Conspiritualists hide their grifts in mantras. MLMs market themselves as communities, while cults preach freedom. When a research firm spotlights Sayer Ji as a disinformation super-spreader, he calls them a hate group. When Lil Nas X spins a catharsis of gay-goth dreams, he embodies MAGA disgust. It’s an age of misdirection.It’s also an age of transference. Living and breathing people become memes. The impulse to communicate gets devoured by the need to perform. Drives to justice adopt dominant affects. Real conspiracies get overshadowed by myths. We’re keeping ourselves very busy while the world burns,'This week we’re releasing a bonus episode into the wild that speaks to a small wedge of the transference game. Matthew contemplates what it means, in both helpful and unhelpful ways, to be named as or reduced to “cis white men”, and how important issues can get lost in the dead zone between culture wars and cults.Both conspirituality and social media influence are driven by the hot take, the keyword, the avatar, and the speed of emotional reactivity. And cults are glued together by intense, non-negotiable emotional demands on participants. So far we’ve shown how all of these elements degrade our chances to evaluate evidence and resist being conned by charismatics or cult leaders. Our hope is that we contribute to a slower and open-ended exploration of how to balance the rhetoric of social change with the nuance of interpersonal empathy.In the Ticker, Derek looks at the retraction crisis plaguing scientific research. Julian watches Lil Nas X lap-dance through the MAGA homo-pocalypse. Matthew looks at a new cult scheme for recruiting anti-vaxxers, while the Jab examines the conspiritualist love of contrarian experts with scientific credentials but no evidence for their claims.Show NotesLil Nas X’s ‘Satan Shoes’ trolled some Christians. But ‘Montero’ is about more than that.Lil Nas X’s unofficial ‘Satan’ Nikes containing human blood sell out in under a minuteLong-retracted papers are still cited in major journalsRetracting publications doesn’t stop them from influencing scienceThe ex-Pfizer scientist who became an anti-vax heroA rare clotting disorder may cloud the world’s hopes for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccineMarketplace
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Conspiraturality Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiraturality.
This is Derek Barris, and it's a bit of a different format this week.
We're deep in research for forthcoming episodes, including a number of interviews and more extensive pieces we've been working on.
So this week we decided to work independently, create some segments for you and then rerun one of Matthew's segments that was only available to Patreon subscribers, but we had such a good response to it.
And I think it really is an important message that we decided to run it here.
He intros that near the end.
As always, you can stay up to date with us on Facebook and Instagram and On Clubhouse, where every Sunday I host a talk for everyone from 1 o'clock to 2 o'clock Pacific, as well as Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where for as little as $5, you can support the podcast and get access to our weekend bonus content and our Monday bonus episodes, which are usually only exclusively there.
But as I said, I really think you're going to enjoy this episode.
Conspiratuality episode 45.
Theater of the Transferred.
Conspiritualists hide their grifts in mantras.
MLMs market themselves as communities, while cults preach freedom.
When a research firm spotlights Sayer G as a disinformation super-spreader, he calls them a hate group.
When Lil Nas X spins a catharsis of gay goth dreams, he embodies MAGA disgust.
It's an age of misdirection.
It's also an age of transference.
Living and breathing people become memes.
The impulse to communicate gets devoured by the need to perform.
Drives to justice adopt dominant affects.
Real conspiracies get overshadowed by myths.
We're keeping ourselves very busy while the world burns.
This week, we're releasing a bonus episode into the wild that speaks to a small wedge of the transference game.
Matthew contemplates what it means in both helpful and unhelpful ways to be named as or reduced to cis white men, and how important issues can get lost in the dead zone between the culture wars and cults.
Reduction and essentialism are key aspects of our politics and potent weapons in the arsenal of conspirituality.
None of the influencers we study on this podcast would have gained their social power without labeling their opponents in black and white terms, without taking black and white positions on things like vaccines, big pharma, and whether or not a person is awake.
Both conspirituality and social media influence are driven by the hot take, the key word, the avatar, and the speed of emotional reactivity.
And cults are glued together by intense non-negotiable emotional demands on participants.
So far, we've shown how all of these elements degrade our chances to evaluate evidence and resist being conned by charismatics or cult leaders.
Our hope is that we contribute to a slower and open-ended exploration of how to balance the rhetoric of social change with the nuance of interpersonal empathy.
In the ticker, Derek looks at the retraction of some research into the paranormal that the reviewers should have seen coming.
I'm going to watch Lil Nas X lap dance through the MAGA home apocalypse.
Matthew looks at a new cult scheme for recruiting anti-vaxxers, and The Jab examines the conspiritualist love of contrarian experts with scientific credentials but no evidence for their claims.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
Get thee behind me, Satan.
Well, as you may know, a 21-year-old rapper named Lil Nas X won the internet over the weekend.
Whether or not you know his name, you definitely couldn't escape his 2019 country hip-hop crossover mega-hit, Old Town Road.
The song made it to a billion streams on Spotify alone by August of that year.
In June of 2019 Lil Nas X came out as gay and has been open in interviews about the courage that it took given the lack of acceptance in both hip-hop and country music.
Seemingly unafraid now of further controversy, he released the music video for his new song Montero, Call Me By Your Name, on March 25th.
And it is as stunning an artistic and technical achievement as it is a brazen flaunting of religious and sexual taboos.
From being seduced by a serpentine lover in the Garden of Eden, to standing trial in a pink wig, being stoned to death, and descending into hell on a stripper pole, the special effects are stunning.
Lil Nas X proceeds then to give Satan a fiery lap dance on his throne before, spoiler alert, breaking his neck and stealing his horned crown.
As of March 29th, the YouTube video has been watched over 37 million times, and Twitter is alight with Christians, conservatives, and yes, QAnons, decrying this as evil heresy and proof of America's cultural decline.
A segment on far-right wing OAN even featured a talking head explaining that recent mass shootings are better explained by art like this Then buy America's easy access to assault rifles.
In response to some of the outrage, the rapper tweeted, I spent my entire teenage years hating myself because of the shit y'all preached would happen to me because I was gay.
So I hope you are mad.
Stay mad.
Feel the same anger you teach us to have toward ourselves.
There's more though.
A companion piece limited edition Satan Sneaker has been released in collaboration with a group called MSCHF or Mischief, known for a series of what they call drops that skewer the world of upscaled art galleries and collectors.
In addition to selling a 1.3 million dollar laptop with some of the world's most dangerous computer viruses installed on it, And buying a Damien Hirst painting only to resell cut up pieces of it at a massive profit?
The collective has also released 15 pairs of a repurposed Nike Jesus sneaker in 2019.
The Jesus shoe sold for $1,425, which is a reference to the biblical verse that describes the Savior walking on water.
Mischief's design included water purported to be from the River Jordan in the soul's air chamber, allowing owners to walk on water.
Now 666 pairs of Lil Nas X's Satan shoe were each sold for $1,018, another biblical reference, this time to the quote, I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.
The air chamber of the sneaker in this case contains red ink and supposedly one drop of human blood just to put the cherry on top of this absolutely epic piece of artistic trolling.
The sneakers sold out in under one minute.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nike is suing this time.
Q followers were perhaps relieved to have something to obsess over this week.
This ticker story comes from the CBC's program Marketplace.
