We need to understand the complete inability of various Eastern clusters of 'New Age" activity to grasp the nature of the modern world, with a resulting determination to foment the stages of a 'postmodern', anti-modern, cultural regression. The drama of revolution and counterrevolution begins with the French revolution, and the violent reactionaries of that period are still very much a clarion call for many in spiritual circles in the generations to come. Gurdjieff is found later to have mixed feelings about the great tide of abolition, is contemptuous, by indirect slur, at liberalism, and the emergence of modern freedom, and clearly exhibits an authoritarian strain in his relations with his 'disciples'. He was, to a high degree of suspicion, a Tsarist agent (who also two-timed in revolutionary groups, perhaps as an infiltrator), and evidently his personal ethics reflect some variety of the Machiavellian strain of the 'realist' in politics, what to say of his 'wheeler dealer' escapades and shadow activities with respect to issues of money. Add the occult strain to this, and the result is a concoction of the guru game that is a rank deception for the flock of liberal or modernist progressive persons drawn into the net of his activities. In all fairness, Gurdjieff seems to have withdrawn from or baulked at what he sensed was afoot in the emergence of later outright fascism and its Nazi horror, but the same can't be said of his later epigones, or of the milieu of sufistic reactionaries that came of age in the era of the Holocaust. If it were a question of being a critic of the extremes of revolution or of the folly of Leninism, that would be one thing, but the contrary extreme, almost of de Maistrean proportions, bodes ill for the foundationalist hopes of a new tradition. Such a 'tradition' will start to founder and confront, ironically, what Gurdjieff called a 'denying force', the great tide of freedom that appears with as much 'spiritual' force as any initiative for the restoration of antiquity. What is puzzling is the poor understanding of history in so many of the gurus of this period, a clear indication that their posture of esotericism is a pretense. In general, Gurdjieff's assertions about the antiquity of real knowledge are mostly antiquarianism, and any plan of action based on denigrating modernity as less than spiritual is amateurish conservatism, more characteristic of religious traditionalists, and hardly to be expected from someone pontificating about the whole course of civilization. 

A wished for spiritual tradition to be founded by a Russian pre-revolutionary intelligence agent is a species of wrong work, if ever there was such a thing, and we should be vigilant as to the result, a series of 'schools' exploiting those who are subject to endless deceptions and disinformation. Creating a spiritual tradition is not so simple, and, ironically, Gurdjieff's 'inability to do' is reflected in what to a close look shows an almost immediate failure. 

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