13: Religion Can Be A Dangerous Verb (w/Dr Theo Wildcroft)
Dr. Theodora Wildcroft joins us again to take us through the basics of contemporary Religious Studies. She discusses how the discipline approaches issues of ritual, value, meaning, charisma, and role-playing, while also leading us through the process by which objects, places, and people become sacred. Spoiler: it’s more about what we do than what we believe.
Wildcroft also dissects the chronic problem of conspiritualists weaponizing myths of rebellion and recovery.
Matthew gives a brief rundown on the trainwreck of Mikki Willis’s “Plandemic 2,” and also talks about the Q-map as an artistic (if delusional) landscape of comfort and connection. Derek contemplates the chemicals we don’t question while putting onto or inside of our bodies, while Julian homes in on one particular chemical: the pyramid scheme propped up by Big Essential Oil.
Show Notes
The QAnon map
How to spot a conspiracy theory – Expert guide to conspiracy theories part one
Mandala Offering – Ring Set Version
Lotsawa House: Mandala Offering
Deep State Mapping Project
Was Lewis Carroll a Pedophile? His Photographs Suggest So
Travis View on Twitter
2019 Plastic Surgery Statistics Report
Risk Associated with Bee Venom Therapy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Class Action: Young Living ‘Nothing More Than an Unlawful Pyramid Scheme’
Multi-Level Vaccine Refusal
Very simplistic visual example of how conspiracy theories can become transnational
Deconstructing the placebo effect and finding the meaning response
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Thanks, Derek.
Episode 13, Religion Can Be a Dangerous Verb.
Dr. Theodora Wildcroft joins us again to take us through the basics of contemporary religious studies.
She discusses how the discipline approaches issues of ritual, value, meaning, charisma, and role-playing, while also leading us through the process by which objects, places, and people become sacred.
Spoiler, it's more about what we do than what we believe.
Wildcroft also dissects the chronic problem of conspiritualists weaponizing myths of rebellion and recovery.
Matthew gives a brief rundown on the train wreck of Mickey Willis's Plandemic II and also talks about the QMAP as an artistic, if delusional, landscape of comfort and connection.
Derek contemplates the chemicals we don't question while putting onto or inside of our bodies.
And I will home in on one particular chemical, the pyramid scheme, propped up by big essential oil.
Several news items today for this week in Conspirituality.
And after my interview and discussion with Theo, I'll be giving a concluder as well with a contemplation on what the big tent, every theory is welcome, spirituality of conspirituality and QAnon might mean.
And also, I wanted to say that for those waiting for it, I'm still working on the Q-adjacent and Q-vocabulary list, so I'm hoping to post that next week.
Well, I think after Trump coming out with his statements, he might have to add a few new words very soon.
Right.
Well, that's the first thing on our news ticker.
You know, this is going to be covered in depth elsewhere, but I just want to have it here for the record that Shannon Pettypiece of NBC asked whether Trump, this is yesterday in a news conference, knew about and or could get behind the idea that he was saving the world from a, quote, satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals, which is an extraordinary phrase to hear in the White House press room.
He declined to disavow Q and then of course went on the attack.
He's actually really good at this.
He said he appreciated the support of QAnon people and then he pretended that their main interest was patriotic as they resisted the protests in Portland and Chicago.
He also talked about sending in more troops to quell protests, so we'll link to Petty Peace's article on NBC News.
The other big news thing this week is that Plandemic 2 Indoctrination dropped on Tuesday at 12 p.m.
Eastern Time, but they had some sort of delay anyway.
It ended up being around 2 o'clock.
Did you guys catch any of that?
Yeah, I went to the theater.
We saw it in 3D.
They have vaccine needles coming at you from 3D with the glasses.
It's fascinating.
There was a gala.
Yeah, I mean, I felt terrible about myself For watching it, for looking at it.
I hated myself.
I was enraged, bored.
I was taking time away from my children.
But this is the way this is going.
The entire media culture is this fire hose and we're trying to drink from it.
I remember when we started this pod, we were wondering about how much content we would have.
But actually, we have the opposite problem, which is what do we focus on?
Who actually has clout?
Who's just grifting?
But also, when does that grift turn into a kind of viral abuse?
So yeah, I watched.
I felt guilty taking time away from more important things.
I also tried to justify it by saying, oh, I'm resting because I could be in the basement and on the couch and stuff.
But then it was so, like, nauseating that I couldn't rest, so that was kind of a lie, too.
Anyway, here's the down-low.
Mickey Willis is still playing Silver Fox, Zoolander, and pseudo-therapist.
He shoots himself in ultra-high definition with great backgrounds during his interviews, immaculate lighting, and then he lets his guests look like these pallid zombies on Zoom or Skype.
So there's a lot just in that.
He also references interviewing dozens of COVID contrarian doctors, but he only quotes a handful.
And I think the main giveaway, I mean, you know what's going on within the first five seconds or so when the first thing across the top of the screen is something like, Scripted recreation of events or something like that.
Anyway, he starts with a recreation of a three-hour CDC war game simulation of a pandemic response.
So this was an actual meeting that took place in the fall of 2019.
And they run these regularly to prepare for a pandemic, just like, you know, a branch of the military would run, you know, war games on a particular crisis situation anywhere else in the world.
Willis's entire premise is that because the CDC prepared for something, they planned for it to happen, therefore they probably made it happen.
But then proving that relies on leaning on this gish-galloping intelligence analyst who goes on and on about patent law, implying, but not really proving, that if the NIH patents a coronavirus sequence, it means they're planning on releasing it into the wild to kill people and then vaccinate them to track them.
So it's totally incoherent.
Also, thankfully, it's really super boring.
It's like 75 minutes of meandering innuendo, and it also really shows how thin the skin of these people are, or can be.
It's, you know, Willis spends a huge chunk of his time not actually making his COVID points, but bitching about the poor reviews his first documentary got, and also, you know, doing things like whining about Wikipedia's entry on Judy Mikovits.
But thankfully the platforms played hardball from the outset.
TikTok, Facebook, Twitter all denied sharing.
You can't find clips on YouTube as far as I can tell.
It's still up on BitChute.
Anyway, of course they're going to say that all of the blocking is the work of the cabal, and so we're going to print up t-shirts saying, yay cabal for blocking Mickey Willis.
Did it include any of the previous work with Megavitz?
Or was that just like, it was kind of expected that people knew that was the appetizer?
Yeah, no, I don't recall any rehashed, recycled footage directly.
He did say I sat down with her again to talk about the reception or, you know, the defamation that she had endured after the first release.
And it's hilarious because He asks her a question and she starts to answer and he fades her out and he asks another question like almost in mid-sentence and then he asks another question and he fades her out and then he kind of throws to if you want more you can look at our website and it's really it's bizarre it's it's there's no real It's all performative.
It's like I sat down to get the real sort of depth of feeling of, you know, how she was responding to this attack on her character and so on.
But, you know, he doesn't really let anybody speak with any clarity because Because everything's so overburdened with the production values of Doom.
Yeah, I really interpreted that as his kind of come on in terms of getting people to go deeper into the Plandemic universe, right?
I'm going to give you a brief preview of some of her responses to what all the critics said about her.
And then if you want more, you can go to the website and here's all the different things I'll show you on the website that you can click on to get more content, to get more involved in what we're doing.
That's actually, sorry Matthew, but that's actually, it's like a reverse engineering of how marketing usually works.
Usually the teasers are online to show you the main, but he's taking the main film to point you back to the teasers.
Right, right, right.
Anyway, the last I looked, you know, I don't know, I think it's playing on BitChute, but also it's playing still on Brian Rose's London TV or London Real, whatever platform.
Uh, and I don't think it's going to come anywhere near the 20 million views in the first couple of days that, uh, that he hit last time.
So, um, I think, I think Ahmed's right that deplatforming works.
Um, second little news thing, Derek posted a column to Big Think about how influencers are using conspirituality, cue adjacent or outright cue content to drive clicks, i.e.
to further monetize because everybody that you can get onto your social media channel, eventually might get into your web properties, and that's the name of the game.
In one interesting development, one of the influencers mentioned in his piece, because he shared a post with the hashtag pizza gate is real, came on to Derek's thread and vociferously denied that they're monetizing Q. Now, there's going to be more to come on this story, including names, but what I want to point out is that for the wellness crowd, it's super interesting to watch how they navigate
The danger of going full on cue or even appearing to go full cue, regardless of what their intentions or their actual commitments are.
This person really did not want to be called on this, but he's boosting the hashtag pizza gate is real.
So either there's some naivety about the fact that Pizzagate and Q are contiguous, or the person doesn't care, or the person knows and they're gaming the algorithm with an inflammatory post.
So it doesn't really matter.
The impact is the same.
Distraction through emotional manipulation.
And the Save Our Children hashtag is the same post.
Those are two of the biggest QAnon hashtags.
Yeah, they're QGateway hashtags, basically.
Rebranding hashtags.
How dare you say that I have any affinity for Q, right?
But also, how dare you suggest that me using it implies anything?
It's very bizarre.
Or to share two different admitted QAnon Theorists in your feed, one of them repeatedly, and then to deny that you have any allegiance to QAnon at all.
And you actually come back and say, I actually speak against QAnon, although you're sharing two major theorists on it.
There's no logic behind that.
Yeah, well, I don't know that there needs to be logic.
I think there needs to be consideration and a calculus of how close a particular wellness brand can get to this particular discourse.
It's an Icarus thing.
It's like, how close to the sun are you willing to fly, right?
Here's another thing.
So I said a lot of newsy items.
So next thing is, from Canada, which is where I am sitting, you know I'm always talking about how porous the border is to conspirituality infection.
Here's digital religion scholar Marc-André Argentino With a photograph from a recent rally in the province of Quebec.
We're going to give the tweet in your show links.
And he says, very simplistic visual example of how conspiracy theories can become transnational.
The top half is local context.
The bottom half is mainstream conspiracy narrative.
Merge them together and magic happens from anti-mask reopen protests with a QAnon Quebec presence.
So when you open up the picture, you're gonna see a poster board with a number of names listed down it.
And some of the names are, well let me just take a look here.
Some of the names are, as you get to the bottom, you get to sort of mainstream conspiracism with Bill Gates, Soros, Rockefeller, and Rothschild, but the five items above are the names Valerie Plante, who's been the mayor of Montreal since 2017, She's been threatened with violence over her opposition to Quebec's racist Bill 21.
This is the so-called secularism bill, which would make it illegal for public servants in Quebec to wear the turban or hijab.
And then they list the name Horacio Arruda.
He's the National Public Health Director.
He's under fire by anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers for pandemic policies.
Then there's François Legault, he's the Quebec Premier, who's obviously not right-wing enough for this crowd.
And then Radio-Canada, which is always under fire from the Canadian right for supposed liberal bias, especially First Nations-related reporting.
This is not unlike NPR or PBS in the U.S.
So I'm just going to screen share here, actually, so that you can see that picture if you are on Oh, no, because I'm not the host.