The headline, Marketplace attended a COVID-19 conspiracy boot camp to see how instructors are targeting vaccine skeptics.
So I'll just read from the article.
Marketplace journalists took part in a U.S.
COVID-19 conspiracy boot camp where aspiring activists, including the leader of one of Canada's prominent misinformation campaigns, Learn tactics of persuasion to associates of doubt about information coming from public health authorities.
Sherry Tenpenny, a Cleveland, Ohio-based osteopath and self-proclaimed grandmother of the anti-vaccination movement in the U.S., runs the six-week online course.
She has hundreds of thousands of followers on social media and has appeared on popular far-right conspiracy podcasts Such as Info Wars.
So the journalist signed up for the $623 Mastering Vaccine Info Boot Camp to find out exactly what was being sold to her students.
Quote, you're in our choir, Tenpenny told the class.
It's those who are on the fence who I need to hear the message, she said.
My job is to teach the 400 of you in the class so that each one of you can go out and teach 1000.
So yeah, 400 people signed up, $623 per student.
That adds up to almost a quarter of a million dollars in course fees.
It's the eighth course that Tenpenny has run since 2017.
This one is COVID-19 specific.
There were attendees from Canada, Europe, India, the Philippines, and according to Tenpenny, there were 18 physicians from South Africa.
But, as the report shows, it also has some MLM-type qualities.
So, reading again from the article, Vladislav Sobolev is the founder of Hugs Over Masks, a Facebook group with more than 10,000 members that's been behind some of the anti-mask and anti-lockdown protests that have taken place across Canada.
Sobolev partnered with Tenpenny last year, so that means there were affiliate fees involved, surely.
To arrange a group of his Hugs Over Masks followers to take the training.
He now says he's organizing activist trainings of his own.
Now here's some extra information from my own reporting.
Hugs Over Masks collaborates with the Canadian QAnon spinoff group that's called The Line.
I've reported on this for The Walrus.
The Line organized really big anti-mask protests in downtown Toronto in the fall.
They were on Saturdays.
It seems that they've petered out.
But the founder of the organization is a guy named Lamont Daigle.
He leads men's groups and sells Kangen Water, which is also an MLM.
Now there's a funny coincidence because I was out for a walk the other day down here in the beaches part of Toronto where we live.
I was on the boardwalk by the lake.
Lovely day.
I came up behind a couple walking slowly and chatting together.
A white woman, black man, both in their 20s.
He was wearing pretty shabby clothes and she looked like she wasn't doing very well health-wise.
They didn't look like they had money or any particular place to be on a Friday afternoon.
And the guy was carrying a lawn sign with the line, a symbol, on it.
This is Lamont Daigle's group.
The slogan read, No More Lockdowns.
They looked pretty alone.
So as I came up beside them, I stopped and I asked them whether the line was still doing protests, and they said yes, but it wasn't very convincing.
I asked them if Lamont Daigle was still organizing things, and the guy's eyes lit up, and he said, yeah, I know Lamont.
And then I played dumb.
I pointed at the sign and I asked, so hey, is all of that about QAnon?
And the guy broke into an even bigger smile and said, oh yeah, QAnon's a big part of this whole thing.
And I had this mixture of feelings, sad, ambivalent, but also empathetic.
I mean, these two were obviously marginalized folks.
Probably no jobs, maybe socially isolated.
And this bullshit, propagandistic, anti-public health movement has given them something to do.
A way of protesting against the alienation of the techno state.
Maybe they became friends through this thing.
Maybe it gave them a way of transmuting their poverty into a kind of ideological monasticism.
There's also something useful and nostalgic about the line protests.
I saw this video coverage of one where they were playing Woody Guthrie songs.
And then I think about Lamont and how the eyes of the young men light up when they say his name.
And then Tenpenny, who is ruthlessly and meticulously monetizing propaganda.
And I get more and more of this feeling that a big unexamined piece of this whole landscape is simply a strange metastasis in capitalism.
The culty aspects are clear in terms of people's attachments and the power dynamics, but underneath the content, underneath the data, there's this basic predatory principle at play, which is how do you accumulate the time, attention, and money that belongs to other people?
And from the point of view of The Mark or The Rank and File, these two people walking down the boardwalk on a Friday afternoon, it's bad enough that they were encouraged to believe in bullshit, but it's almost worse that that belief in bullshit was used to steal their money, their energy, and their lifeblood, and also their altruism, and maybe even their yearning for friendship.
We know the influencers we discuss on Conspirituality cherry-pick their science, while also turning to misinformation and disinformation to find their supposed research.
Whether purposefully or not, and both cases are evident, they're often unwillingly embedded by credible scientific journals.
As with many topics we discuss, there's no single reason for this, but a disturbing phenomenon in the walled gardens of academia has been penetrated by agendas and laziness, and in a strange twist, it's helping those supplement-slinging salesmen we discuss so often prove their case.
Let's begin with a well-known example.
Andrew Wakefield's 1998 study linking vaccines with autism was riddled with holes.
All 12 children involved were hand-picked, which is antithetical to clinical research.
The now disbarred physician falsified pediatric results cited in the research, Wakefield used microscopic level stains to make his case, while a more reliable molecular method found no evidence of a link between vaccines and autism.
And add to this the fact that the parents of study subjects, some with their own agendas such as litigation, kept changing the timeline of their children's conditions.
During all this time when Wakefield was raging against the vaccine, he filed for two patents on singles measles shots.
It was a money play from day one.
23 years later, the vaccine autism myth remains in circulation despite decades of contrary evidence.
Six years after the study was published, 10 of the 13 authors of the paper retracted their findings.
It took The Lancet a few more years, but in 2010 the publication finally retracted the paper.
Journalist Brian Deer documented Wakefield's scam for many years, and still the lie persists.
Science's replication crisis is well known.
That's basically a study says something, and then further research cannot come up with the same findings.
But the research community is suffering from another serious problem, one ill-fated for the social media age.
The retraction crisis.
As science journalist and former marine biologist Fanny Danielek-Zakel recently pointed out, retracted papers are still being cited and used as gospel even when, and sometimes it seems especially when, data are intentionally fabricated.
Currently, roughly 4 retractions occur per 10,000 publications, with the highest percentages being in medicine, life sciences, and chemistry journals.
That overall number might not seem high, yet those retracted studies have an outsized influence.
Wakefield claiming the MMR vaccine causes autism as a ruse to patent his own vaccine is the most infamous example, but there are others.
A 2005 paper touting omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids as having anti-inflammatory effects was retracted in 2008 after it was discovered that one author, Watoru Matsuyama, intentionally falsified data.
While Matsuyama is now deceased, 17 of his papers were retracted between 2007 and 2010.
After 2008, however, 96% of papers that cited that study never mentioned that it had been retracted.
This is not saying that fatty acids are not helpful.
Anecdotally, it is one of two supplements I take daily.
This one for my genetic high cholesterol.
And indeed, my markers dropped dramatically when I began taking them.
But in this instance, Matsuyama claimed that a diet rich in omega-3s reduced inflammation and improved exercise capacity in persons with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Which has never been proven and could potentially be dangerous to people with this condition if they're taking it in hopes of improving what's going on in their bodies.
Then we have German anesthesiologist Joachim Bolt, who comes in with a whopping 103 retractions credited to his name.
