59: Is Rudolf Steiner Dead Yet? (w/Jennifer Sapio)
What should a global network of popular and private schools do when faced with evidence that the foundation of their pedagogy was laid by a racist, proto-fascist pseudoscientist? What should they do when it becomes clear that they are evangelizing while pretending to teach secular humanism? These are the sticky questions raised by Dr. Jennifer Sapio in today’s interview with Matthew. Sapio taught for three years at the Austin Waldorf School. She was hired from her secular training, but gradually found herself drawn into what she calls an “inherently racist cult.” Her mentors pushed her towards accepting the 19th-century babblings of Rudolf Steiner, who, among other exploits, read the “Akashic Records” to learn why the spirit world disapproved of vaccines. They discuss the long shadows of racist and metaphysical nonsense that hang over the otherwise wholesome project of Waldorf education.
In the Ticker, Derek and Julian review a recent episode of Ben Shapiro’s podcast, in which he mutually masturbates with Russell Brand to consummate their brands, but they don’t quite come together.Show NotesThe Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 116The gun control debate is complex, but there are things we can doMovement against critical race theory is deeply necessaryDr. Thomas Cowan: Viral video claiming 5G caused pandemic easily debunkedDr. Sapio’s Waldorf memoir: Waldorf Schools Are Inherently Racist CultsAustin Waldorf School, Tuitions & FeesProf. Staudenmeier: “Anthroposophy and Ecofascism”Protesting too much: Myths about Waldorf educationMatthew on: The “Akashic Records” to “Do Your Research” PipelineAPTN: Residential Schools ArchivesNYT: Unmarked Graves at Residential Schools in Canada: What to KnowAnishnabek.ca: An Overview of the Indian Residential School SystemWoops.
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Conspiratuality59, is Rudolf Steiner dead yet?
With Dr. Jennifer Sapio.
What should a global network of popular and private schools do when faced with evidence that the foundation of their pedagogy was laid by a racist, proto-fascist pseudoscientist?
What should they do when it becomes clear that they are evangelizing while pretending to teach secular humanism?
These are the sticky questions asked by Dr. Jennifer Sapio in today's interview with Matthew.
Sapio taught for three years at the Austin Waldorf School.
She was hired from her secular training, but gradually found herself drawn into what she calls an inherently racist cult.
Her mentors pushed her towards accepting the 19th century babblings of Rudolf Steiner, who, among other exploits, read the Akashic Records to learn why the spirit world disapproved of vaccines.
They discussed the long shadows of racist and metaphysical nonsense that hang over the otherwise wholesome projects of Waldorf education.
In the ticker, Derek and I will review a recent episode of Ben Shapiro's podcast, Oh Goody, in which he mutually masturbates with Russell Brand to consummate their brands.
But they don't quite come together.
And that was my first time reading that paragraph.
Good work, guys.
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.
I must admit, I've always enjoyed the English comedian, actor, and TV personality turned YouTuber and podcaster named Russell Brand.
I enjoy the way his working-class London accent contrasts with his educated vocabulary and capacity for vivid, run-on sentences, as well as his at-times hilarious and self-effacing humor.
For me, though, oddly enough, and I kind of hate to say it, that all started to change when he got sober.
He became more overtly religious, started enthusiastically promoting Kundalini Yoga, and for all of his speak-truth-to-power posturing, he's been remarkably quiet on the cult implosion of that criminally abusive enterprise, which we've covered in depth here on the pod, notably through Matthew's two-episode interview with Philip Desleep,
Brand's politics have always run quite far left of center, but nowadays he seems to be finding his own special version of libertarian conspirituality.
As I looked over the videos on his YouTube channel for the last few months, his 3.4 million subscribers are being treated to musings on how, turns out, UFOs really are real.
The cover-up of the COVID lab leak?
His support of anti-lockdown protests, how the nothing burger of Fauci's emails proves that he lied about COVID's origins, and that the media is covering that up to appease their advertisers and perpetuate a positive narrative about science.
Also that you can't trust Bill Gates and his vaccine gold rush, as well as Russell pushing the great reset conspiracy theory.
He interviews people too.
He's interviewed contrarians like Jordan Peterson and Vandana Shiva, both of whom we've talked about here, as well as spiritual hucksters like Mooji, Eckhart Tolle, and Deepak Chopra.
Now, we're looking at Brand today because in the strange social media bedfellows phenomenon that has become the norm of late, he appeared last week on a 75-minute Sunday special edition of the Ben Shapiro Show.
If you are fortunate enough not to have come across Ben Shapiro, he's the 37-year-old editor emeritus of the Daily Wire.
He was something of a conservative child prodigy, becoming the youngest ever nationally syndicated columnist at 17 after graduating high school at 16.
He completed a BA in Political Science at 20 and obtained a Harvard Law degree at 23.
So this is a smart guy.
He's well known for the slightly high-pitched and quite nasal voice that he uses to speak at breakneck speed and a lawyerly language capacity he uses to incisively dismantle his opponent's arguments, resulting in a plethora of famous YouTube videos with titles like Ben Shapiro Schools SJW Interviewer or Ben Shapiro Destroys Liberal College Student.
He was editor at large at Breitbart from 2012 to 2016, but to his credit, somewhat, resigned due to Breitbart's support of Trump, as well as their lack of support for a female reporter shown on video to have been assaulted by Trump's campaign manager.
This resignation from Breitbart resulted in him becoming a pariah to the alt-right and the most frequent target of anti-Semitic tweets in 2016, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
He nonetheless announced in 2020 that he would vote for Trump this time based on approving of his policies, despite disliking his character, saying, but whatever damage he was going to do has already been done and it's not going to help if I don't vote for him this time.
And third, and most importantly, the Democrats have lost their fucking minds.
Not nasally enough, Julian.
Might have to do a retake.
I'll work on it.
I wasn't planning the impression, but yeah.
Shapiro is very outspoken about his Orthodox Jewish faith and wears a yarmulke in his public appearances, and then he cites his religious beliefs as the basis for seeing homosexuality as a sin and his general opposition to all LGBTQ causes.
He's also thrown his hat in the ring more recently as a vocal opponent of critical race theory in videos that he shared with his 3.2 million YouTube subscribers.
So...
Derek, on episode 46, you actually covered Russell Brand's interview with Lisa Feldman Barrett, in which I think he misframed her writing in ways that implied COVID was perhaps caused by a lack of positive thinking or not having a healthy enough lifestyle.
I was fascinated to see how the conversation between Brand and Shapiro might go.
What are your thoughts on this unholy union?
First off, one thing that became apparent, and you mentioned a 75-minute interview.
It's actually about two hours, but subscribers to The Daily Wire get the additional 45 minutes, which is fine.
A lot of podcasts do that, but just to clarify, one thing about the Interview itself was it was quite tame for both of them, which makes me wonder how much of that was agreed upon or whether they realized that there was an opportunity to have discussions to reach across the aisle, as it were, to try to pick off some of the others fan base.
Now, that's pure speculation.
I'll admit it.
But given how tame this interview was and how Shapiro takes some of his more outrageous arguments and really toned them down for brand.
It does make me wonder what was discussed leading into that.
Now, that said, I fully embrace the reaching across the aisle part, but I'll get to that in a moment.
Now, the question of right and left colliding, as I've argued before, is through individualism, and these are really two perfect characters to discuss that lens.
It is how Ben Shapiro and Russell Brand come together to do a podcast, because that is where they unify their staunch belief in the rugged individualism, albeit in different ways.
And now I want to point out a few things that are positive from this.
It's a very civil talk, which I appreciate.
And for the most part, these are not conspiracy theorists.
I mean, Brand definitely dabbles.
But when you get to like points of QAnon and the big lie, you're not going to hear any of that from them.
Brand maybe a little bit more.
But there's no stop the steal talk from Shapiro.
As I said, as you said, he was not a Trump supporter, but did become a Trump supporter because of his beliefs in the left wing.
And what I really want to point out, what will come out through this in terms of Shapiro, is that like a lot of critical race theory critics like Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Ruffo, well, he's even more insidious.
But they take the most extreme forms of left-wing rhetoric and, you know, really, because Antifa does exist, they will look at them and then kind of put that on all of the left, which It's a lot different than what happens at the right.
Now, the right is a spectrum as well.
There are traditional conservatives, and in a lot of ways, I put Shapiro in the traditional conservative category, not in the alt-right, which he has criticized repeatedly.
But the right still unifies under Trump in a way that you'll never find the left doing.
So that's one point of distinction.
But for this argument, this podcast specifically, there is another factor that connects them, which is a high level of entitlement.
So, for example, in Ben Shapiro, when we get into these clips, and if you were to listen to the whole thing, you're going to hear his very hokey 1950s definition of racism, which he then uses to take a very narrow lens to look at critical race theory.
And you can really see his conservative credentials, like classical conservative credentials, come out when you said he's the Editor Emeritus of the Daily Wire.
That is a high level of academic speak there.
I've never actually heard it.
It is used in journalism, but very rarely.
Yeah, it's an academic term, right, for someone who's retired but maintains their title, so to speak.
It's kind of aristocratic.
It's very aristocratic.
And again, it is used in journalism, but it's a very traditional usage.
It's not really used anymore.
So, you know, and the Daily Wire, for people who don't know, I mean, it's just a Fox News and Breitbart ripoff when you go there.
It's all fear mongering.
You can go to the homepage any day and just find all of the stuff that's on Fox in the same exact style.
So there's nothing really groundbreaking coming from them.
Every headline is really geared toward making you scared of non-white people.
So now, here's the thing about Russell Brand and where his entitlement comes in, because Shapiro does put forward his criticisms of gender identity and identity politics and critical race theory specifically.
And when Russell Brand is pressed on that, He just goes into your favorite term, Julian, spiritual bypassing.
I mean, everything is spiritually bypassed in this discussion, which is his style.
One of my biggest criticisms of Russell is that he will talk about taking down the system, but he never actually talks about what to replace it with or how to do it.
In fact, years ago when he was pressed on it, he did a Rogan move.
He was just like, well, don't look to me.
There are more people to talk about than that.
But his whole brand is built upon taking down the system, but he never, he always defaults to this very milquetoast spirituality that he wants to put forward that doesn't actually say anything.
So for the first clip, I think the perfect example of this is the fact that Beforehand, Ben had signed Russell on to help sell things.
Now, before I play this, they did, I think, four ads together, but I'm going to only play one because it highlights enough.
But what I want to point out, and this is my bigger problem with the reaching across the aisle argument that they try to make throughout this episode, Russell going on Ben's podcast is helping Ben monetize his consumer base and expand that consumer base.
Now, Ben is someone who is an Orthodox Jew who fervently believes that women should not have abortions.
That's where we are in 2021 with him.
So I do take issue with Russell helping to sell advertisements on someone who's then going to take his message.
And there are some other messages that I'm problem with, but I don't want to lead too much, but that abortion one I wanted to point out now.
But let's listen to them sell together.
I totally agree with you that human beings are living in a wide variety of ways now.
I think that there is a human tendency, which is to see everybody else as a threat to you, and that drives people to want to control everybody else's way of life so as to prevent those people from threatening Them.
