3: Why Are Spiritual People Vulnerable to Conspiracy Theories?
Right-wing conspiracy theories are being marketed in wellness communities as a form of spiritual freedom. While pattern recognition is an essential survival instinct, it’s being exploited during a time of a global pandemic, governmental collapse, and social paranoia. Tragically, so-called spiritual leaders are trafficking in propaganda while advocating for individual sovereignty.
We also discuss the history of and science behind 5G and vaccines.
Show Notes
Ivanka Trump’s graduation speech to Class of 2020
Can a Vaccine for Covid-19 Be Developed in Record Time?
Louis Pasteur, from crystals of life to vaccination
The 5G Health Hazard That Isn’t
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, a weekly discussion of the intersection between right-wing a weekly discussion of the intersection between right-wing conspiracy theories and left-wing wellness utopianism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
This week on Conspiratuality, we thought we'd step back from what we've been doing, which is really looking at significant figures on the conspirituality landscape, and really step back to where this started from for us as kind of liberal yoga types.
The question really is, what is the worldview that makes our friends, family, and colleagues vulnerable to conspiracy thinking?
And I have people asking me this, you know, every week on social media and through messages that I get.
How is this happening?
How do I talk to my family?
Why is it that people that I thought looked at the world in this way that I look at it in, are now becoming sort of swept up in this conspiracy mania?
But before we get To the main course, which is going to be discussing that, and the dessert, which is looking at 5G and vaccines in a little more depth.
Let's start with Our appetizer segment called This Week in Conspiratuality.
Right.
And I mean, This Week in Conspiratuality, it's like, where do we even start?
It's kind of hard to choose.
I had a number of things lined up, but I'm really going to go with Eisenstein hits the big time, as he is quoted by Ivanka Trump.
So first of all, I'd like to thank Jesse Hyde for flagging this for me.
If you caught our inaugural episode, you'll know that we covered the viral impact of a sermon slash novella by the New Age writer Charles Eisenstein.
It's called The Coronation.
Well, guess what?
This week, the very same essay was quoted by none other than Ivanka Trump in a commencement address for Wichita State University Tech.
So I have no idea how this essay got into her speechwriter's hands, but we do know that Jack Dorsey and Russell Brand tweeted it out, and it was a big deal.
Officials at the university pulled the speech after an outcry from students and staff over the Trump administration's handling of the Floyd protests.
Not to be deterred, the Trump heiress released the speech on YouTube, and we'll play the Eisenstein clip here.
I think Derek has it lined up.
A recent article written by Charles Eisenstein explained this period in time this way.
He wrote, COVID-19 is like a rehab intermission.
It breaks the addictive hold of normality.
When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal or whether there may be something we've seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future.
This is a great challenge.
Even if the resolution is seemingly small, it could transform something in our lives.
Some families have resolved to continue eating dinner together at least several times a week.
People are using this time to acquire new skills through online platforms and want to continue to advance career certifications.
Many Americans are spending more time in prayer and meditation and want to keep growing in their faith.
Whatever your goal is, This is a unique time for each of us to make a change that we have perhaps long delayed and to grow in some way.
Finally, right now I know the economic uncertainty is real, and it's hard on many of you and your families.
Your own blueprint for your future is likely changing due to the pandemic, but I am confident that even if your path is different from the one you imagined, ultimately it can be better than we could ever have planned.
In my own life, I found that my greatest personal growth has arisen from times of discomfort and uncertainty that one can only really appreciate in hindsight.
Joseph Campbell, a philosopher who also helped inspire the creation of Star Wars, once said, the achievement of the hero is one that he is ready for.
It's really a manifestation of his character.
The landscape and conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero.
the adventure that he's ready for is the one that he gets.
Amazing.
So two writers quoted, Eisenstein and Joseph Campbell, make it into the White House.
And it's just amazing.
I mean, so when you boil down, just to review, when you boil down Eisenstein's very long article, its basic proposition is that COVID-19 presents this potential spiritual doorway to walk through.
In our analysis, we covered three main themes.
The essay's inept and premature scientific musings and links to pseudoscience.
Two, the basic narcissism of the essay and its blindness to the unequal social impacts of the disease.
And thirdly, the covertly racist and emotionally avoidant exhortation to live without fear.
So, I gotta ask, like, do these three points remind you of anything?
Do they sound familiar?
Do they remind you of an administration that's constantly screwing over its science officers, maybe, and distorting or ignoring data?
You know, an administration that's overtly racist but pretends not to be.
And also, like, I mean, I mean, there's a real parallel between what Eisenstein is presenting and the Trump Presentation, the PR of the exceptionalism of fearlessness, especially of the American variety.
So, in our first episode, I had joked that his essay was kind of like this Trojan horse for the wellness sector.
Like, it's really big, it's impressive, the villagers pull it in, and then at night, Kelly Brogan and David Avocado-Wolf, like, come down out of the belly and they get ready for David Icke to show up.
But with this, like with Ivanka quoting it, we can see that the Eisenstein Trojan horse actually is multi-purpose.
Now it's being pulled into the White House, bringing New Age vibes and utopianism into the inner circle as like another tool in the propaganda box.
And so like we just have to wait for Mitch McConnell, quote, Quoting, you know, coronation on the floor of the Senate as he votes to like help Southern states reopen during a caseload spike.
Now, Eisenstein didn't respond to our feedback the first time, so I'm going to be a little bit more direct here.
Charles.
How does it feel to have your essay quoted by the heiress to the Trump empire?
How did that happen?
Do you think your messaging might have been vague enough that it could just be used for anything?
Is that okay with you?
If the White House taps you for speech writing, what will you say?
But really, on behalf of your readership and whatever integrity you believe you feel your work has, is this like a Bruce Springsteen moment for you where you say, screw you, you're not going to use my music for your political rallies?
Is that what it's going to come to?
No, I can't speak for Charles, obviously, but Joseph Campbell is very meaningful to me.
His work really set me off on my life path and my degree in religion and all of that was very inspired by Campbell.
Working at Equinox for so long, I've had a number of of students that I never talk about because I respect that boundary.
But it does bother me that Ivanka was my student for about six months and might have heard me talk about Campbell.
So if that originated there in any capacity, I apologize.
But as I wrote in a tweet to Ivanka, tagging her, letting her know that the hero myth, your family is who the hero is fighting.