Considered the greatest fraud in medicine since Wakefield, his studies, including influential work on the role of hydroxyethyl starch, continues to be cited today without mention of those retractions.
We have two COVID-19 studies published in reputable journals that were retracted after their findings were deemed to be suspect.
The researchers relied on a combination of big data and artificial intelligence to replace randomized controlled clinical trials, which led to the false results.
Still, the retracted papers were cited in other prestigious journals and have, in part, been seized upon by anti-vaxxers that point to a nefarious medical industry trying to confuse us with conflicting evidence.
As Zakol notes, a solid grasp of science matters considering research drives policy and healthcare decisions.
We can't possibly expect every paper to get it right.
And sadly, we also have to factor in biased researchers pushing forward their agendas.
While the publication of such research is troublesome, Zakol takes particular issue with the authors and publications that continue to cite them after they've been retracted.
More than just a critique, though, she offers a path forward.
Quote, In each and every publication, author guidelines should include that the author is needed to check all citations for possible retractions.
Today, numerous citation software are available to do this with ease, such as Zotero, Cite.ai, and Redactech alert users for any retracted papers in the reference list.
As well as more care from authors, preventing post-retraction citations is a responsibility of publishers, too.
Along with double-checking the reference list of papers to be published, they should also make sure that retraction notices appear on all platforms where the study is available." The past year has proven how dangerous scientific misinformation, and even more disturbingly, disinformation, is to public health measures.
The frantic urgency of social media platforms, and the speed with which we consume headlines without reading articles, makes teaching good science even more daunting.
At the very least, we need the gatekeepers to take more responsibility for their publication process.
Being the first to break bad science is way more socially damaging than being the 10th to publish science worth repeating.
The jab.
Our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
I should start the jab today with an addendum to what we discussed in part last week.
This is about AstraZeneca and a blood clotting disorder.
When we recorded last week, AstraZeneca's COVID vaccine had been assessed by the European Medicines Agency as not being causally linked to reported incidents of blood clots.
But in the days since, there have been some new developments.
A German clotting specialist named Andreas Greinacher and his research team appear to have identified a rare disorder in which the wrong kinds of antibodies are created, and this leads to widespread clotting.
The good news is that if this is the case, it is rare and also treatable.
For now, though, more research is necessary to find out if there is a causal connection, and some countries are limiting the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine for this reason.
I want to make a note here that this process of evaluating new data, revising knowledge, and then seeking further clarification is central to scientific method, which can be frustrating and confusing when you're trying to follow the story, but...
Good science communication on developing news usually takes the form of, here's what our research shows, This is what we think it might mean, but we don't know for sure, so more research is required.
And that's exactly what Andreas Graenacher is doing.
But there's a special type of expert, beloved by conspiracists, that I want to talk about today.
It's the scientific contrarian who dares to speak up against mainstream consensus.
Now having advanced degrees or a CV that includes working in research adds value and impact.
Whether they're blowing the whistle on vaccines causing autism, or touting computer simulations that prove Building 7 had to have been a controlled demolition, or exposing the cover-up of extraterrestrial technology from downed UFOs, or raising the alarm about the calamitous nature of quarantine measures and COVID vaccines, These contrarian experts wave a wand of seeming scientific legitimacy over conspiracist claims.
For today's conspiritualists, paradigm-shifting newsfeed revelation is intoxicating.
The contrarian hero rises to social media prominence by going public in a way that completely circumvents how scientific data are evaluated.
But that's a feature, not a bug.
It's part of the maverick job description.
Suddenly finding themselves in the populist spotlight, they can freely make claims without evidence and then explain their current unemployment, in some cases, as personal victimization and the scientific consensus against their opinions as nefarious corruption and conspiracy.
A recent addition to this long list of contrarian scientists is Michael Yeadon.
He's the ex-Pfizer researcher and VP who founded a successful biotech company and then went off the rails.
Yeadon is ground zero for the false claim that the COVID vaccine causes infertility in women.
The scientific community refuted this, but that didn't stop it from becoming a virulent trope on anti-vax websites like RFK Jr.' 's Children's Health Defense.
Since April of 2020, Yeadon has been making one failed prediction after another.
He tweeted that it was very unlikely that the COVID death toll would reach 40,000 in the UK, and that it would just fade away.
Well, the count stands at 127,000 right now.
That September, he wrote in an article that there is no biological principle that leads us to expect a second wave.
Wrong again, Mr. Yeadon.
The following month, he said there was absolutely no need for a COVID vaccine.
The month after that, in a video viewed over 1 million times, he asserted that the pandemic was over.
And by December 1st, he had co-authored the petition containing the data-free infertility claim.
In January, research by the non-profit Kaiser Family Foundation showed that 13% of unvaccinated people had heard that COVID-19 vaccines have been shown to cause infertility.
All evidence so far shows that vaccinated women have absolutely no problem getting pregnant.
They also pass along some COVID immunity to their babies.
As Imran Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate told Reuters in the article I will link in the show notes, Yidden's background gives his dangerous and harmful messages false credibility.
That's exactly the often obscured problem with the contrarian expert.
They flash scientific credentials but present no scientific data.
They are touted for their work in the field but don't follow its rigor.
Failed predictions litter their wake with no accountability and certainly no hint of an apology or an addendum, as we offered at the top of this segment.
And their flavor of the weak prominence on the conspiracy skyline lives on only by the sensationalist headline, not by the details of what was claimed.
And it lives on, too, with the collateral damage of a misinformed and paranoid public.
So let's name this when we see it.
It's called the argument from authority fallacy.
And the point is simply this.
Academic credentials and past employment history don't make up for a lack of evidence in supportive claims that radically contradict the scientific consensus.
About three weeks ago, we released the following audio essay, which is called Cis White Man Means So Many Things, to our Patreon supporters. - which is called Cis White Man Means So Many Things, It got really great feedback, and a number of our supporters suggested that we release it to the wild.
So our plan was to drop it for today, and so we are, but there's one breaking and changing story in the yoga world that makes me want to give a little more context.
On our social feeds, you might have seen my comments on a recent podcast episode that Jay Brown produced with his guest Kachi Ananda.
Ananda came on to basically rifle through a series of anti-trans, fear-mongering talking points, many of which sounded like they were just cribbed from alt-right feeds.
She made dozens of unsubstantiated and paranoid claims.
And, just like a few weeks prior, Jay didn't push back, didn't fact-check.
As we said in episode 43, How to Red Pill a Yoga Podcaster, this is the paradox of Jay's brand.
Misinformation can be cast and monetized as a, quote, difficult conversation, unquote.
Ananda's politics on the issue are misinformed and gross, and there's already been a lot of qualified feedback from trans people and their allies so far asking that Jay take the podcast down.
We were going to do a segment on it this week, but we want to take more time with it as it's still developing.
Refuting Ananda's views is crucial and urgent, and that's happening.
Where we feel we can add value is in expanding our analysis of the intersecting conditions that not only allow for clusterfucks like this to happen, but might make them inevitable.
Just as influencer culture drives the escalation of conspirituality, it also drives the co-optation and monetization of culture war issues.
We also want to take a week to contemplate how the rituals of call-ins, call-outs, and calls for accountability play out.
We'll approach it with open minds, but we're skeptical that any of it is working.