And so, while I'm a big fan of heterogeneous living and different communities living as they want, there have to be certain baseline agreements about things like human rights or individual rights.
I want to ask you about that in just one second.
First, it is time for you to buy life insurance.
I'm panicking.
I'm panicking about my life.
What happens if I die?
What's going to happen to my kids?
I mean, you're a responsible person, Russell, and that is why I'm sure you already have life insurance to protect your children.
Actually, no.
Tell me, what sort of choices should I be making?
It is time for you to buy life insurance.
If you're a serious human being, you need to make sure that, you know, if you plot, your family is taken care of.
Matthew, your face.
You haven't heard any of these yet, at least.
I've found all these clips.
So, Shapiro is somebody that I'm just sort of peripherally aware of, and I think I'm grateful for that.
But, like, so that's his real voice, right?
Like, that's what he does?
So if you listen to him for two hours, that's what you get in your ear?
It gets worse the more contentious the discussion gets, which is usually where he lives.
So the pitch will go up and then it'll get faster.
That's really drug-like, isn't it?
I mean, that feels like some sort of cocaine drip into the listener's ear.
That's, I'm not even talking about, I can't even go near the content, but like, I'm just struck by that.
What incredible anxiety.
When you look at his rhetorical style and then Russell's rhetorical style, they both have them and they have them down.
And there is a sort of drawing in some non-mulism, you know, of pulling in someone and hypnotizing them.
That is very much part.
Now, you know, we could talk about his voice for a while and that it is what it is, but he definitely has a style that is meant to sort of just pound you over with ideas and just drone on to pull you in so that he can get across his messaging.
That does exist.
I want to also just, I hadn't seen his biography, but you said, Julian, that he was the youngest ever nationally syndicated columnist at 17, so he's been doing this, he's 37, he's been doing this for 20 years.
How does, do you know much about the columns at the age of 17?
Has he followed the same themes?
Has he developed much?
No, so he, yes, when he started, because he entered college early, he very early on was critical of professors being left wing.
And, you know, he went to UCLA and then to Harvard.
So specifically with UCLA, you're going to a place that is a more liberal university.
So he very early on, because he had written two books before he was 21, criticizing college professors.
Wow.
So he, yeah, so he went into college hot with this and has continued along those lines ever since.
That's incredibly precocious.
I'd like to know more about his story.
And prior to that, he was a very accomplished violinist.
Oh, wow.
His sister's an opera singer.
Wow.
He's that kind of kid.
Have you heard him play violin?
Yeah, he's good.
He has videos up online occasionally of him as an adult playing.
I think he was better as a kid because he probably practiced all the time.
Does he need a harpist?
Does he need a harpist?
I'm not sure.
You know, the thing I want to observe though is like, they both have this hypnotic cadence and there's obviously this love of language.
With Shapiro, it's this love of precision and driving, you know, harder and deeper with a sharp blade.
With Brandt, it's like spinning off But it's a performance of precision with Shapiro, isn't it?
language and then actually finding places where he can take a tangent like a comedian would where he's improvising in the moment and it's unexpected and funny, right?
Or endearing.
But it's a performance of precision with Shapiro, isn't it?
Because as I think you're going to get to, he doesn't really understand what critical race theory is and he's not going to learn.
No, no, no.
He has no interest in learning.
So I highlighted that clip because it's just showing how quickly he switches modes and brand supporting that.
You know, it's one thing to be a guest on a podcast and you always have to play by the podcast host's rules.
And there are reasons that, for example, we don't advertise and we go with Patreon.
I mean, there are different ways of monetizing.
That's all fine.
But actually pulling your guest in to help sell ads and knowing what that guest is promoting through what he's monetizing is very problematic to me.
Now, that said, let's listen.
He did bring up human nature.
Let's listen to Ben a little bit more when he talks about human nature and identity.
Oh, human nature.
Okay.
So when it comes to human beings, one of the sort of classical traditions, and this is true in Judeo-Christian tradition, it's also true in sort of ancient Greek philosophy, and it's true for most of Western history, and even in the Islamic world, there's this belief that there is such a thing as an innate human nature, and that you run up against challenges in innate human nature, and that what civilization is really about, whatever your form of civilization is, is tailoring yourself to the demands of human nature and the society around you.
That is a very different view of what identity was than what identity has now become.
There's a view that I think is now very prevalent, that human beings are entirely self-created, that we're completely malleable, we can be whatever we want to be, and that what we are searching for is not a way of living in the world, but instead, an inner authenticity, and then we demand that everybody around us sort of mirror our authentic view of ourselves.
And to me, that is dangerous and prevents us from living in a society, because in order for us to actually This I wanted to point out because of two things.
a small community.
We have to understand the rules of the road and that there are limits to what I can demand of you.
This I wanted to point out because of two things.
And again, this is rolling off of what I said about him saying that demanding what other people believe, and yet he uses his resources to push anti-abortion agendas.
And the other one is on his feelings on guns.
And so he is pro-gun and he does, for example, he has written before about promoting this idea of gun violence restraining orders, which again is...
It's if a family member thinks that one of their family members should not have a gun, they can campaign to the authorities to have their guns taken away.
It is the very basic intro level of actually it's basically a policy that doesn't actually accomplish much.
But I did want to point out what he wrote about this, about guns specifically.
Remember the context being not forcing your way on others.
He wrote, we should also radically increase security in schools.
I attended a Jewish high school that was regularly threatened with violence.
Every student who attends that school is now checked in by security.
The school has barriers on every side.
Armed security guards attend the campus.
The same measures should be available at every public school.
So this is indicative of this entire conversation with Russell where he makes this very broad universalist appeal of, hey, I have my beliefs.
You have yours.
Let's not step on each other.
Let's find a way to move, which Russell agrees with.
But then his actual policies are things of this nature.
Yeah, so I think what they're pretending to here is a deep beneath the surface first principles kind of reinventing the wheel of political philosophy, right?
And so in a way, Ben is gesturing towards the utopian versus the tragic view of humanity and, you know, Rousseau versus Hobbes or something like that, right?
Uh, but they don't really get anywhere.
They avoid talking about anything specific, even though we can listen and be like, oh, that's actually what Ben is talking about there, right?
And Russell never, never really, you know, digs into what he might mean specifically.
When he's speaking about the tragedy of the malleable identity, he's, he's missing, I mean, he emphasizes the self-creation part, but he's missing the social construction part.
It's not that, you know, identity politics, You know, on the whole, promises some sort of, like, you can be anything you want to be, but if you are who you are, it's going to be because of a series of social agreements that have to be worked on and negotiated over time between people.
So, yeah, it's a weird kind of non-dichotomy that he points out there.
Yeah, and it's also the classic irony of any religious fundamentalist speaking out against others for imposing their beliefs.
Right, right.
Yeah, and so when he asks Russell his views on human nature, there are only two moments in the entire interview where Russell hits peak Russell, and this is one of them.
So I clipped off part of his word salad here.
You know, this is something that may somewhat wrangle with the patriotism that I assume is somewhat embedded in your Weltanschauung, right?
Hey, baby.
Give me that, Ben.
Give me that, Ben.
Give me that Germanic philosophical term.
Is that if the United Kingdom is not of service to a significant number of people in the United Kingdom.
What is United Kingdom?
Who benefits?
Who is benefited?
If the United States is no longer beneficial to a significant number, why have the United States?
Why not have true confederacy?
Why not have true autonomy?
Why not have true devolution?
Devolve power wherever possible.
Now what happens?
Sovereignty, whenever you bring up these things, sovereignty muscles in its old argument.
You need us to protect you.
If you don't have us, then the terrorists are coming.
Then the darkness is coming.
I'm not suggesting that we don't have municipality intercommunication, rail systems, and all the many other things I simply don't have time to reflect on because I don't have enough glitter on them.
But what I will say is, where possible, let people run their own lives.
You know, it's more and more, Ben, I find myself Agreeing with libertarianism and agreeing with anarcho-syndicalism.
Yes, the rights of the individual, but some, we have responsibility for one another.
You know, like, you're a religious man.
We are God's children.
We are here to love one another.
And once that gets politicized into welfare, I've heard your discourse around subjects around, sort of, welfare and victim mentality and stuff like that, and this is probably Probably the area where I would seem, compared at least to you, mate, more kind of, oh God, we've got to help people.
But for me, I don't want to be no bleeding heart liberal.
For me, like there is a sort of a great power in believing in God, like a might, a glory.
We can change the world.
We can create a better world.
It doesn't have to be like this.
So Matthew, translate.
I hear an improviser trying to negotiate his way around a new market, is what I hear.
Because he seems to be aware of Shapiro's demographic.
He really wants to be friends, or at least make this particular podcast and its marketing potential work.
And so there's a lot of bobbing and weaving.
But as with Derek's breakdown of him a number of episodes ago, Not a lot of it hangs together.
Yeah, it's really interesting because it's like he's finding those predictable footholds that we've already identified in some other people sort of on their transition further right through the doorway of spirituality, right?
Because it's about the rights of the individual.
It's about not having things imposed on you.
And he uses sovereign in sort of the opposite way, right?
He uses it more as a way of talking about aristocratic power.
But also through the overlap with religion.
And then he has a moment there, I started whistling Flight of the Valkyries, he has a moment there talking about You know, the power and the glory of God and how that is what can drive us forward into a better tomorrow.
But then also like this weird, what did you think about the seeming contradiction between libertarianism and anarcho-syndicalism?
It's just, that's the difference between the romaine and the arugula in the word salad, right?
There's no, he's just saying stuff.
I think he's just saying stuff.
Well, I think he isn't a narco-syndicalist.
I mean, I've heard him talk about these sorts of things before, but now he's trying to give it a sort of libertarian spin where it's like being free from the elites controlling us is somehow coherent with a perhaps more right-leaning Yeah, there's no syndicalist aspect of libertarianism, though.
Totally.
It's a contradiction in terms, and so I don't actually know what he's talking about.
I don't think he does either, but I think it probably feels really good, although in a kind of, Derek, you said this was a peak Russell moment, but I don't think it can be a peak Russell moment because he's still trying to make Ben happy.
He's trying to make the conversation work instead of just flying forward with his typical megalomania monologue.
And the crossover with the right, you know, that line is getting more and more blurred, but around the same time that this was published, a week before, Russell was talking, he released a video about whether or not he should go back on Fox News, what happened the last time that he was invited and he's been invited again.
But what was interesting about that video specifically was he was saying, you know, since that last incident, Fox is making a lot more sense.
And he shared three different Tucker Carlson clips of what he agreed with.
Okay.
And, and again, and you know what?
For those specific Tucker Carlson clips, they mostly had to do with bringing down big tech, and that is completely fine.
But to not look at who Tucker is holistically, just as he does not look at who Ben is and what he's promoting holistically, and now putting forward their information to his millions of followers and being like, hey, you know what?
Maybe check out this guy over here.
Well, it's the same process by which the YouTube algorithms work, that they draw you further and further in conspiracy theories.
So that, you know, Russell very much here, when he dabbles in the conspiracy theories, he's opening up his audience to that entire monsoon and that flood that's going to follow from that.
I have a question about why we, through our podcast, are interested in Russell Brand industry.
