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My favorite "Weird Al" Yankovic songs:
A Complicated Song (Avril Lavigne, "Complicated")
The Saga Begins (Don McLean, "American Pie")
Pancreas (The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations")
Canadian Idiot (Green Day, "American Idiot")
Bob (Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," brilliantly redone entirely in palindromes)
Close, But No Cigar (?)
My Baby's In Love With Eddie Vedder (original [?] kick-ass zydeco—get up and dance already, goddammit!—rightfully mocking the "brooding angst" of the early-'90s Pearl Jam/Nirvana-led Grunge generation)
Money For Nothing, Beverly Hillbillies (Dire Straits, "Money For Nothing")
Addicted To Spuds (Robert Palmer, "Addicted To Love")
Jerry Springer (by comparison, Peter Gabriel's later "The Barry Williams Show" isn't even worth mentioning: Weird Al did it far better, years earlier, without sandwiching it in between any of PG's [at his worst] interminably pretentious, navel-gazing musings)
Just discovered The Daily WTF.
Very funny stuff, if you've ever worked in I.T. Even if the joke's on you.
See, the thing is that even utter "hobbyist" programmers, who have never worked in anything beyond VBA, who couldn't write the kind of (C++) code that exists behind Windows or MS Office even if their lives depended on it, will still consider themselves fit to dis Microsoft (etc.) left and right.
As a best-in-class programmer who, inexplicably, is satisfied with building business applications to make other people's lives easier, I have worked closely with such people. I have seen their "spaghetti code" (with Goto statements all over the place) which almost requires one to bring marinara sauce into the workplace just to look at it without laughing ... but they still "know it all." People who, embarrassingly, never learned to do things right even at a student level.
Apply that same psychology and professional (in)competence to the world of spirituality, and what do you have?
Yes: A group of "Wilberites." People who are neither psychologically nor intellectually fit to evaluate our world's philosophies and spiritualities, yet who still have nothing to learn from anyone, save from their clinically narcissistic quack of a leader.
I know how to cut and cut away here (the side of the shoe) and still make it so that it stays on the foot. And the secret of toe cleavage, a very important part of the sexuality of the shoe. You must only show the first two cracks. —Manolo Blahnik
—Manolo Blahnik
"Toe cleavage," eh?
Just when you think you've seen it all....
Julie played water polo She wore a ribbon on her left Manolo.... —Weird Al Yankovic, "Close, But No Cigar"
—Weird Al Yankovic, "Close, But No Cigar"
Back in July, following kw's "planned meltdown," I got contacted by the head of one of the major anti-Scientology websites, through another cult-studies professional, regarding his wish to meet personally with Wilber and "reality-test" him. He also said:
We are going to cover your book [i.e., STG] in our next ... ezine. I and others will also carefully read the Wilbur [sic] work. After I have had some tome [sic] to read more of your work I would like to talk by phone on how we might feature some it on [our] home page.
We have 10,000 subscribers....
And that was the last I heard from him. Because, of course, when he/they actually read my Wilber-debunking work, he will have seen that, in addition to its tone (oh, and the stuff about the "biggest cult around," the Roman Catholic Church, but of course you can't come out and say that), I do not at all buy into the self-exonerating fiction—accepted gospel though it may be in the cult-studies field—that people who have wasted the best years of their lives in destructive groups were merely "brainwashed, innocent victims" of sophisticated, deliberate systems of mind control. As opposed, you know, to generally being "religion addicts" who would believe absolutely anything that got them into a "saved" group (where any overt attempts at mind control, though those most certainly do exist, are almost overkill).
It is well-known that members of closed, destructive groups tend to be idealistic persons. Well then, what do idealists do, if not elevate their heroes to positions of near-perfection? Rather than simply lamenting that so many well-meaning persons get suckered into such "chosen" groups, how about recognizing that the same idealism, and its oft-associated projection and narcissism (in the hope of changing/saving the world through one's membership in a special group of like-minded people), is a big part of what creates the problem in the first place? Ah, but that would require taking responsibility for one's own actions and gullibility rather than blaming others, wouldn't it?
So, no surprise that even these well-known and highly respected anti-Scientologists, who are courageous enough when it comes to standing up to and exposing that organization, would rather ignore one of the few in-depth resources which thoroughly exposes kw for the manipulative, "card-playing" bullshit artist that he is, rather than face the most unflattering reasons for their own participation in our world's allegedly destructive groups. Much easier to cry about how they were manipulated to the point where they couldn't think for themselves (!) than to admit their own deep desire to be told pleasant salvational lies by "perfect" authority-figures. (From NE: "In a sense the members of the integral community could be viewed as having been 'tricked' into believing a set of false ideas from Wilber himself. But 98% of them wouldn't have had it any other way. That is, if kw hadn't fed them what they desperately need to hear, with a veneer of science and rationality, they would have found someone else who would.") They bitch and moan about how, without having been subjected to one or another form of "mind control," supposedly no one would ever believe that one or another alternative spiritual leader is what he claims to be ... and then they go right back to their "safe, traditional" religions, which invariably not only began as full-blown destructive cults, but which have teachings which are every bit as nonsensical as the best of L. Ron Hubbard's spiritual fiction.
They will even absolve the inner circle surrounding the guru/pandit from any responsibility for their actions in abusing others, as those high members, too, were allegedly under the same "mind control"; thus leaving only the guru-figure, among thousands or millions of "innocent victims," to be painted with any blame for the utterly predictably, social psychology-based nature of the community. How oddly convenient, in that it further absolves these experts for their own abuses of peons while holding inner-circle positions in their respective groups.
