S11 #23 - Demand Destruction as a Free‑Religious Discipline - A thought for the day

The full text of this podcast with all the links mentioned in it can be found in the transcript of this edition, or at the following link:

https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2026/05/demand-destruction-as-freereligious.html

Please feel free to post any comments you have about this episode there.

Opening Music, "New Heaven", written by Andrew J. Brown and played by Chris Ingham (piano), Paul Higgs (trumpet), Russ Morgan (drums) and Andrew J. Brown (double bass) 

Thanks for listening. Just a reminder that the texts of all these podcasts are available on my blog. You'll also find there a brief biography, info about my career as a musician, & some photography. Feel free to drop by & say hello. Email: caute.brown[at]gmail.com

Transcript

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Gathering of Mindful Meditation, Music & Conversation

Beyond the immediate loss of thousands of innocent lives, the current war between the US, Israel and Iran now threatens millions more. This is because the Strait of Hormuz carries a third of the global trade in fertilisers, alongside 20% of the natural gas shipments required to produce them. While some politicians and the media are occasionally addressing this impending catastrophe, most commentary we hear still focuses on the economic cost caused by the loss of crude oil and refined products like petrol, diesel, and jet fuel. Today, I want to interrogate a term frequently used in this latter context, namely, ‘demand destruction’. Somewhat unexpectedly, it turns out that through this concept it’s possible to find a positive link to the aims of ‘free-religion’, the spiritual path promoted by our own liberal religious community here in Cambridge.

In the economic context, demand destruction refers to a sustained or permanent decline in consumption triggered by extreme price rises or supply shortages. Unlike a temporary dip in supply, where consumers simply wait for the supply to return and prices to drop, demand destruction occurs when a resource such as jet fuel becomes so prohibitively expensive or scarce that it creates a permanent structural change in the market. Sticking with jet fuel, this manifests in two basic ways: first, airlines are forced to ground fleets, cancel less profitable routes, or accelerate the retirement of older, fuel-heavy aircraft. Second, the resulting high ticket prices reach a point where passengers permanently change their behaviour—switching to rail, opting for video conferencing, or abandoning certain travel habits entirely. The point is that demand doesn’t simply ‘pause’; it actually disappears because the economic environment has made the previous level of activity completely unsustainable.

But even though I think flying a lot less is a very good and necessary thing for the health and well-being of all sentient and non-sentient life on our planet, this particular positive example of economic demand destruction is not my primary concern today. Instead, what I want to consider is the positive kind of demand destruction that a free-religious approachbrings us. In a nutshell, the demand destruction that free-religion deliberately engineers is directed at the ego-self. Sticking to the example of jet fuel, the core principle is something like this: just as the airline industry faces a crisis when it can no longer sustain its current consumption of jet fuel, a spiritual life faces a crisis when it can no longer sustain the relentless demands of the ego.

Let me now take this thought a few steps further by considering something of the philosophy of the important twentieth-century free-religious activist, Tenkō Nishida-san, some of whose work I am translating with my Dharma friend and colleague Miki Nakura-sensei for Tenkō-san’s Ittōen community in Kyoto (Ittōen, by the way, means “Garden of the One Light”). [See HERE & HERE].

It seems clear to me that Tenkō-san would see the current global impasse in the Strait of Hormuz as a physical manifestation of a profound and perennial spiritual crisis. In one of his collected sayings he noted that the “world’s impasse is the accumulation of self-conceit that has forgotten gratitude” (Saying XXXVII). The situation in the Strait of Hormuz is a clear example of what happens when nations and individuals operate out of self-conceit solely and from an “ego-perspective”.

This brings us back to the necessity of demand destruction. In the economic context, this term signifies the death of a commercial habit; in free-religion, it signifies what Tenkō-san calls the “great death of self-attachment” (Saying XV). The reason we find it so difficult to resolve our global problems is that we are constantly trying to fix the world without first destroying the relentless demands of the ego-self. As I hope is clear to you all, President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, and those close to them, are prime examples of totally out-of-control ego-selves.

In Tenkō-san’s view, the only way for humanity truly to get through this is not by making a minor adjustment in ego demand but in effecting a total and complete structural collapse of the ego-demand. I freely admit that the chances of this happening in the near-term with Trump, Netanyahu, Khamenei and their apparatchiks seems pretty minimal. But just because this is the case, we must not let that make us think that we do not ourselves also need to effect a total and complete structural collapse of our own egoic demand.

This is, of course, precisely what Jesus was trying to get at when he taught that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit (John 12:24). Tenkō-san is, I think, saying much the same thing when he notes, “When one has died, there is no problem. It can be said clearly that problems exist because one has not died completely” (Saying XXI) and he then goes on to add that “True repentance is, first of all, the great death of self-attachment” (Saying XV).

Setting aside Trump, Netanyahu, Khamenei et al., the question for us is: how do we bring about this demand destruction of our own ego-selves? Well, for Tenkō-san, this always looks like something he called “taking the lower seat” [Geza 下坐], an idea that clearly resonates with Jesus’ advice that when we are invited to some grand event we should immediately go and take the lowest seat, leaving the question of whether you eventually get invited to a so-called higher seat entirely to the host (see Luke 14:7-14).

What I want us to see is that while so many of the world’s powers continue to fight for the upper seat, the true path to lasting peace, and the ending of so many of the impasses in our world — including the impasse at the Strait of Hormuz — is always to take one step back and take the lower seat. When we do this we immediately begin to destroy the demand to be first, to be right, or to be the exclusive ‘owner’ of things that by their very nature ‘belong to no one’. And this, in turn, is what opens up the real possibility that the causes of our conflicts and impasses begin to disappear. A life—both economic and spiritual—born of taking one step back and taking the lower seat is the way to remove the friction of ego-competition and begin to find better ways to solve our problems.

And, while the traditional economist might view the destruction of demand to zero as a catastrophe, in the spiritual mathematics of free-religion, zero is the ultimate goal. Although, as we were taught in school, we we cannot actually divide by zero, mathematics also shows us a profound paradox: the smaller the divisor becomes, the larger the result grows. As the divisor approaches zero, the result tends toward infinity. Tenkō-san applies this principle to the ego-self saying: “Divide a number by ‘0 (zero)’ and the result is infinity” (Sayings XXVI and XXVII). The point he is trying to make is that when we consciously destroy the demands of the ego‑self—reducing our ‘self-benefit’ to zero—miracle of miracles, we do not end up with nothing; in fact, far from it. We end up with something infinite—we end up finding ourselves freely, spontaneously, unobstructedly returning‑to‑one as part of the one Great Life [Daiseimei 大生命]. And, when all is said and done, it is this returning‑to‑one [kiitsu 帰一] of ourselves with all things that is the primary aim of the kind of free‑religion we seek to practice here in the Cambridge Unitarian Church; it is the very gospel we are attempting to share with the world.