A man in robes sits on a cushion. A line of people wait to touch his feet. He smiles benevolently. He gives a brief teaching. People feel transformed by the encounter. They go home and tell others he is enlightened. Some of them give him their savings, their time, their loyalty. They're convinced he has something they don't. They're right, in a sense. He has their projection.
K had no patience with gurus. He thought they were the central disease in the human search for truth, not its cure. The structure is simple. The seeker is fragmented and afraid. The seeker projects wholeness and confidence onto a figure outside themselves. The figure accepts the projection. The seeker surrenders agency. The figure now has authority. The authority is built entirely from the seeker's longing. The guru didn't earn the authority. The seeker manufactured it and handed it over.
The disease isn't in the guru's personality. Some gurus are kind. Some are wise. Some have actual insight. The disease is structural. The act of surrendering to another person's authority is the disease, regardless of whether the person at the top is good or bad. Good gurus produce dependent disciples. So do bad gurus. The dependency IS the problem K was naming.
There's a relief in surrendering to a teacher. The burden of figuring it out yourself goes away. Someone with more authority will tell you what to do. The body relaxes — for a while. K's claim is that the relief is the giveaway. You haven't solved the problem. You've handed it to someone else, and now you have a new problem: how to keep believing in the person you've handed it to.
A teacher who tells you to surrender to them has already won the only fight that mattered. The fight to be the authority on your own seeing. Once they have that, they don't need to do anything else. The disciples will fill in the rest.