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buddhas, anti-buddhas, civilization, and the importance of method [draft]:

Hopefully without detracting from the gravity of what I'm writing about, I want to note that I am not a scholar or a historian, so there will be some inadvertent cherry picking and possibly howlers or just highly questionable assertions and inferences, not to mention history-writing winners, and all that. But, here we go.

Also, content warning, this starts out maybe a little dark, or at least gray, and then gets darker further in.

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There is the "banality of evil"--everyday cruelty, neglect, professional sadomasochism, and "just following orders."[*]

There is also the "banality of good"--so the story goes, it's hard to refuse warmth to a hungry, cold community member, or to a stranger, at the the persistent request of a community member, if the hungry, cold person is standing right there outside your door. [*]

Of course, we have both of these capacities within us, and much more. They aren't points in a space, they're vague swaths in the space. And they're contingent on causes and conditions. Change the society, change the person's causal history, and something different counterfactually occurs.

Is there bias or directionality? Are both equally likely? Evil or good? A flip of the coin?

What is the essence or long-run emergence of the human condition? (For completeness, artificial and alien intelligence may need to be discussed in a separate section.)

I believe humans are long-run positive-sum.

(I could make a case for this, and I may suggest some things, but this sort of, at least partially, has to be found from the inside, anyway.)

"Long-run" suggest something problematic is going on in the "short-run": There is the anthropomorphized idea of "moloch" [1] or, more abstractly, inadequate equilibria [2]

The rough idea is that distributed, discoordinated, local incentives can produce stable, entrenched, bad globalities, and thereby stable, entrenched, bad localities. (I may have added or distorted something, here.)

Reasoning about equilibria also suggests that seeming utopias often have a hidden dark side, zero-sum coercion or exploitation, somewhere. (See perhaps the origin of the term utopia as well as tvtropes.com.)

It takes (a) serendipitious or deliberate advances in abundance or (b) serendipitious or deliberate advances in coordination, to truly, positive-sum break out of bad equilibria.

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An example of problematic coordination, a combination of good and bad, might be Christianity. See perhaps Girard. Christianity yielded a "universal scapegoat" and an "all-encompassing goodness out there." These may have reduced war, facilitated trade, not to mention they're a source or deep meaning and coherence. One could also argue (as I believe) that these, at least the straw versions, are partially inappropriate reifications, to the degree they've been non-incidental in violence and oppression (arguably crusades, colonialism, imperialism, prejudice, etc.).

Another example of problematic coordination, could be just modernity itself, in the form of (somewhat unnecessarily comingled) reason, so-conceived mind/body dualism, and so on. To the degree that these ideas and situated behaviors are problematic, while producing extraordinary wealth and life improvements, they've arguably also contributed to the dissociation of "the big three," truth, goodness, and beauty, after Ken Wilber, and arguably contributed to atomization, ennui, anomie, and heavily falling birthrates.

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I'm writing this draft in 2021 (2021-02-20). This will necessarily be written without historical perspective, in some sense, but I think the asymptotic limit of "doing good history" can be very good. I'm certainly not there, yet, in this draft--so this might age quite poorly or is even contemporaneously "cringe." (Again, I don't want to detract from gravity, but I want to lampshade that "cringe," in quotes, is cringe.)

To be tonally abrupt after the immediately above, the holocaust wasn't that many decades ago, and genocides have continued before and after. There's some chance that the United States dollar will continue to devalue, and that could be fine or produce instability. Bitcoin and decentralized finance are currently hot. There is a global pandemic. Vaccine technology has been a big, though arguably delayed success.

Now, what are the good futures?

Fully automated luxury [gay] space communism? [3,4]

Neopastoralism?

How might we get there? What are the challenges?

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For context (and this could be accurate or incredibly not-even-wrong or overstated, either my paraphrase or the source material [5,6]), in ancient, net-zero-sum wider environments, tribes will:

  1. find abundant resources
  2. reproduce until those resources are under strain or exhausted
  3. have more men than women, through female infanticide (and possibly murder of the elderly, especially women), to make resource acquisition more efficent and to have resources be depleted more slowly
  4. acquire more resources and women (rape) through war, which also kills men, and the male/female ratio improves, as well as the resource/population ratio.
  5. repeat

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One could say that civilization is the de-escalation of violence [*] through positive-sum coordination. Perhaps, the more positive-sum-ness there is, the more civilization (and adequate equilibria, etc.) and abundance there is. (I am mixing math [metaphors] with synthetic a posteriori descriptions and claims, but, first-pass.)

