I wonder if this is something new.  I’ve come across a few things which I’ve felt inclined to challenge.  One was a video we had to watch in class in which the person in the video said that there’s a systemic problem with education in which it’s goal is to create a white, self sufficient man who embodies three dismal virtues: possession, mastery, and control. He continues that the alternative is to cultivate belonging.   Video   In the class discussion, I pushed back on that suggesting that perhaps it depends on the type of education.  In a business school, for an accounting degree, the debits go on the left and the credits go on the right.  Or for a degree in engineering, I’m not sure belonging is as important as mastery of the subject. It was clear that I had hit a raw nerve with some of my classmates.  I sounded like an asshole.  Of course, I was a white guy pushing back against an emotional presentation from a black man.  He had made a statement that I believe fit into the category of CMAROSLAA. Sima Rosla, if you want to sound it out.

I came across another.  It’s an event on Meetup for Quantum Healing. Now I could be wrong, but I Googled quantum healing, and it looks like a crock of shit. But I can imagine, were to speak to someone who was into quantum healing and challenge them, I would pretty much sound like an asshole. Quantum healing sounds so incredibly profound, and it’s so unprovable, that any conversation about its merits are useless. And any challenge to it just put  you into the asshole category.  So whoever came up with the idea was brilliant.  It’s unchallengable.  It’s Sima Rosla. CMAROSLAA.

The same can be said of i-Ching.  I went to some event that was supposed to be a Dogen discussion group event.  But no one had read the reading, so someone pulled out these special sticks from some special tree and spent the next few hours playing with them to figure out what page of the i-Ching book to turn to.  Okay, maybe it was only like ten or fifteen minutes, but I as time was passing, I was tempted to ask them to just pass me the book and I’ll just open it up to a random page and save us all the time. But I’d sound like an asshole.

A corollary of challenge me at risk of sounding like an asshole, is challenge me at risk of sounding like an idiot.  When you’re famous for a maybe dead cat in a box idea (which is usually misunderstood), have round glasses, smoke, have an impossible to pronounce European sounding name (umlauts count for extra points), and especially have a universe as a backdrop, you can get away with saying the most incredible crap and people will oooh and aaah all over it.  If you push back against this, then obviously you’re an idiot.

Now, of course, I do acknowledge the possibility I am wrong.  Maybe I’m just a simple minded person intimidated by deep thinking. And at heart an asshole and an idiot.  I don’t know.  Could be.