My upcoming book is devoted to the theme that suffering doesn’t come primarily from bad external situations (like political ones), but from the interaction of those bad situations with our mental states of craving and resistance. One might ask: is it possible to split the difference? Could it be that our suffering comes from our mental states but that the institutions make things worse?

Mindfulness critic Ron Purser and Zen teacher David Loy think so. Referring to the traditional “three poisons” of craving (rāga), anger (dosa) and delusion (moha), they claim:

today the three unwholesome motivations that Buddhism highlights—greed, ill will, and delusion—are no longer confined to individual minds, but have become institutionalized into forces beyond personal control.

The emphases are mine, to show what a strong claim is being made here: that our institutions today encourage craving, anger, and delusion in a way that previous societies and institutions did not. Once the problems were confined to individual minds, but they no longer are. Purser and Loy don’t explain their claim in that post, but Loy did so in an important 2004 piece called “What’s Buddhist about socially engaged Buddhism”, no longer available at its original site but thankfully still available through the wonders of archive.org.

I examine Loy’s arguments about institutions encouraging craving and anger in the book. (Overall I don’t think they work, though he’s got more of a case on craving than on anger.) But Loy’s claims about delusion take us far enough afield from the book’s argument that I abbreviated the book’s response to them. Here, I can now give that response in full. Is it true that delusion is “no longer confined to individual minds”, but has become “institutionalized into forces beyond personal control”?

Here’s how Loy begins his case:

There are many aspects to institutionalized delusion. One of them is an extraordinary level of simple ignorance regarding basic history, geography and science. Is there any other “advanced” nation where three times as many people believe in Satan and the virgin birth as in evolution?

Loy seems unaware that no classical Buddhists believed in the modern theory of evolution, which was discovered long after their deaths. If we take that theory to be accurate (as Loy and I do), no premodern, including Buddhists, knew any more of it than modern creationists do. So there’s no reason whatever to take this as an example of the three poisons being any more institutionalized than they were in the Buddha’s day. As for Satan and the virgin birth, these are teachings that most Americans have inherited from a tradition linked with ethical practice, just as Thais or Tibetans inherit teachings about rebirth in the Buddhist hells. That traditional Buddhist teaching is no more confirmed by scientific evidence than are the traditional Christian beliefs. So if in Loy’s view it is delusion to hold such traditional beliefs, then he is effectively accusing most of the world’s Buddhists of that delusion as well. Such a view at least requires argument, which Loy doesn’t provide.

Loy then adds that “The cumulative effect of this ignorance is a collective wego largely unaware of, and indifferent to, what is going on in the rest of the world.” “Wego” is Loy’s term for a collective ego: “intractable social problems too can usually be traced back to a deluded sense of self — in this case, to a collective sense of self, or ‘wego,’ such as one’s own race, class, gender, nation (the primary secular god of the modern world), religion, or some combination thereof (e.g., in the Middle East, where nationalism and religion have become almost indistinguishable).”

It seems to pass Loy by that nobody was aware of the majority of the world’s affairs before the age of exploration, nor could they have been. The typical inhabitant of a 21st-century capitalist society, with access to digital media, is if anything less ignorant of the world’s affairs than was anyone in the Buddha’s day—and often less indifferent to it.

Perhaps when Loy speaks of “institutionalized delusion”, he is referring not to absolute lack of knowledge, but to relative: a knowledge that is lacking in comparison to the total amount of knowledge available. That is, perhaps his view is that premodern South Asian Buddhists should not be considered deluded about world affairs or the origin of life because there was no way for them to have known such things, but because that knowledge is available to us now, we are obligated to know it. Then not living up to that obligation would constitute delusion, in a way that it would not for people who could not have known these matters.

Loy provides no argument for such an obligation, but even if we were to assume that such an obligation and therefore such a delusion exists, it is worth pointing out: such a “delusion” exists only because there has been an increase in total knowledge. On such an account, our society could be considered more deluded than classical South Asia for the sole reason that more knowledge exists in it, and that knowledge creates an obligation to know it. A modern person who knows exactly as much as, or even a little more than, an ancient South Asian would count as deluded where the ancient would not, simply because the contemporary “deluded” person now has more knowledge available. Thus on such an approach, what creates and constitutes “institutionalized delusion” today is an overall increase in available knowledge—and that seems like rather less of a problem.

Even these critiques of Loy’s account are only necessary if we already grant Loy a major concession: that “ignorance” or “delusion”, moha, has do to with ignorance about facts of the empirical or social world. That is not a meaning it has in any South Asian Buddhist texts that I am aware of. The exact nature of moha in those texts is complex, but it always has to do with specific kinds of ignorance that contribute to our mental suffering, in ways that tie to our craving and resistance. Ignorance of world affairs or the origin of life never counted as moha in the Buddha’s day, and Loy makes no case why it should now.

So. Was delusion always something institutionalized beyond individual minds? That would be a separate question, and I suppose one could reasonably try to make that case. But is delusion something newly institutionalized in the modern world of the 21st, 20th or even 19th centuries, no longer confined to individual minds? The answer is simple: no.