Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation
<i>&gt;It feels anti human.</i><p>Because it is. The zeitgeist on the left (so, academia) is consumed by personal shame, guilt, and self-loathing, and a great deal of intellectual work has been done to <i>post hoc</i> rationalize these feelings and package them in catchy phrases. Terms like &quot;cultural appropriation&quot; and &quot;privilege&quot; or &quot;systematic racism&quot; or &quot;toxic masculinity&quot;, may have some technically useful meanings to anthropologists, but within the public sphere they function only as a combined virtue signal and rhetorical weapon. What makes these weapons difficult is that they are so tightly wrapped in an image of compassion such that even those that wield them may not understand their true nature. A clever design.<p>This is a good example of how anything can be used as a weapon, even compassion. I really wish all these academics pushing the narrative of privilege etc would chill out for a second and just enjoy the world as it is, in all it&#x27;s messiness. To stop seeing the world as purely an evil constructed on the mass graves of the innocent. Even if it were true (and in some sense it is) <i>this is still the world we have</i>. This is where kids are growing up, people are falling in love, where discoveries are being made. Sometimes you gotta just say &#x27;fuck it&#x27; and enjoy the world you have without constantly speculating about how it should be, how it should have been, about whether the fruits you are enjoying were earned with blood. We cannot, in each successive generation, reform ourselves to undo the injustices of the past, not only because it&#x27;s practically impossible but because the meaning of injustice changes. And society is finite in its malleability. To be sure, some things can be done, within a generation or two. Maybe three. But after a while, what&#x27;s done is done and you have to move on.<p>EDIT: It&#x27;s curious how sometimes a post gets upvoted, then downvoted, then several more cycles. Now its at 1. I&#x27;d be curious to know the &quot;velocity&quot; on this one, dang.