The Cynic’s Dilemma - Cult Stranger than Fiction?
Rene Ritchie, February 3rd, 2008
John Siracusa, writing on the proposed Microsoft/Yahoo deal, opens with this little pearl:
This Yahoo/Microsoft thing presents another case of the Cynic’s Dilemma. The classic example is the leader of a wacko religious cult. Either he’s a brilliant student of the human psyche, consciously manipulating people for his own benefit, or he’s a true believer. Which scenario is more scary? Which is more evil? Which is more likely? Which would make you feel better about the world? Maybe it’s a little of both?
While often heard about in the technology sphere (Reality Distortion Field anyone?), any claim they’d make to patent cult-like activity would be drowned by martial arts’ prior art. We got tons of it.
When I was in my teens, I began training Karate at a local school. The teacher there, who was in his early 20s, confided in some of us that while he ostensibly taught Karate, he had secretly been trained in California by a high-ranking Shaolin monk. He’d run away as a child, he told us, and scaled a wall, and found the monks training in their California Shaolin Temple, and after coming back again and again, one of the monks had taken him in and trained him in Drunken Monkey.
Now, the guy was not very good at Karate. He wouldn’t spar with anyone except beginners and when they hit him, he’d chide them for “punching wrong”. But he knew how to spin his stories, and he was quick on his dissembling feet.
When someone showed up to class with a book on Drunken Monkey, the guy claimed we’d listened wrong and he’d told us he’d learned Drunken Mantis instead. (When someone later brought up questions on that, he again claimed he’d been listened to wrong, and that what he’d learned was real Drunken Fist, and he had to be really drunk to do it).
Likewise, the Shaolin monk who taught him morphed into a Vietnamese Shaolin monk, and when someone found the same picture of the purported Vietnamese Shaolin master in a martial arts magazine from France on the local Shaolin tour, the story morphed again.
He spoke Chinese, he told us. But when he went to see the local Chinatown Qigong expert, he needed a translator because he, we had to understand, only spoke Cantonese. However, when he wanted to learn from the local Wu Taijiquan master (so he could teach the material the next night), he needed a Cantonese translator, because he, we had to understand, only spoke the rare dialect of the California Vietnamese Drunken Shaolin Monk.
While this all may sound rather transparent and ridiculous (and is embarrassingly more so to write), back then, moment by moment, through a combination of a charismatic story-teller and a need to belong to some type of family unit, many of us bought it whole heartedly and defended it to the point of confrontation with others, including friends from real, traditional arts who tried (with the best of intentions) to point out the obvious transparency and ridiculousness to us, and even when, deep inside, we knew but couldn’t or wouldn’t admit we knew as much to ourselves. (And we all know, deep inside, because it really is that transparent and that ridiculous, and that obvious, but we’re proud and embarrassed and afraid and so we pretend we don’t even to our own detriment).
In our defense, we were, as I said, in our teens and the con only worked on us for a couple of years until we decided to break away. Not that it was easy, we lost friends who still wanted to belong (even and up until the guy took off on them, in the middle of the night, as he’d taken off on others before, and left them with his debts and legal problems, as he’d left others before).
The people who had come before us and left, we were told, hadn’t been worthy, and were always known not to be worthy, and so only we were learning the true secret stuff. And of course, when we left, the generation after us were told we had not been worthy, and has always been known not to be worthy, and only they would learn the truer than true, secreter than secret stuff. (And this cycle would repeat as each generation came to its senses, left, and were used to create the straw-man enemy meant to fuel the indoctrination of the next).
The only exception was the truly frightening disciple. The one who knew from the start that it was a cult. Who wanted it to be a cult, because he/she wanted to run the cult one day his/herself. That there is a beast best avoided at all costs.
Wing Chun Kuen, to bring this all back into focus and onto topic, saved me from the crazy MA cult of my idiot youth, but it also exposed me to the sad realization that even in Wing Chun Kuen, something so simple and practical, there could be cults as well, of personality and of practice.
