Bonus Sample: No Moral Outrage Porn, No Punching Down
Matthew had a plan for this week — a 4K word essay on what could be learned from studying the content of an outrageously offensive conspiritualist… but then he shelved it. Why?A last-minute, off-the-cuff discussion on what it means to indulge or not indulge moral outrage porn. What it means to punch up or down, and how we decide. How we might confront an influencer who has managed to monetize mental illness.Produced with an enormous debt of gratitude to the work of C. Thi. Nguyen.Show Notes“Moral Outrage Porn“: Nguyen and WilliamsNguyen’s public scholarship on gamification, value capture, narrowed morality, and the seductions of certainty.Nguyen on the gamification of public discourseAaron Rabinowitz on cheap talkMatthew’s elegy for Michael Stone
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
You can support our work and have full access to bonus episodes and other premium content by subscribing for as little as $5 a month at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
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No moral outrage porn.
No punching down.
Hey everybody.
So this bonus episode will be a little more informal than usual.
I'm not going to plug in music.
The production values might be a little bit lower.
I'm not going to start and stop if I flub on words because I'm out of time.
I did have something written out and almost produced, which was an examination of the content of a particularly volatile conspirituality influencer.
Dozens of listeners had referred us to this person's Instagram account and their antics.
They have a dedicated but smallish following.
And the content is typical, harmful, cue-adjacent COVID denialism and vaccine disinformation.
The only thing that's original about it is the level of aggression the person performs as they deliver it.
This is aggression masquerading as feminist righteousness directed at the whole world, but also at their followers, which is really weird.
It's so over the top, it's hard to believe.
Until you realize that the brand is outrageousness itself.
So this person is some kind of weird combination of Alex Jones, Alice Cooper, and like a Marina Abramovich for MAGA yoga moms.
As with so many of the influencers we study, it was easy for me to be sucked into their feed with this combination of fascination and nausea.
So I spent some time there and carefully sifted through the scorched earth to find something tender in the whole situation, some fragile key to opening the mystery of how a person becomes this way, what environmental and social and technological forces are at play.
And I found it in this piece of content where the person gave a lengthy description of how they do not understand what friendship is.
And I found this interesting because they accidentally spoke really clearly to the kind of isolation and avoidant attachment in the conspirituality space that feels so precarious, and how that precarity, that feeling of being on the edge of something, can get mistaken for spiritual urgency.
So, conspirituality is an ideology.
It's a reasoning process.
But it's also a financial racket, and it's also a way of being with other people.
And we've seen that its circles can be presumptuous, oppressive, exhausting, volatile.
It has the feeling of the sociality of cults.
And listening to this person talk so aggressively and abusively in one moment and then confess to not understanding what friends are for in the next, it reminded me of what it felt like when I was in cults to not know who my friends were, whether I should have friends at all, or what a friend even was.
And so I wrote out these rich descriptions of what that all felt like.
The stiffness, the claustrophobia, the pretension.
It was very cathartic to remember these things.
So, I had an angle.
Something fresh, critical, also empathetic.
Something that shared continuity with my expertise and the themes that we're always building on.
So cool.
Cool.
I worked hard on it.
4,000 words.
I didn't struggle with the structure or reasoning or the evidence as might be normal for something complex and nuanced.
But through the whole process, it just never felt right.
It was good work, and I kept wondering why I was doing it.
So, just yesterday, as I was about to file it, I had a conversation with someone I trust about it, and I made the call to shelve the essay altogether.
Because the truth is, the whole thing disquieted me.
It brought up a lot of thoughts about power and shame and social media.
So on one hand, there's no doubt that this person's content is extremely toxic and harmful.
They punch down at service workers, people of color, trans people.
Their politics are like twisted up into this tight knot of libertarian narcissism.
They are obviously committing pernicious financial abuse on anyone who pays them for services.
As a cult researcher, I'm positive that this person meets all the standard marks for a charismatic abuser.
But beyond the vaccine disinformation, which is bolstering hesitancy and delaying the attainment of herd immunity, which is killing people, I can tell that the rest of this influencer's content is hurting people in intimate, psychological ways.
I don't know how many people, but whoever is a client of this person, they're in trouble.
And on the other hand, they are clearly suffering, isolated, acting out, all in ways that, paradoxically, they are able to monetize through aesthetics and shock value.
And although there's a thousand reasons to refrain from guessing about what is going on for them, not the least of which is that our society of the spectacle specifically obscures the inner persons in our midst.
I know that there is a person there, and that they may be emotionally or neurologically incapable of tolerating the examination.
The shame.
So I thought, if I'm really incisive here, will I break through this person's defenses enough to jeopardize their sense of self?
How they're knit together?
What happens if I name something so clearly it is unbearable to them?
You know, on one hand, this is what you want to do as a writer.
It's quite a feat.
On the other hand, sometimes it's just too much responsibility.
So my conversation with my friend, they knew who the subject was and, like, out of a growing sense of concern, initiated an intervention right at the moment that I was about to finalize the thing.
They confirmed many of these thoughts.
They also helped me get over the pride that I was taking in my awesome analysis, and to let it go.
Now, I'm a veteran writer, so the loss of the time and the effort isn't that big of a deal anymore.
But there is a small death at play.
Because with each piece, a writerly identity comes into existence alongside the text.
Burying an essay is not just about blipping it into oblivion.
It also means looking at the you that wrote it and saying, I'm sorry, but you have to stay inside.
You have to hide yourself.
Perhaps forever.
So anyway, in this calculus of Whether examining something actually gives it more oxygen, and whether that oxygen will ignite a wildfire of shame, I decided that the numbers didn't work out.
And while this person punches down at people in their content, there's a weird way in which exposing how poisonous and traumatized those actions are would be its own kind of punching down.
They say they are successful, but their own numbers don't bear up.