I think the newsflash is that if you're interested in social justice, it might be a waste of time trying to get a boundary-free podcaster to re-educate themselves.
But we're also delaying a week because placing that segment alongside the following essay might be a bit of a gear grind.
As you'll hear, I'm attempting to parse out a kind of coerciveness in some very idealistic ways of speaking in progressive circles.
I'm taking the phrase cis white man and turning it over like a Necker cube trying to see what it does.
But the thing is, the data points that are discussed in this essay revolve around race, not gender.
So if we put the Brown-Ananda segment in the same space, I think some already complex issues would become more complex by the intersection of these two themes, but also the question of where our politics actually lie, which isn't really that interesting.
I mean, the answer to that question is that amongst the three of us, we're Canadian, white South African expat, and a Jersey boy, and we range from Marxist animist to center-left atheist.
So, we differ on views and approaches, but we don't differ in our focus in trying to improve the intellectual and communications climate.
We're also focused on how toxic social dynamics can really devastate communities and conversations.
One of the things we'll talk about next week is how Ananda's anti-trans talking points have a real cultic ring to them in their intensity, their resistance to outside information, their conspiratorial connections made between inclusive language policies and fears that all humans will soon turn into sexless cyborgs.
But, this week's theme is about how that same intensity, pressure, and urgency to recruit can show up in social justice discourse.
This is not motivated by any shift to the right, but by a desire to unpack the rhetoric, jargon, and performative behaviors that, so often in the reductive rhythm of social media, serve to shut down learning and polarize people who might otherwise work together.
The main thing that Ananda does wrong in that dumpster fire is to reduce and essentialize trans people and then talk about them without talking to them.
In the essay that follows, I'm going to show how Robin DiAngelo does something similar with white people, avoiding all nuance and the burden of evidence as she builds an emotionally coercive case.
The bottom line is, this shit doesn't work on either side.
Cis white man means so many things. *sigh* When I first started working on this podcast with Derek and Julian, someone who was a friend at the time sent me an email that basically said, why are you working with two other cis white men on this project?
The question took me aback.
I froze.
Because, according to certain cultural rules, which are not necessarily the rules of friendship, I couldn't answer this question without being wrong or without appearing to be defensive or fragile.
I had three bad options for answering.
If I said, because they're my friends, then I might be revealing the exclusivity of my social circle, and perhaps my unwillingness to look beyond it.
If I said, they're colleagues who are interested in and skilled in the same subject area, I might be revealing my ignorance of marginalized literature on conspirituality, although it is kind of a new study.
If I said I was scrambling for any kind of work project at the beginning of the pandemic, as my industry was collapsing, and this materialized out of luck and necessity, then I might be proving that I valued money over inclusivity.
I might be revealing my naked opportunism, my complicity in colonial capitalism.
So, I struck an apologetic stance.
I basically said, I know it doesn't look good, but I'll be working on it and using my privilege to share power.
But this felt like a lead balloon.
Not because it was an empty promise.
My commitment to sharing power is really a thing.
But because it didn't seem to answer the underlying assertion of my friend's question, which was, it would have been better if you'd chosen another project with other people.
It was almost like a friend telling me who to be friends with.
The fact that this challenge came from a friend was significant.
Was this an unfriendly thing to do?
Or, according to the hard work of checking privilege, was this actually a sign of true friendship?
That the person felt safe enough to challenge me and assumed their challenge wouldn't strain the friendship?
I don't know the answer to that.
Now, not long after that, we got similar feedback on social media.
Some of it coming from people who didn't know us, who weren't friends.
And some of the prematurely aggravated comments came from people who clearly hadn't listened to any of the episodes or grasped what the subject was.
And in some cases, these challenges felt disingenuous.
This was white people criticizing other white people for starting a project they didn't start, and pretending like they knew it was overall, and in general, the wrong thing to do.
Then, in a post about an episode about racism in the wellness industry, one person of color posted a comment saying that they didn't have time to listen to white people talk about the issue.
And to me, that was totally fine.
But the episode featured in that post contained an interview with a person of color talking about the issue.
So clearly the comment was hasty, maybe misinformed, but that didn't stop other commenters, white commenters, from jumping on board to support the person's objection.
And all of this, strangely, served to erase the presence of our guest.
I don't think this happened in bad faith.
I think it happened because everything on social media moves too damned fast and reactively.
The platform seems built for a mixture of provocation and confusion that keeps people engaged for longer.
Facebook wants us to fight, and if it's not over something real, it might as well be over something untrue or meaningless.
In these scrums, I give the same response.
Apologize, and pledge to use privilege ethically.
For some people, this seems sufficient, and others just storm off anyway.
Since then, I've been thinking a lot about this question, and about why certain answers work or don't work, and when, and about the differences between us on the podcast here, and how those differences mesh with our strengths and blind spots.
I've also been thinking about our differences in how we approach the question.
In episode 26, it all came out into the open when, in talking about social justice-oriented online conflict, Derek laid out a boundary he has when engaging in social media threads.
He described a commenter opening or framing a criticism of his work in the same way that my friend had.
The formula is, quote, coming from a white cis man, your opinion or work is not relevant because, and so on, unquote.
I'm going to call this the identitarian gambit.
Derek explained that for him, it doesn't really matter what comes after the identitarian gambit.
He said that when he hears this opening, or reads it, he just stops.
He's a cis white man looking at the words cis white man, and he's not reading any further.
He's being dismissed, and so he's going to dismiss what follows.
I'm a cisgendered white man as well, and I don't stop reading.
My instinct is to try to depersonalize it, to take on the identitarian gambit, to face it fully, and to own it.
I want to be a good activist, feminist, ally.
Or at least my idea of one.
But in this essay, I'd like to explore whether I'm doing that because it's moral and effective, or because I'm afraid not to, or because I'm confused about the difference between real life behavior and the theater of being good.
Spoiler alert!
The answer is a mixture of all three.
But I figure that if I don't learn to tell these motivations apart, I will be more likely to be drawn into toxic online BS, which only really benefits Mark Zuckerberg.
When Derek outright admits that he stops reading, I feel afraid. - Right.
And that's a big clue.
Because I don't even know what his reason is yet, and I haven't thought to ask.
Here are the I'm Afraid thoughts.
The first is empathetic, but the second is selfish.
First I think, oh Derek, you don't want to say that aloud.
People will accuse you of white fragility.
And then this other thought comes.
Oh, if you say that aloud, I might get attacked for your words.
Someone might say, you're working with a fragile white cis guy.
Someone might demand that I confront you and correct you.
And guess what?
This is exactly the nexus that Clementine Morgan and Jay are talking about on their fascinating podcast Fucking Cancelled.
This cocktail of identitarianism, social media, and cancel culture that they argue is degrading the possibility for good communication, not to mention solidarity, on the left.
And, I would argue, in progressive wellness and even trauma recovery spaces.
Now I want to point out something here, which is that Clementine and Jay have weathered a lot of criticism for being white people criticizing cancel culture, which, BIPOC activists rightly point out, has been an essential tool of asymmetrical justice-seeking in BIPOC activism for a long time.
But what this criticism can miss is the fact that for the most part, Clementine and Jay are identifying a viciousness in cancel culture by which white progressives eviscerate each other online instead of getting on with actually doing something in the world.
