How does it feel to grow up in a back-to-the-land house that vibrates with the anxious passion of conspiracy theories? What would happen when the world began to disconfirm the conspiratorial lore? How would you maintain your relationships, nurture the good, and gently let go of everything else?Maggie joins Matthew for this Listener Story to explore these questions in relation to her journey from childhood to today. Note: my question about conspirituality being an ethnicity was inspired by a conversation with listener Lilium Rajan, a writer who I hope to learn more from.
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I want to finish up by just quoting back something that you DMed to me, and I had some questions about it, but I don't know.
I think it might speak for itself, but you might have a further comment.
I kind of asked you, you know, how you stand now between the conspiracy theory world that you grew up in, and I think I wanted to point out that when you said, I came by it honestly, It almost sounds like conspirituality could be an ethnicity.
Yeah.
You know?
Which is really cool to think about and very subtle, too, because I think, you know, on our podcast project, we're, you know, offering all of these rational resistances to, you know, thinking like this and whatever.
But I mean, if it's actually a cultural and ethnic identity that is bound up with, you know, the history of hippiedom, you know, it's worth treading more carefully, I think.
Anyway, I was asking Where you stand now and you gave this response that I'll just read back.
You wrote, I keep myself on an intentional bridge.
I would probably focus on the sometimes uncomfortable maintenance of that balance.
Personally, what I'm striving for is to not come out the other side exactly, but more
about intentional shedding and integration.
There might be some interesting stuff in there about how fathers shape us, unschooling, whether humans need enchantment and mystery to survive happily, and maybe how heterodox thinkers fall prey to false beliefs and how they sometimes are ahead of the curve.
Yeah, dude, I can't unpack all of that.
No, but I wonder what's most what's most important.
So like, it's interesting.
So I so fell out of love with conspiracy in the last couple of years, not in any small part through, you know, listening to to your podcast, right?
Like, I think I've listened to most of it.
And it's been really useful, but I was already sort of like had stopped being as conspiracy oriented as I had been.
Once Trump got elected, that was like a Like, no.
And then as Pizzagate kind of took off, I was like, well, that's patently crazy, so no.
And then you start, you know, you start kind of going down the opposite rabbit holes.
You follow the rabbit hole back off, maybe, is what happens.
Right.
There's a horseshoe turn at the bottom of the rabbit hole.
Right.
But there's still a couple of things there.
One is that there's lots of topics that deserve discussion, even if they, or in spite of, being promoted by conspiracy theorists.
So I would not suggest that we should not take on unconventional perspectives or topics or address them, you know, or criticize institutions or look seriously into some claims that are that are raised, you know, like The problem with this stuff is that, you know, it's like Save the Children takes you away from saving the children instead of towards it, right?
You're flagging a real thing, a real problem.
And, you know, you might even say, do wealthy and powerful people have more access to abuse?
Probably.
Absolutely they do.
Yeah.
Right.
But once you take that into a fantasy, then you can't do anything about it.
So I would say, like, You know, there's there's I wouldn't want to give up on some of the political content there actually, because I think a lot of it does deserve kind of, you know, like,
We deserve to question whether the lockdowns and mandates were the right thing to do on a policy level.
For sure.
For sure.
I think so, you know, and, and that deserves discussion.
I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater in a way, even if, if a lot of people, I would say take it in the wrong direction or whatever, you know, I might not agree with them on where they end up or how they got there, but I still would say like, you know, there's things we can talk about, you know, but the, and then on the other side, like with respect to things being enchanted, You know, and kind of like, you know, not wanting to lose a sense of, of wonder in a way.
And I think that a lot of more on the spirituality side, more than new age side of things, there is like a hunger.
Yeah.
For, for magic and for the sacred and for the excitement of synchronicity and the sense of like spiritual community and, and all of those things.
Right.
And it's been hard for me falling out with a lot of people who I would have had community
with before, because I didn't talk about it a lot here, but I've also been fairly engaged
with a number of sort of new age communities and neo-shamanic practitioners, stuff like
that.
You know, like my falling out of love with conspirituality, I suppose, has left me personally
in a bit of a spiritual gap, you know, that I'm figuring out what pieces I can reconstruct
into my life.
So there's like an epistemological thing where I don't want to lose my questioning of convention,
nor my tendency to follow rabbit holes, informational rabbit holes.
Cause you never know what, you know, but I don't want to fall into a trap of believing things that are really patently untrue as like a foundational belief or something, you know?
So these two kinds of things are, are difficult.
And I find like, um, No one seems to like it.
Like, no one who's completely in the conventional seems to like questioning.
Like, if I said we deserved question mandates, a lot of people don't like that.
At the same time, like, you know, like, it doesn't matter what you do.
Like, people will criticize you for it, right?
Or take some issue, especially when, you know, the polarization has become so intense.
And I think, like, personally, I'm trying to become less polarized in a whole lot of ways.
