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July 28, 2022 - Conspirituality
01:30:21
114: Guns, Germs & Fear (w/Alan Levinovitz)

Life is scary. Natural disasters, violent intruders, and deadly viruses threaten our survival and endanger our loved ones. When ordinary solutions and institutions are not trusted, we may reach for talismanic help; crystals, herbal remedies, ritual prayer and magical thinking, or we might consult the charismatic oracle who channels prophecies from the Great Beyond—right on your iPhone. But what about weaponry? Even though guns exert devastating real-world impact, our guest argues that they also carry an important  symbolic power. While most may never use it, the knowledge that cold hard steel is nearby is one attempt at managing an anxiety that is all-too human. In fact, coping strategies both magical and militaristic are woven into the American political psyche—and as the pandemic has demonstrated, flare up dramatically during social crises; even at times becoming strange bedfellows. Philosophy and religion professor Alan Levinovitz calls this "empowerment epistemology" and describes it as a connective tissue between the seemingly distant domains of gun culture and the wellness sphere. In both cases, this longing for empowerment in the face of helplessness motivates us to cleave to what we believe protects us, regardless of evidence to the contrary—or the tragic consequences in our middle schools and medical ICUs. Show NotesOprah's 'happiness guru' designed apartments to maximize joy — and they start at $5 millionKilling does not come easy for soldiers - The Washington Post Hanns Johst “Schlageter”Quote/Counterquote: “Whenever I hear the word 'culture'…”  -- -- --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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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can stay up to date with us on all of our social media channels, including independently on Twitter, sometimes Facebook, and on Instagram, where we interface with the community the most.
We are also on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where for $5 a month, you can help support us as well as get access to our Monday bonus episodes.
So, with Patreon, we have shifted things a little recently.
We're doing this Swan Song series.
Matthew, you're driving this whole thing.
What's going on with that?
Well, yeah, it's early access.
We've gotten great response so far.
It's been a real education, I have to say, stretching outside of our established discourse.
I think we're thinking outside of the culty polarization box.
Not because Swan isn't culty, but because, you know, she's left this incredible digital trail.
She's attracted so much media that we can step back and take some sort of long view, not only of her, but of the landscape that she comes from and the spectacle that is generated around her.
And, you know, we've had some listeners say that, you know, You know, concentrating on Swan's history or how John Casby's team, like, funked up the storyline editing is kind of akin to carrying water for a cult leader, which is definitely not what we're doing, I don't think, Julian.
But it does say something about the episodic nature of podcasting where not every detail gets into every piece.
But we've had five episodes so far.
We've dropped three of them.
The first features your amazing story of the falsely generated memory of familial abuse.
We're going to drop that into the main feed in August.
And then we have this interview with Paula Marino on what it means to view Swan through an artistic lens.
Then we look at Marino's interview with the Bosworths on Swan's Childhood.
And in that one, we talk about her possible highly sensitive person status and the notion that some cult formations might be social expressions of post-traumatic play.
But then we've got two episodes in the pipeline, which we just suffered through producing.
It was kind of fun, but also very intense.
The first two of three episodes on Michelle Remembers.
Looking specifically at its position as a reactionary response to Vatican II and increasing secularization.
So, we're a little focused on the fact that the satanic panic largely emerges through this slow-motion, psychotic break in the larger Catholic world.
Conspiratuality 114.
114 guns, germs, and fear with Alan Levinowitz.
Life is scary.
Okay.
Natural disasters, violent intruders, and deadly viruses threaten our survival and endanger our loved ones.
When ordinary solutions and institutions are not trusted, we may reach for talismanic help, crystals, herbal remedies, ritual prayer, and magical thinking.
Or we might consult the charismatic oracle who channels prophecies from the great beyond right on your iPhone.
But what about weaponry?
Even though guns exert devastating real-world impact, our guest today argues that they also carry an important symbolic power.
While most may never use it, the knowledge that cold, hard steel is nearby is one attempt at managing an anxiety that is all too human.
In fact, coping strategies both magical and militaristic are woven into the American political psyche.
And as the pandemic has demonstrated, these flare up dramatically during social crises, even at times becoming strange bedfellows.
Philosophy and religion professor Alan Levinowitz calls this empowerment epistemology and describes it as a connective tissue between the seemingly distant domains of gun culture and the wellness sphere.
In both cases, this longing for empowerment in the face of helplessness motivates us to cleave to what we believe protects us, regardless of evidence to the contrary or the tragic consequences in our middle schools and medical ICUs.
Okay, guys, this is our follow-up to Conspirituality 110.
Temple of the Gun from four weeks ago.
And in that episode, we discussed the routine prevalence of gun porn in current Republican campaign ads.
We did.
As well as new gun legislation that remains sadly toothless when it comes to 18-year-olds being able to purchase assault rifles.
We also talked about how AR-15 manufacturers market the preferred weapon of mass shooters by using Bible verses and holy warrior tropes that refer back to the Christian Crusades.
So that's the perhaps predictable guns, religion, and politics trinity on the right.
But then we turned our attention to how the rightward trend amongst our marquee conspiritualist influencers, people like Christiane Northrup, Mickey Willis, Lori Ladd, and J.P.
Sears, has included increasingly violent rhetoric for some, and for others, even overt pro-gun political posturing.
Now, this week's episode intersects with that conversation from a different angle.
Like, in addition to the way that virulent conspiracism with its reflexive distrust of scientific, academic, and journalistic institutions drives people towards reactionary paranoia, how do we make sense of the appeal of gun culture to those who perhaps identified as peace-loving, spiritual hippie naturalists just a few years ago?
In the wake of the Buffalo and Yuvaldi horrific mass shootings, how's it possible that so many Republican politicians still stand firm on the availability of military-grade weapons as a constitutional right?
And might that stance be mirrored in turn by, say, our conspiritualists who remain staunchly anti-vaccine during 2021 despite 98% of those hospitalized for or dying from COVID reportedly being unvaccinated?
Is it really 98%?
Is that what's come in now?
That's what it was at the peak in 2021.
Another parallel exists in those who insist on alternative medicine in the face of a cancer diagnosis, regardless of what the evidence shows.
If, as John Lennon sardonically put it, happiness is a warm gun, perhaps the slide deeper into embattled paranoia and deranging audience capture now has red-pilled new-agers tuning in to the comforting vibrations of gunpowder and steel.
You know, Julian, one aspect of your conversation with Alan, which I absolutely loved and can't wait for the people to hear here, One thing that really jumped out is this parallel he draws between wellness and gun cultures both being exceedingly self-oriented.
So on the wellness side, your health always comes back to you in some capacity, be it your immune system or, if we slide into the more dangerous A Course in Miracles bullshit, that you alone are responsible for your chronic diseases, as if health is a moral failing of some sort.
And while, yes, guns are often invoked as a way to protect your family, it still often falls back to a form of self-obsession with the broader community, and the public health dangers inherent in higher gun ownership are never really discussed.
Now, not to give too much away, but I really appreciated his speculation about the likelihood that people generally don't sit around talking about what guns they buy that are the best to protect your household.
That's not really the features they're looking for.
And that's not a swipe at responsible gun owners, but more the reality of how a percentage of gun owners fetishize their weapons.
And this sentiment also reminded me the episode we're running in two weeks on the history of traditional Chinese medicine in America.
So just to preempt that, during my interview with Tamara Vinit-Shelton, she notes that 19th century apothecaries that were predominantly in Californian Oregon, they served not only as doctor's offices, but also as social meeting places.
So outside of the office, where in a departure to how we currently treat medicine, the Chinese doctors both diagnosed and prescribed and then prepared the prescription in the same place.
Well, there are also these card tables for people to hang out at.
So this is just showing that medicine was much more communal.
Were they playing cards, Derek?
Were they playing cards?
Yeah, absolutely.
Oh, it could have been other games, but yes, absolutely.
Mahjong or whatever.
But they're waiting for their prescriptions, right?
So the idea is there's a community vibe while you hang out.
Oh no, not even that.
They're not even waiting for their prescriptions.
People just go there to hang out and then other people go to see the doctor.
It's just all in the same place.
So there's that social aspect of it.
And this isn't actually unique to Chinese medicine in 19th century America.
European medicine in the 18th century and before was much more communal than we understand it today.
So, disassociating public health and personal health is really a 20th century phenomenon in many ways.
And while there are some advantages to this strategy, things like germ theory and its effects on each individual immune system, when you separate the individual from their community, you lose a valuable component of the broader concept of health.
And so, as Alan repeatedly points out in your talk, in both wellness and gun cultures, you know, for all their talk on the importance of community, they're really self-isolating in many ways.
