Contrast this perceived adoration of Buddhist monks with an article I read recently about the stupidity of Americans who choose to work for the “man” in a corporate culture. The author, who is a well known blogger, seemed to feel that it was very negative to work in corporate culture for a paycheck. David writes “Every time I write a piece advocating escape from corporate servitude, I receive a few emails that contain a particular kind of scolding. They tell me that only an entitled brat could be unsatisfied with a stable job and a roof, in a world where so many pine for only these things.”
David goes on to say “As if there were no better ideas out there, we take up this yoke by the thousand, slotting ourselves in grids of grey squares, stacked fifty to a hundred high, sealed with a shiny glass exterior.”
I just don’t like David’s tone. I don’t like the absolute admiration of the Buddhist monks either.
So the issue seems to be: How society and the people in society judge your life and how you choose to live it.
I think, that in spite of what we believe, we are indeed vulnerable to fads, in fact, some of us go chasing fads. In this sense, I think this fact calls a question to our ability to objectively judge. Most people do not have the ability to judge objectively and fairly. We have so much personal opinion and history that it becomes impossible to be objective. We always bring our personal histories into the judgment.
What purpose does judgment about others serve? I think it goes back to the human need to be elite. By being superior to others we can place our survival first above everyone else and therefore assure our own survival. When property ownership first conceptualized for humans, wealth became a survival construct. That construct has not changed in spite of the sophistication of our culture. We still struggle to be elite and at the top of our social group, we still struggle for wealth and we do all of these things to assure our survival.
In this struggle – sometimes – our best weapon is to show how smart we are and how much smarter we are than anyone else. We express this by telling everyone how wrong they are and how much more enlightened we are.
I grow weary of this primal twenty first century game. Stop telling me how great you are. Stop telling me what is wrong with how I live. Stop comparing my life to yours. Indeed, you have no more answers to life’s problems than the fabled sesame seed.
We are all quite capable of determining what is good and right for ourselves and our families. This is not to say that we do not need direction and moral reminders of what is good and right in the world. What it means is that we must trust our own selves to gain answers and not put our survival in the hands of elitists, who will tell us their version of rightness, which is to say that elitists should survive first.