Anna's Analysis: the Blind leading the Blind.

alright I'm now gonna make the mistake
of attempting to record a short video on an enormous topic had a conversation with another youtuber called Anna's analysis and I first wrote to her really appreciate Lee because I felt that what she was doing was offering a critique of spiritual gurus spiritual leaders here on YouTube and on Instagram on social media and saying hey this this really isn't up to a high enough standard she was asking some tough questions like who are these people to be offering to intervene in other people's trauma and other people's lack of self love self confidence and someone and so forth when you think about who they are their lack of educational background the problems they're still struggling with so on and so forth in effect she's asking why is it that people who have nothing going for them but a pretty face on social media are managing to charge large amounts of money for selling spiritual snake-oil and life advice and what are the real consequence of this it's a good set of questions and I sent her fan mail initially I spoke to her very positive way saying hey I appreciate that you're taking on this mantle especially because she is vegan and in large part this is discourse going on within the vegan movement or over at the hippy spiritualist end of the vegan movement that I have relatively little to do with myself however as the conversation went on it started to raise other really important questions about truth honesty and integrity and the ways in which people get misled especially in politics living within a digital subculture where everyone in Instagram is posting the same kind of half true statements without anyone doing any fact-checking without anyone doing research or even reading and dubious facts come to be perceived as unquestionable and indeed people even are offended if you question these so-called facts that are really just things people say sometimes in a quotation superimposed on a photograph of a beaut a landscape on Instagram or you know maybe on Twitter it's just text on a plain background but it's things people have said again and again and the people who are participating in reblogging retweeting thumbs up giving the heart to these expressions none of them are questioning where does this come from nor were the intentions of this being created and where does this where's this lead us so a few days ago as an example I had a face-to-face confrontation with two police officers here who made it clear to me that they had absolutely no interest in enforcing the law even we were talking about people who were in possession of hard drugs something like methamphetamine fentanyl or cocaine and who have been witnessed by two people and with photographs using these are drugs this is possession and use flagrantly in public the police did that absolutely no interest in making an arrest interesting conversation ensued and one of the police officers said to me self confidently they say people say they say we're making the transition over to having a system more like Portugal where he alleges you know these illegal drugs are permissible where you know hard drugs have been decriminalized and I said back to them that's just not true in Portugal people are arrested for possession of these drugs people are arrested for using drugs in public or what-have-you they were arrested for possession they're just not sent to criminal court they're sent to what's called the courts of dissuasion it's a separate court system that just specifically handles drug addicts so you can imagine if you live in a big city like Los Angeles you can imagine what an advantage that would be even pubic radically to have one court system that deals with all the real crime and all the other cases and then a separate specialized set of judges prosecutors and what-have-you who are just dealing with drug addicts who you know have a different kind of record and say well the last time you came to this court we sent you to rehab and that didn't work so now you've come back and what are we gonna do with you now so what Portugal did was to separate and specialize the attempts to have interventions helping drug addicts from the rest of criminal law right but it's not the case that in Portugal it's acceptable to be a truck addict they didn't try to normalize the use of heroin cocaine methamphetamine as recreational drugs it's it's really just not true anyway I said this briefly to the cop and I could see on the expression of his on his face one of the cops that this actually was familiar to him he dreads something that sounded like that he was like oh right you know I could god did he get through but he's obviously living in a subculture or a bubble and it may just even be other cops telling him this or maybe messages on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter where people on the left are repeating a myth about drug laws in Portugal about how Portugal as the solution and the solution isn't arresting people and isn't taking people to court and as an enforcement law and everyone's repeating that again and again and none of them are doing the basic fact-checking of even just reading like one newspaper article that describes how the system works in Portugal and what its advantages and disadvantages are because you know if you read it article like that it wouldn't all be good news there'd be some good and some bad to the tale to be told so my conversation with Anna of Anna's analysis turn to this problem of people like herself people most definitely including herself posting and recycling statements about Buddhism about what is the teaching and what is the doctrine of Buddhism that are not true that are not accurate that nobody has even say read a newspaper article about and you know she was pretty defensive and hostile from the start but her level of aggravation escalated quickly and when she ends up saying to me in this very self-righteous voice like how could I possibly think that it's not the teaching of the Buddha to live in the moment and to live for the moment now what I've been trying to tell her up to like the very end of this conversation after the final portion of our speaking I was trying to tell her in a very calm and helpful way look I have more than 10 years of background as a scholar of Buddhism I actually learned Palelei actually but the Canon I can tell you about this as much or as little as you want and I have peer-reviewed publications and I've been around the world I've lived in these countries have studied languages I have this kind of depth of experience I'm I can tell you as much as or as little as you want but no you're demanding of me you're asking to know this is very much the word introduced you're asking what is the harm of you posting and recirculating these lies about Buddhism but at the same time you're really demonstrating to me exactly what the harm is this is exactly the danger of fake news because you're acting self-righteous and offended even when you know that I'm really