Work, Faiths, and Pol Potism of the Spirit

by ishambat | September 17, 2010 at 07:00 pm

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The process of implementing a concepts creates a greater manifestation
of the concept as well as a greater understanding of what the concept
is.

This is seen clearly in case of, say, work. First the goal is to
produce something - say, build a railroad. One would think that's
fairly straightforward - hire a group of men to make tracks and lay
them - but no. To actually build a railroad one does not only need
manual labor but also engineers, managers, accountants, human
relations, people to build and to staff industrial installations,
international relations to get the ore, legal and political power to
get all this done, and of course technological know-how and science at
its base. These are all things that at the simple level are not seen
as work, but they are what the process of doing the work actually
requires. As work builds on itself, work is understood not only to
include manual labor, but a huge array of other endeavors that are
required to get the work done:
Science, mathematics, education, law, finance, politics, economics,
psychology, medicine, environmental science, and literature and
philosophy and intellectual thought to conceptualize, explain and
systematize the preceding. What begins as an attempt to simply build
something creates a huge number of other fields of work. And this
creates a more expanded understanding of what work actually is, as
well as more things that are called work.

Often through history we see attempts to do away with some or all of
these pursuits, claiming that they are not really work, or that they
are parasitical or elitist. But no; they come about as
a necessary aspect of getting the work done. The attempts to do away
with such things always lead to disaster. A Pol Pot who wants to
murder the wealthy, the office workers, and the educated, does not
arrive at improved production. He arrives at a million dead and the
rest starving in labor camps that produce nothing.

The same is true for people who want to simplify things at the
spiritual or intellectual level. Perhaps the simple faith of the
Muslim Jihadist or the Spanish Catholic was good for his peace of mind
and sense of self-certainty, but it has resulted in brutal destruction
of many of the world's greatest civilizations all their works and
their knowledge, murder and enslavement of hundreds of millions of
people, and a horrible life for everyone who remained. As with work,
faith when placed in action and practiced grows in scope and in depth
and arrives at a deeper, more advanced and more rich concept of faith
as well as of life. But a faith that consistently "goes back to the
basics" cannot tolerate such growth and enhancement and thus has to
continuously wipe out the greatest things that come from its
exponents. Like Jerusalem that murdered its prophets, simple faith
destroys its greatest achievements, its greatest knowledge, its
greatest wisdom, and its greatest minds. It is a Saturn that eats its
children for fear that they may show a different path.

What we see in "simple faith," whatever the religion, is Pol Potism
applied to the world of spirit, which then becomes Pol Potism arrived
to all aspects of human life. And what we see in Taliban, Wahabbism,
survivalism, and Bush-style and Inhofe-style Christian fundamentalism,
is the same ignorant and barbaric destructiveness that we see in Pol
Pot.

And it is only by replacing this simple-mindedness with more
intellectually honest pathways that the world can avoid apocalyptic
scenarios prophesied in these religions and take a superior path than
global destruction before the grandchildren of the fundamentalists
claiming "family values" have reached maturity.

The process of implementing a concept arrives at an enhanced
implementation of the concept as well as understanding of what the
concept is and what it means. It is through this ever-greater
complexity and richness, not through simplicity or "going back to the
basics," that grows both the concept and its usefulness for humankind.