Inspired by a recent discussion on psychoanalysis and politics with Pat Blanchfield on Know Your Enemy, this brief meditation focuses on two aspects of the conspirituality landscape that have lurked in the unconscious of the pod:
People do not make sense. There are conflicting impulses and voices within us all. One objective of our project is akin to the goal psychoanalysis: to get those parts talking.
Calling people hypocrites for not making sense is a terrible way of getting them to make sense. What we call hypocrisy, they have used for coherence and survival. The blowback isn't stubbornness, but a confession of needs.
Matthew looks at how the contradictions of Kelly Brogan and JP Sears make sense. Brogan rails against "mommy medicine" while installing herself as "mommy shaman." Sears tells us "Don't outsource your truth," while he absorbs data from Bitchute and Rogan. Brogan's followers are attracted by the simultaneous rejection and reconstitution of authority. JP Sears is a hollow husk of a man, telling his followers to look inside. But when you meet a contradiction or a defence that is harmful, you can’t just argue it away. You have to work towards a better answer to the condition the defence is trying to ease.Show NotesFreud and Politics (w/ Pat Blanchfield)
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The irrational makes sense.
Hello, dear Conspirituality Podcast listeners.
After that big Aubrey Marcus episode, I have something quieter and a little more reflective in the bonus department this week.
Also, not so damn long.
I recently had the great pleasure of listening to a fascinating guest on one of my favorite podcasts.
This is called Know Your Enemy.
That's a pod hosted by two extremely smart, young, and empathetic former conservatives who now grapple with where they come from, with why some of it made sense, and with how people on the left can understand what they're up against.
So this is the podcast that introduced me to people like Daniel Shirell, and also conservative movement historian Sam Tannenhaus, who's the biographer of William F. Buckley.
Now this time, Know Your Enemy has hooked me with a writer named Patrick Blanchfield.
He's a journalist who mainly focuses on gun culture, but also he is a trained psychoanalyst.
And in a recent episode, one of the hosts, Sam Adler-Bell, interviewed him about psychoanalysis and politics, and it was really beautiful and instructive for me.
And also, it was kind of a return to an earlier way of looking at the world that once lit me up and I think could serve me again.
When I was in university, psychoanalysis was in the water of the literary theory that I was swimming through.
All of my favorite theorists of language and meaning, Derrida, Kristeva, Zizou, Lacan, Foucault, Debord, Baudrillard, They were all steeped in notions about unconscious desires.
They were obsessed with transgression, contradiction, confession, and that curious fact that we never quite know what another person means, we never quite know how to grok their inconsistencies and their hypocrisies, and that's because we do not know our own.
So I encourage you to listen to Blanchfield on Know Your Enemy.
I've actually reached out to him to request a guest appearance on our podcast.
But between now and a deeper dive into his brilliant analysis of the psychic splitting of late capitalist politics, I'll just convey two points that he makes that are kind of haunting, and then turn my attention to a couple of conundrums that I believe a little bit of Freud and post-Freud can help with.
The first point, main point, that he makes is about contradictions.
And this is germane to the extent that our whole beat covers ideological and affective contradictions.
How seemingly progressive pro-social spiritualities can curdle into right-wing paranoias which scramble the messages of love and terror.
Blanchfield talks about the contradictions that we see in political figures.
For instance, Trump as the authoritarian father building walls to protect white people from brown rapists, versus Trump as the permissive father who grabs women by the pussy, mocks disabled people, and gobbles Adderall.
These contradictions are not problems for Trump or for his followers.
Rather, they are solutions to internal tensions and split desires.
Trump is performing a double role that may seem duplicitous, but if we stop there, On the supply side, we miss the questions about demand.
Trump is duplicitous to the extent that his followers need contradictory things.
They need to be ruled, but they also need to be given permission to be anarchic.
They need to be virtually ordered to storm the Capitol.
They need to reject one form of control as they bootlick another.
So the second point is about remedies.
You don't debunk Donald Trump by pointing out his duplicity, his hypocrisy, nor do you dissuade his anarcho-bootlicking followers that way.
We're not talking about cognitive processes here, wherein the best debunkers win the Internet Olympics.
When you point out the hypocrisy of the authoritarian Libertine, his follower might say, yes, that's why I love him.
He makes me be good and lets me be bad.
He spanks me and I think I like it.
Now, in the conspirituality world, we could apply the same analysis to Christiane Northrup, who is the loving matriarch, playing her harp for the starseeds, but is also the terrifying crone telling them the vaccine will fill them with Satan juice.
She'll tell her followers not to have sex with their vaccinated partners, but then also sell them dodgy hormone herbs for enhancing pleasure.
Has pointing out these contradictions been effective?
Maybe for the followers who are already on the edge of leaving.
But for the true devotee, it's just not effective because what they need in love is what they're getting.
A maternal figure who confuses caregiving with terror.
And that's what has to be addressed.
So really taking in what Blanchfield says shows me that the smug self-satisfaction of the debunk might have very little to do with communication, but much more to do with point scoring in some sort of unreflexive way.
In fact, if you don't respect the contradictions you come across, it might be that you're not investigating your own.
Crying hypocrisy, after all, is pretty easy, and it has the added advantage of making one feel like one has won an argument.
But who really wins an argument with the psyche?
So, boiled down, these two points are, number one, people do not fucking make sense.
And that means you and me too.
And that's because there are conflicting impulses and voices within us.
The entire point of psychoanalysis, as far as I understand it, is to get those parts talking.
Secondly, calling people hypocrites for not making sense is a terrible way of getting them to make sense.
Because what you call hypocrisy, they have used for coherence and psychic survival.
Alright, so here are the two subjects I will sketch out some thoughts on in this framework.
These are people we study who present massive contradictions, and these contradictions are easy to debunk, but I'm going to suggest that it's more rewarding to understand the needs that they satisfy.
Now the first one is particularly Freudian.
This is Kelly Brogan's use of the terms daddy government and mommy medicine to ridicule the power structures that she says strip us of agency.
And in that, she's not wrong, but her rightness is made absurd and hypocritical when she delivers the line sitting beside her partner Sayer G. And you realize this opportunism at play, that she's positioning herself as mommy medicine woman, and she's positioning Sayer G as daddy tech wizard, offering the para-governmental structures of do-it-yourself data and cryptocurrency.
Pointing out her hypocrisy isn't enough.
I argue that we have to understand why her followers are attracted by the simultaneous rejection and reconstitution of authority that she offers.
The second thing that I'll look at is the favorite mantra of J.P.
Sears.
Don't outsource your truth.
Which could be a reasonable take on critical thinking until it's clear that he's getting his truth from Joe Rogan and Bitchute.
