Gurdjieff’s distortions, and distorted world view
The teaching of Gurdjieff, and I suspect sufism generally, are fragments of something that has become distorted, nay, perverted, by the context and society in which these people were forced to live. It is nothing less than a misfortune that this supposedly new approach to spirituality got mixed up with the occult politics of the nineteenth century, the reactionary cultural milieu of Tsarist Russia (which Gurdjieff by his conditioning thought just!), and the whole legacy of sufistic tradition as it coexisted with the infelicities of medievalism, violent histories, and authoritarian government.
The result is a kind of cancerated non-starter, that noone can use, and that noone suspects for the dark teaching it really is.
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 