In
a purile rant, Wilber tells people to suck his dick (then says if that offends you you belong to the green meme, this being Wilber's generic label for all his imagined enemies), rages against critics, launches an unprovoked personal attack on a colleague and former friend Frank Visser, and tries once again to enforce his own cultic in-group where questioning and freedom of thought are not allowed. It's all the end of what illusion remained of Wilber as any sort of respectable scholar.
A few choice extracts illustrate how someone who was once a sincere (even if limited) philosopher can slide down the path to cultic narcissism and purileness.
"...But simply still, I simply cannot stand this simple criticism of simply anything, let alone “simply,” so simply suck my dick, whaddaya say?...
...these painfully sluggish critics, dragging their bloated bellies across the ground at a snail’s pace of gray dreariness, can frankly just eat my dust and bite my ass....
....Okay, Wyatt [Wilber] has got to go back to work now, protecting the true and the good and the beautiful, while slaying partial-ass pervs, ripping their eyes out and pissing in their eye-sockets, using his Zen sword of prajna to cut off the heads of critics so staggeringly little that he has to slow down about 10-fold just to see them....
...Although, perhaps I should mention that I am at the center of the vanguard of the greatest social transformation in the history of humankind...."
The reader who does not know the background may be puzzled by the vehemence of Wilber's prose. Whatever could he be responding to? An unprovoked attack on a loved one? An attempt to take over the Integral Institute? No, the entire rant is due to Wilber being upset because his peers in the realm of integral theory are offering criticism of his ideas!
In other words, the entire rant is nothing but a reaction to peer review by critics on the Integral World website, which is the only place (apart from his own websites and websites of his followers) where Wilber's ideas are honoured and taken seriously, rather than being considered New Age rubbish as they are by mainstream academia.
In asmuch as peer-review is the life-blood of academic discourse, Wilber's crying foul seems (at least to me) like double standards. On the one hand that this is a guy who demands to be taken as a serious academic, on the other when people do start taking him seriously, which means submitting his ideas to the same scrutiny taht everyonee else's ideas are submitted to, he throws a tantie!
It is worth pointing out that there are only three examples of human social and intellectual interaction where questioning of ideas is not allowed. These are: political dictatorship, religious fundamentalism, and cultic authoritarianism.
That's my take on all this.; although I'm certainly not alone in feeling disquiet and disappointment at Wilber's transformation from self-styled pandit to cult-leader.
The Wilber incident is wonderfully explained and interpreted by Matthew Dalmann, at
http://www.matthewdallman.com/2006/06/ken-wilber.html ; a must read.
Long-time Wilber critic and anti-guruist Geoffrey Falk has a field day, and everything he says is appropriate:
http://www.geoffreyfalk.com/blog/June2006.asp#9
In typical cultic manner, Wilber justifies his outburst on the grounds that it was all crazy wisdom! Good ol' Ken was just testing us; separating the 2nd tier wheat from that accursed green chaff!
http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/show/48. Here we find more paranoid rantings, including
"..and believe me, we got the message: you don’t like us, you hate us, you hate I-I, you hate wilber, you hate this and you hate that—we heard you loud and clear. And we saw you. And now we know each other, don’t we?"
This sort of classic persecution complex is standard in cult leaders in general, and indicative of psychotic withdrawl of the leader and the group from the world. Wilber's own guru Da Free John provides an excellent example of this, but he is by no means the only one.
From his end, Frank Visser sets the matter straight with
Games pandits play: reply to Ken Wilber's raging rant and followed this some days later with "Criticism: Shadow or Challenge?" on the
Wilber Watch blog.
Although Tuff-Ghost, long-time Wilber fan, is dismayed
Vomiting Confetti: Wilber Criticism part I Vomiting Confetti: Wilber Criticism part II - Turn in your badge, most Wilber supporters seem to be remarkably accepting of their guru's diatribe, indicating that the process of cultic conditioning is already far advanced. The amazing thing is that these who are people who in other respects are highly intelligent, insightful, and spiritually-minded. Wilber as blind spot in their overall worldview is reminiscent of the professional educated elite that made up the Heavens Gate cult, who were unable to see anything dysfunctional in Marshall Applewhite's teaching. I'm absolutely not saying the Wilber cult will go the same way of course, but only pointing out the same phenomenon (probbaly universal in all cults, even relatively benign ones like Wilber's) of insiders or devotees selectively and collectively unable to see what to all outsiders is plain and obvious.
Wilber meanwhile weakly cited people who liked his original abusive post:
http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/show/49
Michel Bauwen's
editorial on Wilberism becoming a cult,
was picked up in the blogosphere, here at
http://deepsurface.net/2006/06/13/an-authoritarian-cult/. Michel's further comments on the cult of Wilber:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=245. His comments - insightful as always - have been incorporated into the present site
Here's a good analysis of Wilber's follow-up on his rant, which analyzes the authoritarian cognitive strategies in detail, at
http://dashh.typepad.com/ilife/2006/06/rainbowland.html ; another one, at
http://www.victorialansford.com/2006/06/ballad-of-ken-my-critics-just-dont.html
From outside the blogosphere: the three cognitive strategies used by Wilber to end critical discourse, at
http://www.integralworld.net/overyourhead.html
The older 'setting the record straight' of Matthew Dallman, good overview of what is wrong with Ken Wilber's approach, at
http://www.matthewdallman.com/2005/12/let-me-set-record-straight.html
See also Geoff Falk's
Bald Narcissism: the dis-integration of Ken Wilber
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