Trickle-down spirituality

In this excellent piece Joseph Dillard shows how the trickle-down mentality of economics is actually a much broader core societal metaphor infecting spirituality, particularly that of Ken Wilber. A few excerpts:

"Trickle-down spirituality is a very popular form of laissez-faire, because it not only does not threaten proponents of trickle-down economics, it supports them by signaling solidarity with elite priorities of status, power, control, and privilege. It does so by adopting and championing basic principles commonly identified with laissez-faire economics.  [...] The core principles requiring adherence include personal responsibility, merit, and development: improve yourself and the whole world will get better. [...]  Trickle-down spirituality views consciousness as the fundamental, prevailing reality and human society as its product.  [...] Trickle-down spirituality affirms the primacy of the self and its responsibility to itself for itself, in the belief that when we each are on our own path to enlightenment, the consciousness of mankind is uplifted."


"Spiritual elitists are sure of their moral superiority, because they judge morality by their intentions, not by their trustworthiness in the eyes of those whose lives are impacted by both their actions and inaction. [...] The trickle-down spirituality of elites is a moral program; its world view is its instrument for insuring humans the blessings of an expanded, more liberating world view. [...] For elitists, trickle-down spirituality becomes a reflection of divine order in individual life as enlightenment and in society as utopia. Like Smith's laissez-faire capitalism, spiritual trickle-down is a crusade for the abolition of ethnocentric and non 'worldcentric' world views that are 'less adequate,' thereby cementing its advocates as elitists of the worst sort: those who punish their intellectual and moral inferiors 'for their own good.' This is both bad civilizational parenting and ideological colonialism."