So just be clear on that point because that co-optation was really troublesome.
And if we're gonna pivot to Star Wars, your dad is Jabba the Hutt.
That is true.
That is not Darth Vader.
I had planned on talking about a study that I cover for Big Think on the utility of dread, but I have to say, I'm going to pivot, and so sorry for the last minute pivot, but it happened over the last two days where I've seen this trend, and I'm slightly encroaching on your territory with this, Julian, but you can roll off of it.
If you are white, as we all are and recognize, but if you are white and you are starting your post Dear Black People, Rethink that post because that somebody who has 15,000 followers posted about that she lives in Australia and someone from who's heard us on this podcast tagged me to let me know and that it's the whole all lives matter just nonsense.
Like this is not your moment.
This is not our moment.
It's our moment to help.
Right, but it's not our moment to step up on the pedestal.
Like, get down.
But mostly, somebody else tagged me, or emailed me, about a long, long blog post about Agenda 21, which I had not known about.
I don't know if you guys know this.
No, have not heard of Agenda 21.
Okay.
I'm sorry to say.
Okay, well this might be a future episode.
Julian's shaking his head yes.
But in that, I can't even describe what it was, was a paragraph about George Floyd, but she didn't say his name.
She just referred to him as the black man.
And the whole thing had to do with the idea that it was a covert operation because he was a porn actor, so he was an actor and all that.
I bring this up because I have to say right now, if you fall into that line of thinking where people are talking about, you know, he did drugs or he had issues with the law, go listen to Al Sharpton's address to the funeral, as well as to the protests.
But listen to him.
Listen to George Floyd's daughters and brother, who also gave speeches.
And recognize that these are people in pain.
And with Sharpton, who's been fighting literally his entire life for this cause, listen to them.
And if you are in this wellness world, and you are about helping people, Just listen.
Don't talk.
Understand that that pain is real and this is what people have been going through for a very long time.
And hopefully that little bit of self-reflection will help you because when I'm seeing these posts that can't even...
Say his name.
It's really, really troublesome.
Last point, though, because I want to end on a higher note.
We have had so many responses to this podcast in such a short amount of time.
And thank you, first of all, to everyone who's been tagging us, new people I'm meeting and reaching out.
I really appreciate that.
And we individually have been doing work like this for a long time.
So I think the collective power of this and your feedback is really helpful at this time.
And for people who ask, what can you do right now?
There are certain people you're not going to reach, but it is always about education.
It's about hitting people on a level that they can understand and trying to help.
We've been getting emails from people who are watching partners and friends spiral into this conspiracy land.
And education is the most powerful tool that we have.
So you just got to keep, you got to keep on that path.
Yeah, I second that emotion.
Yes, to education, and thank you so much for all of your support and all of the different ways that you're interacting with what we're doing with appreciation and sharing things with us that we don't know about yet, offering potential topics.
It's all really helpful.
This week, for me, I was fascinated to see that J.P.
Sears, who we covered, I think it was just last week, Release the new video and he's he's been on an interesting journey of the types of content He's been putting out there.
So he'll go from like, you know satirizing people who believe the mainstream media painting us as as Scared fools who don't have enough, you know courage to grab life by the horns He'll go from that to like a video about yoga with his dogs what it's like doing yoga with your dogs at home this week he released the video that to me really illustrates the
The deep confusion that's going on in the conspirituality sort of demographic, which is that this video is a satire of a police training officer who's talking about police brutality.
And so it's supposed to be satirical and ironic in that he's really instructing cops on how to be vicious, but he's doing it, you know, in a sort of underhanded way or in a way that's indirect.
And it was just, it was a train wreck because I don't know where the humor is.
It was very much a lecture coming from a perspective that we would all agree with, so from a more left-wing perspective of solidarity with the protesters and Black Lives Matter.
But yeah, it's like finding this place where, like, am I a satirist or am I someone who's doing political opinion pieces that veer across the spectrum from, you know, crazy to sane and alt-right to being somewhat liberal?
So that was kind of wild.
This week as well, Candace Owens put out a video that a lot of people shared, a lot of white people shared, who I know, and I had the occasion to write the sentence in one comment thread that, you like her because she's young, hot, and black, and says the things that you wish you could say, but don't because you're a white guy.
You know, so that was just appalling.
Candace Owens basically was making the case that How George Floyd lived his life should determine whether or not he is quote-unquote martyred and how much grief people are allowed and outrage people are allowed to express at the way that he was killed.
So of course those arguments are just appallingly bad.
Candace Owens also notably this week endorsed the conspiracy theory that the protests and the rioting and the looting And even George Floyd's death might all be staged by George Soros, who is supposedly, you know, funding Antifa and trying to create a globalist takeover of the world.
Can I just ask Julian, with the theory or the misinformation that Gates didn't have his children vaccinated, or that Bill Gates wants the world to be depopulated or that Bill Gates wants the world to be depopulated or something like that.
There was an interview clip that sort of isolated, decontextualized, and then played over and over again.
Is there any sort of material evidence that people are pointing to about Soros funding Antifa?
No.
I haven't seen any.
I'm just wondering, like, so there's, it's literally it's out of the clear blue sky.
It's people just saying it.
Yeah, honestly, he's not a figure that I've looked at very, very deeply.
He's a billionaire.
He's a philanthropist, very much like Bill Gates.
He's involved in all sorts of initiatives around the world where he has spent most of his fortune.
I think he spent something like 78 of his $80 billion on these initiatives, which are really about uplifting the poorest people in the world and helping literacy and, you know, those sorts of programs.
But for For at least the last 10 or 15 years, figures like Alex Jones have repeated this myth that he is the dark boogeyman behind the liberal globalist agenda.
He has made, he made some of his money doing questionable things in terms of shorting economies, you know, and different countries.
And, and so there is this legacy of how he made his money, which is questionable, but to, and he's even come to terms with that, which is partly why I think he's funding so many things now.
having grown up under a more repressive government and understanding, you know, being a liberal and he's doing generally good work.
So no, it's just completely invented from everything that I've seen these, you know, this every iteration of it.
He's just the perfect boogeyman.
Because people don't know about him.
They don't read about his history.
They know nothing about him.
It's just become that.
This Agenda 21 ridiculousness that I referenced a little while ago was all about Soros and Gates.
