Barely two weeks into various stages of lockdown around the world, New Age philosopher Charles Eisenstein published a 9,000-word essay on the meaning of the pandemic. He summed up his core theme with deft wordplay at about the 7,000-word mark. After suggesting that the global crisis afforded a kind of transformative opportunity, he writes
“Now the question arises: Initiation into what? What is the specific nature and purpose of this initiation? The popular name for the pandemic offers a clue: coronavirus. A corona is a crown. ‘Novel coronavirus pandemic’ means ‘a new coronation for all.’
What was so captivating about this essay that Jack Dorsey tweeted it to the 4.5M followers on his platform? What are Eisenstein’s premises, credentials, rhetorical techniques? What are his connections to medical libertarianism, and how does he manage to endorse conspirituality while seeming to deconstruct it?
Show Notes
The Coronation — Charles Eisenstein
CORONATION UNVEILED: A Critique and Cure for Charles Eisenstein’s Fairy Tale Pandemic Essay — Jack Adam Weber
Daniel Pinchbeck’s response to The Coronation
The Conspiracy Myth — Charles Eisenstein
Covid-19 Is A Rehab Intervention: Charles Eisenstein | Rich Roll Podcast
Charles Eisenstein / Sayer Ji discussion
During COVID-19, Charles Eisenstein Invites You to Think Deeply About His Awesome Writing — Matthew Remski
Transformational Weight Loss — Charles Eisenstein
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And this podcast has come about from Matthew and Julian, who I've both known for about nine years now, either online as Matthew or in person with Julian.
We're both in Los Angeles.
And I've had them as a guest on my Earthrise podcast the last two weeks.
And A, I really love talking to both of them.
And B, I think that these topics that we're addressing, which We all independently work on ourselves, are very important, and so we decided to make this a regular thing, so we'll be doing this podcast every Thursday.
I want to give a brief overview of what Conspirituality is about, and then we're going to talk about our personal investments in this field of research and discussion, and then from there we'll move on and talk about this week's topic.
So Matthew wrote this sort of overview, which I like a lot.
As the alt-right and New Age horseshoe toward each other in a blur of disinformation, well-intentioned discourse and honest debate are being smothered.
Charismatic influencers exploit their followers by peddling dangerous conspiracy theories.
In the process, spiritual beliefs that nurture creativity and meaning are transformed into memes of a quickly globalizing paranoia.
In summation, conspiracy theories are really ruining a lot of discourse, right?
Conspiratuality attempts to bring clarity to this conversation.
A journalist, me, cult researcher, which is Matthew, and philosophical skeptic, Julian, I love that, Matthew, discuss the stories, cognitive dissonances, and cultic dynamics tearing through the yoga, wellness, and new spirituality worlds.
Conspiratuality first came about in 2009 by a Vancouver rap group.
I actually came across the term a few weeks ago, my friend Ben He sent me an article on Medium that a philosopher in London was talking about that topic, but he was referencing a 2011 paper by Charlotte Ward and David Voss that talks about the growing overlap between paranoid conspiracism of right-wingers and the world that Matthew Julian and I have been engaged in, which is yoga, wellness.
We can be, I believe, considered liberals in terms of our political thinking, but more sort of understanding a holism of body and mind and how that has collided with the right wing, which has been happening for a while, but this pandemic has really made it fester in a way that I never actually foresaw.
So we're going to get to our topic this week in a moment, but briefly, since this is the first official episode, we wanted to give you our stakes in the I guess we'll put our details in the show notes, but just a little bit of background.
Matthew, I'm going to talk to you about the story. I'm going to talk to you about the story.
By 19, I'd won like a national poetry award here in Canada and I was starting to work on the first of two very strange novels.
In my early 20s, I had a lot of, probably six months worth of idiopathic seizures, grand mal seizures.
Quite extreme actually, out unconscious for hours at a time.
Waking up in my apartment trying to figure out what had happened and the fallout from that Has always intersected in very mild ways with something something called Geshwin's syndrome which features usually an obsession with Religiosity but also hypergraphia or the inability to stop writing.
So those things resonate.
I haven't been diagnosed with this, but but I have suspicions The short-term fallout of those experiences was a feeling of spiritual isolation and longing.
And so these days I can't help but to look at intense or terrifying experiences that just get described in spiritual terms, maybe because that's what the person has available to them through neurological and mental health lenses.
But then, you know, from 26 to 33, I was recruited into two different cults.
And this was basically during the time in which I would have developed a more, I don't know, legitimate professional life.
And I certainly would have finished college, but instead I became a yoga teacher.
And I mean, I should say that at this juncture, I'm trying to go back to school online for counseling psychology.
To finish the college stuff that I wasn't able to finish, but also so that I can help cult survivors.
Today, as a cult researcher, I'm really interested in how a lot of yoga and Buddhist groups especially control the bodies and psychologies of members, especially through the various theaters that orbit the male charismatic leader.
Now, I've published on these groups for a number of years now.
It's been depressing.
I've been trolled, harassed, but, you know, I've Come to see that it's been worth it.
And also I kind of have a joke about still having a religion, but it's the religion of disillusionment or that moment in which there's clarity after a particular spell, especially an abusive spell lifts.
So it's been nasty work that I've been involved with, but it's also enhanced my belief in people's resilience.
And it's, you know, made me spend a lot more time with my partner and my sons.
So that's a little bit about me.
It's fantastic.
Matthew, we've known each other 10 or 12 years.
I did not know some of those details.
So I'm just taking it in.
Yeah, I knew some of the later details, but not more of the childhood stuff.
Yeah, well, well, nice, nice to meet you.
Yeah, nice to meet you.
And I too, in high school, won a National Poetry Prize and was published in a journal, like that kind of stuff.
That's the funny thing I'm thinking about the three of us is that, you know, here we are talking from this very sort of skeptical philosophical, intellectual place in yogi, meditator, musician, DJ, dancer type people, right?
And yet we found ourselves really interested in this type of critical thinking.
So for me, I grew up in South Africa.
And growing up in South Africa, there was a clear understanding that my family and other people that we were close with had that really we lived in a police state with a censored And if you wanted to know what was really going on, you needed pathways of finding out information from the underground.
