Work, Faiths and Pol Potism of the Spirit

The process of implementing a concepts creates a greater manifestation

of the concept as well as a greater understanding of what the concept

is.

This is seen clearly in case of, say, work. First the goal is to

produce something - say, build a railroad. One would think that's

fairly straightforward - hire a group of men to make tracks and lay

them - but no. To actually build a railroad one does not only need

manual labor but also engineers, managers, accountants, human

relations, people to build and to staff industrial installations,

international relations to get the ore, legal and political power to

get all this done, and of course technological know-how and science at

its base. These are all things that at the simple level are not seen

as work, but they are what the process of doing the work actually

requires. As work builds on itself, work is understood not only to

include manual labor, but a huge array of other endeavors that are

required to get the work done:

Science, mathematics, education, law, finance, politics, economics,

psychology, medicine, environmental science, and literature and

philosophy and intellectual thought to conceptualize, explain and

systematize the preceding. What begins as an attempt to simply build

something creates a huge number of other fields of work. And this

creates a more expanded understanding of what work actually is, as

well as more things that are called work.

Often through history we see attempts to do away with some or all of

these pursuits, claiming that they are not really work, or that they

are parasitical or elitist. But no; they come about as

a necessary aspect of getting the work done. The attempts to do away

with such things always lead to disaster. A Pol Pot who wants to

murder the wealthy, the office workers, and the educated, does not

arrive at improved production. He arrives at a million dead and the

rest starving in labor camps that produce nothing.

The same is true for people who want to simplify things at the

spiritual or intellectual level. Perhaps the simple faith of the

Muslim Jihadist or the Spanish Catholic was good for his peace of mind

and sense of self-certainty, but it has resulted in brutal destruction

of many of the world's greatest civilizations all their works and

their knowledge, murder and enslavement of hundreds of millions of

people, and a horrible life for everyone who remained. As with work,

faith when placed in action and practiced grows in scope and in depth

and arrives at a deeper, more advanced and more rich concept of faith

as well as of life. But a faith that consistently "goes back to the

basics" cannot tolerate such growth and enhancement and thus has to

continuously wipe out the greatest things that come from its

exponents. Like Jerusalem that murdered its prophets, simple faith

destroys its greatest achievements, its greatest knowledge, its

greatest wisdom, and its greatest minds. It is a Saturn that eats its

children for fear that they may show a different path.

What we see in "simple faith," whatever the religion, is Pol Potism

applied to the world of spirit, which then becomes Pol Potism arrived

to all aspects of human life. And what we see in Taliban, Wahabbism,

survivalism, and Bush-style and Inhofe-style Christian fundamentalism,

is the same ignorant and barbaric destructiveness that we see in Pol

Pot.

And it is only by replacing this simple-mindedness with more

intellectually honest pathways that the world can avoid apocalyptic

scenarios prophesied in these religions and take a superior path than

global destruction before the grandchildren of the fundamentalists

claiming "family values" have reached maturity.

The process of implementing a concept arrives at an enhanced

implementation of the concept as well as understanding of what the

concept is and what it means. It is through this ever-greater

complexity and richness, not through simplicity or "going back to the

basics," that grows both the concept and its usefulness for humankind.