Since, I believe in humanity being long-run positive-sum, and since there is still resource competition today, I think we'll need to keep improving the causes and conditions that yield creativity and generativity, which yield more abundance and coordination and safety, which yield more creativity and generativity, and so on. (Technological advances, including possibly general artificial intelligence, will cause big improvements and big disruptions, along the way.)

If creativity and generativity are "circularly-causally-downstream" of (body)mind, then one could argue that at least one leverage point is "self-transformative technology," method, e.g. meditation.

But, e.g. meditation, and the sociological context that circularly-causally facilitates it, isn't good enough, yet, neither the "meditation technology" nor the "social technology." There is more to do.

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Changing topics, slightly, depending on current technology and methods, the available mental/social milieu will sort of stochastically produce net-positive and net-negative "coordinators."

We could have sort of a sophistication axis and a good/bad access.

Low-sophistication and bad is warlords. High-sophistication and good is, say, buddhas and saints. High-sophistication and bad we'll call anti-buddhas.

I'll lampshade that this is extremely reductive. There are no clean examples of any of these, and coordination or governance isn't always "profitably monocausally reducible" to a single individual or a single class of individual.

I don't have enough historical background to comment, but Genghis Khan, the Roman Empire, the Qin dynasty, Alexander the Great, could be case studies of violent unification, for better and worse.

One might think things are a bit better than the above listed examples, in the age of democracy, Westphalian states, and globally interconnected economies, but there are still hot wars, proxy wars, cold wars, "cyber" wars, genocides, propaganda wars, covert and overt assassination programs, nuclear armament and disarmament, a general AI race, and so on. I'm using "war" a little bit too loosely, here, but I think the general point holds. To wit, there is still vicious, violent resource competition, globally, between great powers, perhaps with the possibility of disaster. (And there is also poverty at home and abroad.)

This can be extremely intense to think about. It usually creeps up on a meditator. In a developed country, it was maybe possible to not think about it at all, for the past few decades. But, maybe, history has started again (cf. "the end of history"). If they're not their already, one could slowly titrate "history" and "world" into their "very being and seeming of the world," over thousands of hours.

In any case, so those "coordinators" I mentioned several paragraphs above, in the age of distributed institutions, say there are sometimes people who are "central coordinators," who can remake institutions. (An institution, here, is a pattern of human activity that is somewhat independent of any particular human participating in that pattern of activity.)

Let's distinguish between "relatively rigid" coordinators and "relatively fluid" coordinators.

A relatively more rigid coordinator will have a more dense pattern of phenomenological/epistemic constraints, behavioral rigidities, behavioral/psychological/emotional entrenchment, unreflectiveness, "missing concepts," "'missing' emotions/capacities," and so on, very loosely speaking.

Note that even a "relatively rigid" coordinator, will still be relatively more fluid than a relatively non-central-coordinative person, because it's the fluidity that sort of allows a person to "transcend their distributed niche," in order to have the capacity to remake institutions. Though, that fluidity might sort of be a "forced, effortful, layery" not-really-fluidity, born of trauma, incomplete methods, or other contingency. Some people who are effortfully "fluid" become more and more spontaneously, effortlessly fluid over time.

The degree of rigidity and fluidity of a person (and their "fluidity trajectory") are dependent on personal causal history and self-transformative practice/method or life context.

Practices/methods/contexts can be things like professional training, insight meditation, concentration meditation, personal time and task management, philosophical training, other academic methodologies, and so on.

Arguably, a method that is not "fully-self-reflective-at-the-finest-aconceptual-phenomenological-grain" will eventually produce diminishing returns and eventually net negative returns. A method sort of, perhaps, has to be able to eat itself until there is no method and no other remainder, as it were. Anything less will have lots of benefits but will eventually entrench things like those in the loose, informal list above, repeated here: phenomenological/epistemic constraints, behavioral rigidities, behavioral/psychological/emotional entrenchment, unreflectiveness, "missing concepts," "'missing' emotions/capacities," etc.