So, you know, I grew up with a clear understanding that the media was controlled and was not telling the truth.
That most of my white friends did not know what was really going on in the country.
I grew up with a lot of kids who thought White people, we're in the majority.
We're in the majority in a country where we made up about 10% of the population.
So, you know, I have my own sort of background in terms of a very early sense of the urgency of finding out what's really true.
And not only what's really true factually, but also in a kind of moral truth, a kind of investigation of, well, you know, why is it that as people who are opposed to apartheid, we're actually right?
And the system that we live under is actually evil.
That kind of horrific discrimination and oppression was wrong.
So that's sort of where I begin, is in that soup.
And then I got into yoga and meditation and psychedelics and being in a rock band and all that kind of stuff in my teens.
And was very drawn to the idea of waking up.
To the idea of, you know, Dropping acid was sort of taking the red pill for me and meditating and getting into group mind with other musicians and with audiences.
And over time, I would say for me, as I went through my 20s, I started to grow disillusioned.
I traveled to India.
I spent time in ashrams.
I did a lot of yoga, a lot of meditation.
And in some ways I started to become disillusioned and realized, oh, I needed psychotherapy.
to manage some of the things I was trying to work out through spiritual practice and psychedelics.
And so I got involved in that, a different kind of awakening, so more of a psychological awakening as opposed to perhaps a spiritual or an artistic one.
And then as my path continued, I found disillusionment with the new age and more of an interest in Perhaps the type of enlightenment that we trace back to the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, a sense of the value of reason and science.
And so where I end up in terms of my stakes in this conversation is that I've been committed and fascinated with how we integrate awareness practices, mind-body practices, with a kind of honest understanding of science as well as the wonders that science opens up to us, especially neuroscience for me the last 10 years or so.
And psychology, and how so much of what I think goes wrong in popular spirituality has to do with an absence of psychological and scientific awareness, and that these things can be wonderfully integrated with awareness practices and in community.
You know, that there's something inherently healthy about that kind of integration.
And so the time that we're in right now, with the profusion of conspiracy theories around COVID-19,
And how they have infiltrated New Age circles and yoga circles, for me, it's been a powerful validation of my sense that a certain type of magical thinking and pattern-seeking obsession and desire to sort of always interpret everything through a particular metaphysical lens has a shadow.
And here it is.
We're seeing the shadow play out.
So that's me.
Well, since we're all talking about poetry, my highlight as a playwright was having my last play that I ever wrote featured at the New Yorkian Poets Café.
I actually studied under Miguel Aguirre at Rutgers, who co-founded the New Yorkian Poets Café.
I spent a lot of time there.
And Bob Holman, the other co-founder of the New York Weekend, became a friend of mine.
I produced a lot of shows at the Bowery Poetry Club for years.
So my 20s were poetry.
So yes, we do come to these more intellectualized conversations at times, but they are rooted in an extreme love.
I mean, my real love is mythology.
And so poetry and mythology, of course, are very related.
I remember once, Probably when I was about 24 or 25 walking in Manhattan with my father and asking him why he raised me with no religion and he told me that he grew up with too much of it and that his parents made him go to the local Russian Orthodox Church, but they stayed home and he just grew disillusioned with it.
So he decided he would never raise his children with any religion.
And the irony, I guess you could say, is that I have a degree in religion.
Because by the time I got to college, I also found psychedelics.
That's the topic of the book I'm working on now.
But there was something about the Buddhist and Hindu texts that called to me.
Even if you're not raised with a religion, growing up in America, it is a Christian nation in terms of its ideological foundation.
So there are certain ways of thinking that are indicative of Christianity in this country.
And to have my eyes opened to these alternatives was groundbreaking.
For two years I was the religion columnist at the Daily Targum at Rutgers and because I was also studying journalism which was going to be and has been part of my career ever since.
And what I noticed was I would go in the same day, I might go over to the Shabbat Center and then talk to a priest.
I might talk to an imam.
I would be interviewing all these different religious figures around campus and every one of them thought that their way was the right way.
And there was varying degrees of certainty and there was varying degrees of tolerance, but they were all sure that they had, as Alan Watts would say, the secret sauce or the secret juice, right?
And That made me never really, even in the height of my yoga fascination in my 20s, it never allowed me to take any one system or person too seriously because I just knew that, as the Taoist would say, it is a river that leads to an ocean.
So, if you confuse your river for the ocean, that's where you get in trouble.
But if you understand that that stream opens up into something greater, then you can understand that it's a pathway, but that the ocean itself is much grander than any single stream can ever, you know, attain or lead you to.
And being, growing up in that sort of environment with my father, being a more skeptic about most of things in life, that just also opened it up to being, to seeing the way that people, these, what I feel are really charlatans, whether they purposefully are or not, misguide people and mislead people.
And that just, it just bothers me because People come to practices like yoga, meditation, Buddhism, because they're seeking something and they're trying to make sense out of things and they're vulnerable.
And I think vulnerability is a very important quality and it's one we should nurture and allow to grow.
And when people come in and take advantage of that, whether for vanity or for financial gain, it's just always struck me as seriously problematic.
And so in my writing and in everything that I do, even in my teaching, I've always tried to create a space where people can play and explore, but without there being a cult of any personality, right?
Never giving everyone credit for their do, but never putting too much emphasis on the contributions of any one person.
That's really important.
And I've looked at everything in my life through that filter, and it's made me skeptical of a lot of things, especially as we said during this time, I try not to be surprised, but I am truly surprised at the way that the right and the left have come together right now.
And specifically, and I think this is something we'll get into in the topic for today, the way that the left and the wellness community doesn't realize they're repeating talking points from Trump administration.
That was weird.
Or from the alt-right.
And I think that the alt-right knows what they're doing here.
And I think that where we're coming from, there's a real ignorance of where all of this originates.
And with all that said, the topic of today is "The Coronation" by Charles Eisenstein, which is an essay that has gotten a lot of traction.
And I first found out about it when Daniel Pinchbeck wrote a rebuttal to it, and then Matthew very quickly after wrote his.
So I'm going to let him explain this essay and kind of lead the conversation from there.
Cool, yeah.
