Attack of the know-it-alls

I must be getting old...not that I have ever thought of forty-four as old...but there have been a couple of times recently that I have wanted to yell at the younger (or maybe just inexperienced) members of the forums and mailing lists to get off their broomsticks and sit down and listen to the more experienced members of the community.

Of course, it may just be the fact that I belong to a different branch of the system (or perhaps it is a different flavor).

(For those of you who are curious, I am of the opinion that there are currently just three types of Golden Dawn [Regardie book based; Zalewski work based; and Griffin ultra-secret based]. I am probably wrong. This division also appears in pagan and wicca circles, though the names of the representives are different.)

What happens is that you get people strolling in who have read a couple of books, who want peer recognition, and they promptly tell everyone, including those who are actually working the system, that they are doing everything wrong.

The most amusing part is that they want all the more experienced members to tell them all of their secrets without putting anything on the table themselves, and they want the right to call these more experienced members wrong when the answers do not fit in their simple one layer (probably no work ever done) preconceptions of what the system is supposed to look like.

This is turn brings out the worst in the more experienced members, who so want to shout "get off my lawn"...it leads to even new experienced people who just discovered new groups to be treated like they just fell off the turnip cart.

Now here is what the newbies do not understand...peer recognition sucks.

Being recognized as someone who knows what they are doing gets you hated by those who want fame and recognition which leads to morons disagreeing with everything that you say. It also results in too many lawyers, complaints and complete nutters arriving on your doorstep.

Just say no to peer recognition and fame. It will save you a bunch of trouble later.