You’re not going through this alone: "flagged her as a problem despite stellar grades. She walked away from the program in tears. Then she started writing."
The publication that resulted from that decision, Diogenes in Exile, is now a sustained investigation into how the helping professions are captured.
This kind of decline is historically rare and uniquely dangerous. When a society loses the clarity and the will to defend its own continuity, the decay is slow, steady, and difficult to reverse. Recovery, if it comes, will not resemble the rapid reconstruction of post-war Germany. It will require something deeper: a long process of cultural and moral reawakening, a rediscovery of purpose, and a renewed capacity to see the world as it is rather than as institutions prefer to describe it.
Regarding the censure of a Buddhist approach, this has me wondering what that looks like at Naropa. I have heard from those who went there that it is full and well woke, being in Boulder. I would guess that this would mean that Buddhist practices are legitimate only in the delineated ways.
The Affirmative model mentioned of course had me thinking of the transgender psychology bind that had triggered mandatory "affirmation" as soon as anyone triggers into the transgender domain. I am not currently clear where we're at with that after the recent Supreme Court case, I think, which prohibited limiting the speech of as therapist.
Yes, professional boards are number one controls of institutions. The government partners with them in such a way as to control everyone in a way that would seem unconstitutional. More and more professional are coming under this control system. So ridiculous to the point that the person who cuts your hair may be under this control. Where I am there was a case in which a horse masseuse was persecuted by the state, and after an exhausting legal fight, did eventually win a judgement allowing her to massage horses without the government in the middle.
I am keenly interested in the dynamic of those who do not go along. That can look so many ways. I would very much like to understand the many ways in which a person may come to stand apart, differentiate, facilitate other possibilities, and contribute to both an individual and a grander social experience and historical process.
The comment I made on the Diogenes in Exile substack piece about those of social responsibility who didn't give the shocks:
I think it can also have to do with having experiences of being able to distinguish oneself, especially where consequence occurs. I actually think everyone pretty likely has had these experiences because the inescapability of social pressure is pretty much part of human life. Some people might forget to remember the times they, say, had an experience with a sibling, a neighborhood kid, a classmate, wherein they acted in ways that social pressure would not have dictated. Because I'm the natural works there are often multiple, and sometimes contradictory, social pressures at play, it is a matter of memory, reflection, and framing, to have an understanding for one's own self that "you are a 35% kind of person." It is a major boost to realize that you are, rather than that you are not.
It is a matter of framing the experience, because you could just add easily do a mental search and come up with all of the times you complied, even with misgivings. So, in ones own development, it is a dynamic then of seeing that you have done and do exercise your agency, and also, that you have the capacity to distinguish when your agency is active in this way. Nobody refuses to comply in every instance, so there is a lot of grey.
Back to the fertile grounds to be found in likely every single person. Who, really, lives as an authoritative automation? If there is a there there where being a person with a soul is concerned, then existence in full compliance is just not possible. It's there. Eliciting it is really an exciting (to me) engagement!
Back to likely places to dig. When I think of my family members who seemed all in on masks and vaccines, the variance is still there. For example, the family member who gets every COVID shot, but no more the flu one because getting it always provokes what feels like a flu. Or the long string of medical mistakes that are known to the individual or family. The experience of having been unsafe under the safest authority around is very very common. And naturally, these experiences spark a response that it is only a small step to be able to recognize for oneself that minimally agency of thought was an action. And, because memory is malleable, it is sufficient to return to the memory and discover that aspect of the experience to them mark that agency as a central and objective piece of the experience.
Some might say, if the parent (or grandparent or great grandparent) commited a crime, the child can be punished. I do not agree with this premise, and legally it is not enforceable. There is good reason for this. Extrapolate that to propagating white guilt, and you see how it is indefensible. Legally.
Being older, I would be offended if my anxiety, depression or any other mental health concerns was boiled down to my ethnicity or culture. Now my anxiety, etc could be because of culture but the techniques to navigate me through my "issue" should be the same regardless. I was reading a journal article on a mental health approach to help clients change negative behaviors. I was tracking with them until the author apologetically said the cohort studied were white upper middle class participants and these techniques may not be useful if the participant was a different ethnicity. That maybe they would need expression using dance or ethnic music. Huh? Why would I need to dance unless I was trying to improve my dance form? Not only did it sound ludicrous it sounded narrow minded and stereotypical. No! Use the same technique that was successful in your study! If I wanted to modify to fit my style then give me the autonomy to do so and if using these techniques work, good for me. If they don’t move me back to center The role of the therapist is to guide me through the process. Trying to modify a hundred different ways to fit my ethnicity dilutes the process that has been already validated. This stuff is crazy.