So, I think the topic that we chose, or the title, is Coronation for Whom?
Tracking Eisenstein's Arguments, Influence, and Networks.
So, some of you might have seen the essay, and if you haven't, we'll put the link in the show notes, but it's a 9,000 word essay slash sermon that Eisenstein dropped on March 28th.
Now this is only two weeks after lockdowns began to roll around the world.
It's also six weeks before plandemic dropped and we'll put a flag in that because there's a relationship between these two things.
Now Eisenstein is a favorite New Age theorist of the Burning Man and Wanderlust set and according to various bio notes, he's a Yale grad in math and philosophy.
He's taught at the very bucolic Goddard College in Vermont and he's published a number of books.
So Sacred Economics came out in 2011 and The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible in 2013.
These are well loved amongst contemplative futurists.
If you dig back in his book list though, you'll find things like A book from 2007 called Transformational Weight Loss, which I hope you guys remind me to come back to because I just found this today and it's kind of blowing my mind.
It answers a couple of questions for me actually.
Now through all of this he's made it onto Oprah's Super Soul Sunday.
And with the coronation he seems to really be up leveling his reach and you know one of the things that I said to both of you in the outset of this project is I really want to focus on like the cultural impacts of the various conspirituality strains that we start to look at because it's very easy to get lost in the weeds of You know, sort of minor commentaries or, or, um, sort of fringe characters.
So I really, I really want what we focus on to be able to look at what are the broader impacts.
And for this essay, the stats are pretty clear.
Like we don't have access to Eisenstein's analytics, but, um, from his own Facebook page, it was shared almost 2000 times, but then it really takes off on Twitter, uh, with Jack Dorsey himself, CEO of Twitter, pushing it to four and a half million, uh, subscribers.
Russell Brand has 11 million followers.
Julian Lennon put it out.
Dr. Phil Hammond, who I don't know but he has 80,000 followers.
He works for the NHS in Britain.
There's an anti-Modi activist named Prashant Bhushan in India and he has 1.6 million followers.
Susan Sarandon posted it.
670,000 followers and then Ani DiFranco pushed it out there over Twitter with 56,000 followers as well.
Now, content-wise, the basic theme, I would say, is that not knowing, in a vaguely Eastern-y, spiritual sense of the word, is The most intelligent approach, but also the most empathetic approach to not only the stress that's related to COVID-19 and the lockdowns, but also the data swirling around the pandemic.
And this means that, according to Eisenstein, we should be open to doubts that we have about everything.
Health policies, health reporting, death rates, whether it's even possible to know what's happening.
The main thing that we want to avoid, he argues, is fear, which he says is actually more dangerous than the virus, because fear baits us into doubling down on our failing strategies of repression and control, which is kind of a keynote in his work, as far as I can tell.
He concludes, however, that this fog of uncertainty and destabilization can be a liminal or initiatory process for those who are ready for it, and for a new world in which separation, which is kind of his bugbear word, has been replaced by non-dual something, which he calls in this work, and then I believe in other works, the Great Reunion, or the Time of the Reunion.
So the big takeaway is that for this essay, the real crisis is not the pandemic itself, but how we feel about the pandemic.
And if we succumb to the virus of fear, we will default to emotional and creative repression, and we won't enjoy or take advantage of this transformative moment.
So that's my summary, but just to be fair, I want to also quote the memes that are listed on the Friends of Charles Eisenstein's Facebook page.
They're pull quotes from the essay and it gives a sense of what they, what, I don't know, his people or him, I don't know who does them, but Whatever that his following really believes is important about this essay.
So it's 9,000 words, you know, how are you gonna sum it up?
Well, they've kind of done it for us.
And so one pull quote is, how much are we willing to live in fear?
There's a lot of rhetorical questions, right?
COVID-19, which are actually accusatory, COVID-19 will eventually subside, but the threat of infectious disease is permanent.
Another rhetorical question.
If it keeps us safer, do we want to live in a world where human beings never congregate?
See, anyway, we can get to possibly, who would possibly be able to answer that, right?
How much, another one, how much of life do we want to sacrifice at the altar of security?
And then it just kind of like, it goes totally psychedelic with on the other side of the fear, we can see the love that death liberates.
So, Yeah, what did you guys think?
I've got a lot more to say about who he links to, what the essay is connected with.
I have a lot of thoughts about the actual rhetorical style and some writing devices within it.
But yeah, what did you guys think?
Well, in terms of everything that you were just outlining so well, you know, there's this sense that there's a pre-existing lens that has certain Landmarks in it, right?
Right.
And you're elucidating those already.
The real virus is fear.
And you know, that's a new age trope that's been around for a really long time, that you're either in fear or you're in love.
And if you're in fear, you can't be in love, which is the ultimate reality that we're seeking to always be in touch with.
And so fear is the enemy.
Fear is wrong.
If you're afraid, you are failing to be Appropriately spiritual.
I think that this... I think that this man is a wonderful writer.
And obviously, there's an eloquence and an intelligence at work there that is beautiful.
And I get the appeal.
I really get the appeal.
And I feel like there's... The word that kept coming up for me is slipperiness.
There's a slipperiness in the way that the ideas are being unfolded that simultaneously appeals To that particular New Age futurist, idealist, the true answer to all of our problems is that we wake up out of separation, that we come into a place of deep unity, that we realize these ultimate truths, right?
That are in some ways beyond words, that have this non-dual quality.
I think of it as a kind of a faux non-duality because there's a category error of trying to apply ideas and perspectives from the phenomenological inner work of meditation to the outside world, to politics, to something like a pandemic.
So all of that I find fascinating and disturbing.
And I feel like he sort of, he tries to ride several different lines.
So he's trying to ride a line between appealing to that particular set of spiritual ideas, whilst also sounding sort of intellectual and making reference to data, and he doesn't really ever fully step into the light as being a prophetic kind of spiritual teacher, even though that is there.
And then he also will say all sorts of things about Conspiratorial thinking and fear and paranoia not being something that he's kind of down with, but then any of the links that he includes are links to people explaining the conspiracy theory.
I think I found it more disturbing for that slipperiness.
Then I might find someone else who was just out and out saying, you know, 5G and vaccines are the problem here.
