Tibetan Buddhism and

how the PMC's New Age obsessions deformed Left Politics

With the Dalai Lama getting some heat, I’m going to give you all the key to an embarrassing Western appropriation of Tibetan Buddhism for reactionary politics, beginning with an explanation of Heinrich Harrer, former SS officer’s relationship to His Holiness. Just joking, I’m overpromising on what I can’t deliver since I am in the middle of a work week. I’m leaving some links below for reading. Why would an ex-Nazi like Tibet? High altitudes and adventure tourism — Nazis loved that, anti-modern feudal rule by elites, Harrer and Nazis loved that too. Worship of the childlike innocence of oppressed people, Nazis love that. By the way, Harrer’s version of Tibet animated the Free Tibet movement. His memoir was adapted as a film Seven Years in Tibet.

But to summarize very briefly, the McMindfulness of Western New Agey bs is based on some idea of selflessness that nevertheless makes toxic self-fashioning the focus of its politics and its sociality. Not only is this ‘naive,’ it is downright reactionary. By promoting the subjective over the objective, this ideology privileged ‘feelings’ negative and positive in world finding, a task that all human beings, but especially Leftists must confront. There are objective conditions that create subjective feelings and promotes irrationality as somehow more ‘progressive’ than reason. Prepackaged selflessness is the worst kind of self-aggrandizement.

Fake spirituality and subjective reason always demands what Theodor Adorno called “the sacrifice of the intellect.” For all the decolonize reason types out there, chill on this sentence:

“Because too much thinking, an unwavering autonomy, hinders the conformity to the administered world and causes suffering, countless people project this suffering imposed on them by society onto reason as such.”

Theodor Adorno, “Reason and Revelation.”

I try to deal with the ravages on politics wrought by New Age here:

American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique

And a few more links here.

Heinrich Harrer’s obituary

(note that the Guardian says the Chinese use Harrer’s Nazi past as part of their ‘propaganda.’)

Donald Lopez's Prisoners of Shangri-La

Incredible history of Western fantasies of Tibet, along with discussion of its role in the British Empire’s ideas of its own hegemony.

Finally, a must read —

Michael Parenti's critique of “Friendly Feudalism”