Blame Bruce Lee, blame Kung Fu TV shows and movies, and the money and opportunity they made available, but there seems to be nothing humans can create that other humans can’t pervert for their own power, ego, and fortune. And the sadder truth is, in WCK (and some other arts), a person can be a great teacher and/or gifted fighter, and still a cult-like manipulator. There’s just something about having a legion of pajama uniformed, faith-filled faces, eyes shut tight and ears covered, willing to fetch, clean and carry for you, and create all manner of chaos and controversy to defend your name, no matter how much your own behavior serves to sully it (and them, and the poor art which is seldom if ever given any consideration).
Or maybe we should blame ourselves. If we know, deep down, what’s right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, then maybe we hold some of the responsibility to stop it. To walk away. To run.
If we’re ever expected, for example, we have an organizational enemy, if we’re ever told to attack or otherwise conspire against a person or group of persons, don’t we know that’s fundamentally wrong?
If we’re expected to organize, for example, t-shirts for a commercial club we pay to attend, to come up with a design, to pay for a stencil, and then to hand everything over and, on top of it, buy a t-shirt that we made, don’t we know that’s fundamentally a con?
If we’re expected, for example, to run after our sifu, clean his chair before he puts buttocks upon it, carry his bags full of items bought by our commercial payments, pay for his meal(s), and otherwise dote on him in a way we would never even consider for others (our mechanic? Never. Dentist? You crazy? Piano teacher? What the–?), don’t we know that’s fundamentally taking advantage?
If we’re expected, for example, to take it on faith that our sifu’s abilities are greater than the greatest fighter on the planet, that his/her skills are peerless, that when we’ve seen him/her get battered around or bounced off or refuse to engage even mediocre people outside the cult with our own eyes, that there was some cheating or high-theoretical reasoning that makes him/her still the best of the bestest, don’t we know that’s fundamentally BS?
If we’re expected, for example, to attack anyone who ever left our sifu/cult, to harass the traitor and decry them as never having learned the truer than true, secreter than secret version of the art, and we see generation upon generation of these traitors before us, don’t we fundamentally know we’re next?
(Note, the above examples may or may not represent how truly stupidly taken in by the Karate cult I was as a teenager, and may or may not be reflected by an unfortunate few in every and all arts, including Wing Chun Kuen).
But wait, some of you may say. Wing Chun Kuen is a Chinese art, and there’s a history of Master/Disciple, and a debt that goes beyond mere payment of dues for lessons taught, and a bond beyond the commercial.
Sure. And I have a bridge to Hong Kong to sell you.
Unfortunately, much of the so-called Chinese culture taught to Western students is anything but. In point of fact, it is behavior that, if a teacher ever tried to pull in a traditional Chinese setting, would get them abandoned at the very least. (Not that there aren’t cults even in China where this behavior may go on, but it’s not the norm).
When some teachers came West, they took advantage of Western ignorance to create a more beneficial environment for themselves. They twisted stories and legends and made some up whole-cloth simply to take advantage of those who didn’t know any better.
The truly beautiful thing about Chinese cultural arts is not simply the family structure (a strong subservience to patriarchal leadership), but that family structures bind everyone in all directions, not top-down (that would be more appropriate of a pyramid scheme).
Sigung, sifu, sihing, sijay, sidai, simui — all begin with “si”, a teacher. We all have something to learn from each other, and are all related to, and bound to, each other. It’s a plum-blossom, not a one-way street.
Personally, Wing Chun Kuen saved me from the cult. It brought me a sifu who never gouged financially (who even snuck off to pay for meals for some of his students who were hard-pressed for cash at times), who carried his own bags and offered to carry yours, who didn’t pass one superstition or cultural manipulations (who didn’t like big classes because they reminded him of the PRC army, and reminded us if Kung Fu movies were real, China would never lose in the Olympics), who loved watching the UFC with us and told us if we ever wanted to fight like that, we had to train like that (no super-Wing Chun Kuen entitlement that one system was, by God, better than all others regardless of effort and training), who never wanted to be a grand-master of anything (too much trouble and politics), who never referred to himself by any honorific (don’t put teacher on his business card, his teacher is the teacher, he’s only a transmitter of those teachings), who never spoke badly of any other wing chun person or family (it’s all good, the only question is whether or not the individual can make it work), and who otherwise never demanded my faith, but allowed me to grow an independent sense of faith all on my own.
Hopefully Wing Chun Kuen, it’s simplicity and practicality, can save others from the cult as well.
Even you.
(What? You know what denying it means…)
Add Your Reply!