We are under tyrannical control by the reptilian overlords of the deep state who are trying to introduce a new world order.
That, to me, is less disturbing than someone who is doing such a good job in flowery prose.
And I don't know that he's necessarily deliberately doing that, but that's the style, and it comes across as deeply dishonest to me.
So there are three things that I wrote down while reading the essay and one of them, actually the first one I know Matthew will have some relationship to, which is it reminded me of the strains of Michael Roche.
I practiced at Jiva Mukti for a long time and I did some work for them and I never taught there, but you know, I still have good friends who came from there and I think it was a great institution that Kind of had a lot of cult qualities to it around veganism specifically, but the one thing that would always get me was when a teacher would say, if you cannot back bend well, your heart is not open.
And as I was reading Eisenstein's essay, that's what I kept thinking about that because I've broken a lot of bones and I've spent a lot of time in hospitals in my youth, including almost a year laid up after breaking a femur.
And there are physical problems that I still have from that time.
I'm not very back bendy.
And when you've had a lot of physical trauma and then you have someone telling me if you can't do a good wheel pose, which I still can't, 20 some years of my practice, that it's a spiritual failure.
That's what I kept getting.
That's what I get with Julian, what you were referencing about the whole, I'm just asking this question.
But that question is leading because there was a piece on Joe Rogan being the mainstream media, and I haven't listened to Rogan lately, but I have listened to many and sometimes he does that too, where he'll be like, I'm just asking this, but you know what?
If you're a public figure, you have to have a little more responsibility in the questions that you're asking.
Bill Moyers is one of my heroes, but a great example of that.
There's a responsibility to being in this position of asking questions that you do your research before you ask them.
And so that was the first thing.
The other thing, and again, Julian, you brought this up with the linking to people.
He links to someone named Lisa Rankin, who I don't know.
But the whole essay he talks about is this whole, like, why you shouldn't fear death thing.
And that keeps coming around during this whole pandemic.
This almost like, I am I'm manning up because I'm not scared of death.
And whenever I read stuff like that, I always wonder if these people have ever had their life threatened or had some illness which actually made them question their mortality.
Because when you do, A little fear of death isn't a bad thing, right?
It's healthy.
I think that we don't die well in America.
I think we should make hospice care and the end-of-stage life care way better, but that's a different story.
This whole bravado about not fearing death is problematic, and that was in the essay as well.
And the last thing, and this is sort of the big picture, Overview is this confusion of short-term adjustments for long-term outcomes.
And Yasha Monk, who I might be mispronouncing his name, but he's an excellent writer at The Atlantic, he wrote a piece about the fact that after the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, the Roaring Twenties happened.
And he just warned not to fall into chronocentrism, which is this idea that my age, like what I'm living through, is more important than everything that's come before.
Like this is the moment.
This is the coronation, right?
We have finally, we are the ones we've been waiting for.
That constant thing.
It's this idea that we have something that All of humanity in its 350,000 years have been building up for us to carry this torch.
And the very last thing that Malk writes in the essay is, let's avoid the temptation of chronocentrism.
Sooner or later, this bout of pestilence will come to an end.
Humanity will survive this pandemic.
In its aftermath, as after so many other disasters, we will learn to thrive anew.
And although the world we then inhabit will be different, it won't be unrecognizable.
And when I read that, I'm like, what a level-headed, understandable approach to something that we have a short-term, you know, we have to do certain things just to save as many people as possible, but understanding that there's a long game out there.
And I feel like what's happening with people like Eisenstein is they're taking this moment to put up this spiritual pedestal that they're on top of, even if they're just asking, and that we're transforming into something different.
There's a lot of transformation happening now, but the approach of that essay was so grandiose that it was really hard for me to even make sense of what we're transforming into, which should be the entire point.
of an essay of that magnitude.
May I leap in, Matthew, before you take over?
Because I just wanted to add one thing.
And by the way, Derek, whatever's happening on your end, in terms of a glitch, every now and again, it's not coming through on this end.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
Good to know.
Okay.
Thank you.
So I just wanted to add to that, as you're saying, Derek, and as you pointed out in the beginning, Matthew, this is two weeks into quarantine.
Right.
That publishes this lengthy manifesto, right?
Grandiose manifesto about the coronation.
Okay, now it's coming.
This is something that's very common in cult discourse, right?
That there is a prophetic kind of moment that's very important that we, me and my followers, are living through.
We know what's about to happen next.
It is of absolutely massive proportions.
It will change everything about humanity.
And all of this, as you were saying, Derek, you know, the small adjustments we're making right now are obviously now, you know, we have to argue about whether or not we want those forever or we're going to wake up into love and light.
And the other part that I didn't say earlier that I wanted to add in, Matthew, is this This extreme relativism that has become such a huge part of how people think and talk about things in the New Age.
The sense that not knowing is better than knowing that it's more humble, that ultimate spiritual truths are beyond dualistic conceptions of true and false.
It's all this kind of circular, self-contradictory set of ideas that ultimately, I think, serve the purpose of Shielding us from cognitive dissonance and from feeling emotional and psychological tension and from having to pick a side when sometimes one side is completely wrong.
And so, there's something very seductive about a higher truth that disguises ideology in some kind of relativist, non-dual way.
Yeah, I totally agree, and there's a number of things that I want to follow up on, but I'm glad that you both brought up the grandiosity of the transformational moment, because, you know, the title of our podcast project that's just getting off the ground is Conspiratuality, and my understanding from the research of Ward and others is that what we really see is this conjunction of the
The conspiratorial discourse in which three very spiritual ideas apply, you know, everything happens, nothing happens without a reason, nothing is as it seems and everything is connected.
But from the conspiracist standpoint, you know, especially when we drill down into the terror of places like QAnon and so on, we have this sort of apocalyptic moment that is being predicted, but then the spiritualism that conjoins with conspiracism to form conspirituality labels that moment as being
Ultimately transformative or ushering in a new era or or it's a utopian vision and so and so yeah I think we're really getting to the to the heart of our theme that we're going to we're going to be exploring over the next however long we do this.
I'm really glad that you brought up this juxtaposition between fear and love that is a New Age keynote.
And it has been for years.
