Buddhist Marketer

Get Rankled Not, Lest Ye Rankle

A fellow Academite posted this as his Facebook status update today:

No one should spend eternity in hell for not accepting the grace of Christ as savior, and no one should live a miserable life because they do not know the joy found in the Gospel. If you agree, be bold enough to re-post this as your statement for universal healthcare. - then ask what you personally are doing to make a difference in the care all humans receive.

This rankled me.

• OMG, really?!  Someone who graduated from The Academy is really doing the eternity-in-hell bit?!
• Flashbacks to persecution in the third grade lunchroom
• The Gospel is really the only path to joy; all others straight to misery?!

So quickie-fingers over here retorted

No one should be so ignorant of the scientific method to think that hell is real, or so pompous about their own beliefs that they feel a life sans Gospel is one of misery.

(I’ve since deleted it.  So reactive, I am.  I blame mom.)

But, while making my way through a rather mondo spreadsheet for work, I began thinking on the side about the ridiculousness of my own comment.

• I believe in reincarnation and in universal interconnectedness, yet there’s not a lot of positivist A/B split action to back those beliefs up
• I believe that authentic happiness can only be found by looking inward and continuously sussing out the assumptions beneath my beliefs, and that all other variants of joy are functions of false consciousness

So, really, turning my quickie-fingers back onto myself, one could say

No one should be so ignorant of the scientific method to think that reincarnation is real, or so pompous about their own beliefs that they feel a life sans thoughtful self-reflection is one of misery.

What’s interesting is that there’s a tiny voice in my head that’s still saying, “But REALLY!  That guy is WRONG!  This gospel and hell stuff is LUNACY!”

Of course, there’s likely a more than tiny voice in his head that would state a similar opinion regarding my beliefs.  And yet I would call his incredulity a prime example of simple naivete and ignorance to that which I know is true.  So why can’t I grant him the right to feel hat someone who hasn’t accepted JC is living a life of misery?!

It’s a curious beast, this whole belief thing.  I have to remember to put myself in the other person’s shoes before I start rolling my eyes at what they believe.  Because just because I have, like, totally awesome powers of perception that have granted me unlimited access to truths that span space and time, doesn’t mean everyone else does.

Goal: Less Mediocrity-Bemoaning

I am trying to evolve into a person who places less of a premium on intelligence — whatever that means — and isn’t such a snark-a-luff-a-gus with respect to what my lesser self deems “Cretinous Fumblings By Marketers Or Their Wannabes”.  I recognize that being a wiseacre and skewering the terribly earnest, though terrible, attempts at marketing (or, say, general business strategy, analysis, addition … the list goes on) is not exactly what a Buddhist approaching enlightenment should busy herself with.  However, I couldn’t find the words.

Fortunately, now I have found the words — on someone else’s blog (yes!  I love outsourcing!) [emphasis mine]:

… what troubled me about the interview on the radio was the shrill tone of condemnation. All too frequently, in debates such as this, the absence of a certain piece of knowledge is taken as a sign of shocking ignorance: from Tory MPs protesting that schoolchildren cannot recite the date of the battle of Trafalgar, to clergymen bemoaning the fact that only a tiny percentage of the population can remember by heart the ten commandments, to scientists lamenting that the general public are largely ignorant of the third law of thermodynamics. And I am guilty of making the same claims myself. “Really?” I hear myself saying, “You don’t even know that…?”

The trouble with all of these complaints is that – as I think Zhuangzi once pointed out – the possible objects of knowledge are unlimited, but the things that we can know are, in the end, limited. And the question of the kinds of knowledge that matter – the question of what kinds of things are worth knowing – is not one that is easy to answer. In part, of course, it is contextual… We are, all of us, utterly ignorant when it comes to most of what is out there. But at the same time we, all of us, know all kinds of amazing stuff. What we lazily term other people’s ‘ignorance’, more often than not may simply be the fact that other people judge different things worth knowing, because they exist in different contexts from our own. There are things that I care about and know a bit about… and other things about which I am largely ignorant. But it would be an impoverished – not to say a pretty weird – world if I insisted that everybody should hold the same things as personally worth knowing that I hold as personally worth knowing…

… it seems to me to be more important, in the long run, that we should treat each other well, than that we should know any particular facts about battles, commandments or laws of nature. And it seems to me to be more important that we use what knowledge we have in the service of treating each other well, than that we should know things simply so that we can use them to pour scorn, to manipulate, or to condemn.

Amen to that.

Remind me to stop being such a cranky douche to people who have better things to do with their finite time on this earth than obsess about online marketing. Remind me to try, instead, to share my knowledge about marketing, and learn from others their insights regarding … whatever kinds of knowledge they uniquely value.

