On Dogma

Our ten­den­cy is to believe we are oper­at­ing from a foun­da­tion in val­ues — but this foun­da­tion may not be val­ues so much as dogma.

Dog­ma, as you know, is incon­tro­vert­ible truth, and it is noto­ri­ous­ly cor­rupt­ible on the basis of per­son­al gain. My truths are truer than your truths. My truths are bet­ter, supe­ri­or, more universal. 

In this way dog­ma becomes what and who we are ver­sus what and who they are, the oth­ers, who­ev­er they may be. By adher­ing to our dog­ma, we become supe­ri­or — until in a self-rein­forc­ing way, our own supe­ri­or­i­ty becomes part of the very dog­ma we believe in — and there­fore hold to it ever more tight­ly. We may start off as lib­er­als or con­ser­v­a­tives, cap­i­tal­ists or social­ists, right-wing Chris­tians or lib­er­tar­i­an Sci­en­tol­o­gists — what­ev­er — and pret­ty soon our iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the belief struc­tures of being these things bleeds into an uncon­scious truth, sub­tle or man­i­fest, that we are fun­da­men­tal­ly bet­ter, too — bet­ter than oth­er peo­ple who don’t drink the same kool-aid, have the same “com­mon sense” or share the same “val­ues,” such as they are.

The side effects are com­plete­ly destruc­tive: our supe­ri­or dog­mas and per­son­al supe­ri­or­i­ties only serve to mar­shal ever deep­en­ing cycles of mis­trust, insen­si­tiv­i­ty, dis­re­spect, loss of com­pas­sion and desire for con­trol — lest the oth­ers over­run who we are and what we stand for. We stop ques­tion­ing, search­ing, speak­ing in an actu­al dia­logue, think­ing and dis­cov­er­ing things for our­selves until we become so very rei­fied in our group-con­coct­ed beliefs, col­lec­tive fan­tasies, and adver­sar­i­al behav­iors that things have to fall apart in order, prob­a­bly vio­lent­ly, for any new order to be born. Indeed, we may sense a new world com­ing and feel­ing scared add heat to our con­vic­tions that we both are “right” and “have the right” to do what­ev­er it is we believe we need to do to main­tain what­ev­er belief sys­tem we’ve adopt­ed. It’s all circular.

The con­tests of dog­ma these days, of the supe­ri­or­i­ty of one group over anoth­er, are dis­turb­ing and deaf­en­ing, the pres­sure being to fur­ther polar­ize, pick sides or be judged as a weak, if clos­et­ed enemy.

The deep­er ques­tion, I think, is why such loud, com­pet­ing dog­mas are surg­ing for­ward to be in charge right now. Why do we think there will be win­ners when it cer­tain­ly looks like we all are head­ed to be losers in the process? Ah, per­haps this is the thing, you know: this eter­nal illu­sion that win­ning is still pos­si­ble, leav­ing some­body’s sense of supe­ri­or­i­ty intact. 

We com­mon­ly call peo­ple who have author­i­ty (and dog­ma can con­vey a sense of author­i­ty) lead­ers. But maybe there is an entire­ly dif­fer­ent kind of lead­ing that isn’t based on dog­ma at all, that can’t be manip­u­lat­ed by it. Maybe it’s just this thing about being eth­i­cal and build­ing trust, avoid­ing fan­ta­sy, respect­ing and serv­ing one anoth­er, not excus­ing our­selves on the basis of “what we have to do in order to sur­vive” — which is to say, what our supe­ri­or dog­ma tells us to do so it can sur­vive. I think we could pret­ty much apply this oth­er form of lead­er­ship to our­selves, our affil­i­a­tions, our com­pa­nies, our coun­tries. That might, in fact, help us to actu­al­ly sur­vive and to tru­ly be bet­ter, not just pre­tend we are bet­ter than one another.

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