Yes. Modern psychological counseling must be grounded in the scientific method. This means internal validity, clear connection of cause and effect, no confounding factors, etc. Race and religion do not change the science, and consideration of these confounding factors is to introduce bias into the counseling process. Therapies based upon religious or philosophical theories have no place in modern science-based counseling. Spiritual counseling should be done as an adjunct to science based counseling, not as a part of it. The client should be advised to also seek counsel from their priest, Shaman, or Guru if they wish to do so.
'Those groups, after excluding dissenting voices...'
Reminds me of drug companies who, when doing a drug trial, have been known to first screen the volunteers to ensure they have excluded anyone who may contribute the 'wrong' outcome. In other words the outcome that won't make them any money.
Thank you for this revealing article, it shows another example of how totalitarian overreach (as it always tries to do) worms it's way into our world - they have never stopped. I don't know how many times I've typed the phrase, 'the long march through the institutions' when commenting on university/college education. It's been well over 50 years or more since the first sleeper agent/accolites were implanted all over the so called 'free' world. Not just professors either, its impeded within the financial and administrative levels of education, from day care/kindergartens, through primary and high school - right to tertiary, all of it intentional and all of it deeply and firmly embedded. New bent thoughts and ideas rise up all the time, but they can be easily assimilated because the basic structure was installed years ago.
I am 70, and well and truly retired now. I live in Australia and this situation is appalling here, has been for years. My field initially was the visual arts, as a practitioner, then lecturer at 2 Queensland universities. By the mid 1990s the writing was on the wall regarding indoctrination via post structuralism and post modernism, adherence was total or you were quietly edged out. Practice of sculpture, painting etc was down the bottom of importance, it was theory, especially colonial lenses and critical race theory that was drummed into young minds. What was regurgitated on a wall label was more important than the art work itself. This is groupthink alright and just about every sector has been captured in some way.
30 years ago I left the industry and qualified as a yoga and meditation teacher - building a 2nd career on something that I had quietly practised for years. During the last 10 years I saw groupthink begin to rear it's obvious head in this world as well. Vetting and defining 'true' qualifications became a money making industry, and only special people controlled the gates. National accreditation joined itself with International accreditation agencies, thus redefing what yoga actually was. Trained for 5 years by an ancient yogi in India? Too bad, no proper paperwork = no accreditation. No accreditation = no insurance, no insurance = no employment at established studios, or difficulty in hiring your own space. Often, many younger clients wouldn't sign up with you unless you had the tick of hierarchical approval. I endured for a few more years then gave it away, there was little to no entegrity in the mass yoga system, the qualifications were rubber stamped and often a rushed sham course of 4 weeks.
My wife at the time I was in art school studied social welfare at one of those same institutions, finding that the Marxist aligned professors were rewiring brains to view the world through the lens they wanted - all social welfare clients were 'victims', all who were standing in the way of this view were 'oppressors'. It did both our heads in at the time, we were naive to it all initially, couldn't figure it out. The trouble was, we were trying to be rational and objective, but that, as the above interview shows, was and still is not the objective. It is not be objective at all, but always heading ones subjective experience. Feelings are first, followed by your personal 'truth', and always, always the presence of the victim/oppressed and the oppressor. We are no longer together, but catch up regularly through our children and grandchildren and we are both very worried about the indoctrination of race and gender that is being subtly pushed at our 5 and 6 year old granddaughters. It is evil, plain and simple.
“ If we believe absurdities we shall commit atrocities.” - Voltaire
Glad to see recognition of the corruption that this institution of helping is experiencing, just like every other institution. Except I think the measles analogy is poor due to the medically system's corruption, also starting long ago, actually only diagnosises symptoms that could be a hundred other things but similarly some entity wants us to believe they know it's this specific thing. Glad to see the recognizing of the slow historical drip. As I experienced the helping profession academics and career stints in non-profit charities in my 40's and I saw so many early drips, along with a peer or two, that really showed me that something very dark is systematically infecting initially good initiatives. I believe, like I think Luc Lelievre believes, the institutions are unfixable and I believe they need to fall of their own accord. But unlike those who like to throw the baby out with the bathwater calling therapy 'garbage', I believe there is so much good in the idea of having one other person being there for another person armed with great discovered ideas that really prove to help. But I don't think we should try to change the corrupted system but take what works and build something new, small, locally, and learn to love ourselves and then our neighbors.
A fascinating read. Thank you. I would suppose that this occurs in most professions, like Law, Medicine and the like. In both these professions, I have experienced first hand that practitioners in both are conflicted in what they believe and what their professions demands them to follow. Thank you for this article and most articles you share.
You’re not going through this alone: "flagged her as a problem despite stellar grades. She walked away from the program in tears. Then she started writing."
