Reading Mollie’s post yesterday about religion, and reading today about Krishnamurti’s rejection of any form of authority other than your experience when exploring truth, got me thinking again about tribalism and dogma.
The instinct to find and apply what Krishnamurti calls “false universals” is so strong. The successful case study, “best practice”, or for that matter The Ten Commandments. Having chosen our formula we then identify with those that share our “truth” and reject those who don’t. The sense of comfort we get from having found our answers is reinforced by our dengration of those who have come to different conclusions.
But they are all made up. They are all stories. Whether at work, or in the world at large, we cling to these stories with such desperation that we will fight holy wars over whether my story is more true than yours. We form gangs around our stories and exercise control over membership, who’s in and who’s out. We threaten eternal damnation to those who fall on the wrong side of that line.
But I will say again, they are all made up. They are combinations of made up stories passed down by our ancestors or new stories made up by our experts. We need to be forever sceptical about other people’s stories.
For that matter we need to be forever sceptical about our own…
The Obvious? 