Is it that he mobilizes the language of spirituality, Kundalini Yoga, higher consciousness, and whatever, to
Do this kind of performative politics like at what point do we say the three of us do we say oh he's he's kind of in Steven Crowder territory or Alex Jones territory and we don't really cover that anymore because he's obviously a political comedian slash jokester provocateur And he's shilling for the right with a little bit of left horse shooing.
But, but I mean, is that like, I'm just wondering where he drifts out of relevance because I'm becoming aware of this weird phenomenon where, where we have focused very intently on how, uh, you know, influencers mingle religious, uh, influencers mingle religious, uh, ideals and spiritual language with their political aspirations.
Uh, And I think we find that meaningful and very manipulative in a particular way.
But I'm just wondering where Russell just sort of drops the spiritual stuff altogether.
Or at least we understand that that's just completely dross.
It doesn't really mean anything in the context of this political theater.
And so he drifts off into that territory that we wouldn't cover.
Do you know what I mean?
I think this next section will at least address that and continue the conversation from there.
Because now, I mean, if that wasn't Pete Grussell, I think we're getting to that moment.
I want to talk about the biggest, you know, one of the biggest discussions we're having right now.
We had Dax Devlin Ross on recently, a critical race theory, and about How the right is taking those few instances of the more extremist wing of people wanting to talk more openly about race and the power systems.
So let's first listen to Ben talk about his definition of racism.
There's a broad discussion obviously happening in the United States that's now extended over to the UK about the definition, the very definition of racism.
Now it used to be that the definition of racism was fairly well understood by everybody.
It was the, at least back in the 1950s and 60s, because we were seeing it practiced on a daily level and legally encoded in law.
in many places in the United States.
It was a belief in the inferiority or superiority of a particular group of people based on race, right?
That was the definition of racism.
Now the definition of racism has been shifted and there's this different conversation taking place in which the notion is that it's not just that sentiment.
It is systems of power in general that end with unequal outcome, must therefore be racist, or alternatively, that only people with power can be racist.
So if you're powerless and you are bigoted against somebody else, you might be bigoted, but you're really not racist because real racism and the real challenge of racism isn't a challenge inside the human heart that we all have to fight.
It's not the sort of individual fight that you have in order to live a more Virtuous and fulfilled life, or the same fight that I have, really it's a question of power dynamics.
And this is where I start to get very skeptical of some of the definitional issues here.
Because to me, if morality is now disconnected from individual action, or even solving individual problems, and it now moves up to the level of only people with power are a problem in terms of how they act morally, or all inequalities of outcome A result of an imbalance of power at the top.
I don't think that the logic holds, nor do I actually think that the logic is particularly moral.
So, not only does he misdefine racism in the 1950s and 60s, he also misdefines it now, and then he takes a very leave-it-to-beaver sort of approach to it.
The systems of power have always been racist.
That's part of the argument.
It's not like maybe they wouldn't discuss 70 years ago.
But that's sort of the realization that people are having now, looking at the long-standing systems of power, and how do we dismantle them and build them in a way that's more equitable.
That's one of the foundational ideas of this.
But him pivoting and saying, you know what, it used to be your neighbor was racist, and then eventually they got over it, but now we're looking at only these leaders are racist.
It is such a talking around the point that is appeasing to his crowd, but doesn't actually address what Yeah, he's doing a really, I hear multiple layers of analysis that are sort of intersecting in fallacious ways, right?
So there are mistakes happening in the way that he's reasoning about this.
I tend to think that he is arguing good faith and I do think that there is some, there is a general sort of mismatch within the broader culture around how people do think of these different definitions.
I mean, the one that I think is most tricky is white supremacy, right?
When we talk about white supremacist groups, we're talking about a very specific kind of neo-Nazi ideology and a desire to create a white ethnostate and that sort of thing.
When we talk about white supremacy in a lot of the other ways that many of my friends do on the left, it's It's more subtle and it's less overt.
And it's often talking about something that you may even carry unconsciously.
And even though I think that that can all be valid, how we have that conversation with people who are not already on board with that particular analysis, I think gets very tricky.
And I wonder if sometimes it's self-defeating to insist that people adopt definitions that Maybe they don't understand yet, or don't make sense to them, or that end up making them feel like they're being called racist when they don't feel racist.
I don't know about self-defeating, but I do know that the onslaught of moral panickery around critical race theory has seemingly irrevocably muddied the waters around whether or not the argument around structural power can actually be understood or put forward in a depersonalized way.
I mean, it's like, yeah, there's a fundamental challenge in confronting the liberal view of racism as being about personal, internal morality and, you know, what Ben describes as the struggle that we all must overcome in our hearts, and recognizing that that struggle scales up through history and through the accumulation of institutional actions.
to form power imbalances that actually have real effects on people's lives and kill them when they're on the wrong side of it.
So, yeah, meddling out those two definitions is really difficult.
And I think not only do we have Rufo and others making that intentionally difficult...
Yes.
But we also have this problem that the liberal view of self-development in general really, really wants to hinge itself on if I have a pure heart, if I become a better human being I agree with you that that's not true.
When I say that it's self-defeating, part of what I mean is that it creates a weakness that the propagandists on the right are able to exploit.
They're able to exploit the fact that a lot of middle Americans hear these confusing redefinitions and they hear it as, oh, you're telling me that I'm innately horribly racist and now you're going to tell that to my kids, and that mobilizes them and gets them very agitated.
And I fear for what that might mean in the midterms, but I agree with everything that you're saying.
Yeah, I mean, how would you open the conversation other than to say, so we have this highly personalized internal psychology-based view of racism that has been very useful in helping us examine how we understand difference between people and how we respond to people.
But like, at the same time, there's ways in which those attitudes and policy decisions over years accumulate into X, Y, and Z.
Well, so that's the hard argument.
It's a hard argument to make.
It's really hard.
And the thing is, too, I think two things get conflated.
And what Rufo has done really well is to conflate diversity and inclusion trainings, especially some of the worst versions of them that tend to be very heavy handed and probably inappropriate for kids if indeed they're being taught to kids, which I don't know if that's even true.
But to conflate that with critical race theory, which is actually a very sophisticated academic scholarly analysis of structural racism.
It's not an analysis of how you need to go and do a bunch of really deep quasi-religious work to come to terms with your unconscious internalized whiteness.
So it's a big mess.
It is.
I don't think that we should be looking for ways to differentiate ourselves from one another and condemn one another.
let's say and this is part of his answer and it'll be the last clip of russell that we play i don't think that we should be looking for ways to differentiate ourselves from one another and condemn one another i am
i have no choice because of my own spiritual values if people feel that they are persecuted and it's in a manner that i can't claim to understand because of the distinctions in my personal experience then i would rather choose the root of compassion than condemnation every time When you're talking about vast subjects like race in America with this very particular history, you know, you and I have discussed this elsewhere.
That just because it's seemingly inconceivable that a debt of that nature could ever be repaid due to the complexity, the number of institutions, corporations, nations, individuals potentially involved, that for me, that does not foreclose the idea of reparations.
And while we're using a word like foreclosed, what the hell went on in 2008 where regardless of race, ordinary people, poor people in the main, because who suffers always the poor, were ripped ripped off, skanked by people who will never, it seems, face the consequences of their reckless actions.
Exploitation is happening, it seems, on a large scale.
To have a hierarchical society, it seems you've got to have a bunch of schmoes near the bottom that you're going to exploit, and the more they're fighting one another on account of the books they read when they try to encounter the unknowable or the way they feel about themselves and their identity or their sexuality...
If we can spend all our time squabbling about that, there's going to be no reorganization.
And how I would take this to you, Benny, is that I feel like you have power, and I don't mean this within the terms of perhaps how the conversation is played out, the power of your personality, your ability, your willingness, your determination, your certainty.
So, Julian, define spiritual bypass, please.
Well, Spiritual Bypass is where you use idealistic spiritual beliefs in order to convince yourself that you don't have to deal with the messy process of actually managing emotions and biographical history in the real world and politics.
Or you use it to get out of an awkward pivot during a podcast.
Well, it could be that.
I mean, here's my observation.
I feel like it is an odd segue, but he's sort of leaning on his populist anti-corporate motifs, which he does throughout this conversation, right?
He comes back again and again to championing the rights of ordinary people against the corporate elites.
And also, he's sort of digging into a bit of Marxist analysis here that says it's probably in the best interests of the elites to have racial conflict, dividing people with less power so that they can't organize and band together.
In the beginning, I actually do hear him giving a little bit of a nod to standpoint epistemology, which is part of critical race theory, that, you know, there may be a way that I don't really know what it's like to be in the shoes of someone who, because of their identity, has been oppressed.
At the same time, he's calling for a kind of spiritual unity where we see past those things and we just all get together, right?
But I want to point out what he does exactly what so many of these figures on the right and the CRT critics are doing, which is we're going to talk about the structural powers of racism and how that's affected society.
Hey, but white people were affected in 2008, too.
What about them?
Yes, that that right there, that moment where that's where the bypass came in, but also this reflex action being like, it's not just them, it's me, too.
There's that.
That's also a Gish Gallop technique, right?
Which is part of his whole affect, is how much shit can you throw at the wall, at the podcast wall, so that your phrases can keep coming and the hits can keep feeling solid.
And so, yeah, there's something rhetorical in there as well that is about the scrambling feature of all of this.
Which tells me that it's all more about entertainment than about politics.
Well, it also goes back to where you started, Derek, which is that we don't know what the conversation was behind the scenes.
There's obviously some kind now we can we can analyze it in terms of a sense of saying, hey, a lot of this is marketing and sharing audience with one another.
And that's probably true to some extent.
There's another piece which is like, OK, how do we have civil conversations across the aisle?
But it feels like For both of them, there's some kind of guardrail there that says we can't really go into any of these topics in a meaningful, substantive way and start to have some actual friction beyond like, well, you clearly have this abstract concept that you believe in, and I have a slightly different abstract concept, but we both believe in God, you know?
Well, exactly!
So then what's the value of the conversation at the end of it?
Agreed, I was actually very disappointed in it.
It's the value of influence is what it is.
So we have influencers doing politics and convincing their listenerships that they're doing politics.
Yeah, and Matthew, I wanted to say too, with regard to the question you were raising earlier, in this conversation, yeah, it's hard to see why Russell would be interesting to us.
In terms of his general profile, he is a very influential kind of spiritual thought leader for a lot of people.
who are sort of new to new age ideas.
He sort of crossed over from being a celebrity to being a spiritual influencer, and now he's doing a kind of political routine that dabbles in conspiracy theories. - So you're seeing that in social feeds where people are looking up to him as a spirituality commentator. - I think we've seen that in Los Angeles because he used and now he's doing a kind of political routine that dabbles in conspiracy theories. - So I think we've seen that in Los Angeles because he used to practice here and live here.
He was very much a part of the community here as being that in his transition period.
Yeah, and his one big movie features quite a bit of him doing yoga.
So we've got an interesting interview coming up where I sit down with Dr. Jennifer Sapio, who's an English professor at Austin Community College.
