Your description of strategic thinking and thinkers reminded me of the ferris wheel scene from the movie, The Third Man (from the novel by Graham Greene), where Orson Welles plays a man who is making a fortune wholesaling drugs he knows are deadly, and talks about the people below as “dots” whose lives are totally meaningless. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=21h0G_gU9Tw
17 July 2022 at 13:07
WJT said...
This is a very important point: Strategic thinking is evil in and of itself, regardless of the goal aimed at. It’s obvious once it’s been pointed out.
- that's how it seemed to me, but only once I had realized it explicitly.
Until then, it was a temptation I would *often* fall into ('heady stuff'), until I could sense that it was doing me harm, and then I would try to stop after a while.
This may be why I am intuitively averse to big schemes of social-spiritual prediction/ destiny/ evolution stretching into the future - such as Rudolf Steiner made integral to his system.
This is a thought-provoking post. I agree that "necessarily to regard individual Men, families, organically-real human groupings - as instrumental; as means-to-strategic-ends... " is not good. And in particular that kind of thinking leads to temptation to large-scale evil, probably many of the genocides during the 20th century were planned under influence from that kind of thinking.
I would also distinguish large-scale thinking from strategic thinking in the sense of this post, where not all large-scale thinking is bad. There are trends or spiritual impulses that originate on the macro level, even though they do filter down to the micro level. And so, to act in harmony with it, one might have to consider the macro level effects.
Another thing is that planning the destiny of the world or countries as a whole is not properly the duty of human beings in general (excepting perhaps some very rare people with a special role to play), though I believe there are angels involved in it. So, it leads to great hubris where human beings trying to usurp a role not theirs.
@NLR - "There are trends or spiritual impulses that originate on the macro level, even though they do filter down to the micro level. And so, to act in harmony with it, one might have to consider the macro level effects."
I'm not sure what you mean - could you give an example?
One example would be the idea of a group soul, that people were part of a tribe or a people or a nation. In trying to envision how the group soul works, I don't think of it as a bottom-up phenomeonon, an aggregate of each person's contribution, but rather as something from above, maybe instituted by a powerful being like the angel of a country, which people then fit into.
A spiritual family is bottom up, but a group soul is top-down. I think they are both real, but distinct and operate in different ways.
@NLR - I see what you mean, and I agree that there can be such groups.
I would distinguish this from strategic thinking; because it is personal, indeed individual - but at a 'larger scale'. It's like the difference between a plan and a destiny.
17 July 2022 at 20:13
Alexeyprofi said...
Do you think that eugenic programs, implemented at national level, would be evil too? BC this is what some right-wing christians want to do.
"Do you think that eugenic programs, implemented at national level, would be evil too? "
Yes, of course. https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/search?q=eugenics
18 July 2022 at 20:19
It seems increasingly clear to me that the world's policies are planned by a relatively small global establishment who practice 'strategic thinking'. This is a long-term and large-scale analysis for which a decade is the basic time-segment of change; and even nations are too small to be of much interest: whole alliances and continental divisions (and indeed the planet) are the basis of critique.So when one talks of geographical-population units such as the Anglosphere, Europe, Asia; and timescales of decades, generations, centuries - one is firmly in the realms of strategic thinking... Strategic thinking is heady stuff for its empowered participants (I mean, those few who command the influence and resources to compel their ideas to be taken seriously then implemented). To engage in strategic thinking produces a kind of ecstatic delirium in its participants; which gives them the grandiose delusion that the largeness of scale is intrinsically morally superior to the downstream world of manipulated-sound-bites and biased-selected snippets from the mass media and official communications, upon-which most people in the world waste their energies. This innate moral superiority, and the fact that it is rooted in a world view that sees individual Men as merely subject components of vast masses of hundreds-of-millions being directed by strategists; is what leads to the smug psychopathy of the leadership class - the fact that they are not really human - but instead literally-demonic in their attitudes, motivations and behaviours. The leadership class is literally demonic, because strategic thinking is not just a tool of purposive evil; but is itself innately evil.This means that those who affiliate with God and divine creation cannot use strategic thinking for Good ends. To use strategic thinking is necessarily to regard individual Men, families, organically-real human groupings - as instrumental; as means-to-strategic-ends... And this is precisely to take the side of evil. So; it is useful to know about the attitudes of strategic thinking; because it unmasks the core activities of evil in the world today: the 'litmus test issues' such as the birdemic-peck, transagenda and sexual revolution more generally, climate change emergency, antiracism; and most recently the contrived Fire Nation War with its sub-agendas of hyperinflation and food/ energy famines. When these mini-strategies are truly seen as aspects of strategic thinking; we may understand how it is they encompass the world and persist/ accelerate over timescales many-fold greater than the fare more frequent cycles of politics, business, finance, media... Even across human generations. But those who take the side of Good cannot (and should not try to) combat Establishment strategic thinking with any alternative strategies - because that would be to use The One Ring 'against' Sauron. We should seek understanding at the strategic level - but not ourselves operate at this level. Instead, our units of Christian activity should be individual persons, and groups who are affiliated by love - not groups whose members are joined by bureaucratic organization or economics; and not groups who have been deluded by strategic thinking.