Now, I've written about the differences between individualistic and collectivist nations for years, and while I don't think either one is necessarily better than the other, it's pretty clear that some hyper-individualistic mindsets cause us to miss the forest for the trees.
And so Alan, drawing that parallel throughout the talk is really valuable.
Yeah, I have to say, as the accompanying Canadian, I find it super strange when American culture or cultures try to slam these individualistic drives and communitarian drives together by creating group events around antisocial objects, I find it super strange when American culture or cultures try to slam these individualistic drives and communitarian drives together by creating group events around antisocial objects, like as they do with
I mean, they do, they do, but it's when the, when the American arms dealers bring all of their weaponry to Saudi Arabia and then all the shakes come and have a look at it.
Right.
I mean, I understand cat or dog shows, especially cat shows, I understand with the wall of pheromones hitting you when you walk in, but you go into a convention center and all the humans are there sharing this wave of dopamine while looking at the prize kitties.
Then there's, I've been to Comic Cons and people show up in cosplay and they're sharing fantasy worlds with each other.
There's violence there alluded to, but the stories are ultimately redemptive.
I've never been to a sex toy convention.
So you say, so you say.
Right.
Which are obviously about sharing pleasure.
No, I've been to one.
I did a report on one years ago, so I went to one in Las Vegas.
Awesome.
That's the place, right?
They're pretty strange.
They're pretty strange.
But there is a shared sense of community in a weird way, not in a way that I would ever want to be around again.
Right, I mean, I think that's even going to be there when you're in the ball and gag and riding crop section, because that might be different territory than hunting and fishing conventions, but at least you know that, you know, people are there to get off together.
And at those hunting and fishing conventions, there are rifles, but the context is touching grass and getting back to nature and activities that sync the user up with their outdoors world.
There's camouflage, feathers on the fishing flies, cans of spray scent to make you smell like a doe, but then you have in virtually every state In America on every weekend somewhere a gun show where folks pile in and they're gawking at weaponry with no other function but to murder and maim each other or other human beings I guess imagined other human beings.
Now the dopamine I imagine must be similar but there has to be some sort of charge in the subtext about how any weapon on any given table could be used to murder the customer or the vendor or the mass of people gathering around so I think that dopamine must come from the raw commodification of a sort of, I don't know, a suppressed interpersonal threat.
I just want to tack this question onto the earlier notion of the responsible gun owner, because I think it's a really interesting phrase, and I wonder what it even means when we talk about military-grade weapons.
I get it if you live in the countryside and you go duck hunting like it's not my scene but if you lock your rifles up in a cabinet in a special room with a locked door and you teach your kids how to be super safe and that's part of your culture.
I get it if you live in a crowded city and you know maybe you carry large sums of money from your restaurant or your bar to your car every night and you feel you need a small revolver for self-protection just in case.
If you have the considerable and also continually updated training it takes to know how to actually use the thing in some sort of non-chaotic way.
But yeah, I mean, isn't Responsible Gun Order like an NRA talking point that is usually used to distract from the assault weapons issue by pretending we're all like Teddy Roosevelt in hunting lodges or something?
Well, it is, but I do want to point out, like, the time I went shooting in Los Angeles, my friend who took me, I would put him in that category, meaning someone who lived in a city who didn't really have it for protection.
He truly enjoyed shooting, but he would go out and shoot skeet, and that's what I did with him, and there was no fetishization of it.
Even driving there, he put me through a course of how to hold it, everything.
He took it very seriously.
So I do have some empathy for that term, because I think a lot of people are like that, and I have no inherent problem with guns.
But, Julian, it seems like you're talking about something different here.
Yeah, you know, I think too about the use of language, right?
So the Democrats are going to put something forward that is like the assault weapons ban that ran for 10 years and reduced the likelihood of an American citizen dying in a mass shooting by like 70% and then it expired.
But the Republicans are going to call it a semi-automatic rifle, right?
Because rifles are things that you use for hunting.
How can anyone truly be described as responsible when they're actually stockpiling, let's call it what it is, a machine gun, right?
So you have this long-time Republican capture by the NRA, and of course it's partly about gun lobby money, but it's also partly about preparing for right-wing revolution.
Like, why else do you need a fucking machine gun?
But let's be responsible while we do that.
So I think there's also an interesting intersection here with the proposed, but seemingly stalled out at this point, Austin Gold Star Oasis anti-vax health and freedom development.
That we reported on in late 2020.
And shooting range.
Yeah, and you know, it paints the picture of this alt-med homeschool gated community that could also be a well-armed reactionary compound at the flick of a switch with self-actualized home births and sacred masculine gun reign, you know, retreat training.
Well, they did say they were going to have full-time 24-hour armed guards.
Oh.
I mean, it's the fucking B-roll from the documentary about the Osho compound in Antelope, Oregon, right?
So the helicopter that carried guests from Austin Airport to that would then, they would have some arm protection on the way there, all for a wellness community.
I mean, it's the fucking B-roll from the documentary about the Osho compound in Antelope, Oregon, right?
Where they just all have AK-47s.
Well, speaking of wellness communities, I've also been thinking about Deepak Chopra.
So I I had a good laugh when Alan called Chopra's uber-wealthy health concierge condo project in Miami relentlessly individualistic and such a fitting term.
I actually had to look up the unit itself and it's called the Muse Residences and it's a 49-story, 68-unit condo building in Sunny Isles Beach.
Apparently, Chopra designed seven of them, so they didn't give them free room.
One for each chakra.
Exactly.
The cheapest condo in the entire complex is $5 million, with penthouses initially listed at $18.5 and $20 million.
And this was a few years ago, but I did look recently and there are a number of $5 to $20 million condos currently on sale for those of you who are interested.
And here's what Chopra said about the project while it was being built in 2017.
The place that you live is in your extended body.
The air you're breathing is your breath, and the water is your circulation, so you have to take care of it.
I mean, just earmark the fact that we're scared of punching down on Deepunk Chopra with his diamond-crusted glasses.
Exactly.
That was very good, but that quote just points at douchebag central.
More importantly, this is peak wealth and wellness.
We reported early in the pandemic on that shamanic concierge service in Hollywood, which actually cost me a few friends because I knew some of them.
Whatever.
But this is another example of spiritual wellness for those who can afford it.
And while, to be honest, I'm not against people paying for experiences they enjoy, the marketing around this whole project is just gross and it sums up the individualist wellness culture take that Alan keeps returning to in your conversation.
The sense of, well, I can afford to be healthy, why can't everyone?
And I think the wealth aspect is mostly absent in the gun culture side of the story, but we can identify a through line in the intense focus on the experience of the self.
And let's not forget that even though the wealth aspect may not be exclusionary in certain ways, the whole notion of the right to bear arms is inextricably wedded to the idea of being able to protect your personal property.
Yeah, that's what it's for.
And I think the wealth aspect is also relevant in terms of general national or state neglect.
Because when I reviewed that series last time by the Italian photojournalist who took those photographs of subjects arranging their hundreds of weapons around them.
I suggested that they seem to be forming some sort of protective shrine-like cocoon for each of themselves to inhabit in the absence of state or community care.
And I think that speaks to your point today, Derek, and to several threads in the interview with Alan.
And just to be clear, Matthew, this was an Italian photojournalist.
Photographing Americans with their guns, right?
Yeah, Americans with their guns, and there's probably 30 photographs or something like that from all over the country.
And these are people who have like 50?
Or 100, or 200, or enough to make their two-car garage look like it's just plastered, the walls are plastered in guns.
And then with some of them, they're sort of like mandalic arrangements with them sort of in the center or something, like really bizarre shrines.
Right, so they're those images of excess, which I think come to stand in in that context for, well, who else will protect us or what else is surrounding me?
But I think there's also something talismanic about the single firearm, you know, concealed in a purse or on the hip or in the bedside table.
I have this feeling that for some people it's a singular, inarguable, unyielding symbol of indestructibility.
Some kind of, you know, card in your sleeve, or an ace in the hole, or a way of always feeling that one's center is protected.
And when I say symbol, because this is part of Alan's take, when I say a way of feeling, I think it's often limited to exactly that and only that when we look at the statistics of, you know, so-called successful gun usage in the service of self-defense.
Because there's a huge difference, as I understand it, between having a symbol of deadly force and using an instrument of deadly force.
Like, even on the level, I don't know if you've seen this study, about only 15 to 20% of US soldiers discharging their rifles in World War II.
Or then you probably watched the footage of the Uvalde cops completely paralyzed in that hallway, holding their rifles like stuffies, but not advancing.
I mean, we're really talking about a piece of technology that has been naturalized into the American body politic, sometimes only to paralyze it in the moment of actual need.