I came across Jennifer last summer after we on the podcast began to notice that some of the conspiritualists who made news by pioneering that first fresh spring wave of COVID denialism were quoting a 19th century Austrian spiritualist named Rudolf Steiner, whose musings in something that he called Anthroposophy Became the basis for what we now know as Waldorf education.
By the way, the name Waldorf comes from the name of the Stuttgart cigarette factory where Steiner gave a lecture to workers in 1919 about the need for a new spiritual and holistic educational system.
He was at that point trying to ingratiate himself to the labor and working left in Germany.
That didn't last for very long.
Now, you might remember that Dr. Thomas Cowan, who's an anthroposophist doctor from San Francisco, produced this dumbass video that went viral in March, in which he claimed that viruses are harmless cellular debris that we're shedding all the time, and that the real cause of COVID-related illness was the EMF bombardment of new wireless technologies.
As part of this, he falsely claimed that the 1918 Spanish flu was similarly caused by the expanded use of radio waves.
Now the thing that really stuck out about Cowan's speech was the following, and the video has disappeared from the web in one of the disinformation purges, but I have the transcript and Julian's gonna go for it here.
When you know Steiner, you have the answers to the test.
But you have to then figure out the details.
In 1918, after the biggest pandemic, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, Steiner was asked, what was this all about?
And he said, well, viruses are simply excretions of a toxic cell.
Viruses are pieces of DNA or RNA with a few other proteins.
They are brought out from the cell.
This happens when the cell is poisoned.
They are not the cause of anything.
Okay, so first thing is, who asked him, and why the fuck would anyone have cared about his answer?
I mean, he wasn't a doctor.
I'll return to that.
But the second thing, Julian, can you just repeat this line?
When you know Steiner, you have the answers to the test.
Yeah.
Incredible.
The question that my interview with Jennifer revolves around is, who really knows Steiner, especially today?
And how much do they know?
And how much does it matter to the little children who attend the more than 1,000 Waldorf schools around the world?
So, Jennifer was a Waldorf teacher from the fall of 2018 to February of 2020, and as she writes and describes in our interview, she was only gradually introduced to the reality of Steiner's extremely racist and pseudoscientific religion over her tenure.
And she did this through a series of mentorship encounters as she was drawn more closely into the center of the organization.
And as we'll see from her comments, And also responses to an essay that she wrote.
There are a lot of middle class and higher Global North families who are committed to the very naturalistic, bucolic ideals of Waldorf education, who have almost no idea that he was a proto-fascist whose ideas helped inspire the spirituality of Nazism.
The essay that Jennifer posted to Medium in June of 2020 had the provocative title, Waldorf Schools are Inherently Racist Cults.
Now, in that essay, Jennifer generously avoids naming the school and spotlighting it for criticism because she has broader points to make about Waldorf education globally.
But also in the interview, Jennifer notes that her record of employment is available on LinkedIn, so I'll just get that detail out there on the record up front.
She's writing about none other than the Austin Waldorf School, which according to its website is situated on a 27-acre campus in the Texas Hill Country.
And tuition, by the way, starts at over $13,000 for a kindergarten or preschool half day, and then goes up to over $20,000 per year for high schoolers.
And the Now, just put a pin in the money bit, and also in the fact that of all the places we've referred to in the country that we call conspirituality land, Austin is definitely the capital city with residents including Mickey Willis, Kyle Kingsbury, J.P.
Sears, Aubrey Marcus, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan.
So we'll share Jennifer's essay in the show notes.
We'll also link to an extremely thorough essay from 2009 by Peter Staudenmayer, who teaches German history at Marquette in Milwaukee.
He meticulously details from primary sources the Steiner Full Monty, like all the stuff that Waldorf education custodians don't want people to know.
Here are the opening graphs from his essay.
In June 1910, Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, began a speaking tour of Norway with a lecture to a large and attentive audience in Oslo.
The lecture series was titled, The Mission of National Souls in Relation to Nordic-Germanic Mythology.
In the Oslo Lectures, Steiner presented his theory of folk souls or national souls, Volksseelen in German, Steiner's native tongue, and paid particular attention to the mysterious wonders of the Nordic spirit.
The national souls of northern and central Europe belonged, Steiner explained, to the Germanic-Nordic peoples, the most spiritually advanced ethnic group, which was in turn the vanguard of the highest of five historical root races.
This superior fifth root race, Steiner told his Oslo audience, was naturally the Aryan race.
If this peculiar cosmology sounds eerily similar to the Teutonic myths of Himmler and Hitler, the resemblance is no accident.
Anthroposophy and National Socialism both have deep roots in the confluence of nationalism, right-wing populism, proto-environmentalist romanticism, and esoteric spiritualism that characterized much of German and Austrian culture at the end of the 19th century.
But the connection between Steiner's racially stratified pseudo-religion and the rise of the Nazis goes beyond mere philosophical parallels.
Anthroposophy had a powerful practical influence on the so-called Green Wing of German fascism.
Moreover, the actual politics of Steiner and his followers have consistently displayed a profoundly reactionary streak.
You know, Julian, listening to that first paragraph, I'm thinking about listening to the lecture in Oslo and how well that must have gone over for the audience there.
They must have really loved hearing about that stuff.
We're also in Jules Evans' territory, aren't we?
The Nazi hippies.
Right, right.
So, I think those two graphs give you the idea.
Stoudemire's essay is very well sourced, and in the link you can check out the scads also of denialist comments underneath as a barometer of how conflicted Waldorfians are about the history of their movement, and that's not a good sign.
So it's not just that modern-day Waldorfians downplay the proto-fascist racism of Steiner's ideology, they actively lie about it.
And on a damage control website that I found called waldorfanswers.org, there's a sidebar called It leads to several pages that attempt to bust the so-called myth that a 19th century Austrian New Ager might possibly have had racist views of the Teutonic variety.
Like, who would guess?
They even cite an investigation carried out by none other than their own anthroposophical lawyer who found that, quote, anthroposophy contains no racial doctrine in the sense of A seemingly scientific theory whereby the superiority of one race is supposed to be legitimized at the expense of another.
And now I'm reading that and I'm realizing how the phrase, seemingly scientific, is doing a lot of labor there.
They might actually be saying, well, because, you know, our guy was a pseudoscientist, we can't really say that he was proposing a scientific theory.
There's no way he could have!
Right, right, because he didn't know anything about science.
Right, so the lying here is a really deep concern from a cult studies perspective and also from, I would say, the point of view of anyone considering entrusting their child to this particular culture and history for education.
And there's an irony behind institutional lying, because if it works, it generates this aura of respectability around the group.
It generates an army of defenders, many of whom earnestly believe in the wholesomeness of the group because they were lied to as well.
And because they benefited from the group's social power.
And in reflection on our conversation about CRT, this sounds awfully familiar given what so many of us are now learning about things like systemic racism.
Okay, so I'm going to admit now, for my own part, that I naively believed in the wholesomeness, or at least the harmlessness, of Rudolf Steiner.
It's not that I knew much about him, but when I was 19 and living in Toronto's Annex neighborhood, I used to spend hours in this wonky, used, new-agey bookstore called Seekers.
It's still there, new ownership.
But I'd sit on this big pile of unshelved books in the philosophy, religion, mysticism aisle, which was a problem because I never really questioned why these topics were all lumped together.
But I remember the slim Steiner volumes.
They were usually beautifully printed, hardcover, thin volumes, often sort of black leather or leatherette with, you know, embossed titles like The Philosophy of Freedom, An Outline of Esoteric Science, A Calendar of the Soul, What is Biodynamics?
And all of the titles and opening pages kind of shivered into this nostalgic feeling of, oh, that's really interesting.
I wonder what I've lost to the wheels of modernization.
Because the books had this kind of aura about them.
Everything cultured and European and pre-modern seemed to rub off and imbue me with some kind of opiated glow.
I just want to say that me too, I've always, until learning more, had the same kind of romantic sense of the harmlessness and the wholesomeness.
And in fact, my grandfather met Rudolf Steiner on a visit to South Africa.
And in fact, Rudolf Steiner changed my grandfather's life and had him leave his position as a CEO.
And moved to Scotland to learn how to take care of kids with cerebral palsy and came back to South Africa to start a farm for cerebral palsied kids where they could be self-sustaining and he had this incredible vision as a result.
So in my entire growing up, I always thought of Steiner as a kind of saint.
Wow, that's incredible.
And I mean, that sounds like a really good outcome.
And I suppose that farming was biodynamic, right?
Definitely.
Yeah, I mean, so I never got the vibe from leafing through these books that, you know, Steiner had this very conventional racism for his time, and the fact that I didn't get that vibe is by design, because as Staudenmayer points out in his essay, quote, one crucial stumbling block for English language readers is the anthroposophical tendency to delete racist and anti-Semitic passages from translated editions of Steiner's publications.
He also points out that an entire book of his lectures that was published in translation in English in 1923 chopped out from the German original an essay called Color and the Races of Humankind.
I carried this kind of misinformed, romantic, truncated view of Steiner into later life, and so several years after my bookshop reveries, I was step-parenting a young person in a family, and the decision was made to send her to a Waldorf school close to our home in rural Vermont.
Now, the demographic was, I think, more crunchy and less wealthy than what I think we'll hear Jennifer Sapio describe in Austin, but everyone who, you know, participated could afford private school, which is a huge litmus test.
And what I remember was the confident, smiling, idealistic setting and set of feelings and communications and also this very precious feeling about the school as if there was something magical and countercultural happening at it.
And I felt comforted by the feeling that, unlike in the rest of my fragmented postmodern world, here was a place that felt like it had history and purpose.
And I think that this is a big part of the unconscious allure of Steiner education and the icon of the man standing behind it.
That like the contemporary galaxy-brained guru that Matt and Chris describe on Decoding the Gurus, Steiner had an answer for everything.
And he pretended that those answers came from the great beyond, from his sacred intuition.
He also has this origin story where he had a mystical experience, or a series of them, I think, between the ages of 9 and 12 where he realized that he could read the Akashic Records.
So, you know, his view was as corrupt as any proto-fascist worldview out there, but it was complete and totalizing.
So, did it matter that I never heard overt racism at those parent-child days?
That I never heard overtly religious proselytizing?
Did it matter to the children there?
I mean, couldn't we just enjoy the nice things about the outdoor education and the wooden tools and the nice medieval-y type songs that, you know, mark the transitions?
I mean, my answer now is yes, we could enjoy those nice things, but it's not the right thing to do, actually, because it hurts people.
Up to and including the problem of killing people.
And I don't think this is an exaggeration because I'm referring to Steiner-related vaccine hesitancy, which I'll finish up with.
Because Steiner schools are also famous.
You'll see this in a number of the resources that I provide for outbreaks of measles, mumps, and now it's going to be COVID.
I don't know much about Waldorf, not being a parent, but are there books involved as well, like a traditional classroom?
There are books.
I can't speak to the reading curriculum, but I can say that reading actually is not introduced until Wow.
The child is seven or eight years old due to a number of metaphysical beliefs around the grounding of the new person having to do with when their milk teeth fall out and their new teeth come in.
So, yes, there is reading, but it's reading that is metaphysically directed and sort of apportioned out bit by bit.
And as Jennifer describes, this ends up super isolating the children who attend these schools, actually.