(Trauma, misfortune, and intense life history will start a person off with more of the items in the above list and with a greater degree of any particular item, loosely speaking.)

Part of the reason a method sort of needs to be able to eat itself is that "method-ification" and "tool-ification" of "bodymind," making transformative practice "separate," making it into a "thing," is already really distortive and problematic, though sometimes, in a sociohistorical context, a net win, if that problematicity is accounted for.

Note, this is so hard. As far as I'm aware, just by way of an aside, there was plenty of politics, violence, assassinations in native Buddhisms, throughout history. Hindu contemplatives, highly enlightened, were often warriors, for better and worse, as far as I'm aware. And, people, even with good method, with have a few "deeply hidden/entrenched issues [see the list above]" that will need many years to be addressed.

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Now, an "anti-buddha" (or whatever), can be very historically problematic. I'm using the rather extreme term anti-buddha because there's a sense in which they really actually "go against" the "metaphysical (non-)truths" that are revealed through correct meditative practice, and they can spread that "perfect antispirituality."

For example, first, in some meditative traditions, enlightenment involves navigating extremes between nihilism and eternalism, including "positive" non-reification, "positive emptiness," nebulosity, no-thing-ness, no-goal-ness, etc.

But, an anti-buddha (or a sophisticated warlord, cult leader, persuasive politician, etc.) will tear down other people's ideas with (a) weaponized nihilism and bullshit (in the technical sense) and will try to entrap people (deliberately or by hillclimbing what works) with "eternal" ideas, or "eternal versions" of ideas--god, nationalism, "the future," "necessity." Often, too, there will be apocalyptic imagery offering partial hope but with exhorted resignation on yet more things, producing a sort of aimable zombie hopelessness. (This sketch made some leaps and could be made more mechanistic.) Often they deeply believe in some of their eternalisms and others are insincere affectations, in some complex, shifty combination.

The way things can start, for a relatively rigid coordinator, is that a person can be missing things from childhood, can feel rejected, alone, confused, etc., so they might become fascinated with ideas or texts. If such a text has a thing to do then they might start doing it. And if it seems to help, they might double-down again and again.

This could be a sort of (unrecognized-as-such, except perhaps in retrospect) Faustian bargain anti-meditation, at least in part. It could a narrowly deployed "philosophical method." or dialectical method, or "figuring out what’s wrong with things," or a type of meditation, and so on.

If the method is very incomplete, then use of it might safely produce positive then diminishing returns without further effects.

If the method is relatively complete, but not complete enough, then this is the potential danger zone.

At some point, before engagement with a method, or during, the invidual may have acquired rigid fetishizations and goals.

A fetish is an ("eternal") stand-in, a "false idol," born out of seeming necessity due to confused nihilism, that sort of narrowly and myopically strips away or abstract details and adjacent features from something, and then the attainment of it seemingly promises safety and fulfillment, in some deeply, cosmically felt way. Note, fetishes are often harmless, sexual or otherwise, and generally the best thing to do with them is to enjoy them, and to meditate, the combination of which will eventually, maybe very long-term, self-alignedly evaporate them.

But "fetishes" are more problematic when they coercively involve people at scale. Problematic ones can be sort of "twisted eternal goodnesses," like creepily wanting to make everyone the same (or needing everyone to be the same), or needing people to be "unified," on some deeply warped and creepy "spiritual/cosmic" way. And externalities are ignored or downplayed or deemed "necessary" costs or collateral.

Anyway, a person will be rigidly pursuing fetishized goals (and also often have additional shadow or possibly coercive reproductive goals, that are somehow entangled with the other more surface fetishized goals).

And so if their method is relatively complete but not complete enough, it will help them get closer and closer to realizing seeming instantiations of the fetish/goal, but the method will also be causing them to "run out of mental 'slack', mentally/behaviorally painting them into a corner, pulling them tight.

Sometimes, the person's effectiveness to influence people and the world will go down, but they might still have enough effectiveness to do local damage at some scale. Additionally, they'll have often acquired even more behavioral rigidity and expanded "nihilistic holes"; they'll be even more fixated on their narrow goals, because of how the method was ekking out more solutions/effectiveness/etc. The plans can become more and more grandiose, involving "'noble' lies," "terrible necessities," and so on.

