Notes from Matthew in response to a great question from a listener:
How do you keep from hating these people? The blasé unimaginative crackpots like Aubrey Marcus, the gaslighting meanderings of RFK Jr., the hordes of ignorant, ignorant, ignorant (trying to keep from saying st*pid) jackasses that follow in their wake, so desperately certain of their completely subjective fever dreams?
It’s not easy, but there are some ways of avoiding hatred and disgust, and it’s important to lean into them.
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Today I've got a brief set of reflections for you called Discussed Management, and I've written it in response to a really concise and critical question that came in from a listener by Direct Message.
The question goes, How do you keep from hating these people?
The blasé, unimaginative crackpots like Aubrey Marcus, the gaslighting meanderings of RFK Jr., the hordes of ignorant, ignorant, ignorant, trying to keep from saying stupid, jackasses that follow in their wake so desperately certain of their completely subjective fever dreams.
It's a really good question, but to answer it I'm going to alter the key term here of hatred because that doesn't quite resonate with me.
I'm going to plug in disgust, which feels a lot closer to home.
I'm definitely not beyond hatred, but I think disgust is really at the root.
I can feel hatred for the downstream impacts of mindsets or personalities I find viscerally disgusting, but that's generally in an active phase of doing something about it.
My sense is that the listener's question is much more about that paralyzing inner corrosion you can feel when a person violates your moral sense and you don't know how to respond.
I think the listener's question is important methodologically because I can tell you from experience and self-reflection that if disgust is driving my research, it's going to lead me into some very bleak and misanthropic areas.
And that also means that it's important in terms of intellectual and political health because filtering any analysis through disgust is really going to poison the capacity for the broad sourcing that is essential for clarity and generative solutions.
The narrowing of views tends to be reactionary.
And if that goes far enough, it starts to take on a controlling, maybe even fascist tone.
And because disgust and pollution, after all, are primary obsessions of the fascist, it's probably best if criticism does not mirror the function and tone of its target.
I think it's a culturally important question insofar as it's increasingly obvious that disgust expressed in relation to anti-vaxxers, Anons, Trump supporters in the U.S.
and Poitiers supporters here in Canada works as a kind of lifeblood to their movements.
It confirms all of the ways in which the brutality of capitalism has already told them That they are stupid or worthless.
That they don't deserve healthcare or mental healthcare.
Or that they should keep working through the pandemic with little or no resources.
This is a perspective I'm learning more about and changing views on and leaning into because my primary reflex has been to view that the groups that gather online around charismatic figures have been recruited into cult-like conditions.
And that's a valid analysis, but it often doesn't pay enough attention to where the person was at prior to joining a mastermind or life coaching MLM or a Facebook group devoted to the truckers convoy.
Sociologists tell us that conspiracy theories offer the bonds of community.
And my bias has typically been that the concept of community here when it comes to Kelly Brogan's online courses or avid commenters on Charles Eisenstein's substack That notion of community is thin and fragile, and that because these relationships are built on medical lies or terrible philosophies, that they can't be stable.
But that doesn't account for the health of the communities these people are coming from.
So there's an assumption that I need to be more careful about, that people fall into rabbit holes from relative sanity.
But we never really know where they were before.
If you were brought up in the LDS Church as a Jehovah's Witness, Kelly Brogan's Vital Mind Reset program might feel like going to Woodstock.
So, does disgust have any advantage going the other way?
Or the way in which my values would be supported?
I think disgust can definitely help in the forging of political alliances, but I don't think it's stable because I don't think you can bond over disgust in relation to any dominant group or outgroup without eventually creating purity tests within your own community, driven by the suspicion that the disgusting aspects of the world are always on the verge of creeping in.
How pure is my comrade?
Is he selling out?
Is he losing his way?
On the most personal level, this is a question of psychological, maybe even spiritual importance.
Because it's clear that disgust wears down the capacity for empathy.
It can sour any environment and create unrealistic expectations of family and community members who are then expected to maintain impeccable purity to help buffer against the terrible feeling.
I also think that at times, disgust can be a very efficient method of projective distancing.
Because when I tune into my disgust, I often wonder if the behavior I'm responding to is familiar to me in some way, or it's networked to me, or it reminds me of anything in which I'm complicit.
And if we're thinking about the behavior of proud white men in the commentariat class who employ charisma and persuasion, I have to pull back and take a breath.
And maybe I should take a slight detour here to say that all of my disgust typically is directed at men.
When I encounter disgusting behaviors and ideas from Mickey Willis or Kelly Brogan, Such as the ableist notion that novel viruses either don't exist or they're actually strengthening to our immune systems and so we should let them rip through our communities.
It's really only Willis that gets my disgust feeling going.
With Brogan, I'm not sure I allow myself or am allowed to feel disgust.
With her or with Christiane Northrup or Yolande Norris-Clark, I usually feel just mystified, agog.
It's partly because I just