And those are the same people who "make the rules" about what you're allowed to think and theorize in cult studies, and still be accepted as a knowledgeable professional there: If you want to be a member in good standing of that biased and heavily religious/spiritual group, and not be guilty of "blaming the victim" (can't you hear the violins?), you better not question the most sensitive aspects of their "accepted wisdom" too deeply, regardless of how obviously one-sided and even outright wrong it may be. Where have you seen that psychological dynamic before?
That, at least, is my interpretation of the events.
P.S. On the topic of cult-like behaviors in the eradication of evil (and dissent), see the fine "American Apocalypse" article by Robert J. Lifton.
Over the weekend, I was asked by the leader of an East Coast skeptics' group to provide him with a short summary of the thrust of "Norman Einstein," for him to use in promoting the book. This (MS Word) is what I came up with:
For the past three decades, the transpersonal/integral psychologist Ken Wilber (kw) has been celebrated as the purported "Einstein of consciousness research" by his peers. The least controversial of his work has even been tolerantly reviewed in Skeptical Inquirer, where it was optimistically proposed that kw and his followers "would be a group of people that skeptics could, if not quite embrace, at least live alongside very easily."
In the years since then, Wilber has founded and assumed the presidency of both his think-tank Integral Institute, and an accredited Integral University. The former institute counts among its founding members the following New Age "movers and shakers":
Deepak Chopra Gary Schwartz Larry Dossey Tony Robbins Bob Richards (co-founder of Clarus, makers of the Q-Link pendant—the purported "subtle energy" effects of which kw has explicitly endorsed—and also vice president of Integral Institute)
Deepak Chopra
Gary Schwartz
Larry Dossey
Tony Robbins
Bob Richards (co-founder of Clarus, makers of the Q-Link pendant—the purported "subtle energy" effects of which kw has explicitly endorsed—and also vice president of Integral Institute)
Chopra actually considers Wilber to be his "mentor," while former president Bill Clinton has recently endorsed kw's integral "theory of everything," saying: "[T]he problem is the world needs to be more integrated but it requires a consciousness that's way up here, and an ability to see beyond the differences among us...." Al Gore and Jeb Bush have likewise incorporated Wilber's ideas into their own professional lives, with Bush's "people" initiating contact with kw as early as 1997.
In his own brief criticisms of Wilber's writings in 2003, the skeptic Robert T. Carroll more reasonably dismissed kw's biased misrepresentations of neo-Darwinian evolution as consisting of "a few paragraphs of half-truths and lies." (In response, while asserting that "neo-Darwinian theory can't explain shit," kw recommended to his followers that they study the work of the long-discredited proponent of Intelligent Design, Michael Behe.) Nevertheless, prior to the spring of 2004 the most visible and accessible published criticism of any of Wilber's ideas was given in a few short, online pieces by the Eckankar- and Sai Baba-debunking David Lane—a former endorser of kw's early transpersonal work.
[None of that, of course, is to overlook Andrew Smith's excellent and in-depth criticism of Wilber's four-quadrant and related ideas, going back to 2000.]
Over the past two and a half years, myself and several other critics have gone back to many of Wilber's primary sources, to verify that they consistently do not provide the support for his ideas which he has claimed they do and that, indeed, in many cases they directly contradict his presentation of their contents. In short, through that simple research, which any competent undergraduate should have been able to do but which the entire field of transpersonal psychology failed miserably to execute, kw has been shown, conclusively, to be either grossly dishonest, academically incompetent, or both. That is, far from being a spiritual Einstein, the man is rather a bumbling Velikovsky, completely out of his depth but still convinced that he is making fundamental and radical contributions to the betterment of human knowledge through his "cargo cult philosophy."
In June of 2006, Wilber finally showed his true quack colors for all to see in a multi-part online rant. There, he dismissed the thoroughly researched criticisms of his ideas by myself and others as being the work of "morons" driven by "resentment" of his success and mere psychological shadow-projection. He simultaneously indulged in clear manipulations of his followers, designed to outlaw any questioning of his untenable ideas, in a manner worthy of the gurus Adi Da and Andrew Cohen—both of whom he has enthusiastically endorsed. He further explicitly defined his integral community as a "sanctuary" for the supposedly "second-tier" (of Spiral Dynamics®, which he also grossly misrepresents) spiritual seekers who are drawn to his work while ostensibly being persecuted by a first-tier world which will never understand them.
In doing all that, Wilber has come to be seen even by some of the more sensible former founding members of his community, and by myself, as displaying the trappings of a bona fide cult leader.
AQAL. "The AOL of philosophy."
Maybe this just seems funnier after seven months of hardly having a spare moment to spend for myself, in between I.T. and debunking our world's obvious spiritual frauds and charlatans, but:
'Cause, you know, chances are....
Other stuff gotten done today:
Figured out how a certain bulk-emailing program handles lists, members, and unsubscribes, meaning that I should finally be able to finish off a 200-hour side-project (only 70 billable, but it's for a good [non-profit] cause) over this coming weekend
Realized (with some assistance) that you can use user-defined (SQL Server) functions to populate database views, and then data-bind to those views. (Yes, I know, real programmers don't use data-binding ... but we all do what it takes to pay the rent, right? We're all prostitutes in one way or another....)
