What is Karma?
Beware of the stories we tell about ourselves--
Human beings routinely take shortcuts in their reasoning to make sense of the world. This is so common that there’s a name for it: ‘heuristics’. These can be things like analogies, rules of thumb, general assumptions, and so on. Here’s an example of a character from The Game of Thrones explaining one particular heuristic he uses: think of the worst someone could want.
I chose this example to also illustrate another point. It is true that in many cases it is a good idea to prepare for the worst. But this can also lead to paranoia and self-fulfilling prophesies—like labeling potential allies as enemies. And in this case, the character Little Finger is trying to manipulate House Stark leader Sansa into thinking of her sister Aria as an enemy—even though she is potentially her strongest ally. He’s trying to pit the two sisters against each other so he can manipulate Sansa. (This fails somewhat spectacularly.) This is the problem with heuristics. They are short-cuts we all use to help us navigate the world around us, but like many short-cuts if we aren’t careful they can get us lost.
One of the traditional heuristics from many religions is the idea that sacrifice will result in good luck. Here’s a excerpt from a very good short video on YouTube (How Christians Were Conditioned for the Grift) that explains the most explicit incarnation of this in the modern USA: the so-called ‘prosperity gospel’.
There’s also a flipside to this idea—the bad deeds we do will result in bad luck. A truly depressing one came through FaceBook comments when I posted an article I wrote seven years ago:
If memory serves, it was someone whom I thought identified himself as a Hindu Swami. He argued that it was wrong to get too upset about the way the world treats the poor and oppressed. In effect, he said a young woman who was forced into prostitution and died of syphilis ‘had it coming’ because of the misdeeds she had done in a previous life. Of course, I’m talking about the Asian idea of ‘karma’.
I don’t really have any proof that the Christian God doesn’t want someone’s granny to live in absolute poverty so a televangelist can fly in a private jet; or the cosmic laws of Hinduism don’t approve of forcing a pre-teen into prostitution so she can die of tertiary syphilis. But I don’t see much evidence either way. And in the absence of strong proof, I’m inclined to believe that both the prosperity gospel and karmic punishment are complete and utter bullshit that helps the predatory to prey on the gullible.
So why am going on about the Game of Thrones, the prosperity gospel, and karma? It’s because they are all examples of heuristics that really screw up some people’s ability to make rational decisions:
projecting one’s ideas about how awful other people can be onto others to the point where ‘every accusation becomes an admission’ (also known as ‘projection’)
believing that every personal sacrifice is somehow intrinsically of value simply because it is a sacrifice
refusing to believe that awful things happen to good people through no fault of their own—so we simply assume fault because of the awful things happening
These are pretty easily understood problems, which is why I used them to introduce the idea a lot of people follow pretty dysfunction habits of thinking. Now I want to get to other equally dysfunctional heuristics that I think a lot of people find harder to identify.
The Grievances of Our Ancestors are Not Our Grievances
The other day I was listening to a CBC podcast that was trying to answer the question of whether or not the USA is about to invade Cuba and heard a woman in Florida say that she was happy about the US blockade of Cuba and indictment of Raoul Castro for the ‘crime’ of defending it’s airspace against American-based provocateurs. What set me off was when she said ‘I was only 2 years old when I left Cuba and came to America—and I want to visit the land of my family’. In other words, she is an American who doesn’t have any memories at all of Cuba other than those that were manufactured by and inserted into her consciousness by an expat, anti-Communist community in the USA. And on the basis of this very tenuous connection, she is supporting an embargo that is creating a great deal of misery in that island nation. If you want to know what I’m talking about, check out this short video What Cubans Really Think About Trump. (Here’s an excerpt.)
Cuba isn’t a perfect country (what is?), but it is it’s own nation and a small rump of exiles in Florida and the American ruling class have no right to created misery for it’s people simply because they want to make it a vassal state. (As a Canadian, I can certainly understand this point of view!)