And, you know, I don't think anybody wants to be paralyzed.
People want to be able to act.
They want to be able to act instantly and intuitively.
And that's part, I think, of where Alan's epistemology of empowerment is getting to in the interview and in his book that you cite.
There's a lot of language circulating now throughout the reactionary and heterodox online worlds about valorizing Instantaneous reactions and instincts.
And some of it comes from the evo-psych worlds that fueled the masculinist or manosphere ideologies of alpha, beta, in-cell men, apparently trapped by biological determinants that could only be transcendent through the nurturance of some sort of natural aggression.
Like, in a laundered and Canadian and nerdy form, this is what Jordan Peterson is getting at with, you know, you have to be a dangerous man but in control of yourself in order to succeed because the potential for immediately unleashing violence is seen in his paradigm as a potential corrective to a kind of cultural disease.
Oh my god, Matthew, that moment that you just did an impression of in his Daily Wire, firehose of belligerent and venomous monologue videos like he has new ones every day, sometimes two a day.
That moment was wild.
He keeps topping it though.
This mangled Jungian implication that to be a powerful and mature man, you have to somehow own your dangerous, violent, murderous impulses and then direct them toward noble causes.
It's just a penetratingly high note in these naked appeals to, really, heroic fascism that he's making these days.
Yeah, and I don't know about you, but didn't you sort of, like, understand this when you were 15?
Like, this is not, this is, this is not original.
This is not, there's nothing new about this.
Yeah, that there is such a thing as healthy aggression.
But it's not being a dangerous, like, weird, psychopathic, like, you know, like, like really fully going there in order to then turn.
I mean, really, what he's saying is, dig into your dark instinctive depths and then turn them on the woke DEI, you know, fascists who are coming to impose, you know, climate science on you.
Right, and your steampunk vest can possibly keep it all inside.
It can possibly bind you all together so that you don't explode all over the screen.
Anyway, what clarifies a little of all of this for me around this very confusing idea that firearms can fulfill a natural function, because I kept listening to Alan and I kept reading his article and thinking like, So, these things are mechanized.
These are industrial products.
They're steel.
And they fire with this sort of brutal impersonality, but I think it's actually that impersonal certainty that connects some people to their sense of biological determinism.
Insofar as the firing of a gun is as certain or as, like, destined as the firing of a neuron or, you know, the establishment of your gender, for example.
And it all reminds me of that famous line in Nazi lore.
I don't know if you guys have heard it because the Nazis had to do this same thing.
They had to merge their ideas of blood and soil with the post-human industrial chaos of their blitzkrieg and of their own memories of the First World War.
And so the line is, quote, when I hear culture, I unlock my browning.
Now, people have falsely.
Have you heard that, by the way?
I haven't.
I can't remember where I first came across it.
Maybe I think it was in my old theater days or something like that.
But people thought that Hermann Goering said it.
They thought that Heinrich Himmler said it.
They thought that Goebbels said it.
But it comes from a play in 1933.
It's written to celebrate Hitler's birthday.
There's a Nazi playwright because there were a bunch of them, by the way.
Lots of Nazi poets as well.
He was also an SS officer named Hans Just.
And the line comes as two German university students are discussing the merits of study and bookishness while the fatherland is under such stress.
This is in the interbellum years.
And the most gregarious character in the scene implies that Germany's World War I loss can be attributed to the valorization of ideas instead of actions.
So he says, quote, The last thing I'll stand for is for ideas to get the better of me.
I know that rubbish from 1918.
Fraternity, equality, freedom, beauty, and dignity.
You gotta use the right bait to hook em.
And then you're right in the middle of a parley and they say, hands up, you're disarmed, you Republican voting swine.
Republican there means something a little bit different.
No, let them keep their good distance with their whole ideological kettle of fish.
I shoot with live ammunition.
When I hear the word culture, I release the safety on my Browning.
This is about as anti-intellectual as possible, right?
Exactly, exactly.
And where are we familiar with that from?
I mean, I think the bro science conspirituality version of that is when I hear the word woke or trans or CRT or mask mandate, like basically anything that proposes that I live in a culture with many interconnecting parts that I should learn about and collaborate with.
I reach for my AR.
And for them, I don't think it matters, therefore, that the AR is steel, while the whole food in their smoothie is organic greens.
Both the steel and the greens are hooked into this notion of biology that is yearning to protect and optimize itself through direct and palpable action.
Through instantaneous, like, non-conceptual means?
So I don't think it's a mistake, actually, that the phrase magic bullet is so often used to characterize natural healing products and processes.
Ernest Becker's 1973 book, The Denial of Death, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1974.
Ironically, just two months after the untimely demise of its author from colon cancer at just 49.
In the acclaimed book, Becker argued that human beings avoid the anxiety of our own mortality by investing in heroic, symbolic selves who inhabit transcendent narratives of meaning and membership.
He called these immortality projects.
Of course, religion is the most obvious of these in that it usually promises some kind of eternal life as a reward for noble goodness and pious belief.
But other belief systems can serve a similar purpose.
Whatever the strategy, we humans seek ways to both soothe and empower ourselves in the face of fear.
In a perhaps startling 2021 piece for HuffPo, our interview subject for today, Alan Levinovitz, proposed that two otherwise quite different ways of managing anxiety, namely gun culture and wellness culture, may have more in common than is immediately apparent.
In a philosophical move that resonates with our journey to understand how far-right conspiracies and New Age spirituality became kissing cousins, he frames the overlap between, say, guns and crystals as relying on a shared epistemology of empowerment, or a way of valuing knowledge based on how empowering it feels.
He sees the reassuring presence of both the gun salesman and the anti-vax homeopath as meeting an otherwise similarly unfulfilled need for those who no longer trust the authorities.
I interviewed Levinowitz after the horrific mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde in May, and this led to his HuffPo piece being circulated again on Twitter, which led me in turn to read his book titled, Natural, How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science.
His research on the topic took him to the Hippocrates Institute, where both cancer patients and those merely seeking ageless beauty alike drink organic veggie juices and hook up to vitamin IVs before their immune-boosting yoga class.
He also visited the elite condo development Derek mentioned, where Deepak Chopra consults on the frequency-reflecting paint and circadian lighting in residences which sell for between 5 and 20 million.
Listeners will no doubt be familiar with beliefs that extol the virtues of drug-free home birth, organic food, holistic medicine, herbal remedies, and vaccine-free natural immunity, all of which are leveraging claims of naturalness as an intuitive valence of wholesome spiritual goodness.
But I was less familiar with how Enlightenment philosopher John Locke's language of self-evident and inalienable natural rights influenced the Declaration of Independence, likely in turn derived from religious philosopher Thomas Aquinas' belief in natural law.
On this view then, if we follow Levinowitz's reasoning, the right to bear arms is seen as deriving from the natural instinct of self-defense.
It allows protection of political liberty against tyranny and provides empowerment to reject unnatural government edicts, say about wearing masks or receiving vaccines.
Here's the interview.
We're joined today by Alan Levinowitz, who is an associate professor of philosophy and religion at James Madison University.
Thanks so much for taking the time today, Alan.
Thanks so much for having me.
Really excited to talk.
Yeah, me too.
We've actually wanted to have you on the podcast for quite a while.
Because of your 2021 book, which is right in our wheelhouse, it's called Natural, How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science.
And I'm looking forward to asking you more about that a little bit later, but our paths cross today because of gun violence and the recent horrific mass shootings that just keep on coming.
And they seem to be so characteristic of an American Almost religious creed that says, you know, frictionless access to military-grade weapons is somehow a cornerstone of freedom from tyranny.
And you wrote a uniquely insightful piece for the Huffington Post about a month ago in the wake of the Yuvaldi and Buffalo tragedies.
Maybe not Yuvaldi.
Had Yuvaldi happened already?
No, this was actually, that piece came out a while back.
I want to say maybe a year and a half ago, two years.
I should check the date.
Although it is, you know, sometimes what you write doesn't age very well.
Looking back on it, I really feel like I would stand by everything in the piece.
I think it still explains a lot about contemporary American gun culture.
Yeah, I must have just been looking at the month, but it is perhaps an eternally relevant piece, maybe even more so now.
The pieces titled Gun Culture and Wellness Culture come from the same place.
And in the article you coined this term, empowering epistemology, which seems to me does a lot of the work of describing the shared psychosocial process between these seemingly disparate cultures.
So let's start there.
What do you mean by empowering epistemology and how do you see it expressed in relation to both wellness and guns?
The central insight of that idea of empowering epistemology is that when we try to figure out the world, when we try to understand ourselves or our relationship to our context or other people, one of the most important deciding factors is feeling powerful, is feeling agency.
