Sure, a big question: one Derek explores in the context of this nearly three-year-old Conspirituality project. Criticism and awareness are essential tools in a critical thinking kit, but to what end? As he prepares upcoming presentations on the topic of misinformation in public health, Derek reflects on the value of identifying charlatans and quacks while also speculating about how to move forward.
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What are we doing here?
I mean, what are we building toward?
What is the goal?
It's something I've been thinking about the last few months of this podcast.
And if you're a new bonus subscriber, welcome.
Thank you for your support.
This is a Conspiratuality Bonus episode.
I'm Derek Barris.
The question came up after we filed our book, Conspiratuality, which is being published in June, and I started sketching out my next book, which I'm writing myself, which is on body dysmorphia, male fragility.
And so the question is, where does that lead to?
When you're talking about these concepts, what do you ultimately want to get to?
And as I was going through the process of sketching, I realized it was contentment.
Which is nothing different than when I started studying Buddhism almost 30 years ago.
Now, I'm not a Buddhist, to be fair, but my academic studies is in religion, and Buddhism has always been my favorite.
It provides a nice template for a lot of the issues that I grapple with and the way that I try to live my life.
I long ago realized that happiness isn't really a goal.
It's a byproduct of a life well lived, but it's not really something that I strive for.
And of course we know things like money and fame and all those things aren't really goals ultimately because we have plenty of research and data showing that people who strive for that are never content.
And so that's why I feel like the Buddha was onto something when he realized that contentment through the good times and the bad, and even through the sort of monotone times where things were just kind of coasting along, was really the ultimate in which you could strive for.
I don't want to get into a conversation about all of the metaphysics and extras that are associated with that or any religion or philosophy or belief system.
But it also is something, and excuse me for the anecdote to start today's episode, but it's relevant.
It's something that came to mind the first week of this new year.
Like a lot of people, I was laid off in the latest round of tech layoffs.
I was working for a tech company.
And I started thinking, where do I want to go from here?
And I told my wife.
I'd like to be writing full-time again, because my last few jobs have entailed a lot of different aspects of media and editing, music production, all good stuff, but when you're doing 10 or 11 things for a startup, it can be a lot of a load and not really allowing you to focus on one thing.
So I said I'd like to write again, but I'd also like to look into non-profits.
Now, just to get to the point, I ended up landing a job with Freethink Media, who had bought Big Think a few years ago.
I was a Big Think columnist for many years.
I'm a staff writer there.
My focus is in non-profits.
Synchronicity, whatever you want to say.
It's kind of nice how it worked out.
It's a counterbalance, being able to work with an organization now that is responsible for funding over a thousand nonprofits.
And even the first two that I've come across are talking about ways of tailoring education to individuals and also to get away from the elitist aspects of education, meaning For people who want to get into vocational school, not having the stigmas associated with that.
Creating individual career tracks for people from an earlier age.
And then another one is a group of universities that have come together to talk about political polarization and the ways that we think the other side really operate when that's not true.
For example, one study they recently did had to do with political violence and how something like, with both Democrats and Republicans, over 50% of respondents thought that the other side condoned political violence or even killing political opponents, when in reality, when they were interviewed, it was something like .03% of each side.
And so we have this idea of the other all the time.
So these are just two of the first organizations I've started to work with.
It's a nice counterbalance, as I said, to the work of what we do in conspirituality, which is kind of get mired in cults and conspiracy theories and anti-experts, anti-science a lot.
And that can weigh on you, especially coming up on three years of doing this work.
So it's nice to be able to focus on a whole bunch of organizations that are out on the ground really trying to do good work.
But that doesn't change the fact that with conspirituality, the same question also arises.
Where are we going?
What do we want to get out of this?
What do we hope that people take away from this project and the work that we do?
Because criticism is important.
I think it's really relevant to point out the techniques that certain influencers or aspiring cult leaders use so that you don't fall into that pipeline.
I think there's value in that.
But there's more.
Sure, contentment could play a role in that if that's part of your practice, but I was thinking about something a little bit more tangible.
And the reasons, in part, that I'm thinking about it, in terms of just where does this project go and what are we trying to accomplish, but also, this Friday, I have the pleasure of presenting to the WHO about online miscommunication.
They contacted me a few weeks ago to give a presentation to their communications department.
That's really an honor, truly.
And then, in a couple months, I'm the keynote speaker for the Oregon State Library Association, where I'm going to speak to all of the state's librarians, and I'll have the opportunity to talk about the work that we're doing here as well.
So I had to think about a broader framework for presenting what we do and ultimately what we hope people take away from this work.
And I'll say, right now, that there's no one single place.
I don't believe in that.
I don't believe that the causes of, let's say, something I focus on a lot, anti-vaccination, I don't think that the causes I don't think there's a singular cause, I think it's multivariate.
As are the solutions.
And that's not a satisfying answer all the time because we want simple answers.
This caused this, and then this.
But that's not really how societies operate.
There are too many diverse interests and voices involved for that to be the case.
And that can be frustrating, but it also gets back to what I was talking a moment ago about that study on political violence.
If you can create the other as this thing that always does this, that results in this, well then you have a clear enemy.
But that's, again, not how people operate.
And it's a real challenge in these online spaces.
I got to talk to someone yesterday who was a fan of the pod.
We met in person, made another in real life friend from it.
He's an amazing artist and I've been following his work.
And so we started talking about like...
How these communication forms that we have online are very, it's very hard to be able to debate and express nuance because they're not set up for that type of communication.
So where we were sitting across from each other talking for hours, And maybe didn't come to terms with it.
Well, we actually did agree on a lot, but but we were talking about our friends who we don't always agree with.
And the thing about in real life conversations with people you don't agree with is they tend not to get that heated.
Or if they are heated, then they lead somewhere.
There is some sort of resolution, even if there's no changing of minds.
Just being able to express yourself with someone is really, really healthy.
It's something I've struggled with, because I really like debating people.
I like it because it pushes me intellectually, it pushes me emotionally.
But in these cases where you're just typing at one another, it's impossible to actually reach any resolution.
It's why I mostly, at this point, don't engage a lot, especially with trolls.
I'll engage in good faith arguments, but it just takes up too much time when I could be out meeting people and actually having real world conversations.
Now that said, we are an online project, and we are talking about online indoctrination and how these organizations and influencers move through these online channels.
So I'm not saying I'm dropping off entirely.
I've lived my entire life online in some ways, or at least with computers.
My father was a computer programmer, so I grew up with them my entire lives.
