[Buddha-l] Jung and Dignaga and social mores

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Piya Tan schreef:
> Erik and Dan are two of the most open minds I know on this website whom I
> respect. Maybe on different sides of openness, but still part of the whole.
>
> I think we should write stuff here that we would enjoy reading say 10 years
> from now.
>
> Happy new year, all,
>
> Piya Tan
>
>   
Happy new year Piya and since you asked it so nicely I'll have a go.
I always found that one of the most impressive principles of Buddhism is to see the axis of evil in your own mind and not elsewhere. 
Now this Voeglin guy says that Nazism is the symbol of German nationalism. A symbol is a sign, something that means something, but only for someone, as C.S. Pierce noted. For whom is this symbol a symbol, for mr. Voeglin, for Dan, for the Germans in 1930? And how does he know this. If this Voeglin is a Hegelian, he believes in the Absolute Spirit of universal history, and that you can understand it by dialectical speculation and this makes him an idiot in my eyes. 
Human suffering is in general not brought about by evil persons or evil spirits, not even by the absolute one, but by sheer stupidity. Hannah Arendt called this banality. Robert Mugabe is not an evil person, he's just a stupid old man. 
That some people suffer so much is not because of a lack of compassion of other people. A fugitive doens't give a toss whether you or I can identify with his situation or not, he or she just wants food, water and safety. This is the tragic truth of samsara. 
There is very little we can do. Some people think they can and lo and behold, these three hundred or so mainly small aid organisations travel from disaster area to disaster area and make things worse. Africans call it the white flood, because everywhere this aid caravan arrives many new white buildings come: casinos, energyplants, nightclubs, saunas, offices, and so on. The fourteen year old girl that gets treatment in the hospital in the daytime, dances in the nightclub at night for the same doctor and gets another treatment in his bed. The rebels and robbers just get more cruel, because it's the only way the can draw attention to themselves and force the white flood to head their way.
You see, I'd love to tell Dan that Jung is the axis of evil, but somehow this seems rather outdated to me and moreover it are just words and there's so much more going on in the world than just words.

Erik

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