I was just watching an episode of the X-Files in which Agent Mulder is called on to assist in a hostage negotiation with a former FBI agent who appears to be an alien abductee. This is fiction of course, but what interests me is what it says about how things work in our “advanced” civilization. Mulder believes this man may well have been abducted and wants to reach him through that connection; his superiors are sure the guy is psychotic and see no reason to pander to his fantasies. But there are some problems: first – they assume they know exactly what’s going on, but in fact they don’t. You could even say the former agent is likely to be delusional – but by our own rules of evidence, that is actually unknown: but they ignore those rules of evidence. They also believe their method of hostage negotiation maximizes their chance of success: but is that really true, given that this man is former FBI and knows all the dance steps? Finally, the whole process is based on deception: the FBI script has Mulder reassure the former agent that their aim is to help him and solve his problems – not exactly true – they are looking to solve their problem by putting him away. Arrogance, hierarchy, ignorance, deception – not pretty, but this is the best solution – or is it?
Let me give a more personal example: I now think that Paul Anderson, a meditation teacher with whom I studied for five years, believed that he had seen through the illusion of self – a primary tenet of Buddhism – resulting in a non-attachment so profound that he had moved beyond conventional morality. That allowed him to practice what Buddhists call “crazy wisdom” – to teach in ways that might seem deceptive or even abusive to the uninitiated, but which ultimately spring from compassion. And, naturally, he felt he ought to be accorded some power and rank as a result of having achieved these things – he was inevitably becoming in Buddhist terms a “field of merit:” meaning those who benefited him in some way would reap exceptional karmic rewards – nice work if you can get it. But of course this also represents absolute power. Compassionate or not, I thought Anderson was pretty abusive, and he also had an unfortunate tendency to use his position to seduce the female students in the group, many of whom were married. It turns out a more than a few Tibetan teachers think the same way, and abuse sex and power in the same way, including perhaps the most senior lama to emigrate to the United States, Chogyam Trungpa, a now deceased Dharma saint who has been repeatedly accused of physical and sexual assault by female followers. That doesn’t seem very saintly – what’s going on? Well, to begin with, the “crazy wisdom” shares a lot with the method used above by the FBI: the teacher is wiser than his students and spiritually above them; he needs power to impose a solution which supersedes any interaction with the situation, and being without ego, it’s perfectly OK if he lies or twists things to his own ends.
I believe this formulation is essentially backwards, and it illustrates much of what I think goes wrong in many religious traditions. Why? Start with the idea that you can be so evolved spiritually that you can justify almost any action: this is a way of understanding spiritual authority that can certainly lead to bad behavior. I really can’t see why power should be in the picture at all: I don’t think you can impose the realization of egolessness on others any more than you can force yourself to be compassionate – I’m not even sure this approach actually leads in the right direction; and maybe it’s not such a good idea to abandon ethics because you’re sure your insight is perfect. A more natural path to understanding our true nature might be based on learning to live in a balanced way and dealing with the obstacles to that balance as we learn. To illustrate the difference, imagine that you’re the father of a twelve year old boy who is afraid to jump off the high dive, and you’re both at an event with many other boys and their parents, and none of them appear to have the same problem. Worse, he bursts into tears and embarrasses you in front of the other fathers. Based on my experience, if you’re following my teacher’s example, the answer would be to force the boy off the high dive or to humiliate him to the point where he will jump himself, the argument being that by so doing, you’re making him face his fears, as a man – particularly a spiritual man – should. But is it actually your job to make him into your concept of a man? Aren’t you using the boy to meet your own needs, to deal with your own embarrassment? Jumping off the high dive just means the kid is between the devil and the deep blue sea – you can force him to choose the latter, but it’s not a choice he makes freely: what he really learns is that he can’t trust you and that you will not accept him as he is – he must conceal his fear in order to appear worthy. Is that spirituality? Is that healing?
