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Daily Connect: The Well-Adjusted Nazi and Buddhist Practice
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I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a sane, awake, mature person in a society with at least some troubling conventional modes of behavior, which we accept as natural and healthy. War would be a prime example of this, in my way of thinking. In doing some theoretical writing about our activism program, I came across this Ken Wilber quote. It has to do with his discussion of the four quadrants of being with which he frames our inner, outer, individual and collective existence.
He wrote:
“What good does it do to adjust and integrate the self in a culture that’s itself sick? What does it mean to be a well-adjusted Nazi? Is that mental health? Or is a maladjusted person in a Nazi society the only one who is sane...A malformation—a pathology, a “sickness” in any quadrant will reverberate through all four quadrants…So a society with an alienating mode of production—such as slave wages for dehumanizing labor—will reflect low self-esteem for laborers and an out-of-whack brain chemistry.”
-Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything
Of course, this is quite the extreme example made to highlight a point. We could ask what it means to be a well-adjusted consumer as our consumption continues to wage a War on Nature, or what it means to be a well-adjusted
So is Buddhist practice about adjusting to and accepting your world, or is it about becoming more sanely maladjusted? I think it's a little of both.
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From Herb Kohl and MLK on maladjustment
Herb Kohl quotes MLK
"Now we all should seek to live a well‑adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to tragic militarism. I call upon you to be maladjusted to such things"
great question...
Something recently reminded me of the writings of Hannah Arendt :), and i've been re-reading Eichmann in Jerusalem, which details the trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, one of the nazi implementors of the Holocaust. According to Arendt, the most disturbing thing about Eichmann was that he did not seem to be some sort of psychopath, but quite the opposite: a pleasant, bland, striving-to-please, gentleman... a "well-adjusted Nazi," who was just following along with his supremely sick culture. She coined the term "banality of evil" to describe the complicity of both the German people and the world as the Holocaust unfolded.
Arendt says: "The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together."
I have been unsuccessfully trying to reconcile the part of the dharma that says, "accept things as they are" with the concept of bodhicitta, or compassionate heart/mind. If we are messy, fucked up, lost in samsara and striving (including spiritual striving) which may be induced by our culture (or family), do we just say, yeah, that's what it is... at least to start with? or do we sit in the gap and try to distance ourselves form the crap, move toward something kinder or more "decent" - or (i love your term) "maladjusted" from the norm that we are used to?
it's easy to say we wouldn't do the stuff the Nazis did. But where do we draw the line? what do we simply acknowledge and accept? & where and how do you maladjust from your culture, surroundings or your messy self? serious questions i'd love any clue about... totally lost on this.
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