Why is enlightenment even a thing?

Home - Quora Link

Ooh, I like this question.

The bottom line here is culture. A lot of people don’t remember America’s long tradition of self-help literature and occultism. Self help grew out of frontier medicine men snake oil salesmen, who felt zero scruples about collecting a bunch of tall tales and selling them to hick yokels. John D. Rockefeller’s father was just such a quack, and later this led to JDR funding the very first medical research facility in the United States.

That’s right, evidence-based medicine as we know it today didn’t exist before the oil revolution. Before then it was a mishmash of homeopathy, occultism, and all sorts of syncretic “teaching” that got lumped together in the bookstore under “Self Help.” At some point, Indian gurus started coming over here and contributing. Like an ‘illogic’ snowball that just keeps getting more and more illogical as it rolls downhill.

It is this tradition that pop phenoms like The Secret and The Power of Now are riding on. Even today, science and evidence are scant enough and people are still gullible enough to get taken in by stuff like this.

The recipe is this, first you have to be unfailingly positive in your bearing and claims. This makes it so that when the skeptics come in, you look harmless and they look like assholes.

Second, you have to be talking to really bored people with just a little bit of money to spend. Self help is deceptively cheap, and it’s easy for people to talk themselves into small purchases. If you want to con rich people, well, that’s a different game.

Third, you just need to mix everything up in a big cauldron. Use whatever is fashionable at the moment. I remember one movie I watched that claimed that frozen ice crystals looked better when they came from clearer water, this was hailed as some crazy new discovery.

Enlightenment is the ultimate in self-help empty promises. You can literally claim anything you want about enlightenment, and the only thing people want to know is just how high they have to jump to get there.

Enlightenment is a weird idea that I can’t get rid of or get away from. Anywhere you go on the Internet where the discussion turns spiritual, enlightenment rears its ugly head. If I could go back in time and smack some sense into the people who’ve set the frame of the discussion, I’d do it in a heartbeat. If I could wipe every last trace of the concept from the public consciousness, I’d also do that in a heartbeat.

But as it is, it’s one of the very few gateways I have into the sorts of discussions I want to have. So the first thing I try to do whenever it comes up is to reframe the discussion so that it doesn’t make me want to throw up in my mouth. Can we talk about history, spirituality, science, logic? Pretty please with sugar on top? Anything but enlightenment.

But nobody wants to ask questions about that stuff. They want to know about enlightenment.