The publication that resulted from that decision, Diogenes in Exile, is now a sustained investigation into how the helping professions are captured.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XhrgFvvOcg&list=PLBG6e1YmbrdypMO4QOQZ3n6NP4vGmdN10&index=2
https://hxlibraries.substack.com/p/when-collegiality-becomes-censorship
https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/heresy
This kind of decline is historically rare and uniquely dangerous. When a society loses the clarity and the will to defend its own continuity, the decay is slow, steady, and difficult to reverse. Recovery, if it comes, will not resemble the rapid reconstruction of post-war Germany. It will require something deeper: a long process of cultural and moral reawakening, a rediscovery of purpose, and a renewed capacity to see the world as it is rather than as institutions prefer to describe it.
Regarding the censure of a Buddhist approach, this has me wondering what that looks like at Naropa. I have heard from those who went there that it is full and well woke, being in Boulder. I would guess that this would mean that Buddhist practices are legitimate only in the delineated ways.
The Affirmative model mentioned of course had me thinking of the transgender psychology bind that had triggered mandatory "affirmation" as soon as anyone triggers into the transgender domain. I am not currently clear where we're at with that after the recent Supreme Court case, I think, which prohibited limiting the speech of as therapist.
Yes, professional boards are number one controls of institutions. The government partners with them in such a way as to control everyone in a way that would seem unconstitutional. More and more professional are coming under this control system. So ridiculous to the point that the person who cuts your hair may be under this control. Where I am there was a case in which a horse masseuse was persecuted by the state, and after an exhausting legal fight, did eventually win a judgement allowing her to massage horses without the government in the middle.
I am keenly interested in the dynamic of those who do not go along. That can look so many ways. I would very much like to understand the many ways in which a person may come to stand apart, differentiate, facilitate other possibilities, and contribute to both an individual and a grander social experience and historical process.
The more a system tries to eliminate behavior, the more it reorganizes it beyond institutional visibility.
Kafka shows how this feels.
Weber shows why this happens.
Zinn shows how people exploit these openings.
I always thought psychology/ psychiatry was garbage... I was completely unaware of how bad it could be.... thanks for sharing 👍
The comment I made on the Diogenes in Exile substack piece about those of social responsibility who didn't give the shocks:
I think it can also have to do with having experiences of being able to distinguish oneself, especially where consequence occurs. I actually think everyone pretty likely has had these experiences because the inescapability of social pressure is pretty much part of human life. Some people might forget to remember the times they, say, had an experience with a sibling, a neighborhood kid, a classmate, wherein they acted in ways that social pressure would not have dictated. Because I'm the natural works there are often multiple, and sometimes contradictory, social pressures at play, it is a matter of memory, reflection, and framing, to have an understanding for one's own self that "you are a 35% kind of person." It is a major boost to realize that you are, rather than that you are not.
It is a matter of framing the experience, because you could just add easily do a mental search and come up with all of the times you complied, even with misgivings. So, in ones own development, it is a dynamic then of seeing that you have done and do exercise your agency, and also, that you have the capacity to distinguish when your agency is active in this way. Nobody refuses to comply in every instance, so there is a lot of grey.
Back to the fertile grounds to be found in likely every single person. Who, really, lives as an authoritative automation? If there is a there there where being a person with a soul is concerned, then existence in full compliance is just not possible. It's there. Eliciting it is really an exciting (to me) engagement!
Back to likely places to dig. When I think of my family members who seemed all in on masks and vaccines, the variance is still there. For example, the family member who gets every COVID shot, but no more the flu one because getting it always provokes what feels like a flu. Or the long string of medical mistakes that are known to the individual or family. The experience of having been unsafe under the safest authority around is very very common. And naturally, these experiences spark a response that it is only a small step to be able to recognize for oneself that minimally agency of thought was an action. And, because memory is malleable, it is sufficient to return to the memory and discover that aspect of the experience to them mark that agency as a central and objective piece of the experience.
Some might say, if the parent (or grandparent or great grandparent) commited a crime, the child can be punished. I do not agree with this premise, and legally it is not enforceable. There is good reason for this. Extrapolate that to propagating white guilt, and you see how it is indefensible. Legally.
Being older, I would be offended if my anxiety, depression or any other mental health concerns was boiled down to my ethnicity or culture. Now my anxiety, etc could be because of culture but the techniques to navigate me through my "issue" should be the same regardless. I was reading a journal article on a mental health approach to help clients change negative behaviors. I was tracking with them until the author apologetically said the cohort studied were white upper middle class participants and these techniques may not be useful if the participant was a different ethnicity. That maybe they would need expression using dance or ethnic music. Huh? Why would I need to dance unless I was trying to improve my dance form? Not only did it sound ludicrous it sounded narrow minded and stereotypical. No! Use the same technique that was successful in your study! If I wanted to modify to fit my style then give me the autonomy to do so and if using these techniques work, good for me. If they don’t move me back to center The role of the therapist is to guide me through the process. Trying to modify a hundred different ways to fit my ethnicity dilutes the process that has been already validated. This stuff is crazy.