So, I have this thing that comes to mind for me as a Canadian with regard to, like, you know, can't we enjoy the good things?
It's a topical thing.
It's not new.
Perhaps you've heard that the flags in our country are at half-mast to acknowledge the long-known but only recently made visceral fact that Indigenous children in this country were
basically imprisoned in residential schools run by Catholic orders of priests, nuns, and monks, and that when they died of disease, or neglect, or just the sheer raw grief at having been wrenched from their parents' arms, their little undocumented bodies were just dumped into mass graves.
So there were 139 schools in the system all across the country, Recent research has uncovered over a thousand little bodies in just a handful of those sites, and some estimate that as the sonar digging progresses, tens of thousands will be found.
So, the Canadian history I grew up with told me nothing about the active and intentional genocidal policies of my country.
I got to enjoy the wholesome aspects of settler storytelling.
To envision my forebears as wisdom carriers, as brave frontiersmen, I got to imagine that the founding of the institutions that I now rely on every day were essentially good.
And while none of these impacts on their own has made me consciously racist, they have altogether built up an idealistic vision of what my country and heritage is, and that vision does not want to be disrupted.
That vision permits me the moral smugness of believing, for instance, that Canada, unlike the U.S., was founded on multicultural principles.
But what that really actually means is that British and French colonists worked out this uneasy cultural truce that privileged both cultures while they were actually agreeing and cooperating in genocide.
Now by bringing up this example, it might appear that I'm suggesting that present-day Waldorfians, while by not coming clean about Steiner's shitty writing, are actively complicit in fascism or benefiting from it.
That's not really my point.
It's subtler.
The main thing that my whitewashed Canadian history education did for me was that it gave me an unrealistic picture of my life that I instinctively want to protect.
And it disarmed my willingness to look more deeply.
And that works very well for the stability of Canadian identity.
So I would argue that the Waldorfian failure to cop to its racist underpinnings is a result of something similar, a carefully curated process of idealization.
And what's the harm?
Like, what do people in power who have $20,000 a year to spend on private school, what do they need?
Or rather, what do they need the least?
I would say that they don't need idealized representations of themselves, by which they can claim they are not personally racist, or even worse, by which they can claim that their religion lets them transcend racism.
So, in my interview with Jennifer, we also go a little into the metaphysics of contemporary Waldorf education and its beliefs about children's souls, which are kind of incredible.
And finishing up here, I'll note that Steiner's writing has also given a lot of poetic juice to the anti-vax movement.
There was a quote from a 1917 Steiner lecture that flew around socials this past spring and it probably still is out there.
It's from an essay that's called A Future Vaccine to Prevent Knowledge of Soul and Spirit.
And that's from a book that's called The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness.
And Julian, I will ask you to torture yourself by reading this.
The time will come, and it may not be far off, when quite different tendencies will come up at a congress, like the one held in 1912, and people will say, it is pathological for people to think, to even think, in terms of spirit and soul.
Sound people will speak of nothing but the body.
It will be considered a sign of illness for anyone to arrive at the idea of any such thing as a spirit or a soul.
People who think like that will be considered to be sick and, you can be quite sure of it, a medicine will be found for this.
The soul will be made non-existent with the aid of a drug.
Taking a sound point of view, people will invent a vaccine to influence the organism as early as possible, preferably as soon as it is born, so that this human body never even gets the idea that there is a soul and spirit.
The heirs of modern materialism will look for the vaccine to make the body healthy, That is, make its constitution such that this body no longer talks of such rubbish as soul and spirit, but takes a sound view of the forces which live in engines and in chemistry, and let planets and suns arise from nebulae in the cosmos.
Materialistic physicians will be asked to drive the souls out of humanity.
I mean, it's very powerful, right?
It's very powerful stuff.
Yeah, I mean, I guess that replaces your jab segment for this week.
So that's what we're up against in terms of vaccines, the genocide of souls and spirit while we cover over the other actual genocidal.
You know, there's one line in there that, as you read it, I heard in a particular way.
He writes, it is pathological.
Well, people will say it is pathological for people to even think in terms of spirit and soul.
In talking with Jennifer, one of the things that I felt was that it's not pathological for people to hold anthroposophical beliefs in my view, but when she describes how the teachers are
They're gradually taught to believe that they are in some kind of esoteric communication with the etheric bodies of their students and they have a sleeping ritual.
You know, they go to bed at night and they think of each of the children's souls and their journeys and how they're going.
It's that interventionism, it's that kind of intrusion, psycho-spiritual intrusion that I find pathological.
It fills me with a real anxiety to think that my child would be around somebody who would gaze at them like some kind of spiritual lab rat that way.
It's creepy.
It's creepy.
And that part of the interview is very, very powerful and fascinating and disturbing.
And then the fact, too, that she talks about how ideally it's framed that that sort of activity would be sort of covert.
It would be something that you didn't talk about with the students.
You were interacting with them on the sort of astral plane, so to speak, during that sleeping ritual.
I think I remarked in the interview that it's like a machine for, you know, transference and counter-transference where you've got teachers believing that they're intervening in some existential way in students' lives.
And it's just, it's like, you know, I can't even make that, I can't even bring myself to have intrusive or interpretive thoughts about my own children and their internal selves.
I don't know.
And to think that somebody else would?
To think that somebody else would have a kind of, I don't know, template that they were running as they watched my child move through the world is so incredibly strange.
And distancing and distancing and it would have nothing to do with like, oh, are you actually paying attention to what the child is doing in front of you?
The line somewhere in there, right, between, like, there's the completely disconnected teacher, right, who is not engaging personally at all.
And then there's the teacher who we might think of as being thoughtful and, you know, emotionally intelligent, who does reflect on their students and does go, I wonder what I could do to support that child.
In feeling accepted and in feeling that they can talk about their needs or their boundaries or what have you.
Or I wonder if I need to have a conversation with that child because I feel like something may be going on and maybe talking to their parents and bringing in the child psychologist would be a good idea.
And then you have this idea that there's some kind of revelatory spiritual ideology that you are privy to that then gives you the right to have this kind of creepy invasive presumptuousness about how you're going to intervene on this child's behalf.
It's very weird.
And it does bring up, you know, in both of these topics that we've talked about today, there's this really interesting and I think complex question of how do we think about education in terms of indoctrination, whether that be spiritual slash religious or whether it be political.
And, you know, how do we define those lines specifically?
Because we don't want to say the classroom is never a place where politics should be talked about.
That would be crazy.
And we also don't want to say there's no room for any kind of meaningful, you know, moments of spirituality at school.
But there is some sense of separation that seems crucial.
Well, one through line that I see between our two topics today is that it seems to be a hallmark of liberal thought to focus on the internal self and to make assessments of how the personality, the psychology, and the soul, as it were, are progressing.
And in that sense, you know, Ben Shapiro's 1950s take on the moral struggle to overcome internal racism is very much cut from the same cloth as the notion of the inner spiritual development of the Steiner child towards the greater good or the higher levels of consciousness or something like that.
And both of those views have to really depend on shutting themselves off from the outside world and from larger systems and networks of power and, you know, the way cultures actually operate together and the way economies work.
I found one of the most, like, moving things about Jennifer's discussion was how she talks about One of the hardest things it was for her when it came to leaving was she was scared about what was going to happen to her own child who was in the school and was going to be behind in terms of conventional education when returning to the public system.
And so, it's this weird paradox where there's this focus on the internal self that in certain circumstances can be super isolating.
And really, when we're talking about teachers making shit up about what they see in children, it has nothing to do with relationship.
Yeah, and there's a piece there too that overlaps in terms of perhaps the worst, though well-intentioned aspects of some of what has become popular in social justice circles, certainly online, around a very similar focus about the inner process of becoming a better person and endlessly doing the work to uncover some kind of internal sinfulness.
Yeah, and to interpret things like structural racism as a kind of karma.
Exactly.
Instead of a set of material conditions that actually we can imagine and create policies to change.
Dr. Sapio, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
It's my pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
So, in this very stunning article you published to Medium in, I think, was it the spring of last year?
Am I right about that?
Correct.
Perhaps early summer.
You describe a three-year tenure at a Waldorf school.
You don't name the school, but I'm wondering how much you can say about where it was, or at least a little bit about the politics and the demographics of the region.
First of all, my professional history is publicly available.
information, you know, on LinkedIn or, or otherwise.
So I'm not divulging, um, trade secrets here, although I was careful about, um, I was careful when I wrote and published the article, not to name this school out of, um, you not to name this school out of, um, you know, personal respect for, uh, parents, former parents, students, um, and colleagues of the place where I worked.
Um, so, so for those same reasons, I probably won't say the name, you know, here, but you can look it up on LinkedIn.
Uh, I am in central Texas and, you know, central Texas is, is a blue, you know, bastion in a red state or arguably a purple state where, um, you know, it's a blue, you know, bastion in a red state or arguably a purple state where, We'll see where it heads in the coming elections.
So the culture here is somewhat more progressive than the surrounding areas.
There's a great music scene, food, you know, museums.
It's a wonderful place in general to live.
And it's interesting when you kind of map where some of the other Waldorf schools in the country are, that there are some really big and prominent ones in similar areas around the country as well.
Kind of progressive, culturally alive and thriving cities throughout the U.S.
You write that when you were hired, you say, when I was hired, I knew nothing about Rudolf Steiner, his writings, his spiritual understandings, or the anthroposophical foundations of the pedagogy practiced at the school.
So I'll ask a little bit later about why that was, like how you came into that job as kind of a secular person.
But the story of your tenure has a lot of, you know, all is not what it seems to it.
But that you were attracted to the holistic marketing and you were attracted to, you know, The general interdependent and natural living feeling of the environment.
And I have to say that I have some experience in parenting in relation to a Waldorf school.
It was in Vermont.
I also had a former in-law who was a career teacher.
And so I remember the bucolic setting.
I remember the soft voices.
I remember the medieval-sounding gathering songs that facilitated the transitions and kind of shepherded children into and out of classes.
The whole vibe was very pre-modern, almost pre-industrial.
The children were advised not to touch plastic.
The screens were looked on not as stimuli that should be regulated, but a kind of poison from a world gone wrong.
How much of an impact do you think these, like, sensual and aesthetic values have on attracting families, and how they might obscure the edges of what Steiner actually believed?
I think they work very effectively to obscure the edges.
You know, there's a There's a trend, perhaps, today, and I don't know how long it's been ongoing or if it's a kind of cyclical, you know, throughout our culture we have growing times of these kind of, I call it crunchiness, right?
This kind of, you know, hippie, new age, all organic, you know, As you were saying, I mean, I agree with everything or everything you mentioned about the school in Vermont resonated with my experience as well.
And so perhaps there is an attraction there, you know, for folks who aren't otherwise inclined to, you know, participate in, you know, organized religion.
You know, but who might be interested in something like outdoor education, you know, or just a kind of.
Weak philosophical interest in regulating screens, for example, right?
I mean, there's a line where kind of mainstream and reasonable kind of parenting questions that come up in the newspapers in the past 10 or 20 years asking about, huh, how much should we be exposing our children to screens?
