[For part one of this critique, please go here]

Jargon Out the Yin-Yang

One of my biggest stumbling blocks with Ken Wilber is his interminable use of language. Having written so many wildly successful books, I hesitate to suggest that he’s not a very good writer. I suspect there’s something else going on here (or at least I hope). Consider this example from page 34 of A Theory of Everything:

But in order for this to happen, consciousness must go post-green. Paraphrasing Graves, “The green meme must break down in order to free energy for the jump into second-tier. This is where the leading edge is today.” Since the major cause of fixation to the green meme is boomeritis, then in order for this integral transformation to readily occur, boomeritis must be addressed and remedied, at least to a substantial degree. (Suggestions for doing so are set forth in Boomeritis.) But the fact is, if you see the problem of boomeritis and recognize its danger, you are already over that hump.

I’ve always abided by the “book store test” which means you should be able to pick up a book, open to and read a random passage and it draws you in. This passage miserably fails that test, instead casting you out. Now, if we just try to look at this bit directly by itself without any outside references to Wilber or anything else, does it make any fucking sense? Absolutely none! It’s jargon piled upon jargon piled upon jargon. And if you think maybe I chose an uncharacteristic passage to prove a point, think again! They are all just like this. It’s a completely fair argument.

One thing you’ll run into among people who are fans of Wilber is that they are altogether unable to actually explain any of his ideas to you. They’ll say: “There’s too little space here to do it justice” or if you’re (un)lucky, they will simply break you off a piece of jargon and ask you to take a bite. But for me, jargon does not equal valuable ideas.

On some level, I feel like Wilber is cloaking his ideas in complex ridiculous language on purpose. What purpose could that be? Well, it seems to me that when you spend so much time trying to decode and master vocabulary, you spend less time actually dissecting and analyzing the ideas themselves. It becomes a sort of social game of “follow the leader” where you’re trying to communicate and fit in by learning the lingo. But if you strip away a lot of the Wilberisms, then the ideas start to crumble. I’ll talk more about that in Part 3 of this series though.

As I’ve analyzed elsewhere, the redefinition of words and accumulation of jargon is a classic technique to re-imprint people with a new reality tunnel. Whether that reality tunnel is good or bad is open to debate. But you can get someone to put aside that debate (or important elements of it) by getting them to accept your language usage. Robert Anton Wilson openly talked about this technique, as did L. Ron Hubbard. We see it come up again and again with religions and other story-systems as well.

Hubbard made extensive use of this in his creation of Scientology. There’s actually a term “Scientologese” used to describe the weird distortions of language Hubbard came up with to imprint and maintain his reality tunnel. For examples of what I’m talking about, check out this glossary of Scientology terms. Or an even quicker example would be this letter written in Scientologese. The similarities between this and what Wilber is doing with language seem to be rather strong. The question for me is not whether or not this is being done on purpose, but what Wilber’s purpose is in doing it?