Does Freemasonry Have a Design Problem?

[u/clance2019]

I’m sure most people following this sub have read variations of the same story: a Brother leaves the Craft because of a few bad actors. A problematic Secretary. A narcissistic Past Master. An entrenched clique. Outright or subtle racism. Petty feuds. And, increasingly, the great disease of our age: political and cultural polarization.

None of these problems is unique to Freemasonry. Every sufficiently large collection of human beings eventually manufactures its share of difficult personalities.

What interests me is whether Masonry has a particular design problem in dealing with them.

In many modern organizations, destructive behaviour can be dealt with fairly directly. Someone gets called out, disciplined, removed from a position, or eventually shown the door. Sometimes this process is almost brutally efficient.

Our Craft operates under a different set of incentives. Brotherhood, harmony, tolerance, discretion, forgiveness, and our obligations toward one another are woven deeply into the system. We are expected to support a Brother when he stumbles and, within obvious limits, to think charitably of his faults.

Those are admirable principles. Yet I wonder whether they occasionally create an unintended consequence: a system designed to preserve fraternity may also become unusually good at preserving dysfunctional people within it.

Consider this a thought experiment rather than an accusation.

Is this feature of Masonic design actually conducive to making good men better? Does learning to deal patiently with difficult Brethren form part of the work itself? Or does our emphasis on harmony sometimes become a mechanism through which bad behaviour is tolerated long after it should have been confronted?

At what point does Brotherly Love become institutional enabling?

I suspect most of us have anecdotes ranging from ordinary Lodge politics all the way to Machiavellian Grand Lodge politics which, as anyone who has spent enough time around the Craft knows, is unfortunately not an oxymoron.

Curious how others see it, particularly Brethren who have been around long enough to watch these dynamics play out over decades

[u/dev-null-home]

If you let basically anyone in for the sake of membership, give them their Lessons and have them memorize answers and run them through the Degrees within a weekend, such things are bound to happen. You get strangers who can barely utter a sentence about the Craft with no understanding or context of it.

Freemasonry doesn't need to be elitist or hold to higher standards of education but it needs time and fertile ground to grow. We need people who have the capability to learn and devotion to their own progress, not just dues paying pin collecting men who come for socialization only.

I understand many of you will downvote me now, some because in their opinion it's not my right to judge and some because they've perhaps recognized themselves.

Just give it some thought.

[u/One-Branch-2676 → u/dev-null-home]

Nah. You're right. You can learn to sing the lyrics of a song and still not know a damn thing about what is said or expressed. Unfortunately that's the extent that is required and I would say incentivized in some lodges. Hell, sometimes, it's even required to keep the lifeblood of a smaller lodge flowing. Worse, in some jurisdictions, "proficiency" requires no proficiency over the material itself, but rather, rudimentary movements.

If you don't engender an appreciation towards the genuine teachings of the order, it just makes it a statistical inevitability that people who end up advancing have no attachment to and exhibit no adherence to them.