de baard maakt nog geen filosoof

barba non facit philosophum

I’ll speculate that many have very preconceived and somewhat fixed ideas about a whole host of things. They judge a book by its cover and have many presets about how that book should and ought look. If something does not fit the template already held it is not acceptable and this is particularly true because of internet driven cloning and copying. So-called artificial intelligence is likely to drive the dumbing down trend towards a near uniform mediocrity. Things will become ever more artificial.

If for example a spiritual “teacher” does not comply exactly with some preconceived ideas of how such a being is and how such a being behaves it is likely to cause dissent, disbelief and gossip. People think they know saintly and enlightened behaviour. Logic suggests that such are scarce and therefore rarely encountered. Nevertheless people know exactly how a spiritual teacher should be and how they should teach and how exactly they should behave. They already know how they want to be taught and within which parameters they will accept lessons.

I have worked for over  a decade in UK university education. The proliferation of learning objectives and lesson plans leads to a supermarket style checkout of packaged education. It is worse at high school level. The horizons of education shrink to bullet point measurables for someone to put in an Excel spreadsheet to graph.

Anything even slightly outside of the mainstream is seen as unorthodox or crazy. It will generate gossip and Chinese whispers around the campfires and erudite all-knowing dens on social media. People will tut-tut from a position of ignorance which they mistake as self-diagnosed omniscience.

If the beard does not look right and right-on you clearly have nothing to teach the herd, the shoal or the hive. You will get cancelled for not being boringly same.