And pediatricians going back and forth about the number of minutes or hours.
I mean, it is a legitimate concern.
And so you get that kind of attraction, that magnetic attraction to those, for those folks who, who probably can actually make it through a whole Waldorf tenure with their children without knowing the, I mean, it's possible that, you know, a really uncurious person could go
All of those years with their children in a Waldorf school and not know the actual reasons why.
You know, screens are forbidden, even though screens weren't in existence in 1917 when Steiner was writing.
So yeah, that was a long way around to say yes, I think there is a really effective kind of glomping on to To this kind of new age hippie vibe.
And there's just not an enormous amount of transparency in my experience.
You know, what's happening behind the scenes and faculty meetings and what folks are reading of Steiner's writings.
I have my own small children and as we negotiate screen time, my main concerns are with, you know, neurological development and addictive behaviors and dopamine thresholds and, you know, rewards and gamification and all of this stuff that I know that they're going to have to negotiate as they grow.
And when I think about how anxious it would make me to add on top of that the notion that there was also something sort of fundamentally wrong or poisonous or I don't know from another not from my culture or not aiding my soul into that mix that seems like a lot of pressure and I'm wondering if
You felt a kind of anxiousness underneath some of these rules.
Yes.
I mean, there was a kind of spiritual concern, a worry about, I'm describing what I observed, not what I, not what I felt, but, um, you know, I heard the justification for those types of rules.
Um, You know, being that we're protecting the etheric bodies, the life bodies, the kind of multipartite soul that Steiner describes in his writings.
They can actually be harmed by introducing some of those images early in a child's life is what the belief is.
And so it's that kind of heightened stakes That you see in many religious communities where it's not about a disagreement, you know, on minutes of screen time can be a rational conversation that two parents can disagree about.
But when it becomes a matter of, you know, the health of a child's soul, that's when you really have these heightened kind of tensions developing in the schools as well.
And it's a very imaginative framework which I think will inform a question that we'll get to later about what the impact of something like a vaccine would be, right?
That here's something that is not well understood by this 19th century philosophy and so it has to be foreign to the perfect child's body or something like that.
It has to not be in agreement or it will send them off the wrong path.
You write in your article, I felt increasingly during my nearly three-year tenure that I must fall in line with the fundamental understanding, according to Steiner's Anthroposophy, of who humans are from pre-birth to beyond, I'm assuming that means after death, in order to survive in my workplace.
Indeed, this was explicitly stated in one of this year's faculty meetings.
To the best of my recollection, the quote-unquote Waldorf master teacher who was presenting said, if you are not on board with this kind of spiritual striving, then you should find somewhere else to work.
So, was there a kind of creeping realization that you, I mean, you say increasingly you felt this, but was there a particular moment in which you realized you were being asked to sign on to something that was just not on your bingo card?
It was increasing, that's accurate.
I can say that the pressure and the more and more kind of assertive interpersonal and then public demands did increase, but it's not probably fair to say, you know, that I had no indication from the start.
You know, for example, during my interview in which I shared my, you know, relative lack of knowledge about, you know, the history of the pedagogy except You know, a very limited kind of, through the grapevine, having grown up in the same town, I had kind of a hazy understanding of, oh, this is kind of like an artsy school.
And I expressed that I had concerns, based on previous experiences in other religious institutions, about kind of The oppressive nature and indoctrination and the kind of violence.
I expressed this during my interview and one of the people who was interviewing me said, oh, I absolutely understand.
I hear you.
All we'll have you do is we just start faculty meetings with a verse.
And so I said out loud in the meeting, I said, OK, so You know, essentially a piece of poetry, you know, kind of engaging with language.
I'm okay with that.
And soon after that, once I was hired, is when I was placed in a mentorship relationship with this Master Waldorf teacher who I was referring to in the line you just referenced.
And through that relationship is really when Now in retrospect, I recognize kind of the role within the institution of this really interpersonal relationship where I was getting the lowdown, if you will.
We were reading the esoteric texts and he was making sure that I would get on board with the understanding of This multipartite soul and how I was teaching to the student souls.
I mean, that did come quickly, actually.
And, you know, for a number of personal reasons that I think any, you know, parent, professional, you know, teacher working in this economy, you know, needing the health insurance, etc.
For a number of reasons, I wondered to myself, okay, to what degree can I translate what I'm hearing this person saying, to what degree can I keep an open mind, actually, and make this work?
You know, because I would hear also, you know, from other folks, for example, on the faculty who would say, Oh, take what you like of Steiner's writings and leave the rest.
And so there were mixed messages too, as far as okay, fall in line and let me talk to you about reincarnation and, and the seven year phases of the life cycles, et cetera.
And other folks going, Oh, well, that's just, you know, Isn't it great that we get to teach outside sometimes?
Did you get the sense that there was an open conversation about this, I don't know quite what to call it, it almost sounds like a recruitment process, with regard to how quickly you as a new hire would be brought into the realm of the Master Waldorf Teacher and
And asked to really focus on these esoteric elements while I'm imagining that the rest of your performance is not really being paid attention to?
I sought out professional development in a number of ways that I mentioned in the article and was kind of redirected back to anthroposophical organizations.
I It wasn't a public conversation about, okay, this is how we're going to onboard new faculty.
It was, um, discussed as an idiosyncratic, you know, depending on who the new hire is and what their background is and, and how much kind of bringing up to speed they need and what department they're in.
It was more, um, Understood is kind of like a, you know, a really personal mentorship relationship that was being Including, I imagine, the question of how much you would ultimately care about this aspect of the schooling environment.
It sounds like there's a number of off-ramps for the person who would join a faculty and then not really want to confront directly what the heart of the ideology was.
There'd be a lot of options for them.
I think that since I published, I heard from several And you can, you know, read those comments on Medium where folks said, oh man, yeah, I was there for two months before I got out of there.
And, and, you know, I know that there are folks still there who Um, you know, haven't wholesale adopted the philosophy.
So, so, which suggests there is still room within the organization, depending on how the person is willing to participate or not.
I was actually talking about it from the other angle, which is that for the faculty member who had their doubts, that they could be given a lot of leeway in order to, you know, well, they could focus on the outdoor aspect of things, or they could focus on the fact that the music program was good, that it seems that there was a plausible deniability built into how the organization presented itself.
Yes.
And that's what I kept banking on.
You know, that there was room for me, that I didn't have to follow or believe X, Y, or Z, but could really enjoy these aspects.
The theater program, the plays, the string instruments, you know, the field trips, etc.
However, The increasing part that I mentioned earlier was increasing pressure to comply with the three-year long training program, which ultimately
And by pressure, I mean, you know, folks stopping by your office, folks sending you emails, you know, hearing it from a number of different supervisors, Supervisor A, Supervisor B, Supervisor C, really expressing without ever saying, you know, it was never said, do this or else you're fired.
Let me be clear, that was not said.
But that's, it was clear what was desired of me.
And once I made, once I did the research and followed up about the training programs, actually, you know, applied to one, if not two, spoke to the administrators at those programs, got the syllabi, understood what the reading lists were, I realized this is not, About pedagogy, you know, and about best practices based on cognitive research for how to support student success.
This is a religious training and I'm opposed.
And at some point you realize, as you reference in your article, that included in these ideas in the literature is Steiner's, like, proto-fascism, which is racist, that he talks about the reincarnation and evolution of folk souls who ascend through the races, of course, lifetime by lifetime, laundering themselves towards whiteness.
And you have this great line in the article where you say, no amount of organizing diversity conferences for Waldorf teachers will ever fix this fundamental problem in the foundation of the school's pedagogy.
Now, do you stand by that in the sense that, like, would a faculty or a school be able to really I don't know, just get schizotypal enough that they would be able to put Steiner to one side and then go all in on, you know, diversity, equity and inclusivity on the other.
That's what would be required, you know, and whether that's possible or not, I think is yet to be determined.
The essential Problem here is, you know, that individual teachers can certainly be engaged in anti-racist work and, and, you know, individual departments can develop diversity, equity and inclusion curriculum, right?
But the institution, If it does not say, wholesale, this shit is racist, you know, pardon my language, and we are extracting it, I mean, we do not associate ourselves whatsoever with this language, it's faulty, it's broken, it's wrong, there's no truth in it whatsoever, then, you know, without that,
It's a kind of disingenuous holding two things in one hand at the same time that just don't go together.
I also think, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of your brief presentation, and I did look at the lecture that it was taken from in 1919, of this notion of the evolution of the soul through the races towards whiteness.
it can't really be separated out from the rest of the metaphysics of the development of the person as would be applied to the child.
Like you could, I, I can, I can't really imagine, um, a teacher accepting that the, what did you call it?
The multipartite soul of the child, um, isn't carrying with it some of the same kind of eugenicist, I don't know, sensibility or echo or possibility for shame that the racist stuff does.
Like, it would be very hard to separate those things out.
Like, I don't know that a person could have their cake and eat it too there.
Right, right.
I mean, so when you dive in deep to the explanation behind the curriculum, at every decision, which Steiner indicated, At every grade level, in every subject, what is to be done?
And that still, to a large extent, is the curriculum of Waldorf Schools globally.
You know, every decision was based on this spiritual reincarnation and seven-year life cycles, you know, ideology.
You know, why do children at Waldorf schools not learn how to read until after...
Age seven or so, right?
Until second grade or third grade.
Well, there's this spiritual reincarnation understanding about the milk teeth, right?
And they're actually tethered to their previous, you know, pre-birth body.
And so, so let's say you have an institution, a school that says, okay, You know, that racist part of Steiner, that was some wackadoo stuff, but that milk-teeth part, you know, and the not teaching reading until age 8, we're going to stand by that.
I mean, that's just one example, and I could go on and on about what they don't teach until children are 14 for the same reason, etc.
Just about the milk teeth, I have heard this idea, and is the idea that the milk teeth are remnants of the previous bone structure or the previous life?
I'm not an expert on that particular matter.
My understanding is that the milk teeth are the last remnant attaching the new soul to their mother and to their pre-birth life.
And so once the milk teeth are lost when children are seven or however old, then they're finally instantiated in a more significant way in their bodies and thus able to read is the argument there. then they're finally instantiated in a more significant way in Part of what you're describing in this, I would say, recruitment, attempted indoctrination, it seems like they made a mistake with you.
It's a good thing.
It seems like what you're describing is a party line that is discussed amongst the faculty.
In practical terms, were you able to interact with the kids in a way that remained true to your own secular values?
Or was the experience split in some way between the classroom and the staff room?
I was able to interact with my classroom in a way that felt authentic and professional and productive.
And I stand by those interactions.
I taught English.
You know, we studied history.
I taught architecture.
We built bridges.
We did good work in the classroom.
You know, rarely if ever mentioned Steiner or the word anthroposophy in class, which is by policy.
I mean, so the separation between what happens in the faculty room and what happens in the classroom is by design, and Steiner indicated that as well.
That the kind of spiritual striving to to quote that again was to be understood and done in the faculty rooms on behalf of.
The students.
So, for example, one thing that folks said very often, I heard this a number of times, as a best practice for Waldorf teachers is that when they lie down to go to sleep at night, they should think back through the day in backwards order, and there's a whole reason why for that, and also bring to mind the faces of each of their students.
