Whats wrong with Sam Harris?

[Arizzi]

I see so much hostility towards Sam from Leo and I don't know if many of the criticisms against Sam are entirely valid, and I feel that perhaps Leo hasn't spent a significant amount of time listening to him speak.  I wouldn't know.  But I had him pegged as someone who is actually concerned with the truth.  I have seen him wrestle with new ideas, and change his mind over the course of a podcast. One of his key guiding principles in a discussion should be to be charitable to the other side, and try to address the strongest possible arguments from that side.  He is a meditator and has written a book about the nature of consciousness which promoted spirituality.  This was read by hundreds of thousands of people.  I really don't see how one any of this would lead leo to peg him primarily as stage orange.

Core Values:
Autonomy, materialistic, result-driven
Paradigm:
Success “I improve myself.”
World View:
The (makeable) world is full of chances and opportunities and the world can be fully understood by using rational thinking.
Life Motto:
“I manifest myself through artful calculation.”
Life Theme:
Accumulate material abundance, individual freedom, and grab opportunities.
Life Philosophy:
I am responsible for my own wealth, and that is why I develop my skills. I think, therefore I exist

  I have also heard Sam accused of practicing "Scientism" which I would have to also disagree with.  With some atheists I have listened to (I might point to someone like Richard Dawkins), that might be a fairer assessment, however many others, including Sam Harris, very specifically point out that what science fundamentally is our current best guess at what is true, subject to change at any time as we gather more information, and are limited by our own human biases and limitations.  These words don't sound like a basis of a religion.  

 

Would love to hear everyone's thoughts.

Edit:  I would also love to hear what you all think of Jordan Peterson.  It would be fantastic to to have a video about this.

 

 

 

Edited July 9, 2018 by Arizzi

[Leo Gura]

Rationalism, materialism, scientism, moralism, intellectual crusading, demonization of Islam, duality.

Sam Harris is stuck playing the role of an intellectual. The lesser Jihad.

All classic traps you should watch out for.

Writing a book or talking about spirituality & meditation does not mean one is awakened or has a profound understanding of nonduality.

If you're at stage Blue/Orange/Green, Sam Harris might be useful to you. Once you get beyond that, he will hold you back.

There's nothing "wrong" with him. He is who he is.

[Key Elements]

12 hours ago, Arizzi said:

One of his key guiding principles in a discussion should be to be charitable to the other side, and try to address the strongest possible arguments from that side. 

The point that you said here is a very excellent point. Has he made friends and lived with any Muslim families and got to know them for real? What if Muslim families are raising kids in different parts of the world? How will the kids grow up and adjust to their parents and society? What if they're growing up in the US, UK, India, Pakistan, Dubai, Turkey, etc.? For anyone, you cannot just know them on the surface level. It takes a lot to know someone or even a few ppl deeply.

[ChimpBrain]

He was extremely helpful to me while transitioning out of blue/orange and into orange/green.  I don't find him nearly as appealing as I used to but I'm not exactly sure why.  I think he's doing a lot of people a lot of good though all in all.  For me he helped to transition both from religiousity to atheism and critical thinking, and then from atheism/rationalism into spirituality and meditation.  With all due respect, Leo seems to be too worried about him holding back stage  yellow (1% of population) from developing further and not giving enough credit to the good he's doing for blue and orange people which together comprise what, like 75% of people?  I can see how this would be easy to do coming from Leo's perspective since he's probably more evolved than Sam.  Leo did mention him in a positive light in the green and yellow videos though which was surprising to me and made me respect Leo even more for his objectivity and putting his own bias aside. 

[Guest Quanty]

Sam Harris is plated in "gold leaf", but the inside isn't. 

[Leo Gura]

I do very much enjoy Sam's tirades against Trump. It's a guilty pleasure of mine

He's very good at articulating the problems there because temperamentally, if Trump is matter, Sam is anti-matter.

[Arizzi]

On 7/8/2018 at 10:28 PM, Leo Gura said:

Rationalism, materialism, scientism, moralism, intellectual crusading, demonization of Islam, duality.

Sam Harris is stuck playing the role of an intellectual. The lesser Jihad.

All classic traps you should watch out for.

Writing a book or talking about spirituality & meditation does not mean one is awakened or has a profound understanding of nonduality.

If you're at stage Blue/Orange/Green, Sam Harris might be useful to you. Once you get beyond that, he will hold you back.

There's nothing "wrong" with him. He is who he is.