I won't do that.
We'll put it into the show notes and I'll carry on.
But you can see the poster board.
And what Marc-André is pointing out is that Q can move across the border and then basically adopt any alt-right You know, fringe, conspiracy-oriented, political thread, and then weave it into its quilt really, really effectively.
And so I just wanted to make a note of that.
Also in the news, last thing for me this week, is this amazing article by Caitlin Tiffany in The Atlantic.
It's called, The Women Making Conspiracy Theories Beautiful, How the Domestic Aesthetics of Instagram Repackage QAnon for the Masses.
I'm just going to quote one paragraph.
IG influencers pushing conspirituality to QAnon stuff, this is how the paragraph paraphrase begins, she writes, is also less risky than it might have been a few years ago.
Though Instagram influencers in the lifestyle and parenting spaces used to steer clear of politics and contentious social issues, appealing instead to the broadest audience possible, trends have shifted in the past few years towards more authentic content, open discussion about the challenges of motherhood, the strangeness of existing in a body, the right to speak one's mind.
For the many influencers who have spent years building intimate relationships with their audience, all this candor has served to make these bonds only tighter.
And if followers can trust these women on domestic matters of interior design and party planning and postpartum depression and family emergency, maybe they can trust them on darker, more political issues as well.
I second that's a fantastic piece.
I was talking about it with my wife last night because she's mostly avoided, as a lot of my friends have, like really looking into what QAnon is and I do think it's important for people to at least understand The origin because it's going to spread out and in various and insidious directions for years to come as that article actually projects and I think that that one really gets to the heart of how a
Absolutely insane conspiracy theory like QAnon is could reach the mommy influencers, the fashion bloggers and all of that and actually become part of their, whether in the article that I wrote that you referenced, part of their shop that they could sell swag from.
Right.
Incredible.
Incredible.
Yeah.
Or just part of their philosophy and they actually buy into all of that.
Yeah, and with regard to both of those last two little news snippets, Matthew, it sounds like in terms of the question that all internet entrepreneurs are asked about their product, the answer, yes, To the question, does it scale?
Can it scale?
Right?
It turns out that this can infiltrate across borders, across platforms, into different communities incredibly well, which is remarkable.
I think kind of fascinating and terrifying.
There's also like, there's also, I couldn't help read Caitlin Tiffany's article and not think about how the body politics of early modern yoga really became a product in the global landscape through a kind of domestication into women's wellness and beauty and You know, and fitness through figures like Indra Devi.
So we have this like recurring theme of, you know, women as a consumer class really providing, whether they, you know, whether there's intentionality there or not, a kind of profitability to ideas that would seem to be antithetical to the political values they might otherwise hold.
Yeah.
I also want to point out one thing in the research that I was doing for that article, which crosses with this.
I was fascinated to find that one of the biggest influencers in that space who have taken on the QAnon talking point happens to have been in one of the biggest campaigns
For Alo Yoga and Alo Yoga in a like a three-month period made almost $800,000 from her campaign while at the same time she's on the same Instagram feed where she's featuring Alo Yoga branding talking about QAnon.
And that's a pretty uncomfortable situation to be in.
Right, because the Aloe moves or the Aloeware hashtags are being used in the same threads with Q hashtags?
Is it that direct, Eric?
Oh yeah, it's that direct.
It's not the same post, but it's the same feed.
It's the same feed, right.
And this is what I was, when you referenced before, the person who was combative with me.
It's not, It's not that I'm saying that these people, some of them are directly monetizing QAnon, but if your way of making money and promoting yourself is on a feed and on that feed you are both selling product and supporting these companies and also talking about QAnon, you are building an audience in those directions and you're monetizing off of that because people
As has been shown over and over again, people who start using the QAnon hashtags and come out will gain tens of thousands of followers in a matter of days sometimes.
Yeah, and those followers must revolving door around to the wellness products as well because they'll have disposable income, they'll say, okay, well, this is the wellness influencer that I want to buy my leggings from because, you know... Because they're red-pilled.
Because they're in alignment.
These will be the red-pilled, uh, you know, yoga pants that will help me, you know, with the transformation of, uh, whatever.
And yeah, that's, that's incredible.
I, and that's, that's really, that's really painful to look at.
So were, were you going to, were you going to reach out to Aloe and, uh, for comment, Derek?
I, I do plan on it.
Yes.
I didn't get to it this week, but I do want to follow up on that story.
Yeah.
Cause that money, that's, that's some dirty money.
Yeah.
The thing I noticed about that is that these Instagram influencers who are doing that sort of crossover marketing, very often the posts in their main feed are just their vanilla stuff.
And then it's their stories and their IGTV and things that are up there for shorter periods of time, their highlights, in which they're just full-on QAnon.
And then if you go to their link tree or whatever their thing is they're using to list all their links, Then once you've clicked there, it's like the story is very clear.
Right.
Yeah I've definitely noticed that method of using stories and then having if you like there was one that I found that she had like 25 different story links and then on the very end of the first ream there was a QAnon shop where she was selling her QAnon swag and everything else was being a jet-set travel fashion blogger.
And then all of a sudden there it pops up and you're like okay this is really a little disconcerting.
It's incredible too because if it's Jet Set Fashion Travel Blogger, you know, then the Q stuff adds an extra layer of gamification to why you would travel at all in the first place.
You might be going around now not just to do retreats but to collect information or to spy on the cabal or whatever.
There's going to be retreats soon, guys.
There's going to be Q retreats drop, like baking the stuff retreats, whatever.
There has to be.
There has to be.
And exactly to your point, Matthew, I feel like even that strategy on the social media feed is a form of gamification, right?
There's an Easter egg there.
She's undercover.
Hey, by the way, did you see it?
Did you find the link to the store where you can get the Q shit?
Right.
Wow.
Amazing.
Amazing.
I say Nassara is going to have, or other places in Costa Rica, are going to have a big uptick.
There's going to be like Q-branded retreat centers.
It's going to be awesome.
Okay.
What do you guys have for this week?
All right.
Well, yeah, let's move on from that.
I'm sure it's going to be a recurring theme moving forward.
Okay.
There are generally two reasons people give for being wary of vaccines.
So yeah, this isn't a vaccine talk, but it's going to start there.
Now, the first is the pharmaceutical industry.
And this is a point I repeat very often.
You can understand that vaccines are effective And you can recognize how dangerous the for-profit healthcare system is, especially when it comes to big pharma.
But that's not the point I want to discuss today.
It's the other reason that people give, which is vaccine ingredients.
Now, Julian already did a wonderful job going through the most contentious adjuvants on episode 10.
So if you want to hear that, go back to that episode.
What baffles me is that so many Americans are up in arms about my new qualities of ingredients that you receive only once or maybe a few times during your life, yet will regularly put other chemicals onto or into their bodies without a second thought.
And that's what I want to focus on.
So, we'll start a little basic.
Imagine with me eating a food known to interfere with your body's ability to absorb iodine, which may contribute to hypothyroidism, a condition that involves weight gain, constipation, dry skin, and reduced energy.
Now, you'd never want to eat that food, would you?
But we eat cruciferous vegetables all the time.
If we were really concerned about them, there would be no green juice industry at all.
People with thyroid problems are told to avoid these vegetables specifically, but in general, thanks to a biological process known as hormesis, most of us are fine.
But think about that.
Taking a low dose of something toxic will build up your body's ability to tolerate the toxin.
So that's exactly how we enjoy broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, arugula, and so many other ultimately healthy vegetables.
Now, I admit that was a gimme, but now imagine with me using a substance that can induce partial regional paralysis, make your muscles weak, and cause you to have trouble swallowing.
In fact, you might not be able to chew solid foods for a week or more.
Now, this substance has been known to give users headaches, allergic reactions, and flu-like symptoms.
Now, why would anyone take such a thing?
Yet in 2019, there were 7.7 million cosmetic Botox injections in America, and that number is up 4% from the previous year.
Botulinum toxin, that's the tox, the toxin, has important therapeutic uses.
Yet, as with much of the pharmaceutical industry, in order to maximize revenue, researchers look for other ailments, and our egos are certainly fragile enough to be considered a disorder.
Big Pharma found gold in the plastic surgery market.
So, let me be clear on this point.
If you're anti-vax because you're concerned about dangerous chemicals, but you use Botox, you have some serious self-reflection to do.
Now there are numerous cottage industries that prey on our anxieties about our looks and about aging.
People freak out about squalene, which comes from shark liver oil, rice bran, and wheat germ, but will readily have silicone implants placed into their bodies.
Besides dealing with scar tissue, the chances of continual pain, infection, and implant rupture are all there.
Even more incredible is the loss of physical sensation when you get an implant.
So think about that.
People would rather look a certain way than actually feel their bodies.
Is that a worthwhile trade-off?
And is that natural?
I've criticized plastic surgery for many years.
And I've been criticized because predominantly women get procedures.
But first off, my point is very specific.
I'm talking directly to a community that prides itself on being natural and at being mad at big pharma.
But plastic is the antithesis of natural.
Plus, statistics on cosmetic procedures are changing very quickly.
Many more men are getting cosmetic procedures these days.
In fact, between 2017 and 2018, the highest increase in any cosmetic procedure was male breast reduction surgery in boys aged 13 to 19.
Wow.
That wasn't the most performed surgery, but it was the biggest increase from the previous year.
I grew up overweight and hyperactive, yet both of those things changed as I aged.
I can only imagine now what sort of peer and even parental pressure teens are going through.
In 2019, 223,000 teenagers between the ages of 13 and 19 had cosmetic procedures done.
How is that natural?
Now, here's a question for men, so we aren't just looking at one gender, and I haven't been, but would you take a supplement that increases your risk of a heart attack or a stroke?
That's what happens every time a man takes testosterone, many of whom ingest it to reclaim the male virility of their youth, even though research shows there's no evidence that it works for that.
Male testosterone levels naturally decline once we hit 40.
Now, there is a way that we can keep our testosterone levels up as we age, and that's exercise, which, given our biological inheritance as animals, is one of the most natural activities we can engage in.
I can also talk about the protein powder phenomenon, but I'm not even going to go there.
It's just this constant manic need for more or better that's troublesome.
And again, if we want to talk about natural, we're going way off base with this.
I could take up all two hours of this podcast talking about chemicals we put into our bodies that aren't natural.
And honestly, people make their own choices with what's available to them.
I'm not trying to shame anyone for any of the procedures that they do, but I do want to point out inconsistencies in their arguments because that is very important.
Now, here's the thing.
My wife is in school to become a perfumist, so chemistry is very much in our conversations all the time right now.
She's studying for her degree in chemistry, and she pointed out the other day that a chemical from a natural source is still a chemical.
As Paracelsus famously stated, what is toxic in large doses can be healing in lower doses, and that is true of every chemical that is known.
But let me conclude with one interesting statistic that really drives this point home.
From 2006 to 2018, in America, there was a total of 7,370 vaccine injury case reports filed.
