[Buddha-l] Getting real about Buddhism and capitalism

[curt]

I think that the entanglement of Buddhism with capitalism goes much 
further and deeper than the financial successes and excesses of big shot 
teachers. We are all conditioned by the society that we grow up in - and 
that conditioning continues throughout our lives. I have found that it 
requires extensive meditation practice, ardent study of Marx and Plato, 
and large doses of hallucinogenic drugs to even begin to scratch the 
surface of this conditioning. While my methods to address this problem 
may appear unsound to some - the problem itself, and the urgent need to 
address it, is right out of Buddhism 101. Economic conditioning is 
extremely deeply buried, especially in the American psyche (which is 
rapidly becoming the Human psyche). Americans have a hard time even 
saying the word "class" without twitching and barking uncontrollably. 
And we all belong to an economic class (usually not the one we suppose - 
to the extent that we do suppose) - and the vast majority of the actual 
facts of our lives from the moment we are conceived (think infant 
mortality) to the moment we die are rigidly determined by what class we 
belong to. And these "material conditions" largely condition our 
consciousness.

Anyone who takes the conditioned nature of our minds seriously should 
take a second look at Marx - if you haven't already. Far from being the 
callous materialist that he is usually portrayed as, Marx's whole 
Philosophy is mostly concerned with consciousness - and precisely with 
consciousness as a conditioned phenomenon. Most of what Marx says can be 
very broadly summarized as "if you change the conditioning then you will 
change the resulting consciousness". The rest is working out the 
details. Of course most "Marxists" can't see this because of their 
hyper-materialism - for which they can largely blame Marx himself, whose 
overcorrection of Hegel's idealism doomed Marxism to be congenitally 
stunted in the ethics department. But even though Marx insisted that he 
was a callous materialist - he was actually a Philosopher of the Mind 
(not the brain, but the Mind.) Unfortunately most Marxists do as Marx 
said, not as he did.

Most Buddhist teachers appear to be completely unaware of the pernicious 
role of economics in the conditioning of consciousness. They either 
blandly accept, or enthusiastically endorse whatever the existing 
socio-economic status quo is. This is even true for 99% of Buddhists who 
consider themselves "engaged" - their political/social/economic critique 
rarely strays from a predictably "liberal" agenda that at most seeks to, 
ever so gently and slowly, reform capitalism.

- Curt

Erik Hoogcarspel wrote:

> jkirk schreef:
>
>> Lately some of us have been finding opportunities to critique current 
>> national affairs
>> via a Buddhist critique as well as a Marxist or some other critique. 
>> That being the case, it is time, IMHO, to get real about what it is 
>> that is corrupting and terrorizing the ordinary peoples of the entire 
>> world and ruining their habitats and means of survival:
>> the arms industry and trade. With that in mind, here are some 
>> pertinent data, and I do not want to hear back the NRA argument that 
>> weapons don't kill, people do.
>> Joanna
>>
> You're right of course , Joanna. People kill... with weapons. If 
> everything would depend on people, there would be no reason to 
> prohibit any drug or poison. Since Marx philosophers have discovered 
> the power things have on us, see Marshal McLUhan, Foucault, Heidegger, 
> Latour and Baudrillard. Capitalism depends on greed. This is clear 
> from The Wealth of the Nations by Asam Smith, who took the idea 
> probably from the Fable of the Bees from Bernard de Mandeville. 
> Mandeville argues that the economy thrives on wickedness and I think 
> he is right. What strikes and annoys me is that some (mostly Tibetan) 
> big shots of the sangha claim that their financial succes is a 
> consequence of their holyness.
>
>