Anyway, along the logic of the nexus, I'm afraid when I hear Derek's statement because 1.
I know how easily it is for a person's remarks, however vague, to be used to essentialize them.
How quick Quickly things can go from Derek saying he stops reading that comment to Derek being called fragile, and then that fragility being essentialized into his character, as in, Derek said a fragile thing, to Derek is a fragile white person.
As Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints describes, I also know that this kind of criticism is transitive.
It can apply to me in relation to Derek, as in, Derek as a fragile person can become Conspirituality Podcast is a white fragile organization.
I'm a cis white man too, after all, and our views must be the same.
But let's just pause here for a moment to point out that we haven't even gotten to any views yet.
The discussion has been totally content-free so far.
We are literally not talking about anything yet, except who we appear to be in the world, before we even start talking.
This can be really good for transparent and sensitive communication about power dynamics, but it can also block communication altogether.
And the more important point I'm going to get to is to argue that a certain kind of justice-oriented emotional discourse can also be a red flag for cultic control.
So what is this fragility that I'm so afraid to be accused of having?
Who defines it?
For this, we might as well go straight to Robin DiAngelo, the white academic and corporate consultant whose book White Fragility is now a kind of cultural talisman.
In a printed interview, she says, In a nutshell, white fragility is the defensive reaction so many white people have when our racial worldviews, positions, or advantages are questioned or challenged.
For a lot of white people, just suggesting that being white has meaning will trigger a deep defensive response.
And that defensiveness serves to maintain both our comfort and our positions in a racially inequitable society from which we benefit.
Now on first reading, I totally resonate with this.
But then I pause because that resonance has a flavor that I've now grown to be suspicious of.
It sounds so complete and elegant.
And that feeling is welcome when I'm listening to music, but in politics or psychology, it makes me pause.
So I'll extract one sentence here.
Quote, for a lot of white people, just suggesting that being white has meaning will trigger a deep defensive response.
Now she does hedge by mentioning for a lot of white people, but the statement leaves a lot out and there's no data cited.
Is she really sure that it's the mere mention of whiteness that's enough to provoke deep defensive responses?
Amongst how many people?
And what demographic?
Urban?
Rural?
Boomer?
Gen X?
Millennial?
And according to what type of confrontation?
And in what medium?
This interview is posted on D'Angelo's website, so we can assume that she believes it is self-supporting.
But the more I look at it, the more reductive it seems.
It doesn't account for the reactive nature of social media, for example.
In fact, it seems purpose-built for the reductive and aphoristic pulses of social media.
And the definition also doesn't account for manners.
Any discussion of which, unfortunately, is now difficult to distinguish from tone policing, whereby a conversation that expresses the outrage of marginalization is closely monitored for signs of emotional excess.
But who isn't impacted by manners?
One thing that the D'Angelo discourse does, I believe, is to help reinforce a kind of social media shorthand by which the whiteness of a person becomes an instinctual predictor as to how to interpret their responses.
It's as if the profile pic gives the game away before the person even speaks.
With enough D'Angelo out there, it becomes natural to expect that white people are all and equally triggered around these issues.
They are always already triggered.
You can't trust them.
So when Derek says, I'm not going to engage with a particular line of argument, he's showing the D'Angelo crowd he cannot be trusted.
He's a live wire about to go off.
Now I want to be super clear about one thing.
It's become a talking point on the right to describe the D'Angelo position as being about white self-hatred.
I'm not going to indulge that view because their answer to that problem is to nurture racial pride or even arrogance.
And in more refined circles, this is expressed as a renewed faith in Western exceptionalism or Christian apologetics.
And on that tip, you can tune into our episode on the resurrection of Jordan Peterson.
On the more supremacist side, this comes out in relation to Great Replacement anxieties.
I'm thinking of the Proud Boy types who go to public protests in Wisconsin and guzzle gallons of milk in public as a kind of ritual to prove that they are of the soil and that lactose intolerant immigrants, feminists, and trans people should leave.
Intellectual honesty demands that we don't make guesses about whether Robin DiAngelo hates herself.
That's between her and her therapist.
And it's a distraction from a much more important issue, that whether hateful or empathetic, she's offering a politics of affect as opposed to a politics of material change.
I'm not worried that the fragility consideration is making me hate myself, and I have no insight into those who buy into it fully.
My interest isn't the psychology of it, because that would just be more D'Angelo.
My interest is in what does and doesn't work to foster understanding and solidarity in online communication and in the world.
My main gut feeling is that good communication doesn't happen by demanding that everyone feel the same feelings as a prerequisite for doing good work.
So we started with, "As a cis white man, your opinion is..." but there are other versions that are said to trigger that same fragility.
Such as, as a white feminist, your opinion is... or as a heteronormative settler, your opinion is...
Or in my field, and closer to the bone because this is referring to spirituality, as a white male practitioner of yoga, your practice is...
Now, it's not my purpose in this essay to invalidate this rhetoric.
So, I'll look at why it emerges, and what, in good faith, it might be attempting to do.
And also the good work it does, because I've learned a lot from it.
Like the work of Peggy McIntosh in White Privilege, unpacking the invisible knapsack.
McIntosh credits the work of black feminists especially.
My understanding is that these preemptive framings come from the painstaking study of intersectional power dynamics, in which a person's class, race, gender, sexual orientation, resources, knowledge, experiences, and biases are understood to be always already determining the starting points of their arguments.
Starting points that they feel are reasonable, but may really be blind to.
There's no doubt that what is normal and seems valid for a person is largely predetermined by forces beyond their reckoning.
And something amazing happens when this is revealed.
The two major areas in which I've been shocked into awareness by the confrontational nature of the identitarian gambit are, predictably, in relation to my white and male privilege.
On one occasion, I realized that a very open confrontation I had with a cop on the street here in Toronto would have potentially been lethal had I been black.
In the other case, an argument with my partner, who is female, about whether I'd walk through the city at night to get to the airport or take a cab showed me that my male privilege in relation to bodily safety was simply invisible to me.
I wrote about both of those incidents, and I'll put the links into the show notes.
These were moments in my life of spiritual significance.
My empathy just grew, and I had that feeling that I have that I associate with deep growth, that I was actually becoming smaller, less central to the world, which meant that more of everything else could pour in.
It might sound strange to say that the feeling I can compare it to was that of becoming a parent.
And in the movies, that moment is textured by pride and awe.
But I never felt pride.
And my awe at holding the swaddled infant quickly resolved into the relaxation of becoming as small as he was.
I gazed at him and I knew that I was no longer the center of my world, that my life would now turn more towards service, and I was relieved of a quotient of narcissism.
Being confronted on my identity was similar, because privilege is a kind of structural narcissism.
But the value hasn't just been internal.
Walking through the world with an awareness of privilege has changed some very concrete things for me.
One example would be that I have this sense that the previously unexamined freedom of my body and its movements occur in a space that was just given to me.
It was unearned.
And here in Canada, it was handed to me through the history of colonial genocide.
And so everything I choose and do, socially, politically, economically, is haunted by this question.
What concrete measures can I support to redress that history?
Because it's not over.
I'm here because of it.
In terms of my very food and shelter, there are debts I can help pay.
Not because I'm a bad person, but because it's the right thing to do.
What this means for this podcast is that I'm going to do my best to seek out the views and voices of people who don't typically get heard.