And it reminds me of the fact that the second cult that I was recruited into was rooted in A Course in Miracles, where the underlying sort of word salad refrain is, you know, fear doesn't actually exist.
Only love is real.
Or if you're in fear, love can't exist.
Or love is your only reality and therefore fear is an illusion.
So, So yeah, it would be interesting to sort of like just do some data on tracking the various phrases around the unreality of fear and the reality of love through time over the last 30 years, because I think we're seeing it in spades now.
And with regard to the slipperiness, I just want to give a shout out to Jack Adam Weber, who took the time to rebut the coronation almost point by point.
And, you know, his Herculean effort really sort of proves the point that it takes a lot more time to correct BS than it does to make it.
You know, he spends 10,000 words on his rebuttal, which we'll post in the show notes.
One of his main points is that Eisenstein is pretty successful at hiding his own conspiracism by pretending to be above it, not just through sort of burying his links way down in the text, but...
But because he, you know, gave this critique of Eisenstein's closet conspiracism, Eisenstein took notice enough to base his own follow-up, which was released just last week, on this very point.
And it's called The Conspiracy Myth.
But Eisenstein fails to cite or to link to Weber's critique, and then he goes ahead and he strawmans it.
So when Weber says that Eisenstein is a closet conspiracist, he's referring to overstatements that contribute to the aura of intellectual relativism and then open the door to COVID-19 trutherism.
And, you know, so he's Points out phrases or sentences like this.
So this is Eisenstein quote since the threat of infectious disease like the threat of terrorism Never goes away Not really control measures can easily become permanent if we were going in this direction Anyway, the current justification must be part of a deeper impulse unquote so
So that must especially, which whoever points out, is like an absolutely unsupported claim, like that attributes intentionality and a plan and all of this stuff.
You know, it just doesn't get addressed at all by Eisenstein and the basic point of his follow-up is that COVID-19, truth or conspiracies, they reveal collective unconscious truths.
And that's why he he does this pun he calls his essay the conspiracy myth So he says that the you know, whether it's 5g or it's you know, vaccinations are really modes of surveillance He's saying that well these don't these really just speak to a deeper social psychology than our evidence-based reporting can ever provide And evidence-based reporting has fallen out of trust.
So what did we expect?
So for him, it can be a positive thing that evidence-based communications are now being contested by the mythic.
So now the mythic, or now like COVID conspiracies, get elevated to mythic status.
And that's kind of something that everybody can, I don't know, feel better about or something or meditate on.
Yeah, so I'm above it all, so therefore it doesn't matter.
If the conspiracies are true or false, because I have this lens that sees them as a myth, that sees them as an outpicturing of the collective unconscious, right?
Right, right.
And actually, let me just break in because he sets his readership up for this.
The conspiracy myth is several weeks after the coronation, but two weeks before he publishes the coronation, he goes on Facebook Live with Sayer G, his friend, who's also the founder of GreenMedInfo, a famous anti-vax site.
And they have an exchange which just completely blows my mind because what he ends up saying is, you know, all of this stuff is happening and, you know, we're hearing about 5G and Wuhan towers and stuff like that.
Uh, and, and then he says, let me give the quote here.
He actually says, um, there's lots of narratives.
There's this one, there's that one.
And the way I hold them is, uh, and then there's the standard narrative too, and minor variations on the standard narrative.
And then here he says, so I like to hold them and see who I become as I inhabit those narratives and how I see the world.
Do I feel helpless?
Do I feel activated?
Do I feel defeated?
Do I feel despair?
What view of human nature does it induce in me to hold these different narratives?
And, and I think you can just get from the rhythm there that his primary concern is him, right?
It's like the narratives are, you know, first of all, first of all, What reporters, what the WHO, what your public health officials are telling you about the pandemic, these are all narratives and they're all equal and we can try them on like pieces of clothes and see how we look or feel in them and then we can sort of assess them according to how, not how they impact us, But how they make us, how they make us feel.
And this, like, sort of traces back to, you know, I mean, that's two weeks before the coronation.
He just continues on in that same vein, I guess, without any editorial support.
And, you know, his essay ends up being sort of a hymn to this very abstract but privileged, you know, first-person plural subject.
That doesn't really identify itself.
It doesn't have any positionality.
It is able to sort of ivory tower around.
And really, like, I think what's most heartbreaking about it is that it has such emotional sort of pull for his readership, obviously, that I wonder what happens to the actual feelings of the people who might not have read it and had other feelings, right?
Because if you spend 9,000 words, that's 45 minutes, in this kind of trance state of vague utopianism, but also, wow, what's happening?
The world is really weird, but we can be wise at the same time.
If you spend that time, my question is, do you actually miss out on being able to grieve something?
Where were your 9,000 words?
I wanted to just, before you say something Derek, that that's exactly it.
That's exactly the extreme relativism I'm talking about, right?
Right.
Everything is a mere narrative.
And as you correctly said, all of these narratives are on an equal level playing field.
None more valid, or more false, or more problematic, or more dysfunctional, or more beneficial than the other.
So, I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
But he's talking to a guy who's platforming the Ruther type narratives.
And he's saying, there's this moment in the interview, which was totally amazing, where he says, you know, so I heard somebody talking about, you know, somebody talking about the coronavirus as a cover story for illness caused by the 5G rollout.
And Sayre actually says, I looked at that, yeah.
And I'm like, you looked at it?
You published articles about it, right?
Like, you created a whole website called Questioning COVID.
It's like, it's like, I looked at that.
Yeah.
Oh, really?
You looked at it?
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
You looked at it?
No, you made other people look at it, actually.
It's incredible.
It's incredible.
I'm just asking the question.
It seems to be a technique, honestly, because that's what Mickiewicz did in the pandemic when Mickiewicz asked her, are you anti-vax?
And she's, oh no, I do this when she's been Video at anti-vax wearing vaxed shirts and writing a book with a known anti-vax like it's in this Suspension of disbelief we're supposed to have based around that when they say one thing, but they're doing all this other I do wonder though And this is the question and I don't again the whole Kelly Brogan say or G like world.
I've known greed met info I usually just gloss over it because I know it's bull but I I Is the ultimate goal here, is it selling books?
Is it speaking gigs?