5,151 were compensated for.
there was a total of, in America, there was a total of 7,370 vaccine injury case reports filed.
5,151 were compensated for.
Now, this is out of billions of doses that were administered.
Now, it's hard to find national data on the following natural chemicals, but I did discover that in Australia, there were 4,400 of damaging essential oil exposures from 2014 to 2018.
So that's almost as many that were confirmed in America for vaccines in a third of the time.
Now as the new Netflix series Unwell documents, essential oils, which are marketed as natural, organic, and safe are the cause of more and more injuries every year.
And I don't see a movement rising up to combat big essential oil, even though, as you're about to hear, this industry is bankrupting entire communities.
Now, Julian is going to discuss this topic in more depth.
Yeah.
Can I just ask, though, Derek, about a statistic, which is that like you're saying that one third of the time, sorry, one third of the cases, sorry, it's one tenth of the population we're comparing.
Yeah, that's also true.
It's another thing, right?
Right.
I mean, am I right about that?
Is Australia's about 30 million people?
Yes.
Not only that, but not everyone is using essential oils in that population, whereas most people are vaccinated in America.
All right, so we're talking about huge potential numbers of essential oil injuries.
Actually, more to the point, Matthew, we're talking about really significant percentages, right?
Of the people who are using it who have adverse reactions.
And that's the important thing.
So I watched Unwell.
I know we all were interested in this this week.
Netflix dropped a new docuseries called Unwell.
And I'll just toss this in really quickly because we haven't talked about it yet.
They have an episode about apitherapy, which is the application of bee venom for various things.
And seeing as you talked about Botox, Derek, Apotherapy or bee venom applied directly to the face is something that is quite popular because the royal family has very famously done it for various events in which certain royals looked really lovely in England.
And essentially what it is, is putting bee venom onto your skin so that you have a reaction and your skin swells up And so that gives the appearance of your wrinkles going away.
And, you know, this is a popular cosmetic usage of bee venom.
But bee venom is also used in apitherapy for things like Lyme disease, which I have recovered from and had 14 years ago, multiple sclerosis, and arthritis, and even some people with cancer are drawn into doing bee sting therapy.
And they have an episode on Unwell about something called, where they feature very strongly, something called the Hive Healing Retreat, where participants who have these various chronic illnesses are taught how to self-administer bee sting therapy and The narrative is all about how this is natural and safe, and doctors don't like to talk about it because it eats into the profits of big pharma.
But you do a little digging, and the study that I found was a statistical analysis, a meta-analysis of 145 different studies on apitherapy and the percentage of people who had a dangerous severe reaction, remember where this goes is anaphylactic shock, where you can be dead in a very very short period of time because your airways close off, was 28 percent.
145 studies were analyzed and they found on average 28 percent of people who did this therapy had a very severe allergic reaction that could potentially be fatal.
And so much so that on this hive healing retreat, everyone who's being taught how to administer the bees is also taught how to do the epinephrine injection, just in case, right?
And then get someone, here's the drill for when this happens.
And the other thing is, the more that you are exposed to bee venom, the more likely you are to develop the allergy.
So it turns out, along with what you were saying, Derek, that natural cures like bee venom therapy and essential oils are more dangerous than vaccines, 5G, Alexandro Ocasio-Cortez, you know, they're really some of that.
I don't know about that one.
So as I was saying, Netflix dropped a new docuseries It's called Unwell.
It takes a balanced look in each episode at various wellness or alternative medical modalities, including true believers, warnings and concerns from doctors and scientists, and stories of those who've suffered adverse reactions.
And I want to zoom in, as you were saying, as you were sort of previewing, Derek, on episode one.
of Unwell because it explores essential oils and it actually looks quite closely at the multi-level marketing or pyramid scheme structure of one of the two main players in the aromatherapy sector.
They're called Young Living Essential Oils and they bring in an estimated 1.5 billion dollars a year.
As listeners may know, pyramid schemes rely on networks of unpaid sales recruits who sell products and channel money upstream toward the small number of biggest fish at the very top.
At each level of the pyramid, your job is to get as many new recruits selling under you and to coach them in growing their downline, which in turn you benefit from as well.
Turns out to remain eligible for your downline commissions, you're still required to buy $100 or more in new merchandise every single month, regardless of how much you're actually selling.
And that's also after paying a cash bonus to whomever recruited them in the first place, and purchasing their starter kit at the beginning.
The promise is of being able to take control of your own life and financial freedom, and to rise eventually to the top of the pyramid, to what is called Royal Crown Diamond member status.
At which point you make 1.8 million dollars a year.
Sounds like a great deal, right?
A wonderful career.
The reality, says Austin Tai, who is the lawyer behind a huge class action lawsuit against Young Living, is that out of millions of members over the last 25 years that they've existed, only 46 How big is this sales team?
the Royal Crown Diamond level, and that actually 94% of this giant sales force averages a profit of just $1 per month.
How big is this sales team?
Well, it's unclear, but I looked up the capacity of Utah's Rice Eccles Stadium, which has hosted the epic three-day Young Living Convention, and it holds 45,000 people.
They're all packed in for a religious revival-style multimedia event where tickets go for between $165 and $315 per person.
Thank you.
And what interested me in terms of what we talk about on this podcast is that not only are members sold on this idea of empowering control and freedom, but the messaging directed toward the consumer goes like this.
Essential oils allow users to take ownership of their health by providing safe and effective options for concerns they face on a daily basis.
Now, you couldn't get sort of more vague and generalized, but you're also hitting on certain key emotions about how to be independent, free, take control of your life, and of course, if you're buying in at the level of being a member who's selling, Financial accomplishment.
This message really stands out in the footage that Unwell featured of the sales pitches offered, of course, at small home gatherings.
Because in this viral model, it turns out you're always selling to your friends, your families, and your colleagues, and maybe trying to recruit them So that they're underneath you in the downline, right?
Not only is the pitch about natural, safe, plant-based alternatives to medicine, which, you know, we get as kind of a dodgy claim, both in terms of treatment and prevention, but there's always a carefully baked-in caveat about how they can't directly claim medical benefits because of the mean old FDA and how doctors don't like it because it eats into the profits of big pharma.
Even though the angle is always one of presenting an alternative to medical science that represents radiant, natural, plant-based good health.
The scientific evidence for any medical usage of essential oils is along the spectrum from the very thin claims that it helps people cope better with anxiety or sleep disorders to being completely non-existent.
But, you know, that's just what the doctors say.
Part of the problem, of course, is that wellness products which rely on MLM or pyramid scheme selling foster an intense motivation to find ways to claim that they are a modern cure-all, a lifestyle panacea.
So much so that in 2014, the FDA came after Young Living for website claims like the following.
The oil blend thieves having efficacy against Ebola because of supposed antimicrobial antiviral properties.
Rosemary as a preventative of heart disease and cancer and a treatment for Alzheimer's and dementia and helping to eliminate eczema and dermatitis.
Myrtle as a protection against tetanus and a cure for impotence.
And together with Sandalwood, Myrtle being an effective cancer inhibitor.
Peppermint oil as being effective for asthma, autism, and MS.
The list goes on.
I could keep going.
But of course the FDA now, as of March 2020, has issued letters to two smaller aromatherapy companies, Colloidal Silver Operations and Holistic Herbalists, who are, you guessed it, cashing in on claims of natural cures or effective preventative protocols for COVID-19.
It turns out, of course, there's also considerable overlap between those embracing the essential oils lifestyle and the anti-vax movement, with various anti-vax groups recommending oils as an alternative, and even some young living distributors holding seminars on the dangers of vaccines.
This reminds me, and Matthew was riffing on it again earlier, of Matthew's recent prediction that a new niche in self-care marketing will likely emerge any minute now to help ease the stress and tension of the recently red-pilled.
Perhaps lavender oil?
For sure, absolutely.
We've got to get a blend, actually.
We could do like a set.
Like a combination set?
A custom set, absolutely.
Perhaps lavender oil will be part of the self-regulatory rituals of mindful balance for new age Q converts.
What's next?
Perhaps an invitation to sign up your soft Q wellness website or YouTube channel and build your downline of Q influencers funneling traffic to buy our merch for a slice of that sweet, save the children, American pie.
I'm probably overreacting.
Essential oils are harmless, right?
Well, as Derek has unpacked already, the incidence of mild to severe allergic symptoms, which are usually interpreted by the community as a cleansing process, as well as life-threatening toxicity, especially in kids, hormonal disruption in teens and preteens, There's your gynomastia reference as well.
Hormonal disruption in teens and preteens.
That's one of the things that can happen.
Repeated exposure-based development of severe allergies to these substances have all led the medical consensus to advise Proceeding with extreme caution and in fact keeping your supposedly harmless natural tea tree lavender and eucalyptus oils locked up in the home alongside other potentially harmful chemicals.
But you know, that's just what the scientists say.
I have a question about, I'm still sort of a little bit stunned by the comparison between vaccine injury and Australian rates of essential oil injury.
And I'm wondering, Just as a general question, when you have an unregulated alt-health industry and its associated products, to which there is no one to appeal for accountability, is the magic of the product just reinforced as part of the narrative around why somebody got injured, they didn't apply it properly, or it wasn't the correct blend, or something like that?
Because I mean, when you get injured by a vaccine, what did you say, like two-thirds or three-quarters of those claims got paid out?
They got paid out because there was somebody to go to, because the medical provider was insured, because there were medical laws involved, because somebody could be charged with malpractice.
But if your upline sells you, you know, a COVID oil that gives you a rash and then or tells you that, you know, myrtle is going to you know, cure impotence or something like that, and you debilitate yourself somehow, who are you going to go to?
I'm just wondering, it's like, I guess the question is around, there's no, in the absence of regulation, what do people do with their complaints?
And And do their complaints just sort of like disappear into the same ether that the marketing floated in on?
Which is like nothing, which is magic, right?
Yeah, no, exactly.
I think the key word there is regulation, and actually in that Unwell episode, they do feature the story of one particular woman who had a horrific allergic reaction, and the community kept telling her to keep putting on more oils and keep trying other
There are other combinations of oils, and this was good, and it was a cleansing response, and she was headed towards greater health and well-being, and she talks about taking photos, and they share the photos, and it's really horrific what was happening to her body, and sending them to Young Living, and sending them to Young Living's chief medical officer.
That's right, who just totally blanks her, right?
Just ghosted her.
I also experienced this.
Uh, years ago, my massage therapist who was a good friend was a Young Living Oils rep.
And she at one point tried to get me involved in that chain.
And I'm like, I'm, I'm a yoga instructor, but I'm not really interested in oils, but I did buy some from her.
And I'm going to be honest.
I used to put thieves in my, in my water every day and drink it.
Without adverse effects and it tastes really good.
How do you know though, Derek?
How do you, how do you know it didn't screw with you somehow?
I mean, you're here right now, aren't you?
I'm here now.
Yeah.
But I loved it so much.
