time for yet another round of “tee hee, you think you have lived experiences, but NO THEY DIDN’T HAPPEN BECAUSE WE’VE DECIDED THAT’S NOT HOW THE WORLD WORKS!!!!!!!!”
Wiccan Utilitarianism – something about witchcraft and maximizing utility. Still a work in progress.
See “Urban Pagan.”
An Australian broadcaster tried that “one with everything” joke with the Dalai Lama. However, because of language/cultural barriers, it did not go well…
He should have expected that — the joke is based on colloquial English usage, and one can’t really expect it to translate properly to any other language.
@Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y:
Where did you get that I was doubting he was bullied? I’m mainly complaining about tone and framing… he sets himself up as a “child prodigy” with a “superior mind” that was saved from bullying by Ayn Rand, who finally told him he should be feel proud of being such a wonderful intellectual. That just grates on me, and I was also one of the “smart kids” in school (at least, in grammar and middle school).
…what the fuck. Buddhism and Objectivism are as polar opposite as you can possibly get. Objectivism is pure egosim; Buddhism has as one of its central doctrines the concept of anatman (“without [i.e., there is no] soul/self”). …quite how they believe in karma and reincarnation without an actual self is a bit baffling to me, but eh…
Has this person ever taken even an introductory course of Buddhist thought? Has he ever read any of the sutras? Somehow I don’t think so.
anteprepro #17 and #32:
I’ve been out and about since reading this thread midmorning, and I kept being reminded about your posts and grinning all day. Unfortunately, I’ve had to wave people off when they’ve asked me what’s made me so cheerful. “You had to be there,” was all I could say. Here’s that’s not the case. HAhahahahahahahahaha!
If I could make one suggestion – Who knows if this guy is interested in ice cream. But I bet he’d say “Hmmmmm” about developing Bitkoans.
You want the “now” to be removed?
OK, the sentence reads:
So now you want the “this” removed?
Ah! I see! You actually want fuckers removed! But fuckers==penis==polishsalami! And PZ obliged.
Very appropriately Zen.
But “fuckers” is plural, and “polishsalami” is singular.
Perhaps he was One WIth Everything.
Yep, he was The One. Then he took a red pill and disappeared from the Matrix.
Are you sure it’s not the plural of “polishsalamus”?
…Actually, “salami” is the Italian plural of “salame”…
I assume the answer to why there were multiple “fuckers” is that Polishsalami had siblings elsewhere on the site that also needed to be removed: Germansausage and Swedishmeatballs. Salty meat so succelent, they make Austria hungary.
TLDR, this guy wanted to find a way to be a terrible person and a terrible Buddhist.
We are all one is about the best part of buddhism. I mean, what ELSE is there to like about it if you get rid of that part?
I base my morality on a very simple fact: there is no rational reason to prefer my own well-being over that of another. Objectivists spend so much time breaking themselves away from everyone else that they seem to forget that the rest of the world and it’s problems (some of which richer objectivists are responsible) don’t disappear just because they stopped caring about them.