We don't want to be disempowered.
And unfortunately, The truth is not always empowering.
It is often mysterious.
It's often vague.
We are often small and we don't have control over our safety or circumstances.
And so I believe many people, myself included, I'm sure, figure out ways to fit themselves into the world That are centered primarily not on truth, but on empowerment, on feeling like you have control over yourself.
It's just an extremely important human desire.
And so when I say empowering epistemology, I mean a theory of knowledge that prioritizes one's own sense of agency rather than trying to gain a sort of objective view of where one fits into the world.
You reference in that piece two articles, one by David French in The Atlantic, one by Bethany Mandel in The New York Times, with an op-ed piece that sort of earnestly describe this personal phenomenon of becoming a gun owner in order to feel empowered and safe and free and even to be a good parent.
And you draw parallels between the experience that they're describing and being sort of ritually initiated into something like anti-vax ideology or believing in miraculous ult med cancer cures.
Tell us about those parallels.
I loved those pieces by French and Mandel just because I thought they were Honest.
They were honest and insightful and self-reflective.
And what I got from those pieces was a narrative that was a lot like narratives I'd heard having studied wellness communities and alternative medicine communities, which goes something like this.
The world is a dangerous place.
It can make you sick on the one hand if you're thinking about medicine, or it can kill you or rob you in the case of criminal activity.
It can come to your house and break in.
As a reaction to that dangerous world, you might want to look to authority for protection.
But the wellness narrative often, as with the gun ownership narrative, is that authorities, the top-down approach, they're not going to protect you.
They're not looking out for you.
That's the explanation of why, despite great medical care, despite police forces, people are still getting shot and robbed and dying.
So what do you do in that situation?
Well, both of these authors describe this process of going from fear and feeling like authorities aren't looking out for them to discovering a community of empowered individuals.
I have something for you that the authorities don't want you to have.
and say crystal shop, and for them it's the gun shop, but it might as well be the crystal shop or the alternative medicine practitioner who say, look, I'm with you.
I understand it's a scary place.
I have something for you that the authorities don't want you to have, and it allows you to protect yourself.
And what that promise does is two things.
One, One, it explains, and this is the epistemology, the empowering epistemology, it explains why up until this point you felt insecure and you felt bad.
The reason is that authorities aren't looking out for you.
But there's a and it also provides a solution.
So it provides both an explanation and a solution to existential anxiety about death or fear of harm.
Here's the answer.
You can protect yourself with this alternative to the mainstream authoritative form of protection.
And so in those articles, I was just struck by the parallel between the two.
And then also and I know you're going to ask about this, but also the The absence of empirical evidence that the promised solution actually works.
In other words, the guns don't, having a gun in your home doesn't actually protect you any more than having a crystal around your neck realigns your vibrations to make you less susceptible to cancer.
But that's a sort of separate thing.
But the point is that you get to do it.
You're in charge of your own safety and that is empowering and it's just extremely important.
Anyone who listens to this podcast knows that that word empowerment This crops up again and again and again and again in so many different contexts related to alternative forms of spirituality or wellness.
Yeah, and it strikes me that very often empowerment discourse is a red flag that you're about to perhaps be disempowered or hoodwinked in some way or put your faith in something that maybe is a bit dodgy.
Yeah, it is a red flag.
And I used to, you know, I used to sneer at that word, or if not sneer, at least reflect, I revolted.
And I think one of the things, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, is I just haven't suffered.
You know, I haven't felt disempowered.
I haven't been someone for whom the authorities, you know, the authorities weren't looking out for me, or I haven't been failed by authorities, whether my house was robbed or I got sick and the doctors dismissed me or didn't get it right.
And so, That's a kind of solipsistic view that I'm really trying to get over, which is that when you suffer in that way and when you feel let down by the systems that are in place, you're going to seek out empowerment.
And that doesn't mean you're weak or stupid.
It means you're You're human.
Yeah.
And that's something that we need to understand that not every person promising empowerment is a huckster.
Even though hucksters have realized that that promise is a great way to bait your hook.
Yeah.
I mean, I almost hear you making the distinction between a set of unchosen circumstances that Triggers certain cognitive vulnerabilities that we have and needs that we have much more so than some Essentialist failing on the part of the individual that's exactly that's what a great way to put it there But for the grace of God go I exactly yeah, and and who knows what kinds of circumstances would make me
We seek out the equivalent of these kind of talismanic forms of protection that you have control over, whether a gun or a supplement.
You cite fear and perhaps a traumatic experience, right?
A defining kind of turning point.
Uh, of some kind of threat, maybe, as driving factors.
Uh, but then you also describe the ensuing cognitive style of valuing anecdotes over evidence, and, and, you know, I think you described really well a moment ago, and you, and you do this in your book, which we'll get to, the, the kind of interpersonal quality that happens, say, over the counter at the gun store, or in the, in the alternative medical practitioner space, where
I feel your pain, you know, I'm listening to you, and I understand, and you're not alone, and people like you and I have gone through this, and here's an answer, right?
Here's a solution.
And it does seem that that sort of leans into anecdotes, appeals to emotion, and it can kind of seal off those empowering seeming beliefs from a sort of healthy scrutiny.
And I think this often leads to a conspiratorial mindset in which any data that challenges this new liturgy, if you will, is labeled as perhaps propaganda from corrupt mainstream sources.
You already mentioned feeling failed by institutions.
But you also point out That in the cases of both wellness and gun culture, there are valid complaints and legitimate fears that are at play, even if the epistemology has in the process gotten distorted.
So that's quite a tangle.
And part of why I really wanted to talk to you is you're one of the few people who I think is trying to reckon with that tangle really honestly.
I'm going to give another example, which may not seem necessarily related, but I think it's helpful to address this tangle, which is fear of flying.
And I think fear of flying has a lot of the same sorts of things built into it.
It's very disempowering because you're not in control.
You're just sitting there.
It's a vehicle that most people have never controlled themselves.
They don't understand how it works.
It's very mysterious in the way that even a bus, when you're not driving it, is not.
It's opaque in certain ways.
They even seal off the cockpit from you.
And this is something else I'd like to bring up later, which is another epistemic, sort of technical term, epistemic opacity, which I think is really important.
And so you're scared.
And if you've gone through turbulence or if you've been traumatized by hearing about a plane crashing, you want to be protected, but That fear, you can't address it with statistics all the time.
A person whose fear of flying is rooted in a kind of need for empowerment or a sense of opacity about how security on planes works, they might not necessarily be helped by bloodless statistics about the safety of plane flights.
And so really what we need to do, you can't just shake your finger at people who are afraid of flying and say, well, that's just silly.
I'm just going to keep reciting the statistics to you over and over again and force you out of the plane.
That's that's absurd.
And yet I do feel like that's.
That's the approach often that we take with people who insist that their gun protects them or that their alternative medicine protects them.
And there's another approach, which is to say, well, hey, OK, maybe we've designed, maybe the cockpit that's hidden from the passengers.
Makes people more scared.
Maybe a lack of understanding of how planes fly is not great.
And we should, you know, that's a common form of transportation.
Maybe we should educate people about that in school.
You should be a part of a high school curriculum or something like that.
So instead of addressing the underlying causes of the disempowerment and the fear, throwing more statistics at the people who are scared is only going to alienate them more.
And who's it going to push them towards?
It's going to push them towards the people who aren't doing that, who are saying, hey, look, I hear you, man.
Planes are freaky.
I can't hear you hear about that pilot who got drunk and crashed the plane into the mountains.
I would I would never trust something like that.
I prefer to drive everywhere myself.
And to the extent that those people are providing the psychological balm that's called for They're doing a better job of addressing the fear than the person who just pounds the table and recites statistics.
Yeah, listen, you're more likely to die on your way to the 7-Eleven than you are in a plane crash.
Get over it!
Oh, great.
Oh, thank you.
Right.
It's like the people who tell you to relax.
Has that ever worked?
You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's just not a, it's just not the right approach to an intractable problem.
So I want to come back a little bit later and, and, and maybe hear more, more thoughts from you about how you suggest we approach both individually, because you know, this happens one-on-one, but it's also a sort of collective conversation on, on these kinds of topics.
Um, which, which I, I think a lot of the times we, we, we do quite, quite badly.
But let's pivot for right now to your book.
I'm getting the impression now that maybe you were in the midst of writing the book or you had just finished the book when this article came out.
Is that the thing?
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
So it was on my mind.
So the book once again is called How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science.
And one theme in the book is The modern fetishizing of ancient cultures and traditions as somehow belonging to like a time before the fall, a time before civilization and technology not only created our disconnection from the natural world, which of course must be at the root of all of our maladies, But also led to the loss of empowerment in relation to things like childbirth, which is where you start the book in the beginning, childbirth and food and the sacred.