Or is there some sort of spiritual fulfillment that they're feeling?
I can't speak to that, but I do wonder why you would take that tact.
Why you would say, I've looked into it, when you've been one of the people leading it.
Yeah, I mean, that's a very dodgy thing to say, and I try to stay away in all of my cult research stuff around intentionality or motivation.
It's really speculative, but it's really, really suspicious.
And it's possible that, you know, Eisenstein doesn't know the extent to which Sayre's sites have promoted 5G stuff.
It's possible that in that moment, Sayer's sort of covering his ass and saying, oh yeah, you know, I've kind of heard about that too, and then they move on in the conversation because really they're going to be talking about myths and not who's spreading around propaganda.
So yeah, it's...
What we can say, I think, is that the Eisenstein sphere and the Green Medinfo sphere share an economic space.
And there's overlap between them, and it's almost as if, you know, it's like, I have this little, this way...
You know, since Eisenstein's so hot on mythology, I would like to present an idea called the Eisenstein Trojan Horse.
Because, you know, I think that the essay is like a really big, well-crafted, archetypal, mythic thing.
It's offered as a gift, as in gift economy.
Like, and it seems to roll across the lines of political division on, you know, these wheels of totalizing theory.
And, you know, everybody who encounters it thinks it's very beautiful.
It makes them feel serene.
They pull it into their squares, their workshops, their conventions, their board meetings, their ayahuasca ceremonies.
And it takes a lot of effort to pull it in.
It's like, it's 9,000 words, right?
And they sit quietly in front of it, and the sun sets, and they're gazing at it, and they go to bed happy, and memorized, and comforted, and then when they retire, this door drops open in the belly of the horse, and Kelly Brogan, Sayerji, Christiane Northrup, like, and Robert Kennedy all, like, rappel down on ninja ropes and start setting up pamphlet tables or something like that.
But the thing is, we're not just talking about a town, because Jack Dorsey is tweeting this guy, right?
So I don't know how to, I wish I knew who did the data science on how to measure the impact of something like that, but we're not talking about a small thing, we're talking about Like an affect, a way of being towards information and data that really opens the door.
It really opens the door towards COVID trutherism, and yeah, and doesn't really, and also is not particularly concerned Like, I would love to be able to ask Eisenstein personally, so how do you feel about your friends, you know, questioning COVID site, right?
Is that just free speech or, you know, are you concerned about what they're doing with that stuff?
So, yeah.
There's a way in which it's like the coronation was a smart person's plandemic, and it kind of moved across the line into a whole bunch of demographics, and who knows, maybe soften people up for worse ideas.
One thing that jumped out at me in his conspiracy myth is, you know, the whole myth thing.
Mythology is generally the term used to reference what he's using.
Myth is pretty well embedded in our language as something false.
And I know in my own writing, and that's also because my degree is in that, but I always use mythology when I'm referencing what he's referencing.
And so I know that's a, you know, it's a slight point, but I, It came out to me, and I wouldn't have even brought it up, but right here it comes out to me in the very beginning when he says, I said my purpose is neither to advocate nor to debunk the conspiracy narrative, but rather to look at what it illuminates.
It is, after all, neither provable nor falsifiable.
Are you kidding?
Yes, it is falsifiable.
Like what he's wrapping around in the coronation, you can show it's falsifiable.
So when he says that specifically, it made it really hard for me to continue because if that's where he's starting, I already know I'm going to just get shoveled the whole way through.
Well, let's talk a little bit about where he is starting.
And I also just want to say that I try to be pretty assiduous at staying away from ad hominem, even framework.
So even when I say something like where he is starting, it makes it sound like I'm talking about the person.
I have no idea who this guy is.
I don't really care.
And so I'm really just looking at texts.
The college that I wasn't able to finish was in literary theory, and it's like, the author is dead.
You just have the text, right?
Just look at the text.
And so what I did, going back into his book list, was I found this incredible book called Transformational Weight Loss.
Now, I was like, wait a minute, what's, okay, so are you a dietician?
Are you, did you study some juicing thing or something like that?
There's no sort of, I haven't read the whole thing, so I might be missing something, but there's no framing around it that says I'm qualified to tell people about how to lose weight.
And then I was wondering, okay, well, maybe there's something in his personal history.
Maybe he's got his own personal weight loss story, and he wants to share that.
This is 2007, and as far as I can tell, that's not true.
In fact, the one place that I could find in the preview copy that I got where he's talking about himself, he's like, you know, I, for one, literally, he's saying, you know, I see you, fat person, and I, as a thin person, I admire your efforts to try to improve yourself.
Here's one thin person who actually, yeah, no, so it's actually worse than that.
Let me actually read you the first page of this book, and then this, I think, gives, this is 2007, and it's not like I want to, like, pillory something that is 12 years old, but I do want to try to answer the question of why does this text Take on, through some sort of charismatic virality, the sheen of, I don't know, like, legitimacy.
What validates it?
Like, is this a writer that somehow has been able to present an unearned authority in something?
And have they gotten away with it?
And I think, with this book, I think, yeah, the signs are that's true.
So, introduction.
This book is primarily for overweight and obese people.
In particular, those who cannot seem to control their eating.
If you are fat and find it impossible to control the amount you eat or the foods you choose, then this book is for you.
It is also for anyone who cannot seem to stay on a program of exercise.
It's especially for you, blah blah blah.
It goes down, the end of the little sort of intro sermon is, this book will be fundamentally different from anything you have ever tried before.
And I'm like, oh wow, so wait a minute, he's willing to write like a self-help manual that is fat-shaming, ableist, that, I mean like, it's 2007 and I don't think he would have heard the term fat-shaming then, so I'll give him that.
This is somebody who's willing to, he wrote 9,000 words about COVID-19, and he's not an epidemiologist, but he wrote 144 pages about weight loss, transformational weight loss, without being a dietitian.
And so there's this kind of, like, what puts people in the position where they can do that?
What kind of entitlement, what kind of incredible confidence And like no knowledge or sort of respect for scope of practice.
What allows that to happen?
And when I ask those questions, I know that I'm kind of in cultic territory of charismatic authority knows no limitation.
It will go anywhere.
It will do anything.