And it's like, how much do you... And literally, the woman who wrote it said, I researched this for 24 hours.
That's what she said.
I spent 24 hours on my computers researching it, and here's my evidence.
So what are you really going to learn?
What websites were you looking at?
Well, she actually lists them and that's a whole other story.
Well, there's an interesting piece there too, which is that if you go far enough back in the 80s, he was actively fighting against European nationalism and against the rise of antisemitism and nationalism and white supremacy.
In Europe, and I think that's part of what has happened here, is that people on the right here have sort of identified him as a bit of an enemy because of that, and typically with the Soros conspiracy theories, there's a theme of anti-Semitism that's in there somewhere as well, as this Hungarian Jew who escaped the Soviet Union, right?
For sure.
Yeah.
Are we ready to move on?
Yeah!
Alright, so on to our- The topic of the week!
Yeah, on to our main course, the topic of the week.
Hold on a second.
My phone is disobeying me.
All right.
So the topic that we thought we'd explore this week is why spiritual people are vulnerable to conspiracy theories.
Each of us is going to have our own idea that we unpack a little bit before we discuss.
Mine is really captured by this one word, and the word is pseudoscience.
And under this heading, pseudoscience, I want to just put three bullet points.
Cherry picking.
Argument from authority and mistaking correlation for causation.
And each of those three fallacies or mistakes in how we think about science will show up later in everything that we're going to talk about today, including vaccines and 5G.
Within the New Age yoga, spiritual alternative medicine demographic, in a way, pseudoscience is the lingua franca.
It's really everywhere.
This is because, as with any religious movement, we often want to believe things that conflict with established scientific knowledge.
The scientific worldview is often seen as a threat to our sense of meaning, emotional and intuitive truth, and a kind of open-mindedness that we value about our potential and our capacities.
Also, this relationship to science can sometimes be politicized in this way where it's framed as being overly masculine, Colonialist, and robbing us of, again, things that we really value, like femininity, however that's defined.
Natural wisdom.
Ancient access to well-being and the sacred.
And we see these kinds of themes in Zach Bush, who we covered last time.
All of that beautiful, poetic way of championing our relationship to the natural world.
We see it in Eisenstein to some extent as well.
And we're going to see it in Christiana Northrow, who we're covering next week.
But listen, I'm sympathetic to this.
Experiential, contemplative, emotional, intuitive, embodied practices are where I live.
And I know that both of you guys agree with that as well.
I spend a huge amount of time there, both in terms of my personal practice and in terms of facilitating for others.
But I think there's a way that we can be committed to figuring out how we interpret And understand those experiences in ways that are informed by psychology and by scientific literacy.
A couple weeks ago, when I was first exposed to Zach Bush, I said to the friend of mine who sent me the video that we talked about last week, a lot of it sounds like pseudoscience to me.
And she said, did you invent that term yourself?
So this is clearly, this was an argument that had never been presented to her.
And this is someone, you know, who's deep into all of this ultimate coaching yoga world, never heard the term pseudoscience.
So here's the definition for the purposes of this brief discussion.
Pseudoscience uses language, authority figures, and references studies, scientific studies, in a way that gives the appearance of being driven and informed and validated by science.
But it's without any of the sincere rigor, transparency, accountability, willingness to follow data and accept findings, willingness to acknowledge that when predictions have been made, which is how science works, you create a hypothesis.
That hypothesis has implications.
Those implications have predictions.
If those predictions turn out to be true, then you move to the next step in the process of creating scientific knowledge.
If they turn out not to be true, you acknowledge it and say, well, I guess we have to try something else.
All right, so scientific method really, I want to say as well, is adversarial in the best way.
If you're really engaging in rigorous scientific method, you're opening yourself up to being critiqued and evaluated by people who are hostile to your hypothesis and to the things that you're saying.
So within the pseudoscience landscape, very often science, ironically, and you mentioned this last week, Derek, science is often painted as the bad guy, right?
Science is the mean old white materialist Agenda that wants to take away our sense of meaning and beauty and wonder until one study emerges That appears to prove the thing that I've been claiming from a from a pseudoscience perspective or in conflict with actual scientific knowledge And so then you get into this whole issue of cherry-picking choosing the one study that validates what
You want it to say, ignoring the fact that multiple studies have been done since then that have shown the opposite or that that study has been shown to have various flaws.
One of the big problems with this is PubMed.
So PubMed is a big sort of clearinghouse that you can find online of every scientific study pretty much ever done, going back to a certain date.
And so you can find studies on PubMed that will validate whatever theory you have.
But it's knowing how to look at those studies, how to look at studies that came afterwards, how to see it in context, how to understand how the process of producing scientific knowledge functions.
And typically people who are invested in pseudoscience don't really know how to do that.
So that's the cherry picking piece.
The argument from authority piece is that if you can find proponents of really outlandish and completely unscientific claims, About everything from ancient civilizations, to aliens, to quantum physics, to magical thinking, manifestation, nutritional supplements, cleansing.
But these are all seen as being part of a growing edge new paradigm in science because they have some kind of credential, right?
Maybe they have an MD.
Maybe they are academics.
Maybe they are involved in some kind of research.
Maybe they're just a chiropractor.
But they have some kind of credential that makes it seem as if what they're saying is scientific.
Then you get the argument from authority, which is this person is saying it, and so it must be true, and I'm going to take it on board.
And so, in closing on that idea about why spiritual people may be more susceptible or vulnerable to conspiracy theories, if you have become loyal to some kind of pseudoscience explanation for why something you believe that contradicts established scientific knowledge or has not been proven to be true, Then, one of the retorts to people who point that out is that there's a plot.
There's a cover-up.
The mainstream scientific establishment doesn't want us to know the truth.
The truth will make us too powerful.
The truth will make us not continue spending our money in various ways that they get rich off of.
There's a plot.
There's a cover-up.
And that's why.
And me and my friends are the lightworkers.
We are the ones who are on the side.
of truth and nature and finding a better way that goes beyond testy old materialist science.
So that's my bit on this piece.
Yeah, great, Julian.
I've got a kind of a different direction, and I'm really happy that you gave a really good review of the belief and cognition aspects.
But when you proposed this question, you know, why are spiritual people vulnerable to conspiratorial beliefs, I really got stuck on the designation of spiritual people.
