Anti-intellectualism

[irenicspace]

Cliff Bostock recently wrote an essay for Creative Loafing called, Derrida and Dubya: Anti-intellectualism in America. It was very interesting. Some of his points made me immediately think of the OTO though. I read:

The anti-intellectual typically exhibits little curiosity about other perspectives and no skepticism about his own positions. When

Comments

Facts Is Facts

[keith418]

Thanks for your kind comments.

I'd like to help out with more facts - the problem is that this is often seen as betraying people. For example, I served on the EC for 9 years and have been in the OTO for nearly 18 years. I'd love to tell stories and give out all kinds of facts and incidents that would back up my positions - even now there are events occurring locally I would love to reference. It's just very difficult to do so, even in a veiled manner, without compromising folks. You, I think, have been put in similar situations - when you knew potentially embarrassing things about the leaders of the Order, but promised not to reveal them.

irenicspace, for example, recently cited some emails from a friend in the OTO. Rather than look at the content of his post, people expressed outrage that he had seen fit to cite this problem on LJ, even in a filtered post. Would this reaction, do you suppose, prompt him to cite more cases as they came up? If people really wanted to debate facts, one would think they would welcome a discussion of exactly this kind. That was not, however, what we observed. If you want the message, you cannot kill the messengers. If you busily kill each messenger that bears the bad news, you cannot complain if people are wary of bringing you more information.

If the shoe doesn't fit - well, no one is, of course compelled to wear it. If I, for example, have none of my facts straight and am totally wrong, time will prove this to everyone. On the other hand, if those I think are in denial prove to be ignoring things they need to pay attention to - well, time will prove that to all of us too.

I would suggest that there are, indeed, people in denial and who seek to spin the facts to suit their agendas - the same way I am accused of spinning facts to illustrate my criticisms. This is to be expected. On the other hand, I have consistently called for objective goals with objective metrics, or measurements, that would, among other things, serve to resist spin. If we set a goal to raise X amount of money, by Y date, we either will or we won't. The marked reluctance of the leaders to set the kind of strategic goals that are measurable, and on a fixed time-line, suggests to me that there may be a significant difference between their positive PR (spin) about the OTO on the one hand, and what they privately think the OTO can really be expected to accomplish on the other hand.

One of the ways we judge our leaders is to see whether or not they are capable of sharing bad news with us - and whether they can admit to mistakes. A leader that does nothing but repeat “happy talk” - of one kind or another - does not inspire confidence. Likewise, followers that demand nothing but chirpy “good vibes” are only asking for trouble, As I have said before, when ambition fails to reckon with sacrifices, things will get problematic in a hurray. Have the leaders of the OTO described their ambitions for the Order and what sacrifices they expect us to make to realize those ambitions? I do not think they really have. Thus, we have all sorts of problems.

Re: Honesty is the best policy;

[b_v_borgia]

Honesty is, yes.