Individualism, Ideology and Movements

“I would rather ask questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” ~Richard P. Feynman.

Don’t have the time to read the entire article? You can listen to it here.

The Organization

“Every movement begins as a noble idea and ends as an organization.” Or something like that. Various people including Eric Hoffer are usually credited with it, but I first met the thought in my college days reading the literature of Jiddu Krishnamurti (JK), a philosopher from South India.

JK did not believe in organizations or in a teacher-student relationship. Neither did he consider himself a guru to anyone nor did he consider anyone as his disciple, asking everyone not to follow him blindly, but choose their own path.

No guru, no disciples, no following. Find your own way, he said, and walk it alone.

Krishnamurti himself helped establish foundations and schools. He saw a practical purpose in preserving his talks, publishing his work and creating places for education. But he was equally clear that no organization could lead another human being to truth. The foundations could preserve the words, but they could not do the questioning for you.

Today, those foundations, schools and publishing houses continue in his name. Millions read him, study him, quote him. They gather to carry forward a man who asked not to be carried.

Like building all those golden shrines for Buddha.

I don’t say this to mock anyone. I just see the irony. The man who saw the pattern most clearly could not stop it forming around him.

I still can’t decide whether that proves him right, or wrong.

The Untouched Idea

Is ideology an exploration of ideas, pursued with conviction, that eventually forms into a collective belief system? A system that forms the foundation of a philosophy with a grand vision?

Either way, its adherents may become willing to do almost anything for the cause, transforming the original conviction into a collective belief system, a movement, an organization.

Does it come from the purest of thoughts from within oneself, or from the beliefs formed by nature and nurture?

Perhaps it begins much earlier, with an individual who turns an observation into a belief, a belief into an identity, and an identity into something that must be defended.

Purity is possible only while the individual stands alone with his own thought, before it encounters the preconceived notions of others. A thought that has not yet surrendered its independence to someone else’s conclusions.

An untouched individual has just one place to fight, and that is himself and the universe. Every connection converges on a single point, and every variable lives inside him.

Then he steps into a society, and the connections multiply. One person becomes one among many, and the idea no longer stands on its own. It stands at a crossroads with other humans and other ideas, and one conflicting interest or unintended influence in the chain can tip the whole balance.

It is like the water coming out of a spring high in the hills. While the spring is shaped by the ground through which it flows, it is as pure and clean as it gets.

Then it starts downhill. A stream joins it, then a field drains into it, then a village, then a mill. Each addition is small, and most are adding something new. Some challenge it, some expose it to newer paths and some add new ingredients.

But somewhere along the way one thing enters that shouldn’t. It has the potential to change things completely in a negative way.

The water’s original form is not the same by the time the water reaches the sea.

An idea changes as it travels through people. Sometimes it improves, sometimes it deteriorates, and sometimes it becomes something its originator would no longer recognize.

I haven’t yet found a movement that escaped this.

The Man in the Corner

In the opening of the 1998 film City of Angels, Nicolas Cage stands in the corner of a hospital room, watching Meg Ryan operate on a patient. In the next shot the patient is standing next to him, watching his own surgery. Two versions of the same person. One living it, one witnessing it.

In corporate meetings people talk. Some say things that matter. Some perform. Some just repeat what was said a minute ago. And I find myself doing something strange. I watch. Not just the room, but myself in it.

There is one version of me at the table, contributing and reacting. There is another in the corner, watching all of it, including the one at the table. Can I observe without immediately judging? Can I watch the person speaking, the person performing, the person repeating someone else’s thoughts, and even myself, without deciding what any of them should be?

Maybe this is what JK meant by the observer and the observed.

The corner is a useful place to begin watching from. But JK would probably question the very idea that the person standing in the corner is separate from what he is watching. JK went further. He said that in most of our inner life, the observer and the observed are not two things. When you say “I am angry,” who is the “I”? The one feeling the anger, or the one watching it? Maybe they are the same movement, split in two by language.

This matters because some self-improvement advice assumes a split. We try to fix our anger, our fear, our confusion, as if the one doing the fixing is untouched by what he is fixing. If so, is the split an illusion? And once you really see that, not just understand it, something changes.

Back in the meeting room, the performers don’t know they are performing. The repeaters believe they are adding something. And the man at the table has blind spots I can only partly see from the corner. The witness in the corner isn’t clean either. Watching doesn’t make you exempt. It only makes you a little more honest about what is going on.

A company, a movement or a government is that same room with more people in it. Most of them are at the table. A few are in the corner. All with their own blind spots. What matters is not where they are all standing, but whether anyone is willing to examine their own position.

Experiments

Gandhi called his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Not The Discovery of Truth. Not The Path to Truth. Experiments. Which means more than one, and which means one can be wrong.

Truth isn’t a place you reach and plant a flag. You keep testing it against reality, against yourself, and against the friction of living among other people. Some experiments confirm what you thought. Others take your assumptions apart. You need both.

Nietzsche said there are no facts, only interpretations. I’m not sure that is true. But I have watched people fight to the end for their own facts, and that is reason enough to keep testing.

Neither JK nor Gandhi, nor the others who shaped me early, claimed to have found it. They were still looking. JK ended his talks with sharper questions, not answers.

So I am somewhere in the middle of my own experiment. The idea I started with still holds: don’t follow blindly, and find out for yourself what is true. But how I understand it keeps changing. Something I read at twenty means something else at fifty. The words are the same. I am not.

Maybe that is all I can honestly say about knowing yourself. It is not a state you reach. It is a direction you keep choosing, imperfectly.

So here is the experiment. Does every movement end up betraying the idea it began with? Or have I just not looked hard enough?

To find out, I want to leave the table and stand in the corner for a while to watch and explore.

A philosophical starting point for the forthcoming series, Governance, Power and Humans.