And so I want to trouble that a little bit.
I think we know who we're talking about.
In your essay, you gave this series of tongue-in-cheek lifestyle indicators.
You called them, you called the demographic, the tatted-up, skimpy goddess vegan Instagram influencers and their burning man, scarf-wearing man-bun, quantum raw chocolate-eating partners in polyamory.
You described them as idealistic, adventurous, open to liberated exploration of body and mind.
And usually progressive in their political views.
And that's what I want to focus on.
Because I think the picture is recognizable in relation to consumer aesthetics and affect, but I don't see any coherent politics holding it together.
In fact, it usually seems to me that liberated exploration of body and mind is more libertarian in structure than progressive.
I remember, I don't know if you both remember back in 2012 that there was a bit of a campaign to start a basic social media yoga community education support system to support Obama over Romney.
I was active in that, and you know, not because I thought that it was the best possible outcome to give him a second term, but I expected arguments with greens and anarchists amongst yoga people, and a little bit of that happened.
But what I didn't expect was how many Republicans I actually had in my feeds, and I didn't expect The steep resistance to any collective, pragmatic mobilization of social capital.
Like, the resistance was usually framed as, yoga is a space free of politics, which we know is total garbage.
It's not true.
But at the time, I didn't really understand that clearly.
I didn't have the tools to speak to it.
So, I mean, if by progressive we mean, you know, working in coalition towards the common good, I've just never seen that happen.
I've never seen any politician, like, actively pursue the yoga vote, because they know it's not a coherent demographic.
I think that's because the scene is hyper-individualistic, and what people share is narratives of their individual journeys, and lifestyle products.
I think it's also important to remember that political sentiments amongst yoga and Buddhist practitioners have always run the gamut.
Going back especially to the cusp of modernity in India, yoga was both an organizing force for anti-colonialism, but it was also the budding religion of a nationalism that has only grown in power and influence, and it's now given the world Hindu nationalism as state policy in India.
I always love to tell my, you know, the students and trainings that I facilitate that the Bhagavad Gita was Gandhi's favorite scripture, but it was also the favorite book of his assassin.
And I remember reading about this one proto-nationalist group where members took a vow of devotion and they had to hold the Gita in one hand and a pistol in the other.
Then we have the fact that some of Europe's biggest and earliest yoga fans were Nazis, who specifically associated yoga practice with the development of personal magical powers, flying by location, channeling messages.
They also used Vedic notions of food hygiene, bodily purity, and birth bloodline status to sculpt the body politic of fascism.
So when you throw all of this together, we might see that the interest in purity amongst the vegan Instagrammers is not always indistinguishable from the politics of exclusion and self-interest.
Now, another thing is that, and I've noticed this in my research on yoga cults, is that in the globalization period, Yoga culture in general has often been this place where this kind of throwback social conservatism can be reframed as a kind of spiritual order, right?
And so here I think a lot about how non-Indian yoga people fetishized, for instance, the gender relations of the Indian families to which they were devoted.
So like in the 60s and 70s, Lots of yoga people who had grown up in gender binary nuclear families in Europe and North America and they fled them in the name of the counterculture and lo and behold Where do they find themselves but at the feet of the cultural gender norms of their Indian hosts, right?
And and so there's this like latent heteronormative fetish that informs some of the binary discourse and like goddess discourse and divine masculine discourse we've all heard about.
And this is an important point because as Derek pointed out last week in his review of the scholarship on conspirituality, half of the impulse here is driven by notions of the feminine and the intuitive, which are painted as oppositional to medical convention, but also pushing which are painted as oppositional to medical convention, but also pushing the possibility of rebirth and often using very like sensual So the That's my thing about spiritual people, who are they really?
I'm not quite sure what it means, but when we take the second part of the question and we ask what makes people in general vulnerable to conspiracy thinking, is there a psychological profile?
And here's where, as like a cult survivor and researcher, I have to say that at least in that discipline, there's a real resistance to the notion that there are predictors for recruitment into dodgy or abusive groups.
And there's two reasons for that.
First of all, there isn't good data on it.
I mean, it's possible.
I've heard a lot of people online sort of muse aloud that the conspiritualist person might have a high trauma load or something like that.
I mean, or they might have certain attachment patterns.
I mean, that might be true, but we're just never going to know.
We're never going to be able to find out.
And in cult research, we really don't spend much time on that because speculating on the psychology of recruits, it kind of distracts from the study of control mechanisms.
And those control mechanisms diverse people with all kinds of psychological profiles.
So, what we do see amongst cult recruits, and my implication here is that it's similar to what we will see amongst recruits to conspirituality, is something called situational vulnerability that's usually rooted in a kind of social precariousness.
So that would be recent life changes, people who are going through divorce, unemployment, pandemic anybody, right?
Like academic failure, family alienation, displacement.
There is some evidence that they're in the first, in the year before recruitment into a high demand group, that there can be psychiatric, addictive, or mood disorder issues.
But, you know, that's in just the year before.
There's also, I can say anecdotally, that there might be a predictor found in whether or not the person had belonged to other groups before.
But any one of these situations can allow a group, an ideology, a conspiracy theory, a conspirituality group to present itself as what's called like a false safe haven.
Like if you come into the fold here, you'll be resolved of your tensions.
So, like in other words, I think the main thing that makes people vulnerable to conspirituality is the same set of criteria that makes them vulnerable to cultic control.
And that's basically deception delivered via charismatic leadership.
I want to roll off something you said because it fits into my idea with this, and that is Gandhi, who amazing person on many levels did so much and resonates throughout the ages, which is the mark of someone important.
When he decided he was no longer going to have sex, he didn't ask his wife, He just told her and she wasn't happy about it, but she just had to deal with it.
And as he got fixated on this idea that he was above his sexuality, there was a moment in later on when he was in his 60s or 70s where he had a few different ones.
I believe one, and I'm sorry if I'm wrong on this, but it was a grandniece.
She was in her early 20s when he was 70s and he used to make her sleep naked next to him every night while he was naked and he would cuddle her.
And the idea was if he could cuddle her and not get an erection or sexually aroused, he was practicing his spirituality.
Now, I say this because that's a pretty complex person.
We can talk about the trauma that the women in his life had to endure, but when I see people talk about his non-violence, and even he recognized that violence was necessary in certain capacities in certain times, but they take one sentence.