So that the teacher's angels could commune with the student's angels.
Okay.
And so this was common.
I heard it a number of times.
This is what teachers are supposed to be doing, but you don't go into the classroom the next day or it wasn't, you know, encouraged for you to go in and say, I was thinking about you last night, you know, my angel was talking to yours and here's what happened, right?
It's supposed to be a essentially covert spiritual work to be, you know, without mincing words, covert spiritual work.
I think that's fair.
It sounds like the makings for a real mess of transferences on the part of the faculty where there would be an encouragement for the teacher to view themselves as being spiritual mentors or guides or having some kind of spiritual power or etheric connection to their students.
And, you know, there are psychological theories around that that we can talk about, but I think what made me most uneasy personally about being in those spaces
was the intrusiveness and overbearing quality of the sometimes it felt like it was kindness but there was a sense in which the children were being sermonized or they were being i don't know meditated about or cradled in light or something like that it it there there wasn't a sense of directness that i remember in those
You know, times where I was able to see the teachers interacting with the children, there felt like there was something in between the teacher and the child, an idea, like some sort of radiant idea.
It's really interesting that you say, you know, you felt like there was something between.
There was this concept that I, um, that I discussed with a former colleague about these scarves.
Did the teachers wear scarves at your former school?
I don't recall scarves, no.
Okay, maybe that's just a, you know, southern U.S.
regional thing, but in any case, Uh, this kind of silk scarf motif.
Oh, I do remember this.
I do.
Right?
In Eurythmy?
You know, the decoration in the kindergarten.
Eurythmy is the dance.
Correct.
Correct.
Eurythmia is the kind of dance, movement, gestural, also with enormous spiritual implications, is what they believe.
So in Eurythmia, in the kindergarten, and then in the actual clothing of teachers, this idea of the silk scarf has spiritual resonances as well that are Multivalent, but just specific to the point you just made, teachers are encouraged to wear scarves to protect their etheric body from their students, actually.
So that is explicitly discussed, you know, that With our spirit bodies moving around and able to expand, etc., that we protect ourselves from this bombardment of our students all day by wearing these scarves.
There's a tradition in Ayurvedic medicine of the practitioners wearing preferably white, but it should be silk undergarments that are specifically about that, that allow them to undertake the therapeutic encounter, the clinical that allow them to undertake the therapeutic encounter, the clinical encounter without picking up any of the bodily or spiritual disease of the client.
And so, yeah, I can see the scarf sort of embodying the same principle.
But also, you know, and maybe when it's waved around in Eurythmy, it also becomes this way in which the virtue of the philosophy is kind of held between the teacher and the student as being the reality principle, right?
Like there's something If we're going to communicate with each other, it's going to be in, I don't know, lightness, or it's going to be in sacredness, or it's going to be angelic in some way.
Yeah, and you know, the problem with that metaphor of the healer and the diseased, in the case of a teacher and a student, is that the student would then be the ill, you know, Yeah, the diseased person, which isn't quite how I see the relationship between teacher and student, needless to say.
That's not your jam.
That's not my primary archetype for that dynamic, yeah.
Now, so you were able to maintain a sense of kind of Your internal values as you went through this process and to some extent, or to a large extent, the philosophy stayed at the door.
I'm concerned about the possibility that that Contradiction between the staffroom and the classroom could function the other way.
So for instance, during a pandemic, it might be official staff and school policy to overtly support masking and distancing.
But if the individual teacher is trained to default to their conscience, and that conscience loves Steiner's alt-health, nature-cure ideas, my concern would be that they wouldn't have the heart to enforce the rules when it really counted.
Is that a reasonable concern, or am I kind of being discriminatory towards the teacher, or that, I don't know, is that a stereotype that's unfair?
I think it's fair and I have to say that I left the school prior to... I mean the coronavirus had broken out but there weren't any closures or anything at that point when I left the school and so I really can't speak to the
To the specificity at that place of what the top line statement was and what was actually going on behind the scenes.
But there was a vaguely similar experience while I was there with a measles outbreak in the U.S.
a couple years back.
I'm sorry I don't have the date handy.
But there were several communities in the U.S.
that really had significant measles outbreaks, one of which was another Waldorf school on the East Coast.
And there was an article published in the local newspaper about the, quote, worst measles You know, vaccine compliance data in the county, for sure, although it may have said the state and identifying the school where I worked as as having, you know, those low numbers.
And so I expressed concern.
And so I expressed concern as a parent and a teacher.
And I did see in the top line response back to me That dichotomy.
It was odd because I was, I had two roles in the school as a teacher and as a parent and so when I expressed concern as a parent about, hey look, you know, how many kids in my students class are vaccinated against the measles, you know, and there was a top line, you know, lack of information provided
You know, falling back on privacy, of course, and falling back on the line that we support family freedom and we neither encourage nor discourage vaccination.
So there was no engagement with the fact that We either had attracted a population or created a population of anti-vaxxers at the school.
There was no recognition of that fact at all.
Just, you know, we support freedom.
But then in the faculty meetings that, you know, that kind of distinction was, you know, I would pass around, we would pass around Steiner's writings on vaccines in which
You know, he talks about why we shouldn't do smallpox vaccines and diphtheria vaccines, and then there's this kind of conspiratorial prophecy, essentially, about some future vaccine that will deaden the soul, right?
And I did see that language come up just in popular conversations after the pandemic, after the COVID-19 pandemic.
It was all over social media last spring and into the summer.
Right.
Now, just for legal and technical context, I don't know if this is a county thing or it's a state thing for Texas, but if you were to attend, if your child was to attend a public school in Texas, would they have to present their vaccination record to attend?
Yes, and?
There are waivers, and so I think that every student at the Waldorf School did have to submit a waiver.
I don't think there's necessarily an explanation why, or, you know, there's no kind of pushback to the waiver.
It's just a necessity to present it.
Now, very provocatively, especially for some of your readers who commented, you used the word cult in your title.
And I wanted to ask about that.
We talk a lot about cults on this podcast.
I identify as a cult survivor.
I've studied it quite a bit.
Now, you know, you describe not having done the Waldorf training before your hire, but that there were strong pressures to take it.
If you were to advance professionally.
So this does feel like a slow induction process.
And I'm wondering what would happen organizationally and financially to the Waldorf schools if the training was a prerequisite.
Would it not work to just be to ask people to go from Teachers College straight into Waldorf training?
I think that these schools would fail.
There are not enough, let me be clear, I think that requiring teacher training before hiring Waldorf teachers would cause the schools to have absolutely no faculty to fill the ranks.
And that was public conversation.
Again, as I was discussing with these training programs and talking with my school and with other Waldorf teachers as well, it was common knowledge that Waldorf schools are increasingly being staffed by non-Waldorf trained teachers, and that's a supply and demand problem, that there actually aren't teachers completing those training programs at the rate required.
And so that created, at least in the school where I worked, A divide, right?
And a cultural kind of tension between those who felt, those well-trained teachers who felt they were carrying the torch and doing the good Lord's work, if you will.
And those teachers who had been hired on their merits as, you know, experienced teachers, you know, writers, et cetera, experts in their field who were being, I mean, this is strong language, but to some degree, I think it is fair to call it, you know, they were being treated as second class citizens.
Within the faculty culture, you know, and there would be comments about, oh, you know, well, they're not trained, you know, or just wait until you finish your training and then you'll understand, or we can have that conversation after training.
And this idea that you silly, you know, especially, especially I want to add, there is a kind of anti intellectual bent to it.
Especially if the teachers like me had a PhD and no Waldorf training.
And so there was this real tension between, oh, you know, actually my, the, the master Waldorf teacher who I, um, who was my mentor, uh, early on said to me, you know, your PhD is, is worthless.
That's not what we're doing here.
That's a powerful statement.
Yeah, it was hurtful.
It was very hurtful, but it also allowed me to see the perspective of what was valued at the place of my employment.
And that if it wasn't, you know, my education and experience as a teacher, then what the heck was it?
And that's, you know, how I really started to understand these other objectives.
And there was no way that you were going to advance, of course, without acquiescing to the spiritual training.
I wouldn't have been department chair.
I wouldn't have been a leader of the College of Teachers.
The College of Teachers is a kind of self-governing body in many Waldorf schools.
And yeah, just looking around at the facts of, you know, Who was in charge of those really influential positions.
I thought.
There's nowhere for me to go here.
Now that's, you know, at the same time, there were some administrative positions that had recently been filled with non-Waldorf trained folks.
But that was a, nearly a crisis, nearly a community dividing crisis, you know?
And so again, I'm going, okay, well, that's not going to be a good place for me either, you know?
There's a theorist called Michael Langone who describes the three key aspects of the cultic organization as deception, dependence, and dread of leaving.
And I think that your article hits on two out of the three.
So, you describe this kind of deceptive induction into anthroposophy as a faculty member and also the deception of Secular progressives who are looking for attuned and outdoorsy and child-centered education.
You also describe a faculty that develops a kind of enforced social dependency on the ideology you've just described, you know, that it would limit you economically if you didn't fully buy in.
What about dread of leaving?
Was it hard for you to leave?
What were the consequences, like beyond the typical career disruption that would come from quitting any job?
I think if I hadn't also been a parent at the school, the decision to leave would have been less complicated.
And so I think that that's probably an essential part of Sustaining this institution is bringing teachers and their children together into the organization.
Because my fear of leaving was not primarily about not being able to find another job or, or whatever you, you know, as you mentioned, other kind of normal professional anxiety.
I had a child at the time in first grade.
Who had been at the Waldorf School all through, you know, the three-year kindergarten and had progressed into the grade school, and therefore had received no formal training in
forming letters, reading, you know, except for, of course, what I had provided at home, which was reading every night and, you know, trying to get him to do workbooks for fun and flashcards and that sort of thing.
But the fact was that that did not substitute for formal education in phonics and literacy and language.
And, you know, I was like, And so as a first grader, imagining moving my son or, you know, imagining moving my first grade son into a, you know, traditional learning environment Was terrifying.
That was dreadful.
I thought, what in the world have I done to handicap my son in such a way that he is unable to, you know, seamlessly transition into another educational program?
Without significant support and individualized attention, etc.
That was the part that made me dread it.
I hoped that I could just keep at it long enough for my son to learn how to read.
And if only my son could learn how to read, then I could quit.
And that actually was, I mean, dread is the accurate word there.
It was dreadful.
I was scared, anxious, worried, horrified, regretful of the decision I had made.
And when I, in hindsight, step back and look at that, I realize how insidious that is, institutionally, to Set up your elementary school program so that it is prohibitive of children seamlessly transitioning from your school to anywhere else.
And that was actually not something that they kept a secret.
They actually did say that in admissions meetings and things that, don't worry, your children will catch up by third grade.
In third grade, they'll be at the same level as public schools.
It was something they weren't ashamed of, but it made leaving hard.
So, there's a protective philosophy that says, okay, the child isn't going to be rushed in their development because of the milk teeth and because of the stages of the soul and because only certain things should happen at certain times, and that sounds like it's beneficent and that it is carving a space for pedagogy
outside of the, you know, productivity, you know, rat race or gerbil wheel where, you know, parents are equally concerned about things being learned too fast or children not having enough time for play.