But there's an interesting inversion that you point out between what perhaps Hippocrates in ancient Greece and the Yellow Emperor in ancient China meant by natural and what most people in the wellness sphere mean today when they invoke the idea of natural and especially natural healing, right?
Yeah, the typical divide with natural in the ancient world, and this is cross-cultural, would have been between... I mean, natural is not a word, and we can get to the Chinese context.
Obviously, all of these sorts of concepts are translations, but the relevant binary would have been natural and supernatural.
To the extent that the Huangdi Neijing, which is the Yellow Emperor's classic, or the Hippocratic Corpus, to the extent that those were concerned with natural versus something else, they were concerned with natural versus supernatural.
So the Huangdi Neijing was characterized, surprisingly, by a lack of supernatural explanations of illness.
And that was a departure in the same way Hippocrates or whoever the author was that wrote the Hippocratic Treatise on Epilepsy refused to recognize supernatural explanations for the illness.
So, it was a naturalized form of medicine.
And as I point out in the book, what I think is so fascinating is that nowadays, if you're looking for supernatural explanations, the best place to go Would be to people who are sympathetic to natural medicine.
Yeah.
In other words, now the relevant binary has totally shifted from natural versus supernatural, that is to say, curing with pharmaceuticals versus curing with prayer, to natural and supernatural together over and against artificial.
And understanding what people mean when they say I value natural in the modern context versus artificial is essential to understanding everything from the appeal of natural childbirth to the appeal of natural markets to the appeal of owning guns which in a way way is a kind of natural form of self-defense.
This is how people understand it.
How do we, we have the natural right.
You hear this all the time with gun advocates and it may, and it's very confusing.
We have natural right to bear arms.
If you ask me, what the heck does that mean?
A gun's not a natural thing.
And they say, well, no, what I mean is that it's a natural right as an individual to defend yourself in any way you can and to outsource your ability to defend yourself to some artificial top-down institution.
Well, that's as unnatural as it gets.
This is again why there's some overlap and I'd love to see good sociology done on this between mixed martial arts enthusiasts and natural medicine as well.
So there's this idea, well I'm going to learn how to kick someone's ass because that's the way that you really do it.
Relying on some other person and all of a sudden you start to realize, well maybe this isn't about Natural in the sense that you might imagine it.
Maybe it's about something more like organic or bottom up versus top down or individual freedom versus artificial constraint.
And when you start to see those parallels, I think it's really at least it was for me when I was researching writing this book, a paradigm shift in how you understand the crossover appeal of various different approaches to protecting yourself or organizing your government.
Yeah, so maybe primordial versus cultivated or civilized or something, right?
That's exactly it!
And in the ancient Chinese context, the word for natural, 自然, literally, that is translated as natural, literally means self-so, or so of itself.
And this is contrast as much as it's like organic, right?
It's spontaneous.
And so the contrast is not necessarily between, you know, artifice.
I mean, it is in a sense, but the important part, artifice and naturalness, the important part is that something is so of itself as opposed to being manipulated.
That's that's the key, that it's free and it's spontaneous and it's organic.
There's grassroots versus top down astroturf.
What is astroturf?
I mean, well, yeah, it's plastic, but What we really mean is that it was organized top-down rather than bottom-up.
It wasn't spontaneous, it was deliberate.
Once you substitute that understanding of natural in, all of a sudden all sorts of things that might not make intuitive sense come together.
Yeah, it's a really key idea in the book that I think it just sort of turns everything on its head.
It's fascinating.
You cite an example that's related to this of how perhaps a few hundred years ago Aristocrats would eat highly refined foods.
They would eat white foods, white flour, white rice, super refined sugary delicacies and they believed that this kept them sort of pure and vital and much better than the peasants.
And the poorer then would eat many kinds of unprocessed and the kinds of whole grain foods that today are fetishized by the upper class who are into wellness and natural living, right?
Yes, well another sort of darker side of the way in which this understanding of empowerment plays out, and I say darker just because I don't think it's a great psychological tendency, is that if your sense of security and empowerment comes from individual control over your well-being, over and against authority, one of the things that's important is that you have something that other people don't.
Strangely, that can mean a kind of privilege.
It's you have access to sorts of things, knowledge.
You mentioned conspiracy, but this is why it flows, as you said, so easily into conspiracy.
You have access to things that other people don't have access to, and in lots of different kinds.
If you're poor, you can't afford Expensive natural goop products, or you know, as I talk about in the book, you can't afford an expensive condo that's been tailored to Deepak Chopra's natural medicine specifications.
So then you look for other forms of exclusivity, which is to say conspiracy or occult knowledge.
You know, occult just means hidden.
Hidden from whom?
Hidden from other people, hidden from the authorities.
Esoteric.
Esoteric, exactly.
That's bad, I think.
I think that's bad.
I think it's bad for empowerment to be predicated on having things that other people don't.
At the same time, it makes sense.
What is power except for some kind of imbalance between the things that want to harm you and what you have?
Yeah, I have the hidden knowledge that will protect me from the things that you are vulnerable to and so therefore I can have power over you or you can come over to the dark side and join me and you too can benefit from this.
That's exactly right.
I mean, even, you know, I didn't talk about this in the HuffPo piece about guns and wellness, but I think there's something to the appeal of concealed carry, which again, for people who do not fetishize this, it's bizarre.
You know, it's like, well, why would you need to hide your gun?
And I think the answer is having this secret concealed power It feels really good.
It feels really good.
You're moving through the world as if you are normal, but in fact you are a very powerful being.
Oh yeah, it's pure Clint Eastwood.
Yeah.
Go ahead punk, make my day.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm just waiting for someone to think that they can mess with me.
That's important and something that I wouldn't just want to wave away.
Too often, I think, in the discourse or the dialogue around guns or wellness, there's a lot of impatience with this kind of thing.
And I know it because I've experienced it myself, but it's important to acknowledge these needs rather than just You're trying to wish them away or sneer them away.
Yeah, they live in all of us.
And I can, even though I did my sort of bad Clint Eastwood reference, I know that feeling.
I know that feeling of wanting to have an edge that my opponent might not think I have.
Because there's an anticipatory kind of rush in that.
That's exactly it.
You know, you mentioned Deepak Chopra and I wanted to say that your description of the condo development that Chopra is somehow involved in, right?
And he has a condo and these are multi, multi-million dollar properties and this whole sort of development project that's very, very aimed at uber-wealthy people who are interested in wellness.
You have a moment there where you're describing sort of the different tiers, different levels at which you can buy in and how much more you can spend to get even more wellness within your sanctuary.
And you have just this really, really clever moment where you point out that at a particular tier, It's not that you get to camp out on the rooftop or something.
It is claiming all kinds of natural benefits, but it's this level of intense climate control and purified water that you're going to bathe in and just all of these elements that the colors being arranged, the lighting being in a particular way, that's all going to give you these natural benefits that are obviously so incredibly, incredibly bespoke and based on this.
It's amazing.
Yeah, it was sad, honestly, visiting those condos and seeing what it was that was being advertised.
In part, as I say in the book, because, and this goes back to the empowerment, it's an understanding of empowerment that's relentlessly individual.
And I don't mean that there isn't a community involved in these forms of empowerment, but at the end of the day, it belongs to you.
You own it.
You get to buy the supplements and you get to administer them.
You own the condo.
You own the gun.
And yes, there's a community of gun owners.
There's, you know, I'm sure the condo, the Deepak Chopra's, it's not his condo, but it's a sort of branded form of this condo.
You know, I'm sure all those people meet and they're like, it's great.
I love my, you know, shower with its, with its natural purified water and my, my paint that mimics natural light.
But at the end of the day, it's a, it's a community of individuals.
And to me it seems tragic to embrace a kind of empowerment that depends on this absence of collective purity or collective power.
That's bad and that's sad.
And what we need to do to solve it, and I'm sure we'll get to this a little bit later in the conversation, what we need to do to solve this problem is make sure that our community, our communal institutions are focused on empowerment.
We have good examples of that, right?
I mean, religion does this all the time.
Churches do a really good job of this.
I mean, obviously there's, you can, you can debate that, but it's not, it's not impossible to create communal forms of empowerment.
And it's, I actually think it's when we're, when those are missing, that these individualized alternative forms of empowerment move in.
