Laughing at the Abyss

• “If you have a hero, look again.  You have probably diminished yourself in some way.”

– Sheldon Kopp, from his book,  If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him

• “He must increase, but I must decrease…He who comes from heaven is above all.”

John 3:30-31 (King James Version)

• “Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles,”  (“Germany, Germany above all”)

Former First Line of the German National Anthem (No longer in use)

What do mainstream churches, fashion designers, appliance salespeople, cults, military recruiters, elected officials, New Age gurus, the “legit” drug companies, the diet pill industry, entertainment sell-ebrities and Dr. Phil all have in common?

They’re all peddlers.

They may seem to be peddling different products, but they’re not.  They may seem to be using vastly different language, but they’re not.  They’re all peddling “answers”.  They’re all peddling ways to make themselves increase, and you (or, at least, your bank account) decrease.  They’re all peddling a break from feelings of confusion,ambiguity, and isolation that, at times, can come from confronting the burden of responsibility to make one’s own way in the world.

And in the course of their peddling, a very common sales pitch is used by all peddlers.  It goes something like this.

Part One:  Creating (In You) A Perception of Need (Preferably urgent need, in response to events spun as catastrophe)

In this stage, the peddler convinces you that you are much more flawed than your peers.  Messed up.  “Less than” everyone else.  Unprepared, and possibly at risk for attack/invasion/and end to your “way of life”.  Sick.  Dysfunctional.  Poor.  Alone.  Overweight.  Excluded from eternal happiness, destined (indeed, “damned” to eternal suffering).

Thus, the Jack Chick gospel tract and the supermarket magazine selling airbrushed ideals of impossibly thin women are (in essence) the same thing.

Both aim to convince  you that you are not good enough as-is, and that you need fixing.

Part Two:  Creating A Perception of Their Competence To Meet The Perceived Need

In this stage, the peddler convinces you that they have (or, at least, have access to) the material or spiritual object that will fulfill your alleged need and put you on an equal footing with your peers.  Included, not excluded.

Part Three:  You Are Temporarily Sated.

You feel well, because you suspect you should be doing better since you are following the lead of the dispenser of health and/or material/spiritual well-being.  At the very least, you have a sense of kinship or cohesion with the group of other customers who have purchased the services of your peddler.  You and all the other customers of your peddler are okay, are the “in group”.  Outsiders who did not have the wisdom of becoming customers to your peddler are the “out group”.

Part Four:  You share the “good news” about Jesus/Deepak Chopra/Sarah Palin/Scientology/Barack Obama/Thich Nhat Hanh/Fancy Yoga Retreat with others (or, perhaps more concisely put, you repeat Part One, only this time with yourself as the peddler!)

Of course, there are times in life when we need to consult people who have answers we don’t.   But I’ve always been a bit of a skeptic, at heart.  Even if someone has a good answer on one topic, it doesn’t mean that they have the answers to everything.  And most people and institutions peddling answers aren’t content to admit that they (at best) have only a partial grasp of the truth, because such an admission would only serve to weaken the customer’s brand loyalty.

I’m not advocating that we not make any purchases at all in the marketplace I’ve just described, but rather that we only do so after kicking the tires and looking under the hood.  That we continue to question the wisdom of our sales, because each transaction exacts a piece of ourselves.

Following up on the car analogy, Carl Sagan* put it this way:

“If we have an emotional stake in the answers, if we want badly enough to believe, and if it is important to know the truth, then nothing other than a committed, skeptical scrutiny is required.  It is not very different from buying a used car.  When you buy a used car, it is insufficient to remember that you badly need a car.  After all, it has to work.  It is insufficient to say that the used-car salesman is a friendly fellow.  What you generally do is you kick the tires, you look at the odometer, you open up the hood.  If you do not feel yourself expert in automobile engines, you bring a friend who is.  And you do this for something as unimportant as an automobile.  But on issues of the transcendent, of ethics and morals, of the origin of the world, of the nature of human beings, on those issues should be not insist upon at least equally skeptical scrutiny?”

*In The Varieties Of Scientific Experience:  A Personal View Of The Search For God

(Author’s note:  I make no pretense of having any sort of grasp on capital-T truth.  I’m just searching — aspiring to follow capital-T Truth around wherever it happens to meander.  I welcome any and all polite discussion.)