It's like the Joseph Campbell, follow your bliss.
If you read the whole follow your bliss where it's embedded in, it's a lot more complex than those three words.
And people do that with Gandhi all the time.
And which brings me to the topic of spiritual people being vulnerable.
Everything that I look at is usually through the eyes of evolutionary biology.
I'm just fascinated by it because I want to know the origins of how we came to be who we are.
Just this is a very brief summary, but 350,000 years humans broke off from our last lineage and 60,000 years ago or so is when our prefrontal cortex was fully developed.
So if you think about who we are today and all of our technologies in the way that we live, We've been working with the same neural hardware for 60,000 years and the software updates sometimes Confound the hardware which is problematic and I think a reason why we get into mental health issues And then if you look at society 12,000 years ago is when we got out of the last ice age So the development of agriculture really blossomed at that point.
So really in the in the broad scope of time We are relatively new and yet we're still working with Older hardware.
And why that's important is because the human brain is one of the most fascinating pieces of biological architecture ever constructed.
We can't take credit for it, you know, it's not causation, we're correlation in that sense.
But it really is the 80 to 115 billion neurons and all of their connections that are happening is something that is really unique throughout the history of animals.
But, in order to process that type of hardware, first of all, it takes 20-25% of your daily caloric intake goes to your brain.
So, all the movement you're doing, whatever, the most demanding aspect, the most demanding organ or anything going on in your body is your brain.
Now, with such a high energy demand, Your brain wants to conserve energy any way that it can.
So if there is a shortcut available, it will take the shortcut.
So to go back to Gandhi, you see a quote that is really appealing about nonviolence and he has many.
That's awesome.
That is one piece of the man.
For you to go and then research The Patriarchy of India and what led to him and the attitudes and then put that in the context of Me Too and understand the trauma inflicted on women during that time, you might have a different picture of him.
But that takes research, it takes understanding, it takes cultural nuance because you have to think about the time and the place and his role.
There's a lot of factors, so it's much easier just to see one sentence that you really resonate with and then put that as the idea of that person.
And that is what I see repeating out over and over again with everything that's happening.
Again, to ask a white person, and I published a podcast and essay with my best friend last week who happens to be black, and I've been pulled over four times For no reason, I've had police point guns at my head, I've been patted down, I've been harassed because I was with my friend.
That was the only reason.
And I bring that up because that gave me a window into what he experiences all the time.
He's a lawyer.
He's been working in social activism for 25 years.
He's an amazing person, but all they saw was black guy, white guy.
And when you're in those situations, you're forced to confront your privilege and you're forced to look deeper into issues.
And so, What I've noticed with the spiritual people is they're very big on taking sentences and putting them up.
But to do the research to understand what led to those sentences, it's cognitively demanding.
You have to spend a lot of time to put into and understand nuance.
And we are just not set up as a structure.
The software upgrades we've had in the last 200 years with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is way too fast for our brains to process.
So to conserve energy, we just look for the easiest things.
that as Julian said, usually resonate with what we already believe from our training and our life, or as Matthew was saying, for the reasons that people get caught in, there could be parental reasons, social, it's probably a combination of all of them.
But whatever is going to allow you to move forward without too much thought is what your brain is unconsciously going to gravitate for so that it doesn't have to use more energy than necessary.
And when you take that as an apply, you can, I mean, it's not just spiritual people.
This is tribalism.
That's part of the basis of it.
Your tribe thinks for you, just like a partner thinks for you over time as you know them.
And that really is at the heart of, from a neurological perspective, of why we fall victim to theories that don't have to make sense, that don't even, that are often contradictory, right?
Bill Gates wants to vaccinate everyone in the world so that they live longer so that he can depopulate the world, right?
Think about that.
Like there's no logical thread through that, but Bill Gates, rich person, bad.
That is easy.
And so that perpetuates what I think is this conspiritual thinking.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the whole, you know, I didn't get to correlation versus causation.
I think, I think it's a piece, a big piece of this too, which is that we have brains as you were giving us that little tour of evolutionary biology.
We have brains that, that see patterns and being able to see patterns was incredibly advantageous at a certain stage in our evolution to be able to see that there's actually a predator hiding behind those bushes camouflaged in this way but you can connect the dots and you can see the pattern and you're not lunch today because of that so the patterns that we can see that allow for survival mean that we are
we're almost pre-wired to put a certain amount of importance on patterns and to see patterns even when they're not there and that to me is a significant overlap and what i mean by spiritual people in this sense matthew is is Is people who tend to see the world through a patternistic lens, where there are synchronicities, and there are signs, and there's a hidden pattern that is telling you how to arrive at the place where you wanted to arrive, because the universe is conspiring in your favor.
Just a really quick story.
I know we have to move on, but I'll never forget going to this... A friend of mine was in a men's group, and they did all this work together around theater, and they invited all the friends and family to come and see this Sort of amateur theatrical presentation in a little room.
It was very intimate.
It was very sweet.
And I'll never forget this guy getting up and he did this monologue where he unrolled his yoga mat and he performed his yoga practice as he was doing the monologue.
And the monologue was essentially every day I get up at 6 a.m.
and I make the smoothie and I do the thing and I use the neti pot and I get on my mat and I perform my sun salutation because I know "that when I have become one with the universe, "I will become a regular on a daytime soap opera." This idea that somehow your spiritual practice is a way of getting in the zone so that you get what you want, so that you can read all the hidden signs and be in the right place at the right time so that the universe rewards you.
And that kind of patternistic thinking then has its shadow version with actually everything is conspiring against you and nothing is what it appears and everything has some dark hidden meaning that you can wake up to if you want to ultimately be free.
And so that brings me to 5G, or are we going to go to vaccines first?
Yeah, I think Vaccines is on the tap.
As I was saying, what really interests me is history and everything that I look into, I want to know where it comes from.
It's just fascinating because Origin myths are the foundation of culture, so they're important, but that translates into science as well.
And the earliest instance of vaccines is about 1700 years old.
It comes from a Taoist teacher named Jay Hong.
I am from New Jersey, so forgive my accents on things, just understand that.
But he was part of the Dongxin Dynasty in China.
And the concept that they found in his book was this.
If you get bitten by a dog, kill it, and then take out its brain and put its brain on your wound, which will cure the disease.
