Demanding Humility, Avoiding Accountability

Sarah joined the temple at twenty-two. The philosophy made sense. The community felt like family. Her teacher seemed genuinely wise. He’d helped her understand texts that had confused her for years, guided her through grief when her father died.

Three years in, she noticed something odd. Money was tight for the community kitchen, but leadership had just bought new cars. She asked about it at a meeting. Not accusingly, just curious about the budget.

The response surprised her.

“Mataji, this question comes from pride. You need to work on your surrender.”

The budget question vanished. Sarah became the problem.

She tried again a few months later, this time about why a leader accused of hitting students was still teaching children. Same response. “You’re being offensive. A humble devotee wouldn’t question. Besides, he’s done so much service for the movement. Who are you to judge?”

Sarah started to wonder: Was she proud? Maybe she did need more surrender. She chanted on it, tried to let go. But the questions wouldn’t stop coming.

Eventually she realized the trap. If she questioned, she lacked humility. If she didn’t question, children stayed at risk. The only way to be “humble” was to stop thinking.

She left two years later. It took another three years before she stopped blaming herself.

The Pattern

Sarah’s story is fictional, but the pattern isn’t. Former members of ISKCON, the Catholic Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, various Buddhist groups all tell versions of the same story.

The pattern works like this:

Step 1: You find something valuable. Real insights, genuine community, practices that help. This part isn’t fake.

Step 2: Teachers become authorities. Fair enough: they know more than you about some things.

Step 3: Authorities become unquestionable. Questioning anything (finances, policies, behavior) becomes questioning their spiritual status. And questioning their spiritual status proves you’re spiritually immature.

Step 4: You’re trapped. Question and you’re proud. Don’t question and you’ve abandoned your own mind.

ISKCON itself admits the problem. Their own publications acknowledge being “highly vulnerable to cultic patterns where leaders, or their immature followers proclaim the leader is faultless.”¹

They know. So why doesn’t it change?

Why It Persists

These organizations aren’t purely dysfunctional. That’s what makes this complicated.

People find real value in them. Teachers do help. Communities do support. The philosophy does offer insight. If it were all fake, people would leave. They stay because something genuine is there.

The problem isn’t that spiritual authority is illegitimate. The problem is what happens when it gets mixed up with everything else.

Your guru might genuinely understand the scriptures and spiritual practice. That doesn’t mean they understand accounting, child protection, or organizational management. But when the same person (or body) controls spiritual teaching AND finances AND discipline AND membership status, you can’t question any of it without questioning all of it.

That’s the structural flaw. Different skills get treated as one package. Expertise in one domain becomes immunity in all domains.

The Specific Failures

Let me be concrete about what goes wrong:

Finances: When irregularities get exposed, they’re addressed by internal committees that answer to the same leadership being questioned. No external audit with real authority. The pattern repeats: concerns raised, internal review conducted, case closed quietly.

Child safety: Gurukula abuse isn’t ancient history. Reports continue to surface from schools in India. This is a decades-long problem that keeps recurring. Reforms get announced, but the structure that allows cover-ups (leaders protecting leaders) remains intact.

Criticism: Raise concerns through “proper channels” and watch what happens. The channels lead back to the people you’re concerned about. There’s no independent body with authority to investigate leadership.

The “We’ve Changed” Problem: Organizations point to reforms: child protection offices, ethics committees, published guidelines. But look at the authority structure. Who appoints the child protection office? Who can overrule the ethics committee? If the answer is “the same leadership body that handles everything else,” the reform is cosmetic.

What Actual Change Would Look Like

Real reform isn’t about nicer leaders or better intentions. It’s about structure.

Consider how leadership works in ISKCON: GBC members serve for life and are selected by existing members, not elected by the broader community. This isn’t accountability. It’s self-perpetuation. Here’s what actual reform would require:

Separate the powers: Spiritual teaching, financial management, and disciplinary oversight should be handled by different bodies with different accountability structures. Your guru shouldn’t control your membership status.

External oversight with teeth: Not friendly consultants who write reports that get filed away. Independent reviewers who can access records, interview members confidentially, and publish findings regardless of whether leadership likes them.

Transparent by default: Financial statements, disciplinary decisions, complaint outcomes should all be accessible to members. “Makes leadership look bad” isn’t a valid reason for secrecy.

Protect questioners: Formal whistleblower protection. If someone raises concerns about finances or safety and faces retaliation, that retaliation itself becomes an offense.

What This Means For You

If you’re currently in an organization like this:

Your questions are legitimate. Asking about budgets isn’t pride. Asking about child safety isn’t offense. Asking how decisions get made isn’t spiritual immaturity. Any system that makes these questions dangerous is protecting something other than truth.

Separate the teaching from the structure. The Bhagavad Gita might be profound. That doesn’t mean the organization teaching it has sound governance. You can value the philosophy while recognizing the institution has problems.

Watch how they treat questioners. Not what they say about welcoming feedback, but what actually happens to people who give it. Do concerns get addressed or do questioners get isolated?

If you’ve left:

It wasn’t your fault. You weren’t too proud, too Western, too intellectual. You were someone whose mind kept working in a system that needed it to stop.

Real Humility

Here’s the irony. These organizations talk constantly about humility. But real humility requires exactly what they forbid.

Real humility means admitting you might be wrong, including about your own organization. It means changing course when evidence demands it. It means exposing wrongdoing even when it makes your institution look bad.

What these organizations call “humility” is actually obedience. And obedience to a flawed system isn’t virtue. It’s how the system perpetuates itself.

The path forward requires genuine humility: the willingness to question, to admit error, and to change. That’s what protects people. That’s what makes organizations worthy of trust.

Everything else is just compliance with good PR.