And I'll do this because I know that I have been entrained to speak freely and assume that I will be heard.
This means that when interrogating the ways in which traditional or indigenous remedies are being used by conspiritualists, that I don't ignore the deep cultural and political meanings that these art forms carry.
It means that I'll keep in mind that the ways in which we know the world are inextricable from political and colonial processes.
I've already used the phrase that comes to mind about the feeling of identity in these conversations.
Always already.
When the identitarian gambit pops up, the speaker is pointing at their opponent with a preset for the conversation and its terms.
The assumption is that my responses will always be, always already, conditioned by my identity and its privileges.
And they're right.
They're pointing out an existential, material fact.
The fact of inequality.
A fact that colors everything that follows.
And by pointing it out, they're doing the service of revealing something that all of neoliberal culture wants to pretend isn't there.
The phrase always-already comes from Heidegger's Being and Time.
It pops up alongside terms like givenness and thrownness, which describe the very human phenomenon of realizing, or not realizing, that we are hurled into conditions we cannot understand.
We fall into the river of life and we have to learn to swim as we go.
The fact of the river is non-negotiable and its speed and depth are unknown.
I learned the term first via French literary theory, in which it was used to describe how things like selfhood and the nature of knowledge and even consciousness itself were predetermined by the structures and limitations of one's natal language and customs, which colonize the child's mind before other possibilities can be known.
This sense of permanent entrapment and blindness, I feel, can be very much at play in the mood of today's conversations on privilege and identity.
It can definitely feel like one is always already white, cisgendered, settler, privileged.
Sometimes it feels like a psychoanalytic premise, that you are driven by unconscious forces, sometimes violent, that are related to your very biology.
But people change, right?
Or do they?
People go to therapy, right?
Can cultures go to therapy as well?
Can we let them?
The French theorists I read, Derrida, Deleuze, Baudrillard, were all pretty morose.
They didn't propose a way out of the prison of language and representation other than, like in psychoanalysis, seeing it more clearly and perhaps squeezing some relief or pleasure out of that.
The goal wasn't to become a better actor in the world, but a more self-aware, more elegantly depressed person.
And I want to put a pin in that point, because the difference in these two goals is crucial when we're talking about politics.
Are we working on things, or are we thinking about working on things while we really work on ourselves?
And how much work on ourselves is enough?
It might have been the post-war trauma speaking, and then later disillusionment over the aftermath of May 1968 in Paris.
But for the writers I was reading, it seemed there was little one could do about your predetermined limitations.
However, there was perverse pleasure in discovering one's entrapment.
There was a moment of liberation, oddly, that came from realizing that one would never be free.
There was a moment of pleasure and surrender.
But it was private.
It wasn't going to lead to social policy, to best ethical practices.
So let's put another pin in here to ask, how do we generally assess the effectiveness of our politics online?
Is it through the success of our organizing?
Or the intensity of our self-examination of, quote, doing the work, unquote, seemingly endless and the results of which we can never quite define?
And this sounds a lot like religion, right?
One of the key things I've noticed about what I'll call the D'Angelo Discourse, in which I am meant to meditate on the meaning of being a cis white man, is that it does sound a lot more like Buddhist or New Age contemplation than like activism.
Its success seems more determined by the indescribable quality of one's internal psychology or wokeness than anything else.
And, as Cedric Michael Williams of the Class Unity Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America points out, this emphasis on internality plays right into the hands of corporate interests.
D'Angelo's White Fragility, he writes, reinforces the belief that the responsibility for racism lies with individual workers' attitudes and invisible phenomena, including implicit bias, rather than the policies and practices authorized by employers.
If I were an employer, why wouldn't I want to hire a specialist to train workers to believe that their own identities and unconscious biases are the main sources of inequality, instead of exploitative workplace practices?
Williams is asking, what does all of this self-reflection really change?
How is it not just another lifestyle and personal development choice by which white people might be making themselves feel better, regardless of how it materially impacts racism?
Coming back to my colleague Derek, I think he's asking this too, but more directly than I have as of yet.
Now there's lots of engaging analysis of the pros and cons of what D'Angelo is doing from both white and black writers.
Very smart people will be debating this stuff for years.
I found Daniel Bergner's long read in the New York Times especially nuanced and troubling, and I'll link to it.
But here's something I haven't seen any commenters do yet, even as they report on the zero-sum game of her presentation.
How charismatically dialed in she is, and how much money she makes, and the social buzz around her work.
All of the cult leaders I've studied, and the two that I've lived with, present themselves in two ways.
First, as altruists holding a magic tool that will revolutionize the world, and secondly, as never-compromising emotional bulldogs who strategically present recruits with a non-negotiable threshold for commitment, which means that membership depends on emotional surrender.
With D'Angelo, it seems like that threshold is a full admission to one's white fragility.
And that's the Kafka trap.
Because disputing with her terms is evidence for her that her terms are correct.
Charles Anderson, the cult leader who founded Endeavor Academy, where I was a member for three years from 2000 to 2003, used to say, of course you can't understand what I'm saying.
You're asleep.
And somehow, mystically, agreeing with him that we were asleep, whatever that meant, was the key to waking up.
But you had to agree with him before you opened your mouth.
You had to agree with his assessment of your internal being.
And this was a real mindfuck.
Because to gain liberation, you had to parrot what an authority said about you.
Bergner's article describes a few things that set off culty alarms for me in its reporting on D'Angelo's seminars, which are packed with 300 people paying up to $160 for an afternoon.
paying up to $160 for an afternoon.
That's $48,000 in revenue, by the way.
So Daniel reports on her charismatic flourishes.
He reports on highly educated attendees who seem to be totally entranced.
He reports on strictly programmed exercise work where white people speak first and confessionally.
And then he reports that even the most nuanced explanations of personal positions and experience are taken to be defensive and fragile.
He He also describes highly emotional discharges amongst participants, and then in breakout groups, how people would talk about their prior peak experiences with D'Angelo.
I know this scene.
This is Esalen, it's Omega Institute, it's encounter groups, it's ashrams and meditation centers, it's the workshop circuit.
This is a transformational experience.
It's emotionally effusive, perhaps even emotionally incontinent.
And it begins from the premise that the way you see and understand yourself is delusional and harmful, and you must absolutely change it, and fast.
And all of this overlaps with what happens in cults.
So, regardless of how much D'Angelo gets paid, or the merits of her content, which again is going to be debated for years, the emotional challenge she presents, plus the immersive delivery techniques she uses, these overlap with well-researched systems of manipulation.
And it makes me ask, can any good content be offered and absorbed like this?
And here's something.
Between us on the podcast, Derek is the guy who never got recruited into a cult, despite living and working alongside culty yoga groups for decades.
So this makes me wonder if, temperamentally, he's just naturally allergic to strong and premature emotional demands as conditions for community participation.
Whether he immediately reads that energy as intrusive and as something he's just inclined to say no to, perhaps?
What I remember about the charismatic environments that recruited me is that I had an instantaneous feeling of yes and acceptance when that emotional gauntlet was thrown down.
I don't know why.
I associate those moments with a feeling that I will be abandoned if I don't jump in.
And I believe you can't really be afraid of not joining something if your basic experience in the world is secure.
Maybe Derek is just more securely attached than I am.