I don't think that will work, but...
The idea was to build up a defense naturally against diseases by giving you a little bit of the disease.
And in fact, many centuries later, Paracelsus, who was really the kind of the father of chemistry, he wrote, in all things there is a poison and there is nothing without a poison.
It depends only upon the dose, whether something is poison or not.
And so, when you're looking back at traditional Chinese medicine where this concept of vaccine comes from, at least as far as we know, the thing about history is we only know what we found.
Many of these concepts are probably far older.
But Aristotle, obviously an influential person, he believed that fermentation, death, and rotting were caused by a vital force that was inherent in all of life.
Living things, everything organic, came from non-living matter thanks to a vital heat.
And there's a correlation in Vedic times too with Ayurveda at that time.
And this was his theory of spontaneous generation.
Now that theory actually lasted for 2,000 years and actually most of medicine didn't move that much from the times of Hippocrates and the Socratic school and up until The 19th century medicine didn't change that much, but there were breakthroughs like Paracelsus, but overall there wasn't a lot.
And then Louis Pasteur comes along and his work on yeast infusions was what helped to overcome this idea of spontaneous generation.
So he started working on fermentation for wine and alcohol.
He became fascinated by that.
And at the time the going science was that fermentation was through ferments.
Which was a complex chemical substance that accompanied the alcohol.
Scientists didn't think that fermentation was a living process.
They just thought that this chemical was tethered to alcohol and that's what created it.
Now around this time there was another theory which called miasma theory and this was actually very popular during the bubonic plague so if we think about everything going on now with coronavirus like they had their own conspiracy theories and it was the idea that vapors from the heavens came down and it was the air that made you sick and interestingly at that time
There is a long history in Judaism and Islam and Hinduism and all of a lot of different faiths of cleansing rituals.
Christianity is really singular and not having a lot of them.
And for a few centuries, it was thought that if you didn't bathe, that if you kept your pores clogged, the disease couldn't enter.
And so, the way that Christians combated the bubonic plague was by not washing.
So, a lot of them died, right?
And so, they thought that by changing their linen shirt, they were protected.
So, they changed their shirt often, but they didn't wash.
I mean, their entire lives.
There was baptism, and that was the only time they bathed.
So, you can see, we evolve our understanding of science, and I think that's an important point that's threaded throughout this story.
Now, thanks to the microscope, we started to see how diseases worked, and that's how Pasteur found out about what I'm about to present.
And he became interested in the silkworm epidemic.
He proposed the germ theory of disease, which some people today are questioning for some reason.
Within 20 years of him coming up with germs, this idea, the pathogens were identified for the bubonic plague, leprosy, tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera.
And cholera is the first vaccine that he actually developed.
And Pasteur is considered the father of immunology.
Uh, He coined the term after Edward Jenner.
Now Edward Jenner had inoculated cowpox about almost a century prior, but he didn't have the double blind studies.
And so that's what really makes a difference.
So vaccinations were known, but it wasn't popular science at the time.
That is what led to Pastor doing the anthrax experiment.
And so he took 24 sheep, one goat, and six cows.
He injected a group of them with a little bit of anthrax and he had a control group.
And then two weeks later, he came back and then he gave them all a lethal dose.
And you can guess what happened.
The control group all died.
Except for a few of the cows who got extremely sick, but made it through.
But the ones he vaccinated, no sickness at all.
So that is where vaccination comes from.
Pastor also developed vaccines for gangrene and rabies.
And interestingly, he developed the rabies vaccine by using a rabbit brain.
So 1,700 years later, we're back on taking parts of brain and using it.
But I thought that was an interesting connection.
So that's the history of vaccines.
Now, During this pandemic, I lost my health insurance because it was tethered to my wife's job, and she works in events, so there are no events.
So I've been going through the process of Covered California, and it's been understandably hard, but really just Mind-bogglingly dumb what you have to do.
And I'm just, first of all, the idea that health care has to be tethered to your job is problematic in this phase.
So I started researching health care and health care in the US really only took off in the 1940s.
I didn't know this.
A hundred years ago, if you were sick with a disease, The doctors pretty much just came over, looked at you and said, yeah, we can't do anything.
I mean, that's only a century ago.
And so, this concept of healthcare and how we understand it and going to the doctor and they should know everything, vaccinations are complex.
It's actually one of the most complex, Drugs to develop overall.
It's not just take a little bit of it and throw it in you.
That's not how it works.
Paracelsus knew it's all about dosage.
And what Pasteur showed, though, is it's all about heating.
Now, vegans aren't going to appreciate this, but the flu vaccines that we use are inoculated or incubated inside of chicken eggs.
That's the delivery mechanism.
So they're incubated in chicken eggs and then extracted and sent around the world from there.
In fact, the US government has a secret farm for chicken eggs for vaccines to avoid bioterrorism attacks.
Because if anyone knew where it was and they got into that circulation, they could kill a lot of people.
Now, the process, I'll use the flu vaccine process so you understand the development and how it's developed.
Now, the coronavirus, it's already been shown, cannot be developed in a chicken egg, so it's going to be slightly different.
But with the flu virus, health agencies send virus strains to vaccine manufacturers.
And since Australia is the first official start of a year of the flu season, they use the strains that are going around there to identify for the rest of the world.
And the virus is then injected into a chicken egg where it incubates and replicates.
Scientists harvest the fluid, they purify the virus antigen, and that's how the vaccine is created.
Now last point I want to make because this is really why I even have to say all of this and why vaccines are part of this conversation.
It's because of Andrew Wakefield.
Andrew Wakefield published a study in 1995 that was later retracted that's saying that the MMR, the measles, mumps, and rubella disease causes autism.
I don't want to spend too much time on this.
He has a history.
He had already tried to link a stomach disease two years earlier with a vaccine and that was just rejected because it was nonsense, as is the vaccine autism connection.
But, what is interesting, and the journalist Brian Deer has done a lot of investigative reporting on this, is that he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to falsify the research, his study was retracted, and when he was submitting that study saying that the MMR vaccine was causing autism, he had taken a patent out on a single jab measles vaccine.
So, his idea was if he can get everyone to look over here, he can get this to be the vaccine that everyone used.
So, when you see people out screaming about anti-vaxxers, that's where your origin myth comes from.
