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Jan. 10, 2022 - Conspirituality
10:05
Bonus Sample: Red-pilled Poet, Charles Eisenstein

Charles Eistenstein has had quite the pandemic. Essays read by millions, retweeted by Jack Dorsey, quoted by Ivanka Trump, held up as the poet philosopher of conspirituality—hell, he’s even been on the podcast!Julian tracks the transformative arc of malformed ideas garnished with spiritualized language that has made Eisenstein the romantic mascot of anti-vax, Covid-contrarian wellness. This is how he finds himself now poised to become the mythic storyteller-in-residence of an emerging Austin-based cult of psychedelic bro science and “medical freedom.” -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
You can support our work and have full access to bonus episodes and other premium content by subscribing for as little as $5 a month at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
Thanks for listening and your support, which keeps us ad-free and editorially independent.
Okay, what of more specific conspirituality themes?
Well, for those, we can go back to a 2013 essay titled Synchronicity, Myth, and the New World Order, where he suggests that the loose ends in conspiracy theories, for example about the JFK assassination or 9-11, might be explained by, drumroll please, the guiding spiritual force of synchronicity.
Eisenstein posits conspiracy theories here, in general, as representing an alternate history of the world, based on ominous coincidences that seem to not otherwise be explainable.
To illustrate this, he does a quick thumbnail sketch of the Jewish banking conspiracy, the Deep State, and belief in an alien-controlled Illuminati bent on establishing a new world order.
Before assuring the reader that his purpose is not to debunk these theories based on facts, evidence, or reason, nor to quote-unquote uphold the dominant historical narrative.
Instead, he proposes a third explanation.
Herein may lie an important truth encoded in conspiracy theories.
Not a factual truth, but a mythological truth.
There does seem to be a conspiracy running inside my psyche that keeps me enslaved to fear and greed, that indeed possesses technologies of mind control that presents the whole world through a filter of lies that is Associated somehow with the reptilian part of my brain that manipulates me to serve an agenda inimical to my authentic happiness.
Everything that the Illuminati are purported to do to the world we do to ourselves.
Could it be that when we see an evil cabal controlling the world, we're actually seeing the projection of our own egos?
And because our collective institutions mirror the prevailing psychodynamics of our time, could it be that the story of the New World Order conspiracy, despite its flaws, gives us a window onto some important truths about our society?
I want to interject here and just say, I'm about 70% with him so far.
It's a bit of a stretch, but you know, it's interesting.
He continues.
But there is more to the story.
What if, in addition to predisposing us to see patterns that aren't there, Our emotions and beliefs actually attract experiential data that fits them.
What if, for example, the psychic energy beneath conspiracism organizes events to fit into a conspiracy pattern, so that it looks like a conspiracy, even if there are no actual conspirators?
I am saying, these patterns of events are drawn to history because we need them to flesh out conspiracy theories and give expression to the psychological energies driving those theories.
Alright, I'll read that again.
These patterns of events are drawn to history because we need them to flesh out conspiracy theories and give expression to the psychological energies driving those theories.
It's as if events organize themselves around some kind of field that makes them appear to have a causal linkage even when they do not.
Okay, we ended up somewhere quite unusual.
This impulse to interpret conspiracy theories as containing collective mythic and psychological meaning is perhaps appealing to anyone steeped, as I have been, in Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell, or dare I say, even philosopher-turned-famous-and-charismatic-renegade-psychiatrist R.D.
Laing.
who famously led his team of psychiatrists in 1965 at Kingsley Hall into living in amongst their hospitalized mental patients to try to make sense of their psychotic and schizophrenic states from a shamanic and symbolic perspective.
It's from him that we get that popular romantic quote I'm sure you've heard which says, insanity is a perfectly rational response to an insane world.
But in the end, doesn't this trivialize mental illness and oversimplify reality?
I think it comes from overplaying the hand of social constructivism and extreme relativism that, in the laudable name of reclaiming the dignity of mentally ill people, goes all in on denying distinctions between mental health and mental illness altogether.
Over the course of five years, Lange's Kingsley Hall was home to meditation, all-night therapy, LSD trips, role reversal, and marathon Friday night dinners with visiting mystics, academics, and celebrities.
This was all going on in a sanitarium where no antipsychotic drugs or restraints were used and everyone was free to come and go as they pleased.
In keeping with the title of one of his best-selling books, The Politics of Experience, here everything, including the definitions of sanity and insanity, were being questioned.
Lange rejected all medical, biological, or genetic diagnoses and treatments in favor of a social theory of how psychosis emerged and could be understood and exercised.
The results were chaos, violence, plenty of feces on walls and bodies, freaked out neighbors, patients drumping off the roof, and Lange by one account going through a mental breakdown himself.
But let's pull back from that tangent.
Of course, conspiracy theories are not evidence of clinical psychosis.
But they are probably just as likely to deliver profound mythopoetic meanings and signposts to the more beautiful world we know as possible as the word salad of paranoid schizophrenics.
Even though they may draw upon evocative archetypal imagery, it's not the case, for example, that the QAnon fever dream will one day be studied alongside Persephone's descent into the underworld or the myth of Seth and Osiris.
The ideas from that 2013 essay by Eisenstein, Synchronicity, Myth, and the New World Order, find their resurrection then, in May 2020, with his essay The Conspiracy Myth, which was retweeted by Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter.
Here he suggests that rather than debunking conspiracy theories as false in literal terms, we would do better to interpret them as containing allegorical mythological truths.
Mainstream society, he says, rejects conspiracism but is itself hypnotized by another delusion, the myth of separation.
Here he quotes paranormal researcher and author Rupert Sheldrake in an anecdote about how so many people have had experiences that lead them to believe their dogs may in fact be psychic, as an example of how scientists suppress truths that run counter to the existing narrative.
And I just have to add here again that we have a rather silly and perhaps cute New Age example being used to argue for a really important seeming larger claim about scientific knowledge in our cultural context.
Charles suggests that the conspirators in this case, who are suppressing the truth about psychic dogs, are not people, but the culture, the system, the dominant story.
He says.
Just as, in bioterrain theory, germs are symptoms and exploiters of diseased tissue, so also are conspiratorial cabals symptoms and exploiters of a diseased society.
A society poisoned by the mentality of war, fear, separation, and control.
This deep ideology, the myth of separation, is beyond anyone's power to invent.
The Illuminati, if they exist, are not its authors.
It is more true to say that the mythology is their author.
We do not create our myths.
They create us.
Pretty interesting idea.
I'm not sure it means that much.
But did you notice he referenced bioterrain theory?
It kind of easily slips by in amongst the other pseudo profound poetic phrases.
Here's that sentence again.
Just as in bioterrain theory, germs are symptoms and exploiters of diseased tissue.
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