The Fellow Craft Who Chose the Wrong Exit

Show Notes

The men at the center of the third degree legend were not villains at the outset. They were skilled craftsmen contributing real labor to a significant project, with standing in their community and a grievance that was not invented. The gap they felt between where they were in the hierarchy and where they believed they should be is the same gap that produces the meta conversation in any organization, any lodge, any household. Brian Mattocks examines what happened in the space between that legitimate frustration and the irreversible consequences that followed.

The key mechanics here are psychological and physiological. That uncomfortable sense of not being good enough, or of watching others receive recognition you feel they have not earned, is a real internal experience. What is easy, and what the fellow craft in the legend did, is to place the cause of that discomfort entirely outside yourself. First you blame the system. Then you blame a man. Then you take actions you cannot walk back. Brian draws a direct line between the internal locus of control and the point at which the meta conversation crosses from frustration into something that does lasting damage.

The episode closes with a call to become the twelve fellow craft who recanted rather than the three who did not, and a preview of how to interrupt the pattern without destroying the room.

• How legitimate grievance provides the raw material for the meta conversation
• The internal experience of expectation gaps and imposter-adjacent self-doubt
• Externalizing blame as an abdication of the ability to fix anything
• The progression from system-blame to person-blame to irreversible action
• The obligation of a raised Mason to interrupt unskilled language in the lodge

Complaining that there are no flowers in the neighborhood while not planting any is not analysis. It is surrender dressed up as insight.

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Creators and Guests

Host

Brian Mattocks

Host and Founder of A Mason's Work - a podcast designed to help you use symbolism to grow. He's been working in the craft for over a decade and served as WM, trustee, and sat in every appointed chair in a lodge - at least once :D

What is A Mason's Work?

In this show we discuss the practical applications of masonic symbolism and how the working tools can be used to better yourself, your family, your lodge, and your community. We help good freemasons become better men through honest self development. We talk quite a bit about mental health and men's issues related to emotional and intellectual growth as well.

[00:00] Yesterday, I mentioned the pattern that we're talking about, the meta conversation, the if only phrase that turns into a meeting that doesn't produce anything.
[00:12] That whole conversation has a very old story attached to it.
[00:18] One that the Freemasons carry in their rituals, a permanent reminder of what this kind of talk can eventually cost.
[00:25] I'm not going to recount the full legend here.
[00:27] If you're a Mason, you already know it.
[00:30] If you're not, the summary won't do it justice.
[00:33] What I want to talk about, though, is what happened before the event that the legend describes.
[00:40] The conversation that made everything else possible or facilitated it occurring.
[00:48] Because the men at the story, the center of the story, didn't start out as villains.
[00:52] They were craftsmen.
[00:53] They were skilled craftsmen working on the most significant and important construction project of their age, contributing real labor to something that mattered.
[01:04] Kind of like people you might know at Lodge.
[01:07] They had standing.
[01:09] They had competence.
[01:10] And they had a problem.
[01:11] The problem they had wasn't made up.
[01:15] It was men that kind of looked at where they were in the hierarchy of the work and felt that the gap between where they were and where they thought they should be was a little bit different than they expected.
[01:30] They thought they merited the secret word of a master Mason and were not going to be told what it was.
[01:40] That disconnect internally is a big part of what led to a conversation that inevitably turned into the consequences that pervade our ritual.
[01:55] That self-consciousness, that self-doubt, that gap in expectation between reality and perception is exactly where the problems in everyday life that you see around you start.
[02:17] It is this uncomfortable experience that maybe you're not good enough or the sense that you haven't earned the successes that are coming your way or you watch other people and think that they haven't earned the successes coming their way.
[02:36] Whatever that is, whatever those mechanics are, physiologically, psychologically, what is easy to do is to essentially place the blame for all of that on forces beyond your control.
[02:55] We talked a couple of weeks back about the internal locus of control and expanding that to essentially the entirety of your experience.
[03:03] And when you fail to do that, what happens is you get these conversations that start with blaming the system and then move to blaming a man and then move to taking actions that are irredeemable and irreversible.
[03:21] The conversations feel good in the beginning, like we talked about, but they turn into this recurring pattern of thinking that prevents you from moving forward.
[03:36] And so when we start working through this, you move the solution from actions you can directly take and out into environments that you can not change at all.
[03:56] And it gets worse and worse and worse and worse.
[04:01] It feeds on itself.
[04:02] And that's where we need to start to become the fellow craft who recanted the folks that saw where this conversation was going and put a stop to it.
[04:16] You have a choice when you hear brethren in your lodge starting conversations that inevitably blame other people, the current political environments, the grand lodges, the, you know, Mason down the street, the neighbor who hates Masons, whatever that conversation is.
[04:38] All of those complaints, all of those complaints, the moment you hear someone externalizing those complaints onto people or systems, they are essentially denying their responsibility and abdicating any opportunity to remedy the situation on their own.
[04:58] This is complaining that there are no flowers in your neighborhood and not planting any.
[05:05] We have an opportunity to move past the meta conversation and it is your obligation to get out of the if only mindset to get out of that headspace where you have surrendered your authority to others.
[05:25] You were raised to be a master Mason and the master Mason's work is to take responsibility and move the ball forward.
[05:35] Even if that means stopping the unskilled language of the men around you, we'll talk more about how to do that and why and what we're going to do to make that work in a way that doesn't hurt people's feelings because we all want to do this in unity and harmony.
[05:50] So we'll get more into that over the coming episodes.