And maybe Tada Hazumi, who joined us on the podcast in an earlier episode, is right in his recent writing that a lot of social justice culture hangs together through cultism and trauma bonding.
And we've got to fix that.
Back to the political.
Attachment strategies aside, I'm also wondering whether fragility as a concept will further isolate and atomize white people in relation to each other.
When I'm afraid of what Derek is saying, it's hard to hear it, in his terms.
His concern is about whether that identitarian roadblock, which will frame and stereotype everything that comes after, can lead to a fruitful conversation which people share and learn.
The identitarian gambit attempted to box him in off the bat.
He said no, and this made me scared.
And no conversation was had.
So it worked.
Even worse, it blinds me to who Derek actually is with regard to a particular issue, to the work that he actually does, and the life experiences that have changed him.
Derek's sense of pragmatism and efficiency, as I glean it, allows him to make an assessment about whether or not an interlocutor is opening in good faith, and he turns on or off at the doorway.
Can we call that fragile, without being his therapist?
Even as his friend, I wouldn't be able to label that as fragile, or as closed down to criticism or self-reflection, without knowing a shit ton more about how he responds to criticism over time.
But out on the internet, nobody's interested in him as a person with a history, except an abstract, identitarian history, and that's the point of the gambit.
The label of white cis man can be compounded with the psychological label of fragility to create an impossibility of response or exchange.
People are no longer people, but names and faces that become chess pieces moved around by the winds of history and the performance of politics.
They are allowed to play only if they pass over a threshold of emotional surrender.
So I am not saying that fragility doesn't exist.
People with privilege are obviously defensive when they first encounter the concept that they might not have earned the status they have, and when they first have to question whether they really are where they are due to meritocracy alone.
Looking at being a beneficiary of structural racism is uncomfortable and ugly.
But people do it.
They learn.
They change.
But will the reductivity and essentialism of this social media discourse let them?
Whether through insecurity or altruism, what I've tended to do over the past years when confronted with the identitarian gambit is to do a kind of aikido on myself in which I take the gambit as being in good faith, whether I know whether it is or not, and I assume that if I'm feeling defensive, it's because I've taken it personally.
And that might be an indication of fragility.
And so I should suck it up and look for the content in the criticism that I can respond to.
Sometimes I really have to search because often the criticism is simply about my identity.
And then it veers into ad hominem territory because it begins to essentialize what I must be like based on that identity.
But when I absorb the identitarian gambit properly, people in social justice circles praise me for it.
Oh, you're a cis white man who can actually listen.
We need more like you.
And that feels good.
I showed that I emotionally surrendered to the program, and it rewarded me.
And emotional surrender is all I showed, because regardless of what I do in the real world, that's all that this format can see.
And this makes me wonder how many white people out there are getting the surrender part right while also supporting racist policies in housing or public schooling.
The problem is, we'd never know.
And in all honesty, often the main thing I'm trying to do is to de-escalate growing emotional tension, from all directions, but mainly amongst fellow white people who are terribly anxious about how virtuous they are.
I'm trying to peacekeep.
And this can be noble, and I do learn something on the way, but there I am negotiating online tension that just seems superficial and chaotic.
Meanwhile, the time that I could be out doing community farming, for example, is evaporating.
My sense of ineffectiveness and alienation rises even though I'm on the right team.
I'm negotiating online tension while black and trans and disabled people still need more protections, more services.
I'm playing the role of receptive listening white cis man and getting social rewards for that.
But it's online.
But I'm afraid to stop getting those rewards.
And all of this makes me think that Derek should want these rewards too, because my social training has now led me to believe that a large part of our value relies on how well we play this game.
It's not working.
In a discussion hosted by Jacobin Magazine called Log the Fuck Off, Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House podcast makes an analogy I'll quote here.
He says that a political movement is like shipbuilding.
You get together to build a ship and then you get in the ship and you sail to a new place.
And you learn how to do it as you go.
But with online politics, he says, you're getting together to learn about shipbuilding and you're getting super detailed about it and stressing over every little thing.
But the ship you're building is in a bottle on Mark Zuckerberg's mantelpiece.
And it doesn't go anywhere.
So, back to Derek's position of, I stop reading.
I believe that part of what he's saying is, I'm not going to continue building this ship in this bottle.
That said, because I have been more patient with the identitarian gambit, I have forced myself to learn from it.
And for years now, I've seen it coming.
For a cis white man, you should be like X or Y, you have no right to be A or B, and I've turned it into an almost personal practice, somewhat self-flagellatory.
I've learned to say to myself, don't take it personally.
It's a structural critique.
If this stranger on the internet seems to be flaming me, well, I can absorb that and do more self-reflection, and to give them the benefit of the doubt that they have some kind of rage that they need to vent, and that I can help them do that.
But what I'm realizing now is that that line of thinking can be a slippery slope.
And it's gotten me into situations in which I'm clearly being harassed or even abused by a stranger who has zero concern for who I am and what I contribute, but I am reframing that experience as some kind of necessary penance or reform.
So, point by point, if I say, don't take it personally, it's a structural critique, this is reasonable.
Politics are correctly about the flows of power and money, and I don't have to personalize critiques of structural inequality, and if I do, Robin DiAngelo really does have a point or two I could learn from.
Then if I say, if this stranger on the internet seems to be flaming me, well, I can absorb that and do more self-reflection.
But wait a minute.
Is there any other situation in the world in which I would emotionally defer like this?
Then if I go on to say, I can give them the benefit of the doubt that they have some kind of rage that they need to vent, and I can help them do that.
Well, very noble, perhaps, but where exactly does that end?
Must certain individuals on the internet simply become receptacles?
At what point does accepting that you are an archetypal anger target mean that you forget you're a person who is changing and growing?
And perhaps that's the biggest point, that the labels and rules and archetypes hold a historical validity but do not represent the nuance of moving and changing human beings.
Yes, human beings that move and change according to pathways of access and privilege, but also soul-searching and humility and circumstance.
Someone confronts you.
You hold your baby child for the first time.
Your inner teenager evaporates.
But something happened in relation to the identitarian gambit for me.
I felt two almost imperceptible lines being crossed.
One was from being naive to the discourse into a kind of revelation.
But then there was another line between I'm going to work with this, to this actually feels creepy and borderline abusive, to I feel trapped.
At a certain point, I realized I had learned all I could learn from that discourse.
Not from anti-colonial theorists, not from real thinkers with real content, but from social media reductionism.
And that that discourse wasn't going to change.
And that it didn't matter how much self-reflection I had done on the issues, someone on the internet could still feel justified in starting at square one with me and demanding that I polish up my ship in a bottle.
One problem is that even while social media squeezes us all into an eternal present, we're also, at the same time, all out of phase.
We don't know what anyone else has been through or is going through when we see them online.
Facebook collapses all time and human development into a single, terrifying window of the always-already present and how we perform it.
It is ahistorical.
Whatever is happening on Facebook now feels like the only thing that has ever happened.
The identitarian gambit fits in very well with the static and iconic nature of the profile picture on your Instagram handle.
That's who you are in this moment.
And that's who you'll ever be.
Because this is the only moment.
This moment of endless scrolling.
The pattern of the discourse has its own performative momentum.
It isn't about dialogue.
It's about showing something.