Not really, of course, because it’s not a balanced action: there’s no openness, no compassion, no acceptance there. You’re starting with yourself: you need to start with him. The first issue is whether jumping off the high dive is actually something he needs to work on: it’s not about you – and it shouldn’t be your choice – it’s about him, but let’s say that fear is a problem for him and you both feel this is important. You begin by accepting him as he is – fear, tears and all – then you can help him to begin to look at his fear and see if he really needs it: because of course it’s a defense, a way of protecting himself. Have him jump off the low diving board, if that’s not too scary – something challenging but not devastating, and see if you can help him let go a little – and the first and most important thing is that he knows that you’re in his corner. He can watch his breath or focus on the sensation of his feet on the diving board, and if he doesn’t get as scared because he’s focused on these things, he will begin to relax after a while, and then he will be justly proud and will know that he has found a bit more freedom – he will also have taken a step toward letting go of other fears. Lather, rinse, repeat: try the medium diving board, or the skate park, or whatever. This approach gradually reveals compassion and awareness, too, but in a much more complex and subtle way – not based on power or some image of spirituality or manliness, but on gradually understanding how to make better choices. This exemplifies the Taoist principle of Wu Wei – “not interfering; effortless effort:” the transformation isn’t something you can actually control or force, but it can change your life.
I was reading about the Freudian theory of Eros and Thanatos, which suggests that our drive to live is matched by an equal impulse towards death, and I noticed that Freud doesn’t say much about what drives that urge. I think one answer is the desire for power: whether you are a Samurai or a Los Angeles gang-banger, if you want direct physical control over other people, you come very quickly to the question of how far you will go – if you face a determined opponent, the answer has to be to the death. Humans are rather war-like: doesn’t that reflect our pursuit of dominance and social structures framed by that pursuit? Rather than positing a fundamental desire for death, I tend to think more in evolutionary terms: we share 98.7% of our DNA with chimpanzees, our closest ancestors, and are often tempted, like Lot’s wife, to look back, to use hard-wired strategies – aggression, hierarchy, social-dominance – that are effective for chimps but quite destructive for human civilization.
In 1997, the Boeing corporation merged with MacDonnell Douglas and the day to day leadership basically moved to the officers of the MacDonnell Douglas company. Boeing was an iconic American corporation with an outstanding safety record, a company described by its engineers as “a great place to work.” They were an engineering and safety based company with a strong sense of community – described as a family by employees – a place where no one feared pointing out a design or production problem and where these problems were taken seriously. Things began to change after the merger: the McDonnell Douglas corporate culture was basically profit-driven and the new merged company was in a frenzied competition with its European rival Airbus for market share. There was a mandate to decrease costs, minimize safety concerns and reduce the number of inspectors; suddenly it wasn’t such a good idea for an employee to point out design and production flaws. Then, in 2015, Airbus introduced the A320 family of planes with significant increases in fuel efficiency, generating tremendous sales for the European company. Boeing was caught flat footed, with nothing in production, no design of such a plane even in the pipeline, so, in line with their more recent playbook, they didn’t design a new plane, but chose to put larger, more fuel-efficient engines on the 45 year old 737 air frame, calling the re-engineered plane the 737 Max. But this necessitated design compromises: the larger engines had to be moved farther forward because they couldn’t fit under the wings, and this created the possibility of the plane going nose-up and stalling. So they introduced MCAS, a computer system that would force the plane’s nose down if that happened – and they made the odd (but I suspect cheaper) decision of initiating the MCAS system on the basis of one sensor near the cockpit. This is very unusual; critical systems on airplanes always rely on multiple redundancies: but there was no redundancy here. Then in 2018 and 19 there were two 737 Max crashes: the company’s first response was to blame the pilots and stonewall the congressional investigation and the FAA. Eventually it all came out: the problem was the failure of the single sensor that initiated the MCAS system, forcing the plane’s nose down into a low altitude crash. This was particularly dangerous because the company had concealed the existence of MCAS from the government – and from its pilots – because reporting it would have necessitated expensive pilot training under FAA rules. The pilots of the first downed flight had no idea MCAS existed; the second aircrew knew, but the interim measures proposed by Boeing were not enough to save the plane. The 737 Maxes were finally grounded for 20 months, costing the company around 9 billion dollars, and significant corporate misconduct was revealed, resulting a 2.5 billion dollar fine. But they avoided criminal prosecution; the CEO had to step down, but he left with 62 million in stock options and bonuses. Boeing’s stock price dropped by about 200 points in early 2020 and their reputation as a premier safety-first aviation company was gone – but management did fine: all’s well that ends well, I guess. But maybe it hasn’t ended yet: a Boeing plane recently lost a removable exterior door in flight and there have been allegations of major structural and equipment problems: the company is again under congressional investigation, and has lost money every year since 2018.