It sounds like a protective measure, but I think what you're saying is that it actually, it has this consequence of isolating the child in a kind of developmental pattern.
Yes.
Yeah, and many of those rules for the young children have the effect of isolating the child and the family, you know, further into the Waldorf circle, right?
So the things you mentioned as far as, you know, screen time, many schools will have families sign a contract that they will eliminate screens, not reduce, but eliminate screens.
And then the encouragement is that you also wouldn't have your children, you know, go to their grandparents' house if there was a screen there, or make sure to talk to your cousins before they go over to their cousin's house to have the screen turned off as well.
You know, or the wood toys, right?
You mentioned the plastic.
So when it was holiday time, there were kind of template emails that would go around saying, here's how you can suggest, you know, Waldorf appropriate toys for your family members.
And that, That type of boundary setting does have an isolating effect, for better or worse.
For better or worse.
I had no idea that the elimination of screens was at stake.
And I'm wondering, how many years is it going to take before there's solid feedback on educational and integrating into society outcomes?
Because, you know, at this point we're still in early days.
We would be talking about generations of Waldorf kids that would be basically confined to a pre-digital life.
And when would the first generations of those, how old would they be now?
They would be in their early 20s, I suppose.
Like, are you hearing from kids like that in their early 20s about, you know, educational deficits or not being able to fit in?
Or on the other side, are you hearing gratitude from them as well?
You know, there's a sustained effort At the institution where I formerly taught, and I imagine other schools do this too, right, to bring back successful graduates, you know, to come back on campus and talk about their, you know, journey with, with the high school or with a recruitment meeting or something like that.
And so I, um, You know, there was a curated experience as far as folks who were graduates of the school coming back and saying, I really loved this or that, or I'm so grateful for this experience.
Anecdotally, I think it's also true.
Again, anecdotally and not, you know, generally speaking here, but I think it is true that I also saw a number of the kind of failure to thrive situations after high school as well.
And so surely I think in the, you know, running the numbers of everyone who's ever graduated from Waldorf School, surely there are success stories and surely there are Folks who really struggled perhaps as a result of their upbringing at the Waldorf School.
So you might be aware that a Steiner devotee was an early promoter and booster of COVID denialism.
There's a guy named Dr. Tom Cowan, San Francisco.
He has his MD license still, but it's currently under probation because he prescribed like a quack cancer treatment to somebody over the phone without even meeting them.
And he came out early last April with a video that went viral, and then it was, of course, promoted by a bunch of other COVID-denying influencers.
And the video claimed that germ theory was incorrect and a bunch of other things, but mainly that Steiner had all of the answers.
So, one of the things that he said that I think is echoed in your article was that, you know, he knew the answers, he had intuitive or clairvoyant knowledge of so many subjects, and so if he says something, then you work backwards and figure out why he was right.
Are you surprised by that influence disrupting the COVID era?
Would it be a fringe view in the general Waldorf scene?
And did you maintain enough contact with Waldorf families to get a reading on how many, if any, got drawn into COVID denialism and anti-masking?
I'll answer the second part second.
The first part, you know, does that surprise me?
Not at all.
That doesn't surprise me at all.
You know, I read Steiner's works in faculty meetings, you know, where there was no resistance to the concept, you know, when Steiner would write that modern day physics and psychology has it all wrong.
And by modern day, of course, that was 1917.
But still, it still is, is, you know, it still stands according to, you know, Steiner acolytes.
So, so it doesn't surprise me at all.
You know, we read just, you know, to me, just the wildest stuff about, about, you know, Bones and blood in entirely kind of non-biological and non-accurate chemical ways in Steiner's writings.
So of course, there's a strong, as I said, in Steiner's writings, there's a strong anti-intellectual bent.
Anti-medicine, anti-physics, anti-psychology.
So it doesn't surprise me that somebody who reads so literally Steiner's writings would still purport all of that.
Now, as I mentioned before, I did quit before there were any significant changes in Texas regarding a response to COVID.
So I really can't speak out of personal experience at that school.
However, You know, I wonder.
And that's a language that Waldorf teachers are encouraged to use all the time.
I wonder.
I wonder if the vaccination rate from pre-COVID at that school is the same or different from what it is now.
I wonder.
Well, certainly COVID has accelerated and increasingly polarized anti-vax activism and I think it probably could go either way depending upon the demographic of the school and especially the
The pro or anti-science attitudes of parents, it could depress further if anti-vax ideology was very prevalent because they would be flooded with even more extreme material about the poison nature of the vaccine.
Right.
I think that's entirely possible.
Now, the last thing that I want to do out of a kind of fairness for the fact that we're talking about A culture, but we're also talking about an individual school.
But then on the micro level, we're also talking about individual parents and children.
And what was very interesting about reading your article was that the comments were open and you had people writing to you who knew you as a teacher and who had appreciated you.
So, yeah, there were a lot of really interesting comments, people grateful for your good teaching, also uneasy with your conclusions, especially people who really don't want to be associated with the idea of a cult.
I'd just like to read one from a writer named Mira, and I'm going to just assume that, you know, this is a public statement and so this is okay.
Dear Dr. Sapio, my son, a person of color who lives by the principles of Sanatana Dharma, Not Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy was a student of yours at the school you taught with great dedication.
Your students hold you in the highest esteem and admire you greatly for all the work you do outside of school as well in school.
I'd just like to pause and say that the principles of Sanatana Dharma the person is identifying as a practitioner of contemporary Hinduism.
As you pointed out, parents were never expected to read Steiner's work, and I want to add are never expected to follow his philosophy either.
In fact, there are families of many different faiths and beliefs of the school.
This does not fit the definition of a cult.
Our children are vaccinated, as are many children of the school, which, yes, does respect each family's choice as to vaccinate or not, however, does not force the non-vaccination onto families.
We appreciated that the school teaches each child by acknowledging the soul within the body regardless of the color of the body.
And my son's elementary teacher often mentioned that he was a wise soul in a young body.
Remember, he is a person of color.
We never felt any racism from the teachers or the curriculum.
Our festivals were celebrated in kindergarten and grade school.
The teacher's high standard of dedication, such as that you gave, is to be commended and is truly appreciated.
They give each student a great all-rounded education which provides them with the fundamental building blocks in each subject, as well as critical thinking skills.
They acquire skills to articulate their thoughts and the ability to question and decide upon the truth for themselves.
All skills are much needed in this world these days, and education total worth every cent.
She goes on to talk about how they feel that they spent their money wisely.
You were a wonderful teacher to our son.
Waldorf is not a one-size-fits-all and does not work for some.
However, I would not call it a cult at all.
Thank you once again for being a fantastic teacher to my son and the students at the school you taught at.
I wish you all the very best for the future and that you find what truly resonates with you sincerely.
A very, like, kind, it sounds like, letter and earnest.
How do you feel about the points that Mira makes here?
Listening to the letter makes me feel warm.
I appreciate what this writer shared about her experience of me as an educator and her son's experience.
And I agree with much of what she says as far as what the outcomes were for her family.
And I'm very grateful for that.
And I think all of that can be true.
You know, according to what I have previously said, which is we need to understand the difference between individual actors and institutions.
And so I absolutely agree and validate this family's experience and think it is possible for her child to Have had a wonderful experience at the school and for her family personally to never have felt, you know, racist attacks or otherwise.
And also, I believe it can be true for her not to be a, you know, proponent of Steiner's teachings and attend the school.
So all of that is absolutely true.
What is interesting is that there's not a denial of The problematic nature of the teachings upon which the school is founded.
And that's what my critique is, of the problematic nature of the institution.
And I appreciate that family, appreciate that student, that writer, and think that it can also be true that the institution is as I described.
And because it's not going to go away anytime soon, you're at a very interesting place.
You're in a position in which you've given this very full-throated insider's criticism.
You've used very direct language to describe what I believe is obvious about the history of the philosophy and its internal contradictions with regard to how it greets the modern world.
Going forward, how do you think the Waldorf world will respond to this increasingly well-known line of criticism, and do you think there are individual schools that can do anything to differentiate from the reactionary aspects of the history and culture?
It occurs to me now that there are kind of two extremes in my mind, two directions that the school could go, and one direction would be a full embrace of its
religious and spiritual foundations, and if that were the case, you know, there are a lot of problematic foundational texts in different religious traditions, right?
So if there were a full embrace of the movement as a religion, I think that that would be one possibility for them to continue.
On the other hand, I think that Waldorf schools have an opportunity to divest themselves of the spiritual foundations of anthroposophy and do a secular, Waldorf-inspired pedagogy based on best practices and informed by things that have happened since 1917 as well.
Either way, I think could be potentially You know, if I'm an advocate for growing Waldorf School, I think either way I could consult the institution to do to different effects, right?
Go the hardcore religious route or do a secular break.
If it goes the hardcore religious route, there's an honesty to that that would be on the surface of things and that parents would be able to assess for themselves according to their values and then sign on to.
The secular break, I'm wondering, what do you think is secularizable in terms of pedagogical approaches.
Because just going back to the beginning, my comments were that what I noticed and appreciated were, you know, there was this tender kind of sensibility that proposed that human beings did not have to be enslaved to the industrial world and that somehow they could be more integrated with natural rhythms and functions and so on.
And there's been part of me over the years that has wondered whether...
There really is something good about that, or whether it's always hopelessly ensnared in this kind of backwards-looking, reactionary sort of nostalgia for something that has a lot of baggage with it.
Like, what would be lifted out of the best aspects of Steiner education and then married with, you know, evidence-based pedagogy?
Well, I think that, you know, you can look at education research to see what has developed in parallel.
Right?
And so, good ideas often happen in multiple different arenas, right?
And so, for example, outdoor education, I know I've mentioned that multiple times, there's an enormous amount of scholarly research and data on outdoor education right now that has nothing to do with, you know, fairies or trolls or Life bodies or etheric bodies, right?
And so I think that a clever, you know, researcher could do a quick survey and notice, you know what?
Yeah, sure.
To be fair, Steiner was on to a couple of things, you know.
Dramatic studies, you know, doing theater.
There's a number of scholarly research on, you know, scholarly articles on that type of pedagogy.
Again, that has nothing to do with eurythmy or calling in the spheres of the planets.
So, outdoor education, you know, theater, music, the arts, You know, they have interesting block schedules where students do kind of in-depth education on a particular topic for three or four weeks.
I've seen another local private school do that same kind of scheduling, speaking of rhythms.
So I think that you can come to the same conclusion on what some good aspects of education are with entirely different starting points.
And it doesn't make those same conclusions wrong, right?
We can come not from Steiner's writings, but from, you know, contemporary child psychology and arrive at some of the same concepts, which, you know, Steiner acolytes would say, well, that proves that he was clairvoyant.
But to my opinion, you know, to my mind, I can have a broad enough mind to acknowledge some good ideas and to And to critique problematic ones.
Or maybe simply that Steiner appreciated beautiful classrooms and we everybody loves to be outside and it's really great to get down on your knees and look at the plant life and the ants crawling around and those are all good things.
I mean maybe it's the simplest things that remain.