Along those same notes, you know, you referenced Goop and you just mentioned it a little bit ago as well and Whole Foods and Deepak Chopra and I just, as someone who's critical of that whole world, from inside of it, having really bought into all of it and being in those kinds of communities and in many ways benefiting from them and still identifying with a lot of those values, the way that you really expose, you know, you talk about the bar of soap that you can buy at Whole Foods very cheaply on specific days of the month and it just says,
On the bar of soap, there's all of these mouth-wateringly, on-the-nose metaphors that get used to create these associations.
One of the things you say early in the book is God as nature and nature as goodness in this kind of Uroboros self-referential circle.
That's right and that's why it's so this is again crucial to understanding what's going on with guns or wellness is that you can't simply think of these rituals that people have or these practices that people engage in as monads separable from a broader way of making sense of the world or feeling empowered.
The gun is not just a gun.
It is about one's natural rights in the same way that well, taking those supplements isn't just about dealing with your thyroid problem or whatever it is.
It's about being a certain kind of person in the world.
And that's why I think the inexplicable to many people threat of taking a, why do you want to take away my gun?
Why do you want to take away my supplements?
That, that, that commercial, which if people haven't seen it, they should immediately go Google on, on YouTube with Mel Gibson.
I think, uh, yeah, it's Mel Gibson.
And he's, he's, you know, he's like, people are coming to take away, it's a SWAT team outside coming to take away supplements, which is actually really interesting because it shows you the overlap of gun culture and wellness culture in this really interesting way, which is that the authorities are not out to protect you.
They're coming to get you.
So you need your supplements and your guns to take care of yourself.
And that's why the reaction is so strong to any sense that someone is going to come after this.
It's like a religious freedom question, really, even if it doesn't look that way.
Yeah, I remember in the 90s when there was legislation being debated about how to classify supplements and any of the health food stores I went into, there were these petitions to sign, there were people talking about it, there was this big campaign to get people involved in protecting the right to buy supplements and not have them be designated as medical or having to require some kind of scientific stamp of approval.
And it was a really big deal.
To go back to this idea of nature as God or natural as good, I think what becomes very difficult for those who are invested in these particular approaches to empowerment to understand is that natural things aren't always good.
I mean, this is, again, how many times I'm so tired of hearing people like, yeah, cyanide's natural.
Yeah, sure.
But beyond that sort of cliche, it's that sometimes spontaneously organized things are bad.
Natural things really can make you sick, and it seems so counterintuitive because the term is theologically charged.
It is synonymous with holy or pure, and the idea that something natural, exercising your natural right to defend yourself, how could that be more dangerous?
Then outsourcing your natural right to the government and letting them defend.
Surely it doesn't make any sense.
Of course you're exercising your natural right would be safe and pure and good.
It's a violation.
It's almost like sacrilege to admit to yourself.
Well, no, perhaps Perhaps I'm not better.
Perhaps that's not how it works.
Perhaps that's not the best way to protect myself.
Perhaps I do need to surrender or submit my agency to some other force.
It's this really difficult realization, I think, to come to and to apply in our lives, which is that our intuitions are often faulty.
Absolutely.
and the thing that feels the most right could actually be wrong.
And how to discern that and follow through on that discernment, I think it's kind of central to the human dilemma.
Absolutely.
And with guns, I'm not nearly as familiar with the data and the proposals behind gun legislation that people have out there and when they fail or succeed.
But what I would say is that I do believe there are ways to allow in these forms of empowerment.
This is the classic question of religious liberty.
I think there are ways to allow people to have them while also recognizing what really does make people safe.
And this goes to the, you know, a good example of this is thoughts and prayers.
Every time there's a shooting, the thoughts and prayers happen.
And every time the thoughts and prayers happen, the gun control advocates get really upset.
Understandably.
What are your prayers?
Stop your prayers.
Don't do anything.
And so on and so forth.
I don't think that's a good reaction.
I think thoughts and prayers.
Prayers, again, are something an individual can do.
An individual can relate to God, the most powerful force in the world, and ask for some kind of intervention.
You don't want to waltz in with the introductory note of taking that away from people.
It's absurd.
It's like walking into a church and spitting in the holy water basin before making your case for something.
It just doesn't make any sense.
You can have, as long as the thoughts and prayers aren't also paired with a rejection of the kinds of laws that we might need to keep each other safe.
As long as the supplements are compatible with going and getting chemo when you need it, then we're okay.
And I think the reflex to take away the supplements or to mock the prayers or to attack the record of guns keeping people safe, I don't think that's a good reflex.
I think it is counterproductive.
And in the end, if what's going to keep us safer is people not issuing chemotherapy for alternative medicine or people agreeing to gun control laws, it's bad to open with the kinds of statements about other people's sacred rituals that are going to turn them off to the sorts of reforms that are necessary to keep us safe.
A great observation and a good piece of advice to take to heart.
In talking about the definition of natural and how it's changed over time and the importance of some of the hedging that I think you do really, really well in terms of dealing with the tangle that we've mentioned.
You go back in time to a period in early city life where the kinds of things that were being put in food To make food look a certain way or to make food taste a certain way or to just cheaply produce more of a certain kind of food were just like horrifically, horrifically poisonous.
It's astonishing.
It's astonishing.
Mercury and all kinds of mercury lined wrappers and all I mean, all kinds of it was just it was atrocious.
Incredibly dangerous.
Yeah, so there was no regulation of any of that kind of thing and so it's easy to understand how in the aftermath of that you have the development of more regulation and you have the emphasizing of ingredients that actually are food.
And actually are things that your body can process.
And I've certainly been, you know, I would say maybe 20 years ago, I was very caught up in the whole ideology that says, you know, everything is toxic.
Our food is toxic.
The cleaning supplies are toxic.
Our air is toxic.
The water is toxic.
And so you need to constantly be cleansing and reading labels and finding ways to source everything from You know, what you, what you clean your toilet with to, to your toothpaste, to your shampoo, everything has to, you have to find sources that you can trust that are going to actually be non-toxic.
And especially if you have kids, oh my God, right?
And so it's, it's easy to see how, how that gets, everything can kind of get folded into that.
And we actually have a guy who we've covered a lot on the podcast named JP Sears, who's, who's from here on the West side of LA, who for a long time was sort of a, a,
Emotional healing coach and then he became more of a comedian because he has kind of a satirical sense of humor He did really really good satire of this whole wellness Domain and over time he's just gotten completely red-pilled and you made me think of him He's gone down the whole rabbit hole with regard to all of it including stop the steal and and some QAnon kind of ideas and being anti-vax and all the rest of it and One of his catchphrases is, never outsource your truth.
There it is.
Do your own research.
Yeah, do your own research.
But also, not only is it do your own research, from a wellness and spiritual standpoint, it's the truth lives in your heart.
And when you know it, you know it.
And it doesn't matter what any other authority figure tells you, don't outsource your truth.
And what do you know, J.P.
Sears has become really big into guns.
Now that he's made this gradual transition.
Yep.
One thing I try to do in the book, and I actually do this in my classes too when I'm teaching religion and medicine or religion and science, is I think it can be helpful to take with anti-vaccine, for example.
There's, of course, a long history of this, a lot of scholarship on this.
You may have talked about it on the podcast before, but if you go to a different context, Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, and you think about NGOs coming in, trying to get people to get There's a long history of colonialism.
People have been traumatized collectively and individually.
There is something deeply disempowering and anti-dignity to feel like you depend on some kind of foreign government and opaque medicines that don't fit with your culture, tradition, that you don't understand.
So what you end up with is all sorts of rumors from vampiricism.
Often it's about sterilization, that people are coming in, that what is happening is NGOs want to sterilize you with these vaccines or foreigners want to sterilize you with these vaccines.
When you think about that, you think, well, OK, yeah, I get that.
That makes a lot of sense.
I understand where these people are coming from.
And of course, the strategy is to empower people, to get to know people on the ground, to not just waltz in and set up operations without consulting with local individuals.
And it's, I think, a little bit harder to sympathize, you know, David French or something, wanting his guns.
He's this very immensely privileged man who really has never faced anything like that.
How can you compare, you know, anti-vaccine sentiment in sub-Saharan Africa to David French's desire for guns?
But the truth is the same thing, because you know what?
Fear is fear.
And it's and it's stupid.
That's a word I don't use lightly, but it's stupid and inconsiderate.
To want to rank people's fears and then say, well, this fear is just much less reasonable, a much smaller fear, rank people's traumas.
And that's just not how trauma or pain or fear work.
And so really what's going on with anti-vaccine sentiment here is is no different, I think, in terms of how it operates than it is anywhere else.
Addressing that is really important.
So when someone like Sears says, don't outsource your truth, Sears is scared.
He's scared and he feels helpless.
I mean, you know who feels helpless?
I'll tell you who feels helpless, Julian.
Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, feels helpless.