This is a story of a good company, a life-affirming company, that turned into something else: the old Boeing built the best and safest plane they could and figured out how to make a profit from it; the new Boeing was all about profits. There’s a simple way to maximize profits: skimp on materials and safety, increase production speed, and lower the number of employees – and that’s what they did, by the thousands. The new company was no one’s idea of a family. Finally, it’s just cheaper to lie, to conceal, to blame others – and as for the 346 people killed by their negligence, that’s just a cost of doing business. Each of these choices seems reasonable to the people who make them – not what you’d call ethical, but logical and inevitable: the bottom line is what matters – but in this case, pursuing the bottom line not only resulted in hundreds of deaths but also greatly weakened the parent company. Perhaps there’s something wrong with their logic.
Part of the answer may be in understanding something discovered by Asian civilizations millennia ago: Yin/Yang; in-breath and out-breath; action and recovery – the apparent logic of an action isn’t the only thing that matters: it’s also important to know whether it is balanced – and one form of balance is the Golden Rule. The end cannot justify the means because you can’t really separate ends and means – one influences the other – and you can’t control complex systems long-term just by applying force to them: living systems have complex internal feedbacks, and that means you may not end up where you thought you were going. It also means you have to be cautious about shortcuts – the consequences may be far worse than you imagine – Boeing Airlines is a cautionary tale. In our Aristotelian world it often seems easier to just push toward the goal: “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again:” but maybe we’re missing something. In the movie “Wall Street,” financier Gordon Gekko famously says, “Greed is good.” I’m not so sure about that, but I am sure that greed was the source of a lot of the changes at Boeing – and the result over the last decade or so looks like a slow motion car crash. Why do actions taken with the aim of increasing profits end up hurting the company and reducing its competitiveness? Because they’re not balanced – the company was trying to increase profits by cutting back on quality and safety. Not exactly the Golden Rule. You could ask the same question about the financial crash of 2008: Bear Stearns and other companies were taking advantage of market conditions in order to maximize profits – good, right? Maybe not.
The I Ching is an ancient Taoist text which is both a book of divination and a textbook on how to live a balanced life. It contains 64 hexagrams which can be used as a tool for understanding human situations and choices – one of these is called “Decrease.” The image is of a two story dwelling: “Decrease” describes the situation where the owner removes support from the lower story in order to beautify the upper story – the end result is obvious. Boeing cut spending on innovation, so it was left flat-footed when Airbus came up with a more energy efficient plane. It was cheaper to adapt a 45 year old air frame to the new technology than to create a new airplane, but the compromises involved, including concealing the truth, resulted in a dangerously unstable machine: Decrease. When loan originators and various other players in the home mortgage industry cut corners and deceived both customers and regulators, they made mountains of cash, but it turned out the quality of the loans was much lower than anybody guessed, and the whole structure collapsed: Decrease. Fed chair Alan Greenspan was late to respond to the 2008 crisis because he was certain that corporate boards would not make decisions that harmed their companies – what did he miss? The leaders of these companies don’t seem to have thought much about balance or the danger of taking shortcuts – or ethics for that matter – in considering their options: the hexagram “Decrease” describes the result.
When I was a young man, they used to talk about the Age of Aquarius – a coming social transformation toward a less hierarchical, more open, more communitarian society. It may actually be happening, ever so slowly – but it’s clear that many who profit by the current system will do anything in their power to stop it. I think if humanity is to survive for another millennium, we need to realize that for all its material successes, human culture at the end of thousands of years of technological development is experiencing an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of our pursuit of power over each other and the natural world – we are in some sense in love with death, or, if you like, with our chimp DNA. We can choose at this moment to move forward or backward: forward may mean losing some of the power, status and material benefits that we like; but remember Lot’s wife: moving backward may be far worse.
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