They made, Young Living started making a thieves deodorant.
I was like, Oh great.
So I got it.
And like two or three days later I got a rash and I was like, okay.
And then I tell my friend and she was like, Oh, you're detoxifying.
She actually said that.
So in that part of Unwell, I was like, wow.
And, Then I waited until the rash went away.
And I was like, okay, good.
Let me try again.
I tried again.
I got the rash.
And she said it again.
I just threw it out because I was like, no, I'm getting a rash from a reaction.
That's an allergic reaction.
That's not a detoxification.
Now, if your friend was better at the sales though, or if there was more investment in drawing you in, There could have been a plausible story about well yeah there's a light inflammatory response in relation to the medicine within this particular essential oil that's telling you something about your deeper needs and yeah you know it's it's it they would almost give you like a
You know, the spiritual guru is there to, you know, poke at your ego or something like that.
Yeah.
So it's like, it's like crazy wisdom, right?
And along with that, you could also have some sort of narrative about how it's pulling the toxins that are there from you using unnatural deodorants in the past up to the surface.
And it's really good.
Yeah, that was it.
It was like, you're using aluminum based deodorant before this.
And now you're detoxing.
That was exactly what was said.
And I imagine she's like a lot of the, it looks like predominantly women who sell these, uh, a lot of the women, but a lot of people in general, where they think it really is doing something and they're just buying the line.
And, you know, she's an amazing person.
This is only an isolated incident and otherwise amazing career.
So, I don't want to pin that down, but it is something that happened.
And one other thing that hit me and unwell by forgetting his name, honestly, I don't care, but the guy who said, if you're on, uh, if you're, if you're on welfare, if you're on food stamps, instead of going to Starbucks, buy my online program, that guy, um, my wife pointed this out because in one of the opening scenes, he's spraying essential oils on his children.
In the driveway as they're playing and it's sunny out.
And that's when she actually said what I referenced in my piece about chemicals being chemicals.
You are spraying chemicals directly, like tea tree or whatever it is, directly onto skin that the sun is then hitting, right?
Now, I grew up in New Jersey and I grew up down the shore.
I was going there all the time.
And in the eighties in Jersey, All sorts of people just put coconut oil on their skin to get a better tan.
That was part of the culture.
Now I look back and we're like, wow, okay, skin cancers, we're lucky.
But that is essentially what you're doing when you're putting an oil on your skin and then playing or sitting out in the sun.
And he's doing that to his children.
And to get back to the regulation, it's just like, so if he injures his children, I mean, what recourse do they have?
Well, I mean, they're so invested.
They talked about their multi-million dollar business, and she was the one who wore her tiara to church and stuff like that.
They were really amazing.
They were incredible.
He was spraying that stuff on their kids.
I think they lived in Boulder, so it's like, You know, really high UV on a sunny day.
And I think the voiceover at that point, he says, you know, this is like spraying on liquid happiness or something like that.
And the little kids, of course, it smells nice and so on.
But I mean, I think Talk about being high on your own supply.
If the children did get ill, it would be very difficult for them to cop to that.
It would be extraordinary to see somebody like that pull back and say, wait a minute, I've been mistaken.
Because he has tens of thousands of people in his downline, probably.
Or people like that do.
I mean, the cognitive dissonance must be enormous.
But I wanted to return to what you said about your friend, You know, getting you interested in the thieves oil, and you said, well, I'm a yoga teacher, and so I don't know what these things would, you know, how these would combine.
Well, wouldn't you know that there's incredible crossover, and especially because yoga teaching is such a gig economy, it's really vulnerable.
Its communities are super vulnerable, as I'm sure many of our listeners know, to Infiltration by really predatory MLM groups.
And I've got one story that I'd just like to tell that I was in town to witness personally, and it was that I worked for a business called 889 Yoga here in Toronto, and I worked for a family that I really
Appreciate it, and you know, we got along well, and they ran a great yoga school, and we had a great faculty, and we offered really good programming, and it was, it was over, you know, not overpriced.
It was priced, you know, appropriately for the, you know, overhead and the real estate.
It was boutique-y, and that wasn't really my thing, but she, but they really did a good job of assembling, you know, a good class schedule and good training programs.
And then at some point, the owners got hooked into Elena Brower, who at that point was climbing the tree of becoming a doTERRA super seller.
And I don't know if she's doing that currently, but I remember about six months ago seeing her latest doTERRA commercial or promo, and that she was a top seller or something like that.
But I was there working for this business when Brouwer came to town and did a yoga class plus essential oils for, you know, emotions or whatever class.
It was three hours long.
I didn't go to the class, but I heard that it was like an hour of yoga and then a two-hour sales pitch for the oils.
And there were tens of thousands of dollars in memberships sold that night.
And then within months, The business basically became an essential oils retail store.
Over time, the wellness clinic started taking fewer and fewer appointments.
Basically, the entire business model shifted From yoga studio and wellness clinic with several therapists working out of rooms in the bottom level.
And those rooms eventually were just stored, you know, storage rooms for product.
As I remember walking by them.
And so, you know, within a very short period of time, this very interesting business was basically converted entirely over to MLM selling and many of the staff members and the teachers and the faculties had to be sellers.
I don't know if it was a requirement of employment, but there was certainly pressure because I think the most toxic thing that these companies do is that they really make You know, their participants become predatory towards all of their friends.
You know, everybody is somebody to sell to.
And so, yeah, this was just like, you know, it was this disaster unfolding where we went from a yoga and wellness space to something completely different in a very short period of time.
And, yeah.
What did you say, Julian, was the top level?
What was it called?
Royal Crown Diamond, I think.
Elena yesterday posting her blends for the day.
She is a double blue diamond.
Double blue diamond.
Okay.
So then there's titanium is in there somewhere.
Yeah.
And she's doTERRA.
This was the name they use at Young Living.
DoTERRA used to be, doTERRA is like a split off from Young Living.
It was one company and then, you know, they had a falling out.
Yeah.
Right.
And those are, you know, I want to point out something too, that these are, these are tough conversations because Elaine is a friend.
I haven't talked to her in years, but I knew her in New York and I think she's wonderful as a yoga instructor.
And it's, it's, it's, it really fits into this conspiritualist theme.
And, you know, there has been, we have gotten some pushback.
My, my example this week with that person we discussed, who wasn't a friend, but I actually went to high school with, incredibly.
Um, that it's hard because a lot of the people, not a lot of people, we talk about people, there's gonna be crossover with people we know personally.
And I think it's really important to, to point out the, you know, uh, we kind of lose this in a digital age, but pointing out my best friends hold me accountable when I'm doing something they call bullshit.
And that helps me grow as a person.
And I think this point has to be repeated because we do do criticism on this show.
But here's an example of someone like Elena, who I like very much anytime I've interfaced or hung out with her.
But you can't do this to people, right?
Non-harming in yoga.
is a real thing, if that is what you're calling it and what you're doing.
And that Unwell episode lays it out very clearly that there is a lot of harm that these communities are creating right now.
I mean, yeah, bottom line, if 94% on average of people who would be in the downline of somebody like Elena Brower are making zero or no money or one dollar a month or whatever it is... Losing money.
This is financial abuse, obviously.
Yeah, and part of it is, I mean, two things come up for me.
One is that we have to continuously, I think, make the distinction between being ruthlessly critical of false beliefs and bad ideas and damaging groups, Whilst recognizing that individuals may still be innocent in certain ways and still require our respect and our compassion.
And the other is that when you're talking about an organization like Young Living or doTERRA, most of the people involved are themselves being victimized And don't realize that they may be very, very sincere.
Yeah, and I mean, that brings me back to sort of a cult maxim, which is that, you know, the thing that the cult does really well is that it manipulates the best part of a person.
Their aspirations, their generosity, their willingness to connect, their willingness to serve other people.
I mean, the languaging around these MLMs is so incredibly manipulative in terms of its invocation of empathy, right?
What did the woman keep saying?
Serve more to make more or make more to serve more.
There was some sort of thing about service that was all wrapped up in getting 16,000 people or whatever it was.
The way you ascend the ladder within the organization is based on how many people's lives you're positively impacting, right?
Right, right.
But you have to maintain that fiction that they're positively impacted by making $1 a month or whatever.
How can you honestly sit there and say you have 16,000 people on your downline and not understand that that's a pyramid scheme?
Right.
You have to have really gotten high on the supply.
You have to have been indoctrinated really well.
And yeah, this whole question of intentionality and who means to harm whom, it's just we're never going to get to it.
We're never going to have solid answers to it.
But I mean, also, the feedback loop of success must be so intoxicating with regard to verifying the person's belief around their entitlement to that, you know, beneficence and that plenty.
That, you know, there's so many things involved in helping a person, you know, become diluted and then re-diluted at higher and higher levels with regard to what they're actually doing with their lives.
Yeah, and, you know, with regard to that percentage, that 94% are making a dollar a month, that's not something that's part of their Propaganda, right?
That's something that comes out of the class action lawsuit of the lawyer who's actually investigated them.
So, as with any cultish organization, the people on the inside, they don't know that.
Well, that's true for doTERRA, but I mean, there's paper filings that I've seen through the links provided through a great podcast called The Dream, where a lot of the financials are actually publicly available, and it's been known for a long time.
And when you go on to the Reddit groups that are dedicated to combating MLMs, they're sharing that documentation all the time.
And, you know, if you're involved in those pyramid schemes, you really have to have this iron sort of, you know, vault around keeping out that information.
It's freely available.
This week, we're joined by Dr. Theodora Wildcroft again, this time wearing her religious studies hat.
And she's going to walk us through the religious studies perspective of movements like Conspiratuality and QAnon, but also talk about ways that we can think about these issues and these subcultures in productive and forgiving ways.
Okay, thank you so much for doing this.
This is really, really great.
And, you know, I'm excited to, like, point people your way in this context as well, you know, and outside of the world.
So, okay.
All right, so we're back with my friend Dr. Theo Wildcroft.
And I just want to thank you for the conversation we just finished.
It sounds like it finished last week, but we're just continuing on.
But for this episode, we're going to continue our talk.
But I'm going to ask you some more questions about the conspirituality landscape.
And I'm going to be asking you to wear your religious studies scholar hat.
Yes.
And I suppose just the first and most general question to ask is, what do you look for when you're trying to answer questions like, Is X a new religion or is Y a religious activity?
Like what's the Religious Studies 101 kind of guide to evaluating a cultural phenomenon that has religious overtones?
Yes, and this is a really important question on it.
It speaks to, I think it speaks amongst other things, it speaks to the frustration that often happens with kind of anti-cult activists towards religious studies as a discipline, because our scope of practice is complex and very specific.
And I think we have to talk about kind of the development of religious studies very, very quickly, kind of a potted history as a discipline.
So a lot of the early kind of stages of religious studies was around attempting to do something that wasn't theology, because theology at the time, at least, was very much this is how the world works from a Christian perspective, and therefore we're going to analyze the world from a Christian perspective.