It just feels that it's right.
And again, I'm talking about the texts.
I don't know if he does this in his regular life, but certainly the books give me pause.
It's interesting, you know, I went to look at Daniel Pinchbeck's post that you referred to earlier, Derek, and it was really good.
I thought it was a really good critique.
And then I was looking down through the comments and I noticed several people who are obviously part of Eisenstein's inner circle saying things like, when I listen to Charles, I don't Listen to him as if he believes everything he's saying.
Whoa.
I look at him as inhabiting multiple perspectives.
Whoa.
Right?
And I always think of it more as satsang.
Oh.
Right?
More as sitting at the feet of the awakened one and just, just bathing in the energy of this incredible mind that can take all these different perspectives and ultimately show us That the perspectives themselves, it doesn't matter if they're true or false, they illuminate something about the human condition, they show us a way forward.
I think part of what has been so appealing and why so many of the people that you listed retweeted or shared on Twitter this article, I think a lot of it is that someone who's able to pull back And I think this fat-shaming thing, this book about weight loss is really interesting too, right?
Because it's almost like, it's like a roving kind of attempt to find an audience that is susceptible to a certain kind of being hooked, right?
Right.
I think that people who have really loved it, and this is me speculating, I think that someone who's able to step back and say, oh my God, we're in this scary time.
It's disorienting.
Let me tell you something.
Nobody knows the truth.
The truth is neither approvable nor falsifiable, right?
You start getting into this territory of Orwellian doublespeak and actually in that Sayerji conversation, they talk about Orwellian doublespeak and or truthspeak or whatever it's called and Sayerji actually talks about it as being this profound spiritual observation that Orwell makes, but that there's a shadow side to it.
But that really, you know, life is death and truth is falsehood, etc., etc.
So to be able to step back and say, we're in this scary time.
No one knows what's really true.
But we've always lived, for a long time, we've lived in unsustainable ways, Maybe The Coronation is our opportunity to wake up to making new choices about how we can live in love and unity and equality and all of these kinds of things.
Who's going to say no to that, right?
Who's going to say yes to permanent lockdown?
Who's going to say we should never hug each other or make love ever again or give a massage, right?
No one wants to go with that.
Everyone is instantly on board with the idea that this is our opportunity to fix everything that's wrong with the world.
What a wonderful pivot that takes away so much of the anxiety and refocuses us on idealism and some kind of future utopia.
It can take away the anxiety to the extent that it's bought into, though, because it's actually a very anxious solution.
The totalizing solution carries with it the possibility of its own fracture.
And I think the dedication that people will show to it might be indicative of how much you have to buy in in order to sustain it.
Like all spiritual bypass.
Right, right, right.
Now, I'm looking at the time, and I want to ask you guys if you have time for one more little change, or if, Derek, you want to throw in something?
Well, there's one thing, but go ahead, Matthew.
Yeah, I go.
In terms of time.
In terms of time, an hour is an idea.
And by the way, my hour is different from your hour.
I'm in Eastern time zone anyway.
Yeah, so as of now, just know that if I am ever limited by that, I will let you guys know.
So, it's actually two points that are related.
When I think of what Eisenstein is doing and what Mickey Willis, when he called himself an investigative journalist, if you are an investigative journalist, the truth is you do have to ask a wide range of questions and you do have to look at multiple perspectives.
That's very important.
If they were actually interested in getting to the truth, they would have challenged the people they were talking to.
You have to.
You have to do your research and then ask questions that make people uncomfortable.
That's the only way you'll ever get.
And there's actually a style.
I mean, it's something, in my brief time as an actual reporter, it's hard because you need to spend multiple days with someone to do it.
But you have to open up and let them be comfortable with you and then ask the hard questions.
And everyone has a different threshold.
But in neither of these cases, in Sayoji Video or in Plandemic, was there ever one attempt at making the interview subject uncomfortable or challenging them in any capacity?
Oh, not at all.
Not at all.
And that leads to, like, when you're constructing an article as an investigative journalist, You conclude, you have conclusions, like I'm reading the book Dreamland right now, which is about the opioid crisis, and it's a masterful piece of investigative journalism.
And what Eisenstein fails to do, and this is to Julian's point about, you're right.
If you're talking about transformation and unity and people getting to a better place, We're all for that.
I don't know anyone who isn't, but I did not see in anything we've discussed in these three weeks, I have not seen any of the people we've discussed offer concrete solutions for getting there or where they're even looks like.
And so if you are anti-Vibe G, What is that?
Like, break apart the telecommunications companies?
Is it burning the towers?
Is it throwing out your phones?
Like, what is the action necessary?
Don't just raise people up.
Offer some solutions.
And from all these people, I see no solutions being offered.
Yeah, I don't think the solution is the product, though.
I think the product is the affect.
Let me jump in really quickly, Matthew, before we go to your next topic.
I wanted to say that I just started watching the Netflix Epstein documentary.
I'm spacing out his first name right now.
Jeffrey.
Jeffrey, that's right.
That was Mark, David, Jeffrey.
Yeah, so the Jeffrey Epstein thing.
And I was really struck by exactly what you're saying, Derek, which is that here's this documentary that goes back in time.
To the beginnings of this particular investigative journalist becoming aware of Jeffrey Epstein and the things of which he was accused and, you know, we found out he was very heavily involved in.
And the way that she talked about the process of uncovering the story and then the interviews that followed and the timeline and the scrupulousness.
I mean, it's such a huge... I'm on a curse for the first time on this podcast.
It's such a huge fucking irony to me that That these people who are claiming to be skeptical of mainstream media sources will look at people who have these high level of integrity about how they really investigate and find out the facts and talk to people and get perspectives from different sides by asking the difficult questions.
We'll just generalize that all of them are bought and paid for by the power structure and in on the conspiracy and then we'll take on board These completely, you know, superficial, not living up to any kind of journalistic standards, not asking hard questions, not looking from multiple angles, kind of conspiracy purveyor.
It's a stunning irony.
Yeah, agreed.
I mean, the devaluation of expertise, it's a whole other subject, that's like a whole sort of political science, you know, scholarly field now, I think.