"The evil of strategic thinking"
10 Comments -
Your description of strategic thinking and thinkers reminded me of the ferris wheel scene from the movie, The Third Man (from the novel by Graham Greene), where Orson Welles plays a man who is making a fortune wholesaling drugs he knows are deadly, and talks about the people below as “dots” whose lives are totally meaningless.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=21h0G_gU9Tw
17 July 2022 at 13:07
This is a very important point: Strategic thinking is evil in and of itself, regardless of the goal aimed at. It’s obvious once it’s been pointed out.
17 July 2022 at 13:56
@WJT "It’s obvious once it’s been pointed out."
- that's how it seemed to me, but only once I had realized it explicitly.
Until then, it was a temptation I would *often* fall into ('heady stuff'), until I could sense that it was doing me harm, and then I would try to stop after a while.
This may be why I am intuitively averse to big schemes of social-spiritual prediction/ destiny/ evolution stretching into the future - such as Rudolf Steiner made integral to his system.
17 July 2022 at 14:19
Add "social science" frameworks and concepts. Once these animate a person or groups thinking--its over....
17 July 2022 at 15:54
This is a thought-provoking post. I agree that "necessarily to regard individual Men, families, organically-real human groupings - as instrumental; as means-to-strategic-ends... " is not good. And in particular that kind of thinking leads to temptation to large-scale evil, probably many of the genocides during the 20th century were planned under influence from that kind of thinking.
I would also distinguish large-scale thinking from strategic thinking in the sense of this post, where not all large-scale thinking is bad. There are trends or spiritual impulses that originate on the macro level, even though they do filter down to the micro level. And so, to act in harmony with it, one might have to consider the macro level effects.
Another thing is that planning the destiny of the world or countries as a whole is not properly the duty of human beings in general (excepting perhaps some very rare people with a special role to play), though I believe there are angels involved in it. So, it leads to great hubris where human beings trying to usurp a role not theirs.
17 July 2022 at 17:03
@NLR - "There are trends or spiritual impulses that originate on the macro level, even though they do filter down to the micro level. And so, to act in harmony with it, one might have to consider the macro level effects."
I'm not sure what you mean - could you give an example?
17 July 2022 at 18:45
One example would be the idea of a group soul, that people were part of a tribe or a people or a nation. In trying to envision how the group soul works, I don't think of it as a bottom-up phenomeonon, an aggregate of each person's contribution, but rather as something from above, maybe instituted by a powerful being like the angel of a country, which people then fit into.
A spiritual family is bottom up, but a group soul is top-down. I think they are both real, but distinct and operate in different ways.
17 July 2022 at 19:13
@NLR - I see what you mean, and I agree that there can be such groups.
I would distinguish this from strategic thinking; because it is personal, indeed individual - but at a 'larger scale'. It's like the difference between a plan and a destiny.
17 July 2022 at 20:13
Do you think that eugenic programs, implemented at national level, would be evil too? BC this is what some right-wing christians want to do.
18 July 2022 at 20:01
"Do you think that eugenic programs, implemented at national level, would be evil too? "
Yes, of course. https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/search?q=eugenics
18 July 2022 at 20:19