And therefore religious studies starts to look at kind of how can we categorize like how can we correct look at other things beyond Christianity?
How can we look at things like Hinduism and Buddhism and so on and so forth?
And how can we categorize them in ways that allow us to compare different kinds of religion?
And the issue with that, of course, is one of positionality, that what tends to happen, particularly in the early days, is a way of understanding those other religions that is overly informed by that kind of, you know, for want of a better word, kind of Western Christian, often Protestant perspective.
So, you know, we tend to squash particularly things like Buddhism and Hinduism and a lot of new religious movements into a shape that looks like what we think religion is.
And the last, kind of, 20-30 years, there's been a massive, kind of, almost a crisis of faith within religious studies about how we can better represent the actuality of people's experiences.
Rather than saying, this is the shape of what religion looks like, And therefore I'm going to try and fit these disparate phenomena.
And if they fit this frame, therefore they're a religion, right?
Right.
And we try very much not to do that anymore.
And that's frustrating for people who want to identify, for example, cults, because, you know, you have a frame, and if it fits this frame, therefore it's a cult, therefore it's damaging, therefore we can, you know, we can talk about it in this way.
It kind of, you know, it crosses a threshold of needing addressing, because it has these kind of mechanisms of of harm within it.
It is increasingly difficult to find a religious studies scholar who is comfortable with the idea of religion as a noun, right?
Because what we've realised is the more we've looked at the actual kind of behaviours, beliefs and so on associated with religious practice, The more we can apply those to all sorts of other environments as well and a real kind of common Religious Studies 101 thing to do in your kind of first year is to come across kind of classical definitions of religion and apply them to football, to soccer.
Because they apply.
Almost entirely.
Right.
Pretty much everything applies.
And it's a fun kind of thought experiment.
So there's a theorist, Mallory Nye, who has kind of come up with the neologism of using the word religion-ing.
Okay.
What we're talking about is patterns of behavior.
Right.
Rather than necessarily fixed beliefs.
So what that allows us to do, it's useful because it allows us to look at what people actually do.
And it allows us to look at what everyday people do.
So that maybe what's interesting about what's happening in your local church, for example, is less about the sermons that are being given.
And it's more about the interactions during the coffee morning on the side.
Right?
So it's about how it's about, and it is about behaviors and practices.
About the coffee thing on the side, I grew up Catholic, and the one space that felt wholesome to me, that felt nurturing to me, it was called St.
Thomas Aquinas Chapel, and it was on the campus of the University of Toronto, and my parents used to take me there Sunday mornings when they were in the graduate students' residence.
And we were able to walk there.
It was downtown.
It was like a Vatican II hippie church with folk music and stuff like that.
And I remember the music, but more than that, I remember the incredible warmth of the parish hall.
And I can remember the smell of the shitty, shitty coffee.
And I can remember how wonderful it felt in there with the sunlight streaming through and people chatting with each other and happy to see each other.
And it's very interesting to kind of excavate Feelings like that and scenes from that, from my own lived religion experience, and to recognize that whatever the theology was, it provided a vehicle for that sociology, really, that set of behaviors that gave me a lot of relief.
Most people involved in most, many, or not most, many people involved in many religions, when you actually talk to them, are less kind of interested in, like the theology is almost irrelevant.
Theology is important to priests.
Right.
Not actually that important to the congregation in many cases.
religion is a cultural thing it's a set of behaviors it's about coming together it's about the more than instrumental the more than the more than kind of you know mechanical it's about um it's about the ways in which we care for each other it's about the ways in which we create meaning in our lives it's it's it's about all of these different things right
you can find those um one of the issues uh with using words like religion and spirituality and cult is that all of those definitions have histories that are politicized okay so when we say a lot of people will tell you that spirituality is unorganized and religion is organized that's not true that There is no definition of spirituality that cannot be applied to some form of religion and vice versa.
It is a distinction that's made by people who want to make a political point, right?
So, I am not religious, I am spiritual, because I am not one of those brainwashed, institutionalized people.
Or religious people will say, spirituality is that wishy-washy stuff that doesn't have any kind of backbone to it.
And the same is true with the word cult.
As you said, no one ever joins a cult, right?
No one joins a religion or joins a spirituality.
They get involved in behaviours and patterns and belief structures and meaning making.
That makes sense to them at the time.
And in different ways, that may be more or less deceptive.
And that word deceptive, I think, is the word we need to come to.
Oh, that's at the heart of it.
It's at the heart of it.
And it's, I mean, from my understanding of the turf battles between cult theory and religious studies, which has been going on for the last 20 years, and it's really acrimonious, is that the It feels like the brick wall is that, for instance, if you told me that, if somebody studied the organization run by Michael Roach, whose organization I was in for three years, if you told me that
If a religious studies person went and studied what he does as a form of new religious movement or something like that, I would say, yeah, but that's not what he's doing.
The religiosity, the spirituality, the content, the Tibetan Buddhism, even his fluency in medieval Tibetan scripture, that's a cover for doing something else.
That's not primarily what's going on.
And so my argument with the religious studies scholar who wanted to investigate Michael Roach's group as being a new religious movement is that they would be validating a lie.
They would be validating something that is not fit for purpose, that's not being transparent about what it is.
OK, so part of what's going on there, again, we have to come back to the scope of practice, because what's really going on with the religious studies is a very definite, in practice it gets fuzzy, but a very definite principle.
And that very definite principle is it is not our job to moralize.
It is not our job to say this person is doing a bad thing.
It is our job to apply certain frameworks and see if those frameworks are useful in aiding understanding.
Now those frameworks may come from cultic studies or they may come from religious studies but there isn't, there isn't, you can apply, both are possible.
Right.
He can at one and the same time be involved in behaviours that are religious and behaviours that are cultic and the only difference that you, that's incredibly important to cultic studies is the motivation.
Is this a cover?
Is this true?
Is this real?
And that's where religious studies ends because it is not within our scope of practice to make that determination.
Right.
So it's not that we're saying it's fine.
That's what we're saying.
Now, I do think that increasingly religious studies scholars are starting to enter that territory, but we need to do so incredibly carefully for obvious reasons.
Right, because you'll lose your field work.
I mean, there's all kinds of... Because we could get it wrong!
Right, you could get it wrong.
All kinds of insider, outsider problems.
And what you're asking me to do, if you're asking me to say, is what Michael Roach was doing a cover?
Like, what was the truth of what happened?
Is it my job as a humanity scholar or as an anthropologist or whatever to tell you the truth?
Mm hmm.
That feels like an overreach for me.
Right.
What I can tell you is, or what I am comfortable discussing, is do the actions involved cause harm?
Right.
And I think that that, if we're going to, again, I'm not a psychologist, but I think that that, that we're on such firmer ground if we talk about whether actions cause harm than if, than what the motivations are.
Because I don't, I think motivations are complex.
And I would put money on the fact that Michael Roach believed his own shit.
Right.
And that's why, in most cult theory, the intentionality of the leader is actually off the table, because we can't investigate it.
And also, kind of like the intentionality of the sexual abuser, it doesn't really matter.
Irrelevant.
Absolutely irrelevant.
Yes.
And in fact, focusing on it...
Focusing on it actually extends the problem and enhances the charismatic mythos of the character, that somehow their internal motivation is more important than anybody else's, or what it actually results in.
So yeah, it's just, it doesn't matter.
So I think we're coming to the same conclusions, but we're coming to similar conclusions, but We're using different language.
So I don't think that wall is necessarily as solid as it's often portrayed.
Right.
Thinking about differences in language.
Right.
So if you want to talk about, you know, actions of harm and patterns that cause harm, yeah, we can talk about that.
Right.
Well, specifically to what I would call the messianic influencers that we study on this podcast, you know, the two wings of conspirituality are the development and the assertion of
An organized evil world and series of overlords and sometimes even metaphysical forces that are reigned against human development and, you know, the liberation of consciousness and that, you know, the wellness product or the spirituality associated with it is going to be the answer.
And so, in structure, it seems like many of these worldviews and this paradigm in general would be fairly familiar to the scholar of religious studies.
Am I right about that?
Oh yeah, there's an entire subfield of Of conspiracy theory, of religious studies scholars studying conspiracy theories, but they tend to do it not exactly quietly, but they don't make a massive fanfare when their stuff comes out because it's covert research and it's hostile research in many cases.
So it is work that goes on, but it's work that goes on often by scholars who do not wish to open themselves up To the kind of flood of attacks that would happen if they talked about it very, very publicly.
So they're the cult researchers of religious studies, I suppose.
I mean, in the sense of opening themselves up to attack or to hostility.
Yes, yes.
I mean, in the sense of opening in the sense of opening themselves up to to to attack or to or to host.
Yes, yes, yes.
And what they do.
But often what they're doing, interestingly, is that they are using our understanding of how religious behaviors happen to and they're taking that lens and they're applying it to conspiracy.
So even before you get conspirituality, other conspiracy theories were already being studied as a form of religion-ing, as a form of religious practice.
Right.
So, you know, that commonality was there before the conspirituality people have put those two things together.
You know, religious scholars were already putting them together.
And I suppose going back to religioning, which I think is associated with, I think you taught me the term lived religion years ago as well, introduced me to that.
You know, I think on this podcast, but also in the academic research so far, which there isn't a lot of, it seems that conspirituality is defined in the same way that you're speaking of
Clerics, having been responsible for defining a theology in the past, that here are the series of beliefs, and these are the intended or the aspirational outcomes of this group.
But also, I mean, what I've been really attracted to in this field is the series of behaviors, really.
That the influencers that we study are often, they're charismatic, they are able to very quickly play upon very tender emotional subjects.
They're able to speak to, you know, William James's old formulation of the highest or the deepest truths.
And so it's really a pattern of behaviors that I think we're looking at.
And so sometimes it becomes difficult... And feedback loops.
You've talked about feedback loops and that those behaviors...
are in feedback loops and it's the feedback, I don't think it's necessarily, I think when we talk about these things as grifts, as cons, we fail to understand the real mechanisms that drive them because whilst they are deceptive, absolutely deceptive, the structures are deceptive, but what's actually happening is a feedback loop between the charismatic leader and the community.
That goes round and round and round and round and, you know, is feeding that leader in some way and is feeding their own ability to kind of narrativize something.
And to create myth.
Yeah, in a way it's... and also then we have the algorithm on top of that which is kind of like an amplification machine for charisma, right?
Like AI is actually charisma disembodied in a way.
It's like it takes the thing that's flashy for some reason and then it just spots light the shit out of it until... until what?
That's the only thing that exists.
It's very strange.
I've never really put that together.
No, it's a useful insight.
But I also think there's a link when we're talking about motivations between that and the people behind AIs.
There's a really interesting thing that most of these kind of tech bro kind of guys do that you're kind of Mark Zuckerberg's of the world.
That they're doing, in which they're saying, you know, we are hands-off.
Like, it's not us.
So there's a lack of motivation.