He feels helpless because there are institutions outside of his control that often come to conclusions that disempower him.
And that's a terrible, terrible feeling.
And so he's going to start leaning into, as any person who feels disempowered in this particular way does, finding sources of truth within himself, right?
What does that mean?
Of course, it means just seeking out other authorities that agree with you, but anyone can feel this.
The most powerful people in the world can feel this sense of existential helplessness.
And the antidote, ever and always, is not outsourcing your truth.
Because outsourcing it has led you to this feeling of helplessness to begin with.
Don't outsource your ability to protect yourself.
Don't outsource your medical care.
Keep it here.
Keep it to yourself.
And that will give you at least a sense of power and dignity.
Yeah, I wanted to go back to the Wellness Industrial Complex, because you describe it, I think, as a kind of recapitulation, in a way, of both the Indian caste system and the Medieval Catholic Church's practice of selling indulgences, as well as a much more recent kind of ecumenical practice of pew rental.
In that these create a kind of social hierarchy that has some sort of basis in spiritual rank, perhaps.
Tell us about that.
This is another warning sign for me, is when any standard of purity seems to map directly onto the kind of stratification of power in a society.
So when you mentioned those, that back in the day people would eat pure white bread because that was the way to maintain purity, it's because it was expensive and inaccessible.
And if you go back even further to the sort of later Taoist monks and alchemists who were promising forms of purity and natural salvation, what would they say?
Well, they would say things like the masses of people eat the five grains, the Wugu.
Well, look at them.
They're getting sick and they're dying.
Of course, that's just because they're humans and that's just the human condition, but you know, they're getting sick and they're dying.
What's causing it?
It's because they're like everybody else.
This is the sheeple of ancient China.
They're just doing what everyone else does.
I will offer you, say the monks or goop or whoever it is that's selling this, I will offer you the thing that the masses don't have.
It's going to cost you money, but I will offer it to you, and your salvation will lie in distinguishing yourself from those masses.
Whenever I see that, whenever something like that happens, whether it's buying your way to the front of a church so that you can be literally closer than anyone else to the Word of God, or whether it's buying your way to purity through Goop's astonishingly overpriced products, or whether it's even owning a gun The way the other people around you don't.
The search for empowerment by distinguishing yourself from the masses is both incredibly important, cross-cultural, trans-historical.
It always works.
It's a very, very, very, very easy way to convince people of things.
And it's also bad.
It distorts things.
Now, I want to say, it has its roots in truth.
Oftentimes, the most privileged people are the ones who do the best.
The people who are least likely to live near pollution are the wealthy, to take one obvious example.
And so, what's really bad about these kind of caste-based or power-based forms of understanding purity is that they start, as all of these things do, with a grain of truth.
And then instead of the solution being, well, let's improve the kinds of things, let's improve pollution, let's make it, let's make it so that people don't have to live by highways or something like that.
They capitalize on it, no pun intended, by offering people an escape, individuals an escape from that problem.
And often that escape doesn't, you know, all it does is reinforce their sense that they're already distant from the masses anyway.
So it's not a good solution.
In the same way that guns aren't a good solution to violence, you know?
It's a bad solution, but it does, if you've got your gun hidden, it means you're walking around thinking you're different from everyone else.
Feels good.
You're not going to be the sucker.
You're not going to be the victim.
That's right.
You write about The distinction between the priest and the doctor actually being quite recent, and illness as once being the province of supernatural diagnosis and prescription, and in some circles it still is.
And then you borrow these two really interesting questions from the anthropologist Arthur Kleinman, who I believe is also a psychoanalyst or psychotherapist of some kind.
Physician, yeah.
Psychiatrist, I think.
He observed... Don't quote me on it.
...that when we experience suffering, there are these two questions that arise.
The first is the question of bafflement, or why me?
And the second is the question of order and control, or what is there to be done?
And this really, I think, gets to the heart of the matter.
It's, you know, you're talking about these things that are transcultural and exist, you know, perennially across time.
This existential anxiety of uncertainty and powerlessness, How to make sense of why some people get sick and die, why some people are victims of violent crime, and how we avoid it.
The truth.
Part of the truth, at least.
And there's a great, I think I mentioned this in the book, although I'm not sure, there was a study that came out, I forget when it came out, Nature, don't quote me on any of this, but the guts of it are true.
Study came out, very respected scientific journal, in which they attributed a significant amount of cancer cases to random chance.
It's just random mutations.
It's not smoking.
It's not toxicity.
It's not genetics.
It really is just random chance.
And I remember reading... Well, that and repressed anger, obviously.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
You did it.
At least with repressed anger, you have some control over it.
Then you can just un-repress yourself and avoid cancer.
So, people were really upset by this study.
And what they were upset by was the idea, which has been upsetting since the story of Job, that you might just suffer randomly.
That the reason your house got robbed is because sometimes houses get robbed.
That's it.
That's it.
And at the end of the day, you can do some things to stop your house from being robbed, but you can never defend yourself fully.
That's terrible.
Or why did you get lung cancer?
So many smokers don't get lung cancer.
Why me?
And the answer is, I don't know.
We don't know.
That's the truth, but it's unacceptable.
It's an unacceptable answer often to people who are suffering.
Why me?
We don't know.
It does not solve the problem of bafflement.
And so, people are going to seek out rituals and authorities that answer those questions for them.
And to the extent that science and scientific medicine can't provide those answers, by design, people are going to look somewhere else.
They're going to look to a place where there's never, where the answer is never, I don't know.
And so a place like that is the Hippocrates Health Institute in West Palm Beach, Florida, where you spend quite a bit of time.
I feel like you've been there for, for a lot of pages.
I want us to just read their mission statement because in a way it perfectly exemplifies this aspect of the Zeitgeist we're discussing.
So, on their about page it says, starting in 1956, the year that Hippocrates Wellness was founded by Anne Wigmore, we have operated on the belief that given the proper tools and environment, our bodies are self-healing and self-rejuvenating.
That was a philosophy practiced by Hippocrates himself and passed down to us today from this father of modern medicine.
As a 5th century BC Greek physician, Hippocrates treated the body as a whole, not just as a series of parts, and taught a natural healing process centered on a wholesome natural diet.
He developed an oath of medical ethics that physicians today still repeat as they begin their careers in medicine.
An important part of that original oath Written in 400 BC reads, I will give no deadly medicine to anyone.
This admonition seems to have been disregarded by much of modern medicine as physicians brought blindly and reflexively embrace the marketing campaign of every new pharmaceutical drug coming off industry assembly lines.
They usually decide what to prescribe based on the education, in quotations, they receive from the marketing representatives for the drug companies.
For a half century, we've seen pass through our institute doors practically every illness and disease known to afflict humankind.
Some guests arrive after being given virtual death sentences by their medical practitioners.
They are told they have only weeks or months to live.
Wow.
Others come because they believe in preventative medicine and they understand the importance of detoxifying to strengthen their immune system.
Others have come to retard the aging process, control their weight, or simply enhance the quality of their lives.
Wow.
What was it like being at Hippocrates?
Well, as I say in the book, the guy who heads up the place is just the living, breathing caricature of a snake oil salesman.
I mean, when you see this man, which is interesting because he's not natural looking.
This is not like a hippie, you know, hippie, dippy guy with dreads or something.
He's got a suit and tie.
He's artificially tanned to a degree that's really remarkable.
His teeth are unusually white and pointy.
You know, I mean, it's just, you know, he's got a widow's peak that Satan would envy.
And yet the clinic itself is very, very peaceful and relaxing.
There's trees everywhere.
The patients are juicing their own wheatgrass and drinking it.
And to go back to part of that mission statement, one of the things that's reinforced by the environment is that our systems are naturally healthy.
That all forms of ill health are departures from some kind of plan.
And 200 years ago, even 100 years ago, and certainly in some parts of the world, even today, the idea, you know, if you suffered, and again, this is a misunderstanding of suffering that goes back to Job.
The idea was, well, if you suffered, you must have done something wrong.
And of course, the book of Job is an argument against this.
All Job's asshole friends were like, well, what'd you do, Job?
I bet you did something.
Like, that must be why you've got boils all over you.
And the book, of course, is an argument against that.
But the reason it has to argue against it is such a powerful belief.
So the idea is, well, you must have done something wrong.
Secular science has advanced to the point that we can just no longer blame illness on sin.
But we are desperate to believe in a kind of natural system that is benevolent and perfect.
And so, instead of talking about God or sin or whatever the religious or supernatural explanation of illness is, we switch over to natural.
And this is what happens at the Apocaties Institute.
Any disorder you feel, the pain during childbirth, cancer, whatever it is, that's because of a departure from the natural order of things.