Yes. Modern psychological counseling must be grounded in the scientific method. This means internal validity, clear connection of cause and effect, no confounding factors, etc. Race and religion do not change the science, and consideration of these confounding factors is to introduce bias into the counseling process. Therapies based upon religious or philosophical theories have no place in modern science-based counseling. Spiritual counseling should be done as an adjunct to science based counseling, not as a part of it. The client should be advised to also seek counsel from their priest, Shaman, or Guru if they wish to do so.
'Those groups, after excluding dissenting voices...'
Reminds me of drug companies who, when doing a drug trial, have been known to first screen the volunteers to ensure they have excluded anyone who may contribute the 'wrong' outcome. In other words the outcome that won't make them any money.
Thank you for this revealing article, it shows another example of how totalitarian overreach (as it always tries to do) worms it's way into our world - they have never stopped. I don't know how many times I've typed the phrase, 'the long march through the institutions' when commenting on university/college education. It's been well over 50 years or more since the first sleeper agent/accolites were implanted all over the so called 'free' world. Not just professors either, its impeded within the financial and administrative levels of education, from day care/kindergartens, through primary and high school - right to tertiary, all of it intentional and all of it deeply and firmly embedded. New bent thoughts and ideas rise up all the time, but they can be easily assimilated because the basic structure was installed years ago.
I am 70, and well and truly retired now. I live in Australia and this situation is appalling here, has been for years. My field initially was the visual arts, as a practitioner, then lecturer at 2 Queensland universities. By the mid 1990s the writing was on the wall regarding indoctrination via post structuralism and post modernism, adherence was total or you were quietly edged out. Practice of sculpture, painting etc was down the bottom of importance, it was theory, especially colonial lenses and critical race theory that was drummed into young minds. What was regurgitated on a wall label was more important than the art work itself. This is groupthink alright and just about every sector has been captured in some way.
30 years ago I left the industry and qualified as a yoga and meditation teacher - building a 2nd career on something that I had quietly practised for years. During the last 10 years I saw groupthink begin to rear it's obvious head in this world as well. Vetting and defining 'true' qualifications became a money making industry, and only special people controlled the gates. National accreditation joined itself with International accreditation agencies, thus redefing what yoga actually was. Trained for 5 years by an ancient yogi in India? Too bad, no proper paperwork = no accreditation. No accreditation = no insurance, no insurance = no employment at established studios, or difficulty in hiring your own space. Often, many younger clients wouldn't sign up with you unless you had the tick of hierarchical approval. I endured for a few more years then gave it away, there was little to no entegrity in the mass yoga system, the qualifications were rubber stamped and often a rushed sham course of 4 weeks.
My wife at the time I was in art school studied social welfare at one of those same institutions, finding that the Marxist aligned professors were rewiring brains to view the world through the lens they wanted - all social welfare clients were 'victims', all who were standing in the way of this view were 'oppressors'. It did both our heads in at the time, we were naive to it all initially, couldn't figure it out. The trouble was, we were trying to be rational and objective, but that, as the above interview shows, was and still is not the objective. It is not be objective at all, but always heading ones subjective experience. Feelings are first, followed by your personal 'truth', and always, always the presence of the victim/oppressed and the oppressor. We are no longer together, but catch up regularly through our children and grandchildren and we are both very worried about the indoctrination of race and gender that is being subtly pushed at our 5 and 6 year old granddaughters. It is evil, plain and simple.
“ If we believe absurdities we shall commit atrocities.” - Voltaire
Glad to see recognition of the corruption that this institution of helping is experiencing, just like every other institution. Except I think the measles analogy is poor due to the medically system's corruption, also starting long ago, actually only diagnosises symptoms that could be a hundred other things but similarly some entity wants us to believe they know it's this specific thing. Glad to see the recognizing of the slow historical drip. As I experienced the helping profession academics and career stints in non-profit charities in my 40's and I saw so many early drips, along with a peer or two, that really showed me that something very dark is systematically infecting initially good initiatives. I believe, like I think Luc Lelievre believes, the institutions are unfixable and I believe they need to fall of their own accord. But unlike those who like to throw the baby out with the bathwater calling therapy 'garbage', I believe there is so much good in the idea of having one other person being there for another person armed with great discovered ideas that really prove to help. But I don't think we should try to change the corrupted system but take what works and build something new, small, locally, and learn to love ourselves and then our neighbors.
A fascinating read. Thank you. I would suppose that this occurs in most professions, like Law, Medicine and the like. In both these professions, I have experienced first hand that practitioners in both are conflicted in what they believe and what their professions demands them to follow. Thank you for this article and most articles you share.