Now, last point is that The contention of the anti-vaxxers is that the mercury levels were causing autism by thimerosal.
Thimerosal was identified by the FDA in 1999 as being potentially problematic in infants, and so they took it out of vaccines.
And almost all vaccines no longer have thimerosal, although some do, and they believe they're at relatively low dosages.
They found better preservatives such as phenol, which you use in your mouthwash.
So in 1992, Children had a 1 in 150 chance of being on the spectrum of autism.
In 1998, it was 1 in 110 and then thimerosal was taken out of the vaccines.
Today, the rate is 1 in 54.
So, if it was thimerosal that was causing it, we've actually increased by 50% the rate of autism over that time.
So, it's not the vaccines.
Yeah.
That was a lot.
With the thimerosal, really, two things that I wanted to add to that.
One is that you would get more mercury from eating like, I think, a half of a regular-sized can of tuna.
Three ounces of tuna fish are equivalent to the vaccine dose.
Yeah and the other is that actually there was never it was never shown that that that amount of thimerosal did have adverse effects on people beyond the occasional mild side effect and it was taken out mostly because of all of the activism and then as you're saying after it was taken out You know, you don't get the shift that the prediction, right, that should be made if this is a scientific process, did not come true.
And it's another, it's a great example of correlation versus causation, right?
So if the vaccine rates, if the autism rates are going up, and the number of vaccinations is going up, there's a correlation between those two things.
If you're a scientifically minded person, you say, that's interesting.
More research is required to find out if there's a causal relationship.
Does one cause the other, or do the two just kind of tend to go together for whatever other set of reasons that we might be able to discern if we look at it carefully?
And I would argue that, first of all, that there was never a causal connection ever shown, but that actually our understanding of autism, our ability to diagnose autism and catch it sooner and define what the spectrum of autism looks like, has Improved and improved and improved over the years.
So now we have more people who we understand have autism.
I don't know that autism rates have necessarily increased.
We just know what they have.
Right.
And they didn't, I mean, you had shared my Hannah Gadsby article and I don't know, you've seen the special, uh, right.
And it's just, just talk about amazing.
Uh, just like just treating it as if it's one thing.
It's not.
Yeah.
And, and that, well, I don't want to get into an autism story, but yeah.
Yeah.
Any comments, Matthew?
I mean, I have some general comments about, we're looking at, you guys are taking the science side of describing where anxieties around vaccines and 5G comes from.
And I've got some general comments about the fact that they're both penetrative technologies and what that means.
So maybe I'll leave that until after we cover 5G.
Okay, yeah, in the interest of time maybe we move on to 5G and then wrap up with our discussion.
Okay, so if you're paying any attention to the conspiracy landscape, which it's hard not to if you're on social media at all, vaccines and 5G are a huge part of the sort of interwoven variations on the conspiracy theories around COVID-19.
So let's just talk about 5G briefly here.
There's a lot to cover, but I'll see how much I can summarize it.
But that really, since electricity was harnessed in the 1880s, people have been afraid that this extremely powerful invisible force might be dangerous.
And it's understandable, right?
You could be electrocuted.
And electrocution is a real thing.
Electricity is really powerful.
So you can see how people would think, well, maybe even if we're not touching a live wire, the electricity around us could still maybe somehow be harmful.
This is not crazy.
Once radio and telephone were invented, there was outcry that these were going to have negative effects on our health as well.
But this was just simply not found to be the case.
And so as the unfolding of technology has continued with the advent of cell phones, a lot of the same fears came up.
And And so then we begin the process of moving from 1G to 5G.
And 1G is really just the first generation of cellular technology that all of our cell phones ran on in the beginning.
And we've come now to the beginning of 5G becoming available.
With each successive new generation, people have had the same fearful arguments that they've leveled against it.
And the question really is why?
You know, to be fair to the concerns, the concern is that because these technologies use electromagnetic energy, It must mean that they have some kind of danger because this is a form of radiation, right?
So radiation is a scary word.
Radiation we know causes cancer because electrons are ripped away from atoms by the radiation and this creates errors in DNA coding.
So it's understandable that if you know that, you might think, well, gee, this uses radiation as well.
It's becoming more powerful with each successive generation.
I'm hearing that the frequencies are higher.
All of that sounds dangerous.
Has it really been tested?
Is it going to kill us all?
And is it enacting some kind of more subtle, long-term, pervasive damage to our health?
So here's the thing to understand about that.
Ionizing radiation, which is that one end of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, includes ultraviolet radiation, x-rays, and what we typically think of as nuclear radiation.
All of this is dangerous.
And after prolonged exposure, it does cause cancer for reasons we understand.
It has to do with the very, very intense energetic, the power of it, the capacity for those very high frequencies to do damage at the level of the atom and rip away electrons, which then affects how the DNA is being encoded.
But the type of radiation that we use for radios, TVs, cell phones, microwave ovens, radar and satellites, are all on the non-ionizing side of the spectrum, meaning that all of these frequencies are much too low to do any of that kind of damage, which is why we've lived with these technologies for a long time without any adverse effects.
It's understandable to be concerned about it, but I think there's a way here that, and again, this is understandable, I have sympathy for where people are coming from, There's a way that often amongst people in our broad demographic, there's a sense that you have to keep your eye on those scientists.
Because they say that things are safe, but maybe they're not really safe.
And this kind of goes back to times in history where doctors got things wrong and where scientists got things wrong.
So there's this fear that non-ionizing radiation could cause cancer.
And you know, there's a longer discussion about studies and counter studies and where we're at with that.
Basically, the scientific consensus is that none of this kind of radiation is dangerous.
A couple little numbers about that.
One of the fears is that 5G is higher frequency.
Surely higher frequency is dangerous.
We've never dealt with it before, proponents of the fearful conspiracy theories will say.
But the fact is we've been using these frequencies in radar, ultrasound, Microwave ovens, airport scanners, and fiber optics for a long time with no adverse effects related in terms of the environment or in terms of biological tissue, including our bodies.
In fact, your remote control that you use at home has an infrared frequency around 300,000 times higher than the highest 5G frequencies.
And your basic household light bulb has an electromagnetic frequency about 600,000 times higher than 5G.
Talk about microwaves.
5G is for the first time using millimeter waves or microwaves, so that sounds scary.