 

So actually some of this is stuff that has been on my mind a long time.  Some of these things I can agree with but  many people you have painted with these labels don't seem to fit them very well at all.  I suspect, and I acknowledge completely that this notion may be mistaken, that to some degree your preconceived opinions of him distort your view of his character.  I'm sure you would agree and I might reiterate your point that our individual "maps" are not the territory by far.

I'm very curious to talk about some of the specific points you brought up.  It is true that Harris does demonize and resort to dogma sometimes.  I might point to his views on trump and perhaps some of the headline statements he's made about islam.  But the core of his speech centered around the idea that specific beliefs matter.  It is inconceivable that all religions and their holy books say the same thing.  It is also very possible that the teachings themselves of the Koran may lend themselves to more extreme interpretations.  Of course whatever effect is also confounded to a large degree with historical and cultural factors of course.  But the idea itself is a valid one to my eye, even if I believe that historic and cultural factors are more indicative.  However Sam's idea doesn't seem like a demonization to me.  

About Scientism, I'm also puzzled with the frequency with which you color people with this. Maybe I don't realize how prevalent it is (I feel if it is it is merely that the vast majority of people are ignorant, don't think about it, or care) There is definitely some dogma, but you seem to decry refuting bad evidence.  Of course we should be open minded, and we don't comprehend reality, but within the purview of science, as long as we remain open and intellectually honest, rejecting bad or unsubstantiated ideas is a path that leads to greater truth.  

 

I would go on but would like to hear thoughts.

[Leo Gura]

There are numerous problems I have with Sam Harris:

• He doesn't understand what God is, what enlightenment is, what consciousness is, or what intelligence is.
• He does not understand the true origins of religion.
• He still clings to and advocates a rationalist morality, without being conscious that morality is a human invention and a weapon of the ego.
• He demonizes Islam by citing poll studies which are greatly distorted and misrepresentative. The majority of Muslims DO NOT believe it is right to kill apostates, etc. Those polls are just bad.
• He has built a cult following of atheists and rationalists which use Sam to justify a closedminded scientism.
• He still fundamentally holds a dualistic, materialistic worldview -- despite his meditation and spiritual questing.
• He doesn't really fathom the depth of psychedelics.
• He doesn't really fathom the depth of consciousness.
• He doesn't understand what Truth is. He doesn't understand that science and language cannot access Truth.
• He treats consciousness as though it is produced by the brain.
• He advances American exceptionalism, which is a blindness to national and cultural self-bias.
• He acts as though Western culture is objectively better and superior to other cultures.
• In evaluating the problems in the Middle East he places way too much emphasis on Islamic beliefs vs geo-political, historical, and economic factors, which are far more significant.
• There is no acknowledgment that Islam can be practiced at different levels of consciousness: Purple, Red, Blue, Orange, Green, Yellow, Turquoise. He paints all of Islam as Red/Blue. This is a fundamental error. The problems which exist within Islam are NOT due to specific beliefs in the Quran but due to lack of geo-political and consciousness development in the Middle East. All of the problems in the Middle East could be resolved without changing the Quran or the basics of Islam.
• He places way too much importance on the content of belief vs one's level of consciousness.
• He is engaging in a lesser Jihad and indoctrinating his fanbase into doing the same.
• Seems to me like he's making more enemies in the Middle East than building bridges. It's not an accident that he gets so many death threats. Because he's try to ram American culture down people's throats.
• He stokes up right wing Islamophobia.

He is the poster-child for scientism by making claims like the following: "The scientific data can't be racist." Which is quite ignorant of what "data" is. There is no such thing as data. All data is theory-laden and will of course be cherry-picked by the ego to justify its self-biases. Which is precisely the problem of scientism, and what people like JP or Sam Harris are doing. They use "data" and "reason" to be advance their biases.

I don't see an awareness of the nuances of epistemology within him. I also don't see an awareness of how the ego-mind uses logic, data, science, and rationality to advance its agenda.

Sam's entire rationalist philosophy is ego-based from my perspective.

He likes to play the philosopher without realizing that Western philosophy is dead because it is all mind-based ego games. You will never arrive a Truth via Western philosophy or science.

And the problem is that because he presents an air of authority and intelligence, people just swallow it up without realizing that they are being indoctrinated into a religion.

From the big picture perspective, the very problems that Sam Harris is pointing out within Islam, are the very same problems he himself is falling into. There is lack of self-awareness of the mechanisms of the ego-mind. Fundamentalism isn't just a problem for Islam. It's also a problem for materialistic atheists.

If people didn't take him too seriously, that would be okay. But his fanbase is cult-like and really believes in it.