A Buddhist priest once told me that there was two parts to any doctrine: belief and attitude. You could truly believe, and yet your false attitudes could undo all your grand beliefs. You could disbelieve, and yet your attitudes could reflect all the faithfulness and simplicity of a true believer, and in this way compensate for wrong belief, at least with the friends and family that surround you. I see this same truth in culture, as the beliefs of the Chinese have reached a crisis point, their attitudes are even more important, and yet the cultivation of positive attitudes has some how become less important and practical to what the Chinese call the “reality of consuming.” Many things that would otherwise be impossible have been accomplished through the shear force of will that a properly honed attitude releases in the world, and this becomes increasingly evident as attitudes of work mold society in ways exciting and strange. An interesting phenomenon that we see played out in the West just as it is constant in the East is that contemporary attitudes are based on the beliefs of the past, whether or not those beliefs are still a functional part of the culture.

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