And what we have to ask ourselves, you know, that is such an adolescent kind of form of morality.
You know, I didn't mean to do it, therefore I'm not responsible.
Yes, but again, did your actions cause harm?
There's a really useful Twitter account, That every day just tweets out, Jeff Bezos chose not to end world poverty today.
Right.
It's not about, have you deliberately harmed the world?
It's about, given the evidence, what are you failing to take responsibility for as a result of your actions?
Right.
And it's also, I mean, not to diagnose any of those tech bros, but like, there's also an emotional avoidance structure to all of the interactions that is very paradoxical, because on one hand, technologically, they've created the charisma machine, On the other hand, they disclaim it for themselves as though they could be completely disinvolved.
And so they can sit back somehow, like observers and eat popcorn or something and watch something like a movie.
It's very, very odd and disarming.
But on charisma, in your research, you know, into post lineage yoga, which I think is going to be a formulation that I hope a lot of religious scholars apply to emerging spiritualities, you've had to consider the function of charismatic leadership.
And as a cult researcher myself, now watching various conspiritualists mobilize charisma to manipulate people, I pay a lot of attention to this as well.
And, you know, so for instance, the guy who makes Plandemic, Mickey Willis, and that Dr. Zach Bush, who talks about the microbiome and how we don't need vaccines because dirt is really great.
They're all using basic jargon and entrancement techniques to bond with viewers as opposed to convey data to them.
So I'm just wondering, in your experience, in your field work, there's got to be a place in which charismatic leadership is healthy.
But what does it look like when it is?
I think, yes.
I see charisma as being part of the meaning-making drive.
In general and um the meaning making so that there's something that that is known within the literature increasingly is the meaning making response that we often characterize as placebo and it's it's a really interesting kind of correlation because when we talk about placebo we talk about something that is inherently a bad thing right that's the thing we want to design out of all of our experiments right and part of what's happening when we talk about a meaning making response rather than placebo
is that we are reassessing the power of the meaning-making response in human beings as being an inherent kind of human thing.
The fact that human beings are able to physically affect their own reality, I mean, literally create your own internal painkillers or whatever as a result of the meaning-making response is an incredible thing.
And in a similar way, the ways in which we do this, the difference between kind of the placebo, the placebo happens usually within some form of a one-to-one relationship.
So that's either between like a medical professional of some kind, a therapeutic professional of some kind, and an individual, or sometimes it's mediated through a particular pill, you know, an object.
So it's a relationship with the object, or a relationship with the person, or a relationship with the person that's mediated through an object, you know, it's that kind of thing.
So that's the meaning-making response described as placebo.
When we're talking about meaning-making response described as charisma, we're talking about group environments.
But I think it's the same.
It's the same processes.
It's the ways in which we create meaning as human beings.
And that is powerful because it is our ability to do that together, to become more than the sum of our parts, to channel insights from a place that we don't quite understand.
It is that that creates the drive for justice.
It is that which creates the very idea that there can be a world that is moral and just and fair.
It is that that creates activism in many ways, right?
And is that that allows us to make real changes.
So the charismatic response is part of the meaning making response just expressed as a group.
Now, as with placebos, what's important is to understand those mechanisms.
Because if we understand those mechanisms, then we can enter into them with informed consent.
If you are a leader of a ritual event and you are holding the role of holding space, if you are the person who is channeling and becoming the ritual avatar for a particular quality or deity that needs to be invoked, if everyone involved in that process is aware that this is a function of some kind of magic that happens between human beings and that you are just the person in the middle at that time, Then that's okay.
We can use that accordingly.
Is that plausible?
Does that happen though?
It's happened in some ritual.
Okay, this is where I put another hat on.
I've been part of that happening.
Okay, so my understanding of placebo is that there's a layer of deception or dissembling involved with the administration of it.
Nope, nope.
Placebos work.
They don't work the same, but placebos can work even if you know it's placebo.
Now that is a new idea to me.
Isn't that wild?
The meaning making response is real.
So my theory is that much of what we call ritual is actually meaning making.
So I was at a conference a couple of years ago in Vienna and I came across this, there was a paper on Tibetan precious pills for example.
So Tibetan precious pills, you know I can talk about this at length because I find them utterly fascinating, it's not my research, but I'm going to talk a little bit about them.
The thing about precious pills is that they are a combination, they are created, like the actual creation of those pills
It's a function of a active ingredients like active herbs are herbs and kind of active biomedical ingredients are used yeah there's also a lot of communal ritual around creating those pills so you know monks circumnavigate like walk around them and chant and so on and so forth and also there are ingredients that are added because they are precious powdered lapis lazuli for example right now
If you have a pill that has an active ingredient, let's say it has aspirin in it, it has willow bark in it, that is one thing.
If you have a pill that has willow bark in it and has been created in a group communal experience at the heart of your village and it took two months for it to happen and the monks chanted over it every day and it has powdered lapis lazuli in it and all the rest of it and all of this is deliberate, Is that going to have a greater effect on your headache than the one that just comes out of a blister pack?
Of course it is.
Well, I mean, when you say, of course it is, when you say, of course it is, uh, you, oh, are you saying... That's magic!
All right, but you're saying the thing, the thing that comes out of the blister pack, you're, you're saying that's the, that's the, the aspirin or whatever, the actual pharmaceutical... Yeah, just on its own.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, is it going to, I mean, so there's a part of me that wants to say, well, yes, it's going to be more effective in terms of a whole series of meaning responses, but aren't we going to have to double-blind test those two, that against the blister pack in order to figure it out, or no?
If you double-blind test it, you take out the meaning-making response.
Right, okay.
That's the problem with double-blind tests.
Double-blind tests are brilliant for assessing the active ingredients.
But they are useless at telling us what actually works.
In most cases, in most cases of healing, the active ingredient is only one part of the story.
I have seen studies that say that up to 50% of the efficacy of a medical intervention is in the relationship in the room.
And 50% in the pill that's given.
Right.
Well, absolutely.
The studies in psychotherapy with regard to methodologies are exactly about that.
But it has very little to do with the theory that the therapist is trained in.
Right.
Exactly.
Right.
But that is true even when we're talking about a dispensing relationship.
That 50% is true even when we're talking about a GP giving you a particular pill.
Okay, so we're talking about, all right, so then if we isolate out meaning response and meaning making, then we've got a direction of possible benefit, personal, social, therapeutic benefit, and we also have a direction of Of possible harm and manipulation.
And now, the bias of this podcast is to look at the latter, right?
The bias of my work as a cult researcher is to look at the space in which meaning response is actively weaponized against members so that people's best, most altruistic Gestures, aspirations, their yearnings are turned against them.
Because that's what cult leaders tend to do.
That's about the concentration of power.
Who gets to be the person in the center of that ritual?
Who gets to be the person who is the channel?
And how far do you like ossify and crystallize that relationship?
And what else do you ascribe to that person?
So, um, you know, does that person, after they have been at the center of this great ritual and they have channeled the gods and they have, you know, been the channel for healing for the entire community, do they go and do the washing up?
Or do they go and sit on a throne and have acolytes massage their feet?
Right.
What's important, as in so many things in human relationships, is the power and the understanding.
Right.
Because, you know, actually I'm involved in various different kind of alternative religious communities of different kinds and, you know, we step into roles, charismatic roles, in and out of them all the time.
I have a dear friend of mine who wants me to do the blessing for her hand fasting next year.
Am I the person who marries them?
Is that something that becomes an ossified part of my identity?
No, that is a role that I step into as one of service and it is a temporary role I step into when I step out.
Yeah, in fact, maybe where the rubber hits the road with this in terms of the wellness influencers in conspirituality is what's very, very clear is that there isn't necessarily a throne that anybody's sitting on except the vaulted sort of space of how many social media followers one has.
But there is no discernible, with so many of them, there's no discernible flip back and forth between content production and service.
So the more the person really gets involved with, I'm going to put this message out there about how masks are actually slave muzzles, or about how vaccines equal raping children, and I'm not actually going to do anything with regard to the soup kitchen, or I'm not going to...
Because that's what's important.
It's that role.
And they are continually, so if you think about, I mean, so many kind of pagan riches I've been to have involved a circle and someone in the middle.
And you can see that, like, does that person step out of the middle?
Do they ever step out in the middle?
Or is, I mean, when you're talking about the kind of ramping up conspirituality discourse, you know, when it gets to the point where it literally is lizard people and Donald Trump will save us all and so on and so forth.
Is that, on some level, a kind of instinctive need to continue to hold the center of the circle?
Oh, for sure.
I often get the sense, and this is where Dan Shaw's formulation of traumatic narcissism, which I'll make sure I put into the show notes, is really helpful, because he paints the picture of the cult leader as being the person who, if they even think about stepping out of the middle, they'll fucking die.
They'll just die.
They won't be alive anymore.
They'll cease to exist because the only thing that's actually fueling them is either the attention or the sense that they are creating a safe world around them.
And they will see that on some level as an act of service.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, I suppose, I suppose the smarter you are, the better your rationalizations will be for taking that, for taking that center space, right?
Like, okay.
I'm the only one who can save these poor people.
Right, right.
Right, right.
Yeah, I think Julian, a couple of episodes ago, talked about how they, the group went to, On a forest, their leader, and said, can you please behave a little bit differently?
And she came back with the answer of, well, I've checked in with spirit and I've been told that no, this is the way I have to do things.
Which is just like the best answer everywhere.
Yeah.
Which is why, you know, I have an ongoing fondness and maintain links with pagan communities because within, at least within British paganism, we don't have that kind of attitude towards our gods.
Like, we're allowed to say no.
We're allowed to tell our gods when they're being assholes.
And say, no, there are gods we don't work with.
There are gods we don't talk about because we don't want to invite them into the room because they're trouble.
Yeah, right.
Right?
Right.
Just like people.
Yeah!
Oh, but this is another thing.
Okay, now I also, I didn't send you this as part of our pre-discussion, but it's also occurring to me that one of the things that's going on with your experience in paganism is that it also has evolved in a whole UK radical leftist politics as well.
Am I right about that?
Yeah, some of it.
Some of it.
It's the counterculture, you know, the counterculture.
Is it radical left?
Is it radical right?
Is it both at the same time?
The counterculture is the counterculture.
So we're very familiar with that intersection, but I'm wondering whether the capacity for people to understand that they're playing a role at the center and that they're going to share power Has some sort of correlation with progressive politics that is familiar to you in protesting circumstances or when you join the anarchist group and get peddled?
Yeah, I think it's convergent evolution rather than, you know, it's kind of, I think it's a similar process because it works.
Because actually, in the end, it's exhausting being in the centre of that circle.
Right.
Any quote-unquote, I'm not going to use the word, I was going to use the word normal then, I don't believe in normal, Any kind of sensible human being, and I know how loaded that term is, wants to go and do the washing up.
Wait a minute, did you just go from normal to sensible?
Sensible, yeah.
Okay, great, all right.
Is that a British something?