Yeah, I mean what, so yeah, what I wanted to make sure that I hit on was just something about the structure of the rhetoric and how, just how
Effective it is in creating a mood off the bat in the coronation and the thing that I want to focus on and really here I'm inspired by in In my examination of abuse in yoga environments I've I've come up with this with this sort of
formula for looking at what I call somatic dominance, which is a series of pre-verbal, sort of unconscious, power dynamic gestures that occur between people who have power and people who have less power.
And rhetorically in the Coronation, there's something similar going on with the use of the first person plural.
Now, when I ran this text through a text analyzer, just to see where the main keywords were, I found that the most used word in the entire essay, coming in at 66 times, was the word hour.
And then us, and then we, they're all up there at the top.
And you can see that, you know, he speaks from this, what I would call the first person omniscient plural.
But he never really identifies himself, who the we is.
He'll say our culture, our civilization, our world.
And it's like, there's no sense of diversity, of inequality, of what it means to, you know, he's writing about the coronation for all.
And, you know, he's, I don't know if he knows that, you know, I don't know, some outrageous percentage of case fatalities in the United States is gonna be among black people.
So it's just, there's all kinds of levels of sort of privilege that are unacknowledged and unspoken to.
And so in my first kind of WTF article about this, I really focused on the universalism of that language.
But then, You know, I heard him interviewed by Rich Roll, who I don't know, because he did probably a dozen interviews with various podcasters after he released The Coronation.
And when I heard that, this other door popped open.
So the first door is, well, he's trying to speak for everybody.
But behind that question is, but who is he actually speaking to?
And who is the target audience?
And I heard some things that gave me some clues, so I want to run these by you.
It's just from one podcast, but I think it's pretty indicative.
So here's a quote.
He's describing what he finds to be problematic about the culture in general.
He's talking about, you know, his Concern about the myth of technological utopia.
So here's the quote.
And someday this grand project will be complete.
This is what he says, our culture, whoever we are, believes.
And someday this grand project will be complete.
When science develops a theory of everything, When nanotechnology and genetic engineering allows us to extend our control down to the nano level, then we will be completely safe and perhaps even win victory over death itself and attain to immortality and become the gods.
The ultimate conquest would be to conquer death itself.
Then we would have finally ascended over nature and this ambition of ascent has a technological rendition where we ended up in space and Uploading our consciousness to computers and things like that and so it always also has a spiritual rendition which sees spiritual progress Analogously to technological progress as being more and more separate from the earth from the world So he goes on and and and it I was listening to this and I was like, wait a minute Who actually believes this?
Like, who does he imagine believes that we will, that we, whoever we are, will conquer death?
It's like he's created, and I realized, oh, what this essay is really good at is, and maybe other parts of his writing, is creating an amazing straw man.
Somebody who believed that death can be conquered, that science can solve every problem, that our ultimate destiny is to be immortal brainwaves uploaded to the cloud, right?
So, like, is he talking to a 15-year-old?
Is he talking to Elon Musk?
Like, is he responding to some other equally charismatic writer with big ideas?
He's talking to the ghost of Ernest Becker.
I guess.
I mean, when I kept thinking about it, it was like, wait, what this really does is it creates a really demeaning, contemptuous picture of the majority of people who are painted as both naive but also ready for his wisdom download.
I really have to wonder why his readership feels comforted instead of patronized.
Like, why they seem to mistake being infantilized for being inspired.
I mean, he loves to talk about how we separate ourselves from the other, which is a term that he co-opts from the subaltern.
Like, he doesn't reference the actual people who come up with that word.
But the only other I see in this text is the person he, like, contemptuously scapegoats.
It's this ridiculous caricature of the common citizen who is deprived of all capacity for, like, self-reflection, gravitas, dignity.
It feels like the writing of somebody who doesn't interview people, right?
Because people are complex.
So I just wanted to make sure I got that in.
It was like, wait, he's speaking for everybody, but then he's also speaking to somebody that doesn't exist.
And because I don't know anybody who is that stupid.
Yeah, and there's something about how like calm and restful the entire discourse is that makes it that like it's very very Like I it took a while to see.
Oh, yeah, there's somebody that he actually hates in here there's somebody that this text actually really hates and I don't know who it is and I wanted to make one comment and then Beth, I know you have thoughts, Julian.
It just amazes me that he talks so confidently about mythology, but he apparently hasn't read any.
Because mythology is the stories of man's grappling with nature.
And I referenced this, I wrote a Big Think article yesterday that was based on Julian's essay, and I talk about Arjuna, who is the hero of the Bhagavad Gita, but in the Mahabharata, he dies because of his pride.
And mythology always makes sure that people come to terms, like this goes from Gilgamesh on, they come to terms with their hubris.
And the idea that we will transcend death, that is Gilgamesh.
That is our first mythology that we have and it's been perpetuated for 4,000 years now.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
Recognizing that there is this straw man, I think is big.
Because if you're going to present a vague utopian vision for which you are the prophetic kind of harbinger, then being very specific about the enemy that you're going to strawman seems really useful, right?
And if that strawman is that science and technology has this inevitable kind of vision of where we're headed towards that ultimately robs us of our connection with nature and of our humanity and of our true spiritual
Destiny then that that's that I think that speaks very powerful very powerfully to the audience that you know We're all sort of situated within right and I mean props to to Jack Weber for bringing out like closet conspiracy theorists because as As a term because really once you unpack the straw man this person that doesn't exist It's it's you know, it leaves me with the thought of okay.
Well, I Like, who has been undone here?
What has actually been... I don't know anybody.
I don't know anybody alive who, if you sat down and talked with them, would say, well, obviously we're going to be cryogenized, and that's what we want, and that we're not dealing with death properly.
I mean, the thing about the conspiracy theory is that it always contains something that is more or less plausible, more or less resonant.
And of course, we belong to a capitalistic neoliberal culture that does what it can to propagandize us away from death and destruction.
And so it's like, yeah, that's obvious, but let's turn to the actual critiques of that instead of, Yeah, and contained within that strawmanning and that particular setting up of these oppositions, even though we're pretending to be non-dual, right?
Contained within that, then, is the resonance with 5G technology can't be trusted.
Vaccines are part of a medical model that has lied to us and doesn't have