But the reason that microwave ovens generate such heat is that they focus and contain the energy very intensely.
It's kind of similar to how a hydrojet, a high-pressure stream of very concentrated water can do incredible damage, but water itself is not inherently dangerous.
Nonetheless, these conspiracy theories have emerged that say 5G is going to weaken your immunity so that COVID-19 can come in, right?
It sets the stage.
COVID-19 maybe is caused by 5G.
It's all a hoax.
It's not really a virus.
It's caused by 5G and this is a way to make us sick so that then we get the vaccination.
The vaccination has microchips in it that are going to track your movements and be used for surveillance because cell phones don't do that already, right?
Somehow we need this elaborate plan to get to the point where we can Have a surveillance state.
It's like we have a surveillance state already.
Some people have never heard of Edward Snowden, right?
This is, of course, linked to a much larger claim that all global pandemics, from the Spanish flu to HIV to SARS to Ebola and now COVID-19, correlate with each new rollout of successive electromagnetic technology and therefore were caused by them.
Of course, this ignores the fact that we had Global pandemics way before any of this kind of technology existed.
So that's my little shtick on 5G.
It's really great.
I'm glad that you both took the heavy lifting there on the science, which is totally out of my wheelhouse and I actually just, it's very grounding to me to hear it laid out.
And yeah, I just wanted to comment on The meanings of these technologies as I see them play out in conspirituality.
And the first thing that it makes me think of is that there was this case a few years back that made it to the Southern California Supreme Court, San Diego, I believe.
Some Christian parents were taking the Encinitas School Board to court over the board's contract with a yoga nonprofit that provided yoga classes as part of their phys ed program.
Now they argued that the yoga classes violated the Establishment Clause and were covertly indoctrinating their children into Hinduism.
And the non-profit was, and still is, the Joyce Foundation, and they argued back, deceptively in my opinion, that yoga had no religious connections.
They were lying.
And on their now defunct website, there was this photograph of the founder of Ashtanga Yoga, Pattabhi Joyce, also an abuser, presented as a religious icon.
And, you know, the portrait was encircled by marigolds.
But what happened was that in following the case, it became clear that the main concern of the Christian parents was over the unknown impacts within the bodies and psyches of their children.
They had no specific evidence that their kids were being contaminated or poisoned, but that wasn't the real focus It was the potential that like this unknown empty space of their children's inner bodies would be somehow taken over by an outside force That they wouldn't know their child's inner world in the same way.
That they would not be the ones to fill up their children's bodies and minds with content and alliances and sentiments.
And this sounds really familiar now, because with both vaccines and 5G, we have these penetrative technologies that are going to seep into our inner bodies, that the state is sanctioning, And even attributing health and wellness claims to.
I mean, 5G not so much, except there's a lot of talk around how it will improve communications and safety and so on.
The mechanisms are obscure to the public, they're hard to understand, they're administered by institutions, and they seem to be rolling out like everything else in our complex societies, on their own, without oversight.
And I think, you know, probably some conspiritualists are personally fearful of this invasive kind of technology, like the possibility that the state will actually take over their internal space.
But that anxiety really ramps up around the mysterious internal worlds of children.
And when that internal world is pathologized, Pathologized, which is what like these clowns like Wakefield do with autistic children.
The panic just rises further and the autistic child is not seen by these children as a uniquely neurodivergent person, but as some sort of medical mistake.
And it doesn't feel like a mistake to me that Wakefield pinned vaccination to autism in children.
I don't think it would have been as captivating to his audience or as manipulative if he'd falsely claimed that it caused liver disease.
Right.
So, I mean, it's not also, I also think it's not an accident that these penetrating invasive technologies mirror, but in this kind of demonic form, the notions of divine influence.
A lot of the resistance language sets up kind of like angelic defense on the part of the conspiritualist.
Like I'm going to fill my body with herbs rather than vaccines or I'm going to breathe in the light or I'm going to build my immune system rather than have like a fake immune profile implanted in me.
Or I'm going to reject the radio waves of 5G and bathe myself in angel light, or I'm not going to let the frequencies disrupt my connection to source, right?
So there's this old Psychoanalytic term, cathexis, and it points to an irrational investment of emotional meaning into a particular object, sometimes a random object.
So I don't think this is really about vaccines or 5G, because they could have fetishized anything.
I think it's the penetrative theme, the notion of being invaded, that it's really about the protection of something that is unseen and unknown.
It's about the protection of inner personal space.
And then I think on a broader level, you know, it connects to the racism of the entire movement by being connected to like, you know, the autonomy of our borders and keeping things as they always have been.
And the word you didn't drop in that I kept waiting for was sovereign.
Oh yeah, yeah, we gotta do a whole show on sovereign and sovereignty.
Yeah.
On everything you just said.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Nice.
One note, just about the origins of Wakefield.
It was stomach encephalitis, something of that nature is the disease that he was originally trying to pin it on.
And a woman came to him two years after that and had read his work and said, my child has this thing and it came after the vaccine.
So there was actually somebody who Maybe she set off a lightbulb in him because that's what he stuck with because when it was shown that vaccines weren't problematic with what he was focused on, when she presented the autism, that's when he jumped on it.
So I don't know, you know, I will never probably know the exact how that played out, but that's actually the timeline of how he came up with that vaccine autism connection.
So you have this extraordinary irony that within this community that is so focused on how everything is a cover-up Everything is corrupt.
There's this terrible thing going on.
It has to do with vaccines and autism.
The one really true fact that we know for sure is that the guy who started off that whole meme had his license taken away, was found guilty, confessed to having fabricated the study and the data for his own gain because he was creating a different vaccine that was competing.
With the one he was trying to discredit, and yet his name lives on as the patron saint of the anti-vax movement.
And after, when he got traction in it, he also, he created a disease, and then of course he started selling the cure for it, and this was in the early 2000s.
So yeah, that's, yeah.
Yeah, it's very, it's very in alignment with the fact that these whole, the 75 year old man who was pushed being Antifa was started by Christian Rez at the One American Network that has become Trump's state media.
And this is also the guy who a few months ago when the pandemic started was really pushing the Soros connection hard.
So where was his job before One America?
Is he worked for Russian state television.
He's a Russian plant who's working for this company that The people we're discussing in the wellness, they're taking his Russian propaganda and they're putting it forward right now.
