[aron]

I wanted to re-visit Terry's post of his experience in Bellevue, where the elder said, "This isn't a democracy - the church life is an army". Specifically, it is an Asian army. As I said, if you read the history books you will see the American Army having an allowance for discussion, for back-and-forth. Earlier I gave George Washington and his generals as a classic case, but it was by no means the last. Conversely, in the Asian army it's expected that no commentary or public deliberation will be raised. At all. Ever.

In the American Army, if the commander gives an illegal order, the troops not only have the right to resist, but will be held accountable if they comply. Lt. Calley and the men of My Lai in Vietnam (shooting unarmed civilians in a ditch) found this out: you're expected to know the rules, and an order by a superior can't countermand them. But in the Asian army, any command from above is the rule, in and of itself. "Even when he's wrong he's right" is a classic orientalism.

I remember my LC "junior elder" telling me that whatever the "senior elder" said, he would do without question or hesitation, however wrong or ridiculous. At the time I thought it strange, as much of the Asian-steeped world of the LC was. But I went along anyway. (I found it preferable to the even stranger world I'd come from.)

Lastly, the Asian army doesn't value individual human life very much. If you're left behind, or plowed under, too bad for you. The "lost sheep" doesn't count for much - the army must go on. No Gettysburg Address for the fallen. The Individual is continually sacrificed for the Mother Ship. From the banzai charges of the WWII Japanese to the human wave assaults of the Chinese and Koreans in the next war, the tactics of sacrificing pawns for the greater good was considered to be sound, even de rigueur. Using such tactics, the North Vietnamese eventually triumphed over the U.S. a decade later - they suffered exponentially greater losses, but had the stomach to absorb the suffering while the U.S. didn't.

So when WL paid lip service to his fallen comrades, and Steve Isitt went out to find them, he found out how much WL really cared. Not at all, in fact. Because the lost sheep had stories to tell, and the Mother Ship couldn't absorb the tales. Fact-finders and truth-tellers, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary, were shunned like the plague. In the Asian-flavored LC, if the individual couldn't be utilized to service the collective, they had no value. As in zero - the lost sheep don't exist. The collective must go on, and acknowledging lost individuals threatens the group-centric church life. Instead, we get the faceless, drab, grey, sea of proletariat small potatoes. There aren't any individuals - Mother Ship is all. It's Maoism with a religious face.