I don't know.
With a massive kind of inverted commas around it, because at some point, good God, you just want to go and do the washing up, don't you?
Yeah.
He wants to see the face of God every day.
See, and this is the other thing that is so exhausting to me about Messianic discourse, influencer discourse, is that there's no pleasure in washing is that there's no pleasure in washing up and regular activities.
And when there is, that is even sort of made into grandiose zen whatever, you know, and turned into its own course about chopping water or whatever.
Instead of like, you know, chopping water, carrying wood is not a fucking poem.
It's a boring thing to do.
It's a boring thing to do.
And so there's no... I suppose that's also a product of the attention economy, is that we can't have boring things.
And if we can have boring things, there's a whole sort of wedge of human experience that we're not allowed to have that is actually self-regulating.
Yeah.
And okay, let's talk about self-regulation, because that was another thing that I really wanted to make sure we talked about.
If we're talking about conspiracy in general as saying the things that cannot otherwise be said, there is something really, really important here about co-regulation and distance.
Like any virus, and we can see conspiracy as a form of virus, but let's talk about coronavirus for a moment, any virus exploits a human need generally.
And the kind of unacknowledged need within human society a lot of the time is around proximity and co-regulation.
So, you know, on the one hand people are saying, oh just stay at home for God's sake, you know, but that need for kind of haircuts and your manicure and you're going to the beach and so on and so forth isn't actually about The haircuts and the manicures and so on and so forth.
It's actually a human need for co-regulation.
And the reason why this is important is because when we're talking about health, well-being and care, when you said that the well-being industry doesn't have a product, it doesn't have a product, it does have a process.
And the process that links health, well-being, care, all of these, is the process of care through proximity.
Right.
It's such a great point.
It's such a great point because it's like, there's a lot of acrimony poured upon people who want to have their haircuts.
And there's this part of me that's saying it's not about the fucking haircut.
It's not.
It's not about the haircut.
I nearly cried when I got back to my barber.
I'm seeing him again tomorrow.
Right.
And I didn't expect that.
I didn't expect... Okay, so now actually maybe some hidden gift of this entire experience is that we're recognizing what we missed because we didn't understand that it gave us a kind of proximity that was relieving.
Yes, and the same is true when you're looking at the entertainment industries.
Like why do people miss, like there's really interesting things going on about Now we're in a phase, at least here in the UK, of trying to figure out whether there are ways of doing what we want to do in a socially distanced way.
In many cases, the professionals involved in those industries are saying it's not worth it.
Right.
So if you take about live gigs, for example, You know, you're talking about bringing venues down to 20% capacity.
Now leave to one side the fact that they're not financially viable until they hit about 80 to 90 percent.
Leave that on one side.
You're talking about a live gig, a live music experience in which there are 200 people in a room rather than a thousand people in a room.
You're talking about the fact that all of those people have to sit down and maintain distance, that they're not allowed to sing They're not allowed to dance, right?
For the people on the stage and for the audience, there is a huge grief involved in even contemplating that as an idea.
How do you even perform as a musician in those circumstances?
Unless, you know, as my other half pointed out, unless you're a folk, it's a folk gig, in which case you're fine because you're used to it.
But most, for most musical experiences are based on that kind of live creativity.
And all of those things rely on contact and proximity.
And I'm hearing this from yoga teachers.
Yoga teachers are saying, well, you know, I'd have to go down to this and I'd have to do it in this, this, you know, people who are doing it outside are figuring it out.
Right.
So if you're able to do it outside, people are saying it's beautiful.
And I've got you know, you've got the co-regulatory aspect of being outside and in nature.
You know, I did it.
I did a session recently for students of mine, and it was a student's place.
There were about five of us.
You know, we were in the garden.
It was lovely.
Her dogs were there.
Always good to have the dogs for the extra code regulation.
Right.
And it was beautiful.
But every time I get off a Zoom class, It's heartbreaking, right?
Because something profound is missing.
So I wonder, I mean, this is kind of a new thought for me.
I wonder if one of the things that's happening in conspirituality discourse is similar to, but of a different sort of order altogether, to what we were speaking about last time with regard to the silencing of trauma.
That what we hear in conspiracy... Now you're getting it.
Yeah, yeah.
What we hear in conspirituality is kind of a yearning and a grief for something.
Is life worth living if you have to stay two meters away from everyone?
Right, right.
And so that gets repeated ad nauseum in a way that clashes with the logistical communications demands of public health, because all they need to say is, just please stay two metres apart, we could clear this up in a month.
But they're not talking about how difficult that is.
You just said just.
Just stay two meters apart from all of the human beings.
Right, okay, right, right.
Oh, yeah, so, so, so, so... Just do that.
Right, right, right.
So when, when public health officials are trying to say that, it almost, it almost feels as if they, they need to develop their own charismatic, grief-aware discourse I mean, some of them are okay at it.
We've got a few in Canada who are like, I know this is really hard.
This is a devastating thing.
It's going to be very hard for your children.
Our home is really sad right now.
But it doesn't... Yeah.
That's why we're looking for those metaphors, for those ways to resolve that conflict.
Right.
Yeah.
How many people do you know who are looking for dogs right now?
The shelters are open with people wanting dogs in this country.
Right.
Because on some level, people know they need that co-regulation from another mammal.
Right.
I mean, we have kids, so we're not there!
There's no damn way that this is the right time for a dog.
I'm on the list.
Yes.
And I have a husband who I love and I get lots of co-regulation from, but that co-regulation right now is from another human being who is also in a state of anxiety.
Okay.
So, all right.
Now, this brings up maybe the last thing.
Is that the demographic that we're most used to serving, you and I, in the yoga industry, such as it is, it seems to have driven off a cliff, is, you know, we're talking about like millennials and Gen Z people who May not be pair bonded yet, or may not be, or they're still negotiating family life in some way.
And so it almost feels as though the yearning for contact It's going to be much more poignant for that particular demographic.
But it's true for me too.
I need significant co-regulation beyond that pair bond on a regular basis.
I need it from strangers, I need it from friends, I need it from the people I work with.
And I provide it for others.
I would be misusing my charisma as an influencer if I came to you, Theo, and I said, I said, you know, the people who want to keep you away from your mates, the people who want to like social distancing, they want to actually increase your sense of isolation so that you could be more easily controlled.
They want to increase your trauma.
They want to abuse you.
And they want to damage children.
Okay, now is that a... It's a really easy story to sell, right?
Can you sense where that would hit?
Yeah, that's deep.
That's profound.
That's the thing.
Yeah, that would absolutely hit.
So going back to our last conversation, you generously disclosed this history that many, many people will share parts of, and that leaves them vulnerable to that kind of overselling of what could just be grief.
Yes.
We could just be saying, yeah, it's really awful.
It's really awful that we have to do this.
Viruses are terrible.
We also don't have the language for describing co-regulation.
It's not part of our general discourse.
When I was talking about the lack of help for that, I've been on the phone to mental health professionals And I'm educating them on somatic co-regulation and why it's important for survivors.
And they're going, that all makes perfect sense.
Thank you.
I'd never heard of that before.
Who's the expert within this conversation?
We don't have the language for it.
We don't have the cultural view that this is something important.
We don't deal with it well in any way, shape or form.
And you have to put that alongside, remember, the other side.
It's like two Two dynamics in tension.
One is the need for proximity, and the other is the decreasing amount of trust in that proximity.
Because strangers out there, people I don't know out there, even people who are my friends, do I trust them right now?
Do I trust, you know, I've never been more in need of that hug?
I've never been more scared of going for it.
So that is there, and I don't think I am unusual in that.
I think that is incredibly common.
It's just that I have a language and a history for explaining it.
I think these are primal, fundamental human needs that I have had to understand because of my history, but that are universal.
It's trauma survivors as the canaries in the coal mine again, right?
So we can explain things in ways in which will hopefully make sense to non-survivor populations.
Because what we're describing you're also going through.
Well, also, I think then the listening has to extend to, well, what did you do?
And how did you learn to take care of yourself?
And how did you learn in the absence of care?
How did you learn in the absence of structured and networked care?
How did you learn how to do these things?
And did it help?
And did it help when somebody handed you a series of kundalini yoga mantras and told you to breathe really hard?
And did it help when somebody sold you the story that, you know, this green smoothie was going to cure all your problems?
I think the reason why I'm laughing is because it's incredibly rare that survivors are asked that question and yet we are the experts.
We're the ones who've been coping.
We're the one, you know, the very definition of the word survivor rather than the victim is someone who's coped.
Like I've got this far.
I've held my life together.
Therefore there are strategies that I use that work and I'm used to finding new strategies.
It took me about three weeks to get my emergency strategies in place.
It's probably going to take me another six months to get the, you know, the rest in place.
Do you mean following lockdown?
I mean in terms of, you know, the things that I need to keep myself regulated.
Right.
So there's immediate kind of first aid stuff that I have in place.
I have an emergency diazepam prescription.
Let's normalize having Valium in your house, which I haven't needed to take, but it's there if I need it.
Thank you, Theo.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, it's the first time we've had a guest return or same interview, but used for two separate weeks.
And just if you look it over to the scope, she's such a fascinating thinker.
I am also a religious studies.
I have a degree in religious studies.
So it's something she brings up a lot of points that I've thought about before and have spent decades now after getting my degree, thinking about these cultures.
And it's amazing how you come across someone who just thinks about it in entirely different ways.
But it really makes me think about it, too.
What I really liked was something that I've thought about a lot, and I've mentioned this before, and Joel and I have talked about Joseph Campbell, and I'll probably always reference him, but that Buddhist nuns don't dream of Jesus, right?
So the framework that you grew up with is how you view the world, and I think from My fascination has been with cognitive science and how that actually, not just philosophically, but biologically, is part of our inheritance.
From language to food to music, you will tend to like the music that you grow up with the most, especially from the ages of like 16 to 24, stay with you for life.
But that's an important thing in a globalized society because I think us growing up in a globalized world, we don't recognize that for most of history people couldn't fly places and so didn't have contact with people and all contact was hearsay.
So we really are still young in the ability to take in and consume so many religions at the same time and yet I sometimes find a problem with the theory of everything framework applied to religion, as if you can just take a little bit of Buddhism and a little bit of the ayahuasca and a little bit of Christianity and throw them together as if they come from the same place.
And in some primordial ways they do, but from the context of a culture, they are very different.
And that differentiation doesn't always happen when people are trying to approach topics, Yeah, I just want to say thank you to Theo for coming on and sharing so deeply, because the conversations this week and last week really span There's a lot to think about there.
And I also want to bring up something she said.
intersecting set of topics from alternative medicine to chronic illness to societal issues to new religion to how do we think about what makes something a cult?
Is harm coming to people as a result of what's happening in groups?
There's a lot to think about there.
And I also want to bring up something she said.
I have this here on YouTube, you'll see it's the Norton Anthology of Religions.
This is the six major religions.
It's about 3,500 pages of religious thought.