For me, it comes down to valuing myself as a smart person.  I need to continue to step away from that, and continue to step towards feeling comfortable with alleged mediocrity.  After all, it is a fiction that I will leave this earth truly knowing anything.  To re-snip:

the things that we can know are, in the end, limited

You can read the full, thought-provoking blog post entitled “Things Worth Knowing” by clicking here.

Greed, Desire, Suffering, And The Bubble

In Damien Keown’s Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction he writes:

Whereas the Judaeo-Christian tradition attributes the Fall of Man to pride and disobedience, Buddhism locates the origin of human suffering in desire.

A page earlier, he notes that Buddhist thought suggests the following:

It is the moral status of the inhabitants that determines the fate of the world-system.  A world inhabited by ignorant and selfish people, for example, would decline at a faster speed than one with a wise and virtuous population.

In thinking about the market bubble, I cannot help but consider the psyches and inner monologues of its participants.  

• “Oh man, housing prices are going up; if I don’t get in now I might miss out on all that wealth.  So even if I can’t afford it, really, the bank is going to give me a loan so it must be okay …”
• “I should start flipping houses like all these guys I see on cable making buckets!  I could make so much money!”
• “Sure, this guy has no job, no income, and no assets, but I’m going to get paid by a big bank for every new loan I sign up, and if I don’t sign him up someone else might get rich instead!”

Buddhist Behaving Badly

I should not have written

Well, I’m sorry, Ms. Langholtz, that you’re a dumb cunt.

in my recent “It Rub Me Wrong Way” post.  First off, most readers may not realize that the word ‘cunt’ has no impact on me (the p- word, though; shudder!); at the Academy one of my three friends named Angie had the affectionate nickname of ‘Little Cunt’.  Adorbz! So, while the word has little power in my brain, I should have been more mindful of the fact that it has a sprinkle of nastiness to it in the brains of most.

Also, it’s a bit more productive to be constructive.  And so, my better self would have written something like:

Hey, Ms. Langholtz, it wasn’t cool of you to, when confronted with reader feedback about that offensive line, not actually apologize for your own behavior, but instead, apologize to the reader for having had feelings.

I apologize for having been a dumb cunt about this.

“Buddhism” intersection “green”

From “Help Wanted“, an interview of Van Jones ‘93JD by Melinda Tuhus in the March/April 2009 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine (bolding mine):

Y: One of your key slogans, which comes out of your previous organizing work, is “Green jobs, not jails.” Is the large number of minorities in prison something you see as a rallying point, or is it too leftist or too maximalist to be effective?

J: I don’t think that most of America would sign onto that tomorrow, but there’s a logic here, with regard to the green economy. Fundamentally, the moral claim has to be that if you’re going to have a green economy you shouldn’t have any throwaway resources, you shouldn’t have any throwaway species, and you shouldn’t have any throwaway people, and that we shouldn’t just have a green movement about reclaiming thrown-away stuff. It should also be about reclaiming thrown-away lives and thrown-away communities.

Why I’m grateful for the recession

From a letter from Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara of the Village Zendo, emphasis mine:

Here is a Zen Koan for our times:

A seeker asked Yun Men, “How is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall?”

Yun Men said, “Body exposed in the golden wind.”

In these times when everything seems to be stripped bare, and the camouflage of the “good times” is ripped away, we can ask ourselves, What really matters?  What in my life truly has value?  What do I want to support and what can I let drop away?  The astringent quality of an economic downturn can bring us back to the fundamental matter of what is vitally important to us, and what is superfluous, ephemeral.

In a materialistic society such as ours, many will simply increase their efforts to grasp onto their possessions, their “image,” their constructed notions of who they are — and miss the opportunity to reconnect with life’s deepest and most fundamental values…

Koans are not effective when they are simply explained, they must be lived.  So how do you see it?  How do you use this time of radical exposure to care for the things in life that you value most?

I am grateful that this downturn is giving many people an opportunity to step off of the treadmill and contemplate that which connects them more deeply to themselves, and to others.  I am grateful that, as a society, we’re being forced to consider the assumptions that govern our markets and social behaviors.  I’m grateful that despite everything, I’m in a position where I can offer advice, good cheer, and at least one part-time job.

I’m grateful for my $12 hat, my $10 feather pin, the vintage hat pin from my sister-in-law that anchors the hat to my head even in the windiest of weather.  It’s brought me closer to my nonagenarian nabe Bea, a former hat-check girl, who taught me how to use the hat pin correctly, and invites many a stranger to make eye contact and say hello in order to comment on my hat.