And all you need to do to avoid pain and suffering or heal yourself is to go back to that order.
There's always an explanation.
There's always a solution to the bafflement.
And what's essential is that you, you are a key part of that solution.
Remember, again, in that mission statement, this is something you hear all the time in alternative medicine, treating the whole body.
There is something to this, which is that No one wants to feel like a collection of parts.
As I say in the book, we are not automobiles.
And even though we can be actually treated as automobiles, it's fine.
You know, as a surgeon goes in and fixes your foot, that is fine.
But we're whole people.
We're whole human beings.
And to the extent that there are systems meant to deal with our suffering, like our medical system, that do not fully embrace our humanity, places like Hippocrates are going to move in and supply that for you.
Yeah, one of the ways that you framed it that I thought was was it's so simple and yet and yet so on point is that you noticed while you were at Hippocrates Health Institute that there were differences between that place and how it felt to be in that place and conventional hospitals that had nothing to do with superstition.
There were differences that had to do with aesthetics and bedside manner and the experience that someone was having that was perhaps empowering, dignified.
Tremendously so.
You get to get your own food.
I mean, just the contrast between, and we're actually starting to see this now in bespoke hospitals, which is, you know, our concierge care.
There's plants everywhere.
You get to choose your own food.
You get to make your own food.
You get to interact with other people.
You're not isolated and controlled.
You are not, in the etymology of the word itself, you are not a patient.
You are not waiting patiently to do things.
You are active and empowered and you are surrounded by life in the form of plants and there's a noted absence of stainless steel, I feel like, at the Hippocrates Institute, right?
Everything doesn't look sterile and clean because their ultimate concern is not with sterility and cleanliness.
It is with making you feel healthy, which is different from actually making you healthy, although they're, of course, interrelated.
But it does seem, yes, absolutely.
It does seem like there is something that has happened in the extension of a kind of clinical laboratory setting in which you're trying to isolate variables very, very precisely.
Somehow extending that kind of ambiance into the place where human beings are being cared for, it doesn't work.
And it does explain why people feel so alienated.
That's absolutely right.
It's very dehumanizing.
It's very dehumanizing.
And it's also, and again, I said I was going to touch on that, so this is a good enough time to touch on it now.
It's also opaque.
So thinking about insurance, for example, just to tell you, medical billing, which famously, at least in the United States, famously Byzantine and opaque and totally inexplicable.
When you don't have access to the system, that is controlling you and determining how you are supposed to act.
It's tremendously disempowering.
And in the realm of technology studies, this term epistemic opacity, that I think is really helpful here, which basically just means that knowledge of how something works can be opaque or transparent.
And so when you grow your own food, it appears to you, at least, that this is epistemically transparent, how the tomato got to your table.
You put a plant in the garden, it grew, the sunlight made it grow, then you picked the tomato, you brought it in.
Whereas, when you go to Walmart to buy the tomatoes, how those tomatoes got there is epistemically opaque.
This is why the iPhone, or cars, people complain about.
Cars, back in the day, you could open up the hood of any car, and if you were good with cars, you could fix it.
And now cars are designed to be epistemically opaque.
You don't understand how they work.
You have to take it in.
And then what do they do at the shop?
I don't know if you ever take any of your car.
They'll often just plug it in to a computer and the computer diagnoses it.
So even to the people at the shop, the algorithm that's diagnosing the car is opaque.
Does that mean that cars today are less safe or that we are paying more to fix our cars than in the past?
No, it does not mean that.
But it does mean that we're going to feel disempowered by our cars more than we did in the past.
You're not going to be able to just ask your neighbor to come over and fix your car.
And a medical system that is designed to diagnose and bill people In a way that is opaque and inaccessible is going to necessarily lead to an alternative medical system in which people feel like their care is transparent, that they understand it.
And there's nothing that's easier to understand than unnatural hurts you.
Natural is good.
Eat natural foods.
Don't eat unnatural foods and you'll be fine.
That's great.
It's very empowering.
Then you go juice your wheatgrass and die of cancer six months later.
I want to read a little bit from you here, because there's one particular passage that, when I heard it, I was just really struck by it.
And I'd love to hear, in closing, just whatever final thoughts you have, and maybe they'll be related to this or maybe not.
That's entirely up to you.
There's very little critique or exclusion in the world of natural healing.
Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, homeopathy, and you mentioned an indigenous Native American form of healing, despite being developed according to radically different methods, All are welcome because all are sacred to the people who believe in them.
Calling them natural simply lays a symbolic and epistemological foundation for their coexistence.
Observing that modern medical science cannot do this is not a critique so much as a recognition of its necessary shortcomings.
Methodologically separating the cultural and personal significance of medical rituals from evaluations of their efficacy is an extraordinary engine of discovery.
Maybe I'll ask you what you discover through that extraordinary engine.
Well, first, just to take that idea that this is a world of inclusion.
That's really important because, of course, if you went if you went to actual Chinese medical practitioners who are developing Chinese medicine, they wouldn't say, oh, yeah, this is totally totally compatible with with Indian medicine.
It's the same thing.
Qi is really just chakras.
I mean, this is like it's If you think about it.
Homeopathy simulates the same mechanism.
Right.
Exactly.
It's totally absurd if you think about it until you realize it's not what it's about.
It's not about an engine of discovery.
This is not.
Now, I mean, for Chinese medicine, it was and so it was for Ayurveda.
But for people that embrace these now, it's not about primarily figuring out what's true.
It's about feeling empowered.
And I suspect and this is maybe a good place to end.
I suspect that in gun ownership communities, I bet there is not a lot of, hey, okay, which gun is the best gun for protecting yourself?
All these other guns are bad.
There's really only one kind of gun you should own to protect yourself.
My guess is these are extremely welcoming And open communities and everyone's like, oh, cool gun, man.
You chose a handgun.
I went with a rifle.
No one's no one is my guess.
And again, I've never been in a community of people discussing how their preferred guns protect them.
But I would guess counterintuitively, perhaps to people who think that gun owners are all mean or bad.
It's super supportive.
There is no wrong gun to own.
In a community of gun owners who own guns to protect themselves, just as there is- You qualify.
That's right.
There's no wrong alternative medicine in a community of people who have sought out an alternative medicine to be empowered.
That's how it is.
And recognizing what these, to outsiders, forms of comfort and empowerment, what they're providing to the people that have them, failing to recognize that is a disastrous first step when it comes to ultimately solving the problems failing to recognize that is a disastrous first step when it comes to ultimately solving the problems that I think we all want to solve, which is to make our communities People recognize it when often, I think, when the culture is not their own.
In other words, the idea that you would have an indigenous elder present in a doctor's office to make people, indigenous people, who might not be comfortable with the culture of medicine that they're stepping into, to make them more comfortable.
That's that's just a no brainer.
That's kind.
People don't want to extend that same courtesy, I think, to to those who they feel are more like them culturally.
No one wants to extend that courtesy to David French and his guns because they feel like David French's guns are dangerous.
But but and I get that.
But if we're going to solve these problems, I think that the same kind of empathy and compassion and understanding has to be extended to everyone who embraces a ritual, no matter how irrational, that helps them feel safe and empowered in a world that's arbitrary and dangerous.
Yeah, it makes me think about how our intuition's about choice.
And how I think we might look at someone from a culture that's radically different from our own and say, well, they have no choice in thinking as they do.
But we look at someone who's very similar to us, who has a diametrically opposed point of view, and we go, well, they're choosing to be an amoral kind of bastard.
You know, I want to, I want to end on, I want to, I want to end on something, this guy, Rick Bedlack, he's a, he's a Duke, he's an ALS specialist and just an incredible guy.
And he, he wears these Like sparkly tuxedos and ties and stuff.
He dresses like crazy.
He just totally dresses crazy.
He doesn't wear doctors, you know, traditional doctor's clothing.
And I said, Rick, you know, I was talking to him.
I said, Rick, why do you dress this way?
And he says, it's the best treatment I've got right now for ALS.
Wow.
You know, of course, it's sort of tongue-in-cheek, but not really.
What he means is that people need a moment where they can laugh.
Yeah.
Um, where they can get outside of their fear of this illness that has no, um, that has no good treatment right now.
And interestingly, Bedlack has told me that he refers people to alternative medicine practitioners.
Um, at Duke there's an integrative medicine center and he sends people there.
He is not a pseudoscientific loon by any means, but he understands, as only a physician who cares for patients with ALS probably could understand, just how important empowerment is.
And if you've got nothing else, who are you to tell your patient, That they can't laugh at your sparkly tie or go get acupuncture or try some kind of homeopathic medicine.
At least they can feel human and in control as they suffer.
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