I’ve seen this sort of thing a couple other times:
children generations removed from their Irish immigrant ancestors who are bitter about the potato famine
Zionists adamant that Israel belongs to Jewish settlers because of what’s written in the Hebrew Bible and because the Holocaust was horrific
Please note, I’m not talking about people who have been directly impacted by recent atrocities—like the survivors of residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, or Jim Crow. Nor am I talk about folks simply asking for people to admit bad things actually happened. And I’m certainly not talking about people who are facing real discrimination right now. Instead, I’m talking about folks whose entire understanding of a past wrong comes exclusively from a collective ‘story’ that their subculture has repeated over and over again—and who are using this story to justify wrongs being committed against other people who had nothing at all to do with those historical crimes.
Years ago I remember watching a play put on by a First Nations drama company. It consisted of a series of scenes in the lives of people in Canada. One was of a young woman who’s family died in the potato famine and survived a trip across the Atlantic in a ‘coffin ship’. Another was First Nations community that had it’s land taken by settlers. And yet another was a Central American family of immigrants that fled a CIA-sponsored terror campaign. After the audience watched these characters tell their stories, a narrator simply pointed-out that almost everyone who lives in Canada has some sort of persecution in their ancestral background. If that is the case—what benefit do we get from using it as an excuse to persecute others as a form of redress?
The Point of Karma Isn’t to Point Fingers—it’s to Stop it!
Eastern religions don’t suggest people should try to get good karma so they can move up the food chain and become luckier and luckier. Instead, they consider this process a wheel where people are constantly moving round and round throughout eternity. For them, the point isn’t getting ahead—it’s breaking the wheel and getting beyond it.
Like Little Finger from the Game of Thrones, I have my own heuristic ‘little game’. When I learn about some cultural artifact I do a couple things. First, I try to figure out if it is being used to ill effect. If it is, I try to think about another way of using it in a way that would be a benefit. And in the case of karma, I’d suggest that it is a useful concept if we don’t think of it as being about people’s actions but instead the beliefs that lead to those actions.
I’m not alone in thinking this, as this quote from a website would suggest:
The wheel of karma has three distinct components: the thought (vritti) that propels the action; the impression (samskara) created by that thought and the ensuing action; and the next round (chakra) of action propelled by the samskara. Thus, another name for the wheel of karma is vritti samskara chakra. This concept is the ground for understanding the law of karma. If we take a closer look at how we create our personal wheel of karma, we will begin to see what a profound effect it has on all aspects of our lives.
Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, PhD—The Wheel of Karma
Looking at the example of Little Finger, I’d say the bad karma comes from his assumption that everyone ‘plays the game’ of pitting one person against another. Sansa and Aria beat him because they follow their late father’s heuristic: ‘in the winter the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives’. That is to say, to break the wheel of karma that fuels the Game of Thrones world, what’s needed is for people to trust each other and put the good of the group ahead of the individual. Because Sansa trusts Aria, together they are able to outwit Little Finger.
With regard to the Israel/Palestine conflict, the karmic wheel is broken by people realizing how Zionists have perverted the memory of the Holocaust and used it to create a racist Apartheid state. Once you do that, ‘never again’ means ‘never again to anyone’, not just ‘never again to us’.
And with regard to Cuba, the America government and Cuban-Americans citizens have to accept that it is an independent nation. And as such, it has it’s own set of priorities and history. And that not only includes the harm that the Castro government has inflicted on some people, but also the harm that the USA and the Batista regime that preceded Castro had inflicted on many others. Yes, Cuba has it’s own set of problems. But it should be allowed to deal with them by itself instead of being bludgeoned into becoming another vassal state like Puerto Rico. Breaking the wheel of karma involves the people of America—even those exiles in Florida—finally deciding that there are enough problems in the USA to deal with already without meddling with Cuba too.
Hi Bill. I was brought up to believe the exact narrative you posted about the Israeli Palestine conflict. Thanks for calling it out.
Rachel