And this is where I wish the term virtue signaling wasn't a right-wing slur because it's an apt term for using rhetorical strategy over interpersonal strategy.
It's rhetorically effective to lump me and Derek together as white cis men who must do X or Y in order to be good people.
It is rhetorically effective to identify Karens or Beckys or suburban wine moms in critiques of white feminism as though they are heartless ice queens.
But the truth is that Derek and I are significantly different in terms of history, circumstance, attachment patternings, the diseases and traumas we've lived through.
If a piece of rhetoric collapses us together, what we're really being told is that instead of sharing differences that we can learn about and negotiate around, and unique skills through which we can contribute, What we mostly share is historical guilt and shame.
So, will I be changing my orientation or behavior?
Probably, somewhat.
I don't think I would ever take Derek's path of, I just stop reading, full stop.
But now I can appreciate the efficiency of this.
It's a kind of moral shorthand that understands that if a fight starts with a dirty blow, it's likely to continue that way, and the last thing you want to do is enable that or dignify it with attention.
However, I also want to hold out the possibility that people don't have to be stuck in the gambit.
That the gambit has become reflexive and defensive, but that it can be let go of if you indicate that you are listening to the content beneath it.
Here's the way that this might look.
As a cis white man, you shouldn't have thoughts, or those thoughts, about X.
My reply can then be, while I share your concern about X and respect where you're coming from, here are some additional thoughts about it from where I stand.
And sometimes the pivot to better, richer content makes the gambit less of a brick wall or a focal point.
Occasionally, a good conversation emerges when you just look past the rhetoric and say, hey, I hear you, and there's room to talk about the real content here.
And even though this doesn't always or even regularly happen, I'm going to keep going with it.
As I'm cruising to the end here, I have to make sure I come clean about one thing.
I have my own way of using the Identitarian Gambit, but in a way that advantages me.
It doesn't involve race or gender, so I want to be careful about not suggesting that it does, but what I do can have a similar impact to the rhetoric I'm describing.
Over the last several years, when I'm asked for my bio note for online copy or in a podcast, I open with my identification as a cult survivor.
So, in conversations on Facebook, I will often respond to what I believe is a misconception about cults with my own form of positive identitarian gambit.
I'll say, well, as a cult survivor, I can say that what's important to remember is, and in one way, this is totally legit and valuable.
Because after all, the media landscape is now flooded with cold content, and there's a lot of crap commentary flying around that is really just pop psychology or sensationalism.
And so positioning myself as having some authority through experience and research seems like a strategically appropriate thing to do if I want my content to affect change.
But here's the thing.
The phrase, as a cult survivor, doesn't actually say that much.
Cult survivors and researchers come from wildly diverse experiences and we hold very different views.
Cult survivor, like cis white man, is a real structural category, but it's also a vague personal descriptor.
The problem comes up when I use the label applied to myself.
I have this bodily feeling that it means more than it actually does, that it's clearer than it is.
And that meaning and clarity give me a kind of puffed up feeling before I even open my mouth.
It may even be compensatory in those moments in which I actually feel ill-equipped.
If I use it, I fantasize that the person I'm conversing with will have to mentally genuflect in front of that identity, and then the conversation can proceed from there.
Not only that, I'm showing everyone who's watching us converse who's in charge, who has the upper hand, who deserves the benefit of the doubt.
And this is all before we actually converse about anything.
Now part of me wonders whether I've adopted this rhetoric as a way of claiming ownership over a piece of the social justice pie, or as a way of deflecting attention from my own racial or gendered privilege.
Where Derek reads White Cis Man and stops reading, I see it and say, yeah, that's true, but I'm also a cult survivor, so I'm different.
The clue here is the sense of armored confidence I feel when laying out my identitarian gambit.
I'm saying, I know what I'm talking about and if you challenge me, I have license to take that as a personal insult to my experience.
But do I really need to put on that armor?
Maybe when I was coming out I did, but I don't think I need to anymore.
If my data makes sense and adds to the conversation, that should be enough.
I'm not opposed to disclosing that I'm a cult survivor within the flow of a conversation, but I do think it's distorting to seize the mic with that statement.
That said, there is a structural argument to be made that centering survivors in any discussion of institutional abuse will provide greater clarity to the issues at hand.
And I can argue that point, that we should center cult survivors without centering myself.
This essay has been a little long, so to review, 1.
The identitarian gambit can function to preempt dialogue from a bad-faith position of moral superiority that erases interpersonal realities and dynamics.
2.
One can work around it as a practice of humility and growth, but at a certain point, one will have changed and learned, even if the rhetoric hasn't.
3.
Working with the rhetoric can in some cases lead to more honest dialogue.
4.
Working with it can in some cases enable harassment or abusive behavior.
5.
The farther you get into language that symbolizes rather than humanizes people, the more your group is vulnerable to cultism.
6.
Derek is more abrupt with his boundaries on this than I am, and that's okay.
I'm going to finish with the thing that most concerns me.
I'm in my 50th year, and I'm going to increasingly turn my attention to shipbuilding outside of the bottle.
Finally.
I feel that from 26 through 40, I was in cults but then recovering from cults.
And then from 40 years old till now, I've been a gig worker using social media to add to the discourse on cultic dynamics.
And I'm starting to wonder What have I actually done with my hands?
And who has tricked me into staying inside, not only in this bottle, but in my office?
I'm a white, cisgendered man.
And I'm now the father to two boys who are definitely white and statistically likely to present as cisgendered.
And pretty soon, they'll be drawn into that bottle-bound shipbuilding project.
And so here are the things that I want for them.
There's a lot of me in this list, but also a little bit of Derek.
He only thinks he doesn't have kids, but it's amazing who we actually influence and how.
It's not just social media BS that's transitive.
It's also parenting values.
So here's the list of what I want for them.
One, I would like them to learn and understand the reality of structural racism and their place in that structure.
2.
I would like them to learn how to share power, given their place.
3.
I would like them to learn that while racism is real, interpersonally and structurally, the discourse around racism can be manipulated by people on social media more interested in showing off than in changing the material world.
4.
I want to teach them the shipbuilding metaphor so that they don't have to spend years in the bottle thinking they're sailing to a better place.
5.
I want to teach them that real work unfolds over time.
No emotional or political junk food will create change.
6.
I want to teach them how to tell when, whether intentionally or not, people are interacting with them in bad faith.
7.
I want to teach them about how to distinguish whether people are using terms that punish or educate, that stereotype or humanize.
8.
Whether people are boxing them in or allowing them to change.
9.
Whether they are being emotionally manipulated.
10.
What a cult feels like and how cults work.
11.
I would like to teach them how to stay positive, even as they realize how fragmented this landscape is, and how easy it is for well-intentioned people to really hurt each other.
Here are the stakes.
If in time they are able to hold two things, a sense of historical accountability and a secure recognition of their personal dignity and their ability to grow, they will recognize when people they want to be in solidarity with are being sucked into the reductive world of memes and horizontal attacks.
They will know what that unintentional cultism feels like, and hopefully they will withdraw and regroup, instead of reactively bouncing over to the alt-right sphere where they'll find the cult of Jordan Peterson, who will gaze on them like a stern but loving father and indulge their grievances and convert avoidable relational friction into the spirituality of reactionary narcissism.
My sons deserve a world in which they can be structurally responsible and interpersonally worthy.