an expert in Buddhism and you know nothing about ism your self consciously spurred me your self confidently saying to me how could it possibly be that this meme this illustration of posted on Instagram is wrong and you're right how do you really mean to tell me like that's just preposterous that the Buddha didn't teach people that they should live in the moment I live for the moment all right no you guys already guessed the doctrine of Buddhism is not that people should live in the moment live for them oh it's not right mmm the poly Canon teaches you many things and maybe you could bend over backwards to take half a sentence out of context from some instructions that are being given of a meditation and try to misrepresent that as if the Buddhism is living in the moment for the moment but no that is a doctrine for self-indulgence wealthy white Western people in the 21st century and it might actually be really worthwhile people to examine where that doctrine comes from what motivations they have in propounding in and what that leads to like what are the consequences for your life if you start believing and living by this doctrine but she was so self-confident I would even say she was so self-righteous in defending her version of Buddhism what if she thinks she knows about Buddhism even though that's just based on little clips of text in front of like images of a beautiful scenery posted on Instagram like these little memes right these little spiritual soup song you know they can get put on the Internet um but those quotations they take on their sense of power because within your social circle it's not just you who's posting them maybe it's all your friends it's everyone you know who's posting them it's other people you respect and look up to who are giving it the thumbs up or the red heart button or who are leaving comments and yeah that's a great saying that's a good phrase your idea of Buddhism were more broadly your idea of spirituality your idea of truth in this way it's almost like self-selected brainwashing and then when you meet one person who challenges you on that this is happening many times the Internet in different political context look when you meet one person challenges you and says wait you know that's not what the law in Portugal actually is you know that's not the way rehabilitation and the court system in Portugal works at all where did you hear that how did you come to that conclusion and the real answer is it's just something all my friends seem to be saying on the internet right wait wait a minute that's not the teaching of the Buddha that's that's not the doctor and our philosophy that it's not what the ocean at all why did you why did you create that image why did you post that image of literally putting those words in the Buddha's mouth and pretending presenting that as the as the content of Buddhism um and when people come back to you with this self-righteous indignation which is basically you know how dare you interrupt my enjoyment of this long ongoing process of the blind leading the blind because that that's what they like that's what they want to do and they don't engage in that as if it were a game they're engaging in that process of the blind leading the blind as if it were the most meaningful as if it were the most rewarding thing in their lives indeed as if it were a kind of hallowed spiritual mission as if it had great philosophical weight for them so we have a bit of a discourse in the 21st century questioning fake news and stereotypically fake news is thought of as something from the right wing and as something motivated with very definite ends right so maybe a stereotypical example of fake news would be right-wing conservatives spreading lies about abortion and abortion clinics and then if you ask the move of this because they will very often admit that what they're presenting is false serves as rated they will say to you that from their perspective they're trying to save human lives they feel that their sense of moral purpose is so important that it justifies lying or spreading this different misinformation or what-have-you that's maybe the stereotype but the real danger of fake news and and falsehoods being spread on social media I feel is that people get into participating in it all the time with no particular motivation this girl this youtuber and his analysis she doesn't think of herself as a Buddhist she doesn't think result as being motivated to lie about Buddhism she doesn't think of ourselves be motivated tell the truth about she's not trying to propound it she's not trying to criticize it she doesn't think about this way but she's in a subculture where she's hearing this back from so many different voices and her own voice has joined the cacophony of making these spiritual and pseudo philosophical pronouncements and again I can tell you that I've heard the tone of her voice when she was saying this there was no way to shake her out of her sense of certainty that this is something she knows even though she's never read a single book about it she's never read a single newspaper article about it um and she said very self-righteously that she has friends who are Buddhists she presumably means white Western people who don't speak any Asian language who can't read Chinese Japanese Tibetan or any of those languages let alone Pali sorry it is Pali not Sanskrit you need to learn that well forever but ism not burmese not cambodian but anyway it would help if you knew a language like burmese cambodian lotion or whatever over these are presumably white Western people who were also into yoga and spiritual quotations on Instagram simply through this effect of the crowd echoing back to you your own self righteous ignorance this sense of walking together the blind leading the blind and loving it there's something tremendously dangerous here and I see the danger most of all in terms of drug policy both in terms of the private decisions people are making to get involved with psychedelic drugs for example like LSD ayahuasca and someone on the basis of the positive experiences they've heard others had very often in the same form a quotation from ROM dass or a quotation from Sam Harris one of the other people who tries to glamorize and spiritualize these these drugs all the way over to the question of what do we do now in the year 2020 when we have epidemic levels of addiction to fentanyl and other opioids on the street when we have epidemic levels of mass mass addiction to methamphetamines and other stimulants on the streets where do we go from here and the answer can't possibly be arrived at through this self-righteous cycle of people patting themselves on the back the blind leading the blind sooner or later someone has to stand up and say how do you know that why do you think you know that is anyone really learning these things empirically is anyone really open-minded enough to at least ask the right questions so together we can share our doubts share whatever it is we've learned and eventually come to the right answers