(Relatively rigid coordinators sometimes supplement an incomplete method with faith healers, "shamans," witches, bad occultism [which makes use of confusions between "reality" and illusion] and more. They can help a rigid coordinator squeeze out more slack in their method, eventually causing further rigidity. Sometimes, such healers, etc., are helping the person be less rigid, too. In any case, attendants/collaborators like this are something to keep an eye out for.)

As the person keeps applying their method, there can be a "sealing off," where critiques, outside corrections, pleas are fodder for smug, triumphalist dismissals and dehumanizations. ("People who are not overtly trying to become strong are weak, second class," etc.)

To the degree a relatively rigid coordinator successfully influences other people, aside from more overt violence, financial ruin, lost years, etc., there is something like, generally, "out-of-ordering" people.

With an incomplete method, a relatively rigid coordinator will encounter "seeming hard truths, too soon." That is, they'll encounter twisted versions of the truth (or they'll be too young to unconfusedly interpret what they're exposed to), so "kind of right truths", but with terrible implications for self and others. And then, they'll sort of force those "terrible, hard truths" on other people. To the degree that people are receptive, they might somewhat tie themselves in knots to sort of reify those "hard truths," and so those people may try to change "out of order," in self-harming ways.

The ideal thing would be to encounter challenging things about the world in graded ways that lead to up-front metabolization, integration, empowerment, etc. But the relatively rigid coordinator can sort of push people onwards, reflectively or unreflectively, intentionally or unintentionally, sometimes in a sort of blood-from-a-stone sort of way, and there can be terrible local costs or even ones that reverberate through history.

Finally, an anti-buddha might even be "anti-bodhisatva" because of expanding and exponentially compounding nth-order effects. I'm going to allude to "psychic"/"siddhi" stuff, discussed elsewhere in the document. But something analogous applies for just bog-standard "norm erosion" and "character erosion," by example. (Also I don't mean to imply that "psychic"/"siddhi" stuff has more than anything general and incidental to do with buddhas and bodhisatvas, materialist/physicalist/steelmanned, and/or idealized, and otherwise.):

Someone applying incomplete methods is more likely to have magnified and problematic "psychic"/"siddhi" stuff going on, which can lead to contagious fantasy/reality confusion as well as increased "psychic contagion" in general. ("Reality" is generally a fluid, personal thing, modulo non-inappropriately-reified "truth," all things being equal, but there can be particularly problematic possible confusion.) Then, if that person or anyone else in the environment, also has violent ideation, which would otherwise be private and known-to-be-non-real, people might pick up on the ideation, on some level feel like it's real, and this can lead to interpersonal escalating paranoia cycles and even physical violence.

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In some sense, we all sort of want to be left alone to grow and play, to acquire wider ambitions, deeper intimacies, wider vistas, at our own pace.

But, sometimes, just like in the books or movies, a looming darkness or more local problem, can sort of force its way into a pastoral setting, sometimes from very slowly and initially from far off.

There are perhaps large-scale, secular trends, global boom and bust cycles [7,8], that are more likely to produce "buddhas" and "anti-buddhas," as it were.

The antidote to "anti-buddhas" is, well, say, "buddhas," but, rather, just in the sense that the maybe-historical buddha was allegedly the discoverer and purveyor of relatively better methods of self-transformation (all things being equal).

If an otherwise-anti-buddha encountered a compelling text or teacher, that had the quality of being relatively very hard to distort or warp or practice incorrectly, that was "relatively complete," in some sense, then they would be less likely to go "full anti-buddha."

(It may be the case that, if they aren't closed off enough, giving an anti-buddha recognizably better methods might cause them to viciously (in a good way) engage with them to become something that is no longer an anti-buddha. (There might be a transient period where they are temporarily more dangerous, and there could be some tail risk that they'd permanently become much more dangerous, if something contingently remained still "stuck.")

Additionally, anti-buddhas aside, transformative practices can directly help individuals become able to participate in the creation and renewal of institutions, for an ever-more-positive-sum world.

Good methods, directly and indirectly, can be used for deescalation and creation. And a fully complete method is, in some sense, perhaps, a very narrow range of things, indeed. (Though, it will include expansive reverie, long aimless walks, creatively, play, etc.)

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