And it's a fascinating reference book that I turn to when I'm doing research on different articles.
And one thing that's brought up in the very beginning, I think it was by Jack Miles, who wrote a wonderful book on God.
God and treating the Bible as literature is he talks about how they once had a scholarly meeting where hundreds of religious scholars were in a room to talk about a definition of what religion means and the very first thing they talked about was this and that the conference almost ended because it got so heated that people were just fighting over it.
But to her point about treating religion as a noun or a verb instead of a noun, one of the best classes I took, and Jack Miles also wrote a book on this, but this was in 95, was taking a class called Bible as Literature.
And it was taught by a priest, but he brought no theology into it in terms of indoctrination or anything trying to put across a message.
We looked at the Bible as if you would read any other novel, And if you haven't done that, I highly suggest it because it'll change your perception on where it comes from and what it's saying.
Yeah, I had a similar education and the benefit of being able to be in Northrop Frye's last class that he taught at Victoria College at University of Toronto.
I think he pretty much is at the forefront of the Bible as literature movement through the 50s and 60s.
Yeah, that was wonderful.
Like what he did is he outlined comedic structures and the repetition of symbology and the journey metaphors that progress from Old to New Testaments.
And yeah, that was a really, really rich time.
But then, you know, equally rich is me being able to speak with Theo over the last years for hours and hours and hours over about the The notion of lived religion, which I had never really thought about before.
Like, what do people actually do when they say they believe something, regardless of the creed they use or how they identify in the census?
Like, what do they actually do in their daily lives?
What do they have on their altar?
Because that's going to tell you a lot more about how they treat their fellows and the world than, you know, whatever document they've signed on to.
And last point I'll bring up, and it's brief, but Matthew, I can point you to a few different studies that show that placebos do work, even if you're told it's a placebo.
It's actually one of the most fascinating aspects of pharmacology.
I can give you a pill and say, there is only sugar in this pill, but I'm going to give it to you for your headache, and there is a good chance it will help your headache.
Well, you know, that's actually, that actually is reflective of the original meaning of, or the original Latin, which is, I shall please, right?
And that always meant to me, it also always implied that the patient was going to intentionally give the gift of health back to the doctor because they had been offered something.
And that seems to imply some sort of like understanding or transparency in the exchange, right?
And it also, in that episode of Unwell we referenced earlier, I actually was happy that they opened up with a clinical nurse who distributes essential oils who says, you know, it's probably placebo sometimes.
And then you have her with a patient who smiles and looks at her and goes, you know, I don't know if it's the oil or the attention you're giving me, but I feel better.
All right.
I wanted to conclude this episode with something outside of the news, but related to the news also.
All of that reporting that I did off the top.
Because, to be honest, I've really been stuck in a reverie.
And it's been inspired by two things.
And those two things have led me back into considering my own spiritual life.
The first thing is a simple bit of analysis which is embodied in the three rules of conspiracy.
So here's a quote from Professor Peter Knight, laying them out for the conversation.
They had a great podcast series that we'll link to.
So he writes, the three basic assumptions are first that nothing happens by accident.
The idea that in history there are no coincidences, no cock-ups.
The second idea is that nothing is as it seems.
the suggestion that you need to look beneath the surface to detect the actions and the intentions of the evil conspirators.
And the third idea is that everything is connected.
So those three things are boiled down, nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected.
So those are the boiled down convictions.
And the second thing is the sense of what those convictions feel like to live in.
So you can sort of like break down the elements, the theoretical elements of the, you know, the conspiracist mindset or model.
But then what does it feel like to be embedded within it?
And here's where I want to link to an image in the show notes that's been floating around.
What it is, is that it's a map of the QAnon theoretical landscape.
And it's made by a QAnon devotee named Dylan Lewis-Monroe.
And he runs a website called Deep State Mapping, where he advertises what he calls art.
And I think this is an important point.
He calls it art.
So, you know, in the show notes, when you click on the image, you'll be able to zoom in and see the details.
There's actually text there, and it's arranged in this networked fashion to express an entire shadow history of civilization.
But instead of trying to read it, which will probably give you a headache, I'd also suggest keeping it zoomed out and then unfocusing your eyes so that you can take in the composition and the patterns and the textures.
Because I think that's really important for understanding the feeling of being immersed in the range of worldviews between conspirituality, soft cue, and hard cue.
To me it's like looking at a satellite picture of a city, or a Jackson Pollock painting, and the three rules are going on.
Nothing happens by accident, although ironically with Pollock it's apparently all accidental, but then the way it comes together seems to be perfect in a way, and nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected.
Now, as a piece of art, it has rhythm, it has movement, it has a kind of completeness.
So the connection I want to make here is to the ritual art and practices that I learned in the cult of Michael Roach.
Because I have the feeling that those experiences might be generalizable and they might shed some light on how easy it has been for Conspirituality and QAnon to recruit from spirituality groups.
So, on a philosophical level, what Roach taught jived exactly with that three-part formula.
Nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected.
And parts one and three, so nothing happens by accident and everything is connected, were really taken care of by theories of karma.
And on Monday, I told Patrick Farnsworth on his podcast, Last Born in the Wilderness, because, you know, we appeared on it, all three of us.
That was really cool.
I told him that number two, nothing is as it seems, is equally crucial because it allowed Roach to present Buddhism as a fundamental challenge to consensus reality.
And that's what the red pill is.
A threshold experience beyond which you are never the same.
And whether you cross over into Buddhist enlightenment or a QAnon fever dream seems to be a matter of luck.
So with Nothing Is As It Seems, the point is you change your entire identity as you pass through.
And the metaphors are all sex and birth related.
Spirals, rabbit holes, going down into the dark in order to come out into the light.
On a side note, and I posted about this on Facebook, I'm just wondering when QAnon peeps are going to figure out that the white rabbit is a symbol of fertility and carnal pleasure, and that when the young girl Alice is falling down the rabbit hole in Wonderland, that's telling us a lot about Lewis Carroll's own obsession with little girls.
Anyway, the map.
If you look at the map, I'm feeling it as a totalizing immersive object.
And I'm going to relate it to one of these rituals that we were taught to do every day as part of our Tibetan Buddhist liturgy.
It was something called the mandala offering.
It was the enactment of symbolically gathering together every beautiful and productive thing in the world and arranging it into an offering that you would present to the lineage of lamas that stretched back to the Buddha himself.
Now this wasn't just a visualization.
The Tibetans are really hands-on in an almost animistic way so When we went to Kathmandu and stayed in a monastery there, we were encouraged to go out to the shops by the Bodnath Stupa and find a three-ring mandala set.
They're made of copper or brass or something called white metal.
Then we got about four cups of rice and some gemstones and we wrapped them up with the set in a silk kerchief and we carried it everywhere.
So, because you were supposed to do the mandala before every set of prayers, and it was kind of a sweet thing to do.
So you would take it out and you would clean the bottom plate, which was, you know, as I said, brass, copper, white metal, and you take this rice and rub it on it as though you were cleaning it, and then you started the chant.
And there were seed syllables, and then a whole list of objects that you wanted to offer to the Buddhas, represented by the gemstones.
So food, medicine, a chariot, the cow that never runs out of milk, gold, and then wish-fulfilling jewels.
When I got back home, one of the things that I used, Canadians will know this, is that When you bought Red Rose Tea through the 70s, you know, for the 50s, 60s, and 70s and 80s, I think, they gave you this little ceramic figurine, usually a dog or something.
And so I had a lot of those, a collection, and I would put those into the mandala set.
And so it brought together this, you know, sort of aspect of my own family, you know, tchotchkes that I was able to offer as I was saying these prayers to the Buddha.
The whole thing was very calming.
And I'll link to a video of a monk going through the practice.
Now, at the end of the chanting, you're holding this castle made of rice and trinkets, and you're meant to focus all of your love and attention on that castle, on that mandala.
And you're to imagine that the Buddhas were so pleased with you, that they exalted in your care, in your generosity.
And then when the prayer was over, you let the whole thing crumble and fall into the kerchief, like the dissolution of some sort of beautiful dream, but also the humbling dissolution of your sense of identity.
And your sense of conventional reality.
Now this wasn't just like an occasional thing.
You did it every day.
And some students were even assigned the task of completing 100,000 mandala offerings before proceeding on to the next teachings.
So one thing that I want to point out about learning this stuff as a long, young, traveling white adult in, you know, exile Tibet and, you know, places like, you know, Baila Kuppe and so on, is that it kind of sent you back into kindergarten.
So, there we would be, sitting on the floor, sing-songing something in a foreign language.
We learned the Tibetan alphabet, we did the Sanskrit alphabet.
When it came to writing, they handed us these little newsprint workbooks that were printed in Nepal with letter exercises.
So I spent months of my life going to primary school in a Tibetan refugee community.
And on the surface, I told myself I was studying a spiritual path, but a large part of that was actually that I was trying to have an early life do-over, as if becoming Matthew in Toronto or Dublin or Vermont or wherever I ended up was some sort of like wrong turn.
And if I became six years old again, but Tibetan this time, my life would make more sense.
So I'm thinking about this in relation to the Q-map because Monroe, the artist, has obviously gathered together an entire mandala of deep and meaningful data to him and he's offered it to his gamified community.
And if you take another look at it, the map itself also carries hints of the meticulously designed compositions of tantric icons.
So Travis View, the most obsessive and dedicated Q researcher out there, he's the co-host of QAA podcast, and he writes for Washington Post.
He always says that Q is a big tent fury designed to absorb everything else.
And usually we talk about that as though it's kind of imperialistic, like it's going out and like co-opting things, and that's true, but I also think we can think about it in another way, that it's about gathering meaningful things, and things that are precious because they are meaningful, you know, broken threads of history, things that haven't been solved, mysteries, things that glow in the dark, and to bring them all together in a kind of ritual meaning making.
And the other thing that Monroe is obviously doing is gathering up, you know, all of this, all of these unanswered questions.
And, you know, he's creating a fabric.
But the thing about the Tibetan ritual is, the mandala offering, is that you let the mandala crumble to the ground.
It's just like those sand paintings that the monks work on for weeks and then they brush them away.
This is the ancient thing, right?
Like you build something and then you watch it disappear, like you actually destroy it.
And if we're talking about Indian wisdom culture, this goes right back to the root of fire ritual.
You gather things together and then you burn them in sacrifice.
And this teaches you something about generosity and impermanence.
Yeah, there's all kinds of language around, you know, you're appeasing the gods, but you're also just, you're giving food to the fire.
So I would say that one real tragedy of conspirituality is that people are building this mandala of meanings and and they're balancing this fragile thing in the air and it's made of rice and sand and reiki prayers and prayer based bracelets and drops of essential oils and bits of sage and supplement pills and it's like it's teetering up there And it's almost like they forgot to let it crumble.
And as time passes, and as it's harder to hold in the air, and as they start to tremble more and more, of course they're going to stiffen up.
They're going to hold it more tightly.
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