Resource for Your Source: TheMes of Jack
Hypocrisy – Two Case Studies:
Eckhart Tolle and Noam Chomsky
HYPOCRITE, n. “One who, professing virtues that he does not respect, secures the advantage of seeming to be what he depises.” Ambrose Bierce
“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.” Francois de La Rochefoucauld
“The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.” Jane Addams
“Go put your creed into your deed.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.” Hannah Arendt
“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.” Socrates
Two of my favorite Hypocrites are Eckhart Tolle and Noam Chomsky.
CASE STUDY 1: ECKHART TOLLE
The questions to ask of the “spiritual gurus” such as Tolle SHOULD NOT BE:
What is God, Truth, Reality, etc.,
How much are you worth, your total assets?
How do you earn your money?
Are you sexually active and with which sex and why or why not?
Do you believe in monogamy and why or why not?
What do you do with your money?
Do you do drugs and why or why not?
Etc.
Ask real SEXUAL/FINANCIAL Questions and get REAL ANSWERS.
Here are other views of the Enlightened Eckhart Tolle (note the dates):
“He says he doesn’t pay much attention to money, although he jokes that he “should pay more”. He has used his new-found wealth to buy a flat, which overlooks wild parkland, and a car. He says that while he has no intention of setting up an ashram or centre, 'it could develop organically'. Still, he has no plans to create an empire or “a heavy commercial structure.
Munro Magruder, assistant publisher at New World Library, the American publisher that picked up the American rights for Tolle in 1999, says: 'The last big best-seller we had was The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra … One of those laws is to practise detachment, but Chopra doesn’t. He is very involved in the business. (But) Eckhart truly practises detachment. 'He’s never asked how many copies of his book we’ve sold, nor enquired about the marketing campaign. He couldn’t care less. He’s only interested in being a teacher, and people resonate with that. He’s the genuine article.' "Telegraph Magazine
http://www.inner-growth.info/power_of_now_tolle/eckhart_tolle_teleg_mag.htm 2003
"Whatever you think people are withholding from you praise, appreciation, assistance, loving care and so on give it to them. Soon after you start giving, you will start receiving." Eckhart Tolle
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/religion/2010-04-15-tolle15_CV_N.htm 2010
“Money is a good example. An enlightened person or business is not concerned primarily with making money, because when you are concerned with making money you want the future more than the present.” Eckhart Tolle
http://rayhemachandra.com/2010/09/25/eckhart-tolle-on-making-money/ 2010
“When asked about his wealth some of his replies seem evasive. I noticed he once justified the price of his seminars with some comment about it costing a lot to organise such things. But this failed to address the obvious point that the tours are raking in a fortune. It actually seemed like a slightly dishonest answer from someone trying to defend their self-image.
He also reacted by making some vague comment about the possibility of setting up a foundation to help people with his money. However to my knowledge he has held onto vast reserves of cash he could never possibly need for well over a decade.” Blog
http://www.howtoforgivepeople.com/eckhart-tolle-criticism-2 2013
“Eckhart Tolle has established a huge worldwide commercial enterprise through his business company, Eckhart Teachings. Last month, Watkins Bookshop in London named Eckhart as the world’s second most influential spiritual teacher after the Dalai Lame and immediately ahead of Pope Francis.
He has become one of the best known spiritual teachers in the Western world offering retreats, public talks as well as appearing on various television programs. Millions have read one or more of his four books: The Power Of Now; The Practise Of The Power Of Now; A New Earth; Stillness Speaks. Published in 35 languages, these four books have gone onto sell some 12 million copies or more between them.
His commercial activities in the UK alone include Eckhart Tolle TV Live Stream for six months. $99.65, New Earth Card Deck for £19.00, New Earth Calendar for £11.00, Inspirational Selections from A New Earth £18.00, Eckhart Tolle’s Findhorn Retreat (2 DVDs and a book). £27.00, Eckhart Tolle’s Music to Quiet the Mind £13.00, In the Presence of Mystery (Audio) £22.50 and much, much more. Eckhart charges individuals between the cheapest seats at £50 to £75 for the “platinum seats” to listen to him give a two hour talk with questions and answers.
Eckhart gives talks addressing the suffering of clinging to ownership. Yet, it is stated on his website: “Absolutely no recording devices of any kind are allowed at the retreat.” Eckhart Teachings keep a tight control over recorded access to his words.
In A New Earth (page 46), Eckhart writes about the problem of the ego. ‘I don’t have enough yet’ by which the ego really means ‘I am not enough yet.’
‘Having – the concept of ownership – is a fiction created by the ego… Wanting keeps the ego alive much more than having. It is an addictive need….’
Fine words, Mr. Tolle. You have made $millions in the last 15 years. Do you really need to own so much money? Why do you still want to make even more money?
Please explain to your many followers how your desires and needs to make so much money from your talks, retreats and commercial sales contribute to a new Earth.
Please let your followers know what you do with your immense wealth?
Do you use your money to create a better life for people? If so, what organisations, trusts, charities do you give to?
Do you invest you invest your money in the financial markets? If so, which?
Do you leave your money in your bank? If so, why?
It is surely appropriate to question whether his growing personal wealth, and his desire for more, is compatible with his spiritual teachings.
Ask not for whom the Bell Tolles as you toil for his Toll, same as you pay your Tax to the other God called Government.
CASE STUDY 2: NOAM CHOMSKY
The questions to ask of the “political gurus” such as Chomsky SHOULD NOT BE:
Why is Capitalism, America, etc. causing so much human misery,
but SHOULD BE:
How much are you worth, your total assets?
Do you own stocks, bonds, or other financial instruments and why or why not?
What do you do with your money?
Do you believe in the Free Market or the State and why or why not?
Do you believe in any justification for initiated force to get what you want and why or why not?
Etc.
Ask real POLITICAL/FINANCIAL Questions and get REAL ANSWERS.
Here are other views of the Defender of Democracy and the Poor Noam Chomsky:
“There’s a famous definition in the Gospels of the hypocrite, and the hypocrite is the person who refuses to apply to himself the standards he applies to others. By that standard, the entire commentary and discussion of the so-called War on Terror is pure hypocrisy, virtually without exception. Can anybody understand that? No, they can’t understand it.” Noam Chomsky, Power and Terror, 2003
“For all his in-principle disdain of communism, however, when it came to the real world of international politics Chomsky turned out to endorse a fairly orthodox band of socialist revolutionaries. They included the architects of communism in Cuba, Fidel Castro and Che Guevera, as well as Mao Tse-tung and the founders of the Chinese communist state. Chomsky told a forum in New York in December, 1967 that in China ‘one finds many things that are really quite admirable.’ He believed the Chinese had gone some way to empowering the masses along lines endorsed by his own libertarian socialist principles:
"China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step." When he provided this endorsement of what he called Mao Tse-tung’s ‘relatively livable’ and ‘just society,’ Chomsky was probably unaware he was speaking only five years after the end of the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst in human history. He did not know, because the full story did not come out for another two decades, that the very collectivization he endorsed was the principal cause of this famine, one of the greatest human catastrophes ever, with a total death toll of thirty million people.”
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=18389 2003
Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, by Peter Schweizer, New York: Doubleday. According to Do As I Say (Not As I Do) author and Hoover Institution hand Peter Schweizer, he is also a raging hypocrite. He once told an interviewer for National Public Radio that he didn’t want to discuss “the house, the children, personal life—anything like that.” According to Chomsky, “This is not about a person. It’s about ideas and principles.” Schweizer has a different take. He argues that Chomsky’s life is strikingly inconsistent with his stated ideals, and he marshals copious evidence to back up that claim:
• Chomsky joined the faculty of MIT not as a member of the Linguistics Department but as part of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. Lab professors were blessed with lighter teaching loads, higher salaries, and extensive support staff. The only catch was that their work, reports Schweizer, “was funded entirely by the Pentagon and a few multinational corporations.” The professor saw no problem in railing against the entire defense establishment while he drew a salary from same and conducted research that the generals found useful.
• The MIT mandarin often identifies with the working class and calls himself a socialist, but he acquired one home in Lexington, Massachusetts, valued at $850,000 and another estate in Wellfleet worth at least $1.2 million. The Wellfleet home is smack dab in the middle of a state park, and any further developments are prohibited by law. The radical historian Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, is one of the few neighbors who could afford to buy in.
• Chomsky is dead set against tax havens and has railed against trusts as tools for the rich to perpetuate structural inequality. And yet, ‘A few years back he went to Boston’s venerable white-shoe law firm Palmer and Dodge and, with the help of a tax attorney specializing in ‘income-tax planning,’ set up an irrevocable trust to protect his assets against Uncle Sam.’ When questioned about this, Chomsky told Schweizer, ‘I don’t apologize for putting aside money for my children and grandchildren.’
The author replies with what becomes a well worn refrain by the end of the book: that Chomsky ‘offered no explanation for why he condemns others who are equally proud of their provision for their children and who try to protect their assets from Uncle Sam.’”
http://reason.com/archives/2006/04/01/im-ok-youre-a-hypocrite 2006
Check out the film on Left-Wing Hypocrites like Chomsky and others here:
Ask the cunning linguist to say what he means and to mean what he says. Check his bank balance and where his Ass and its Ets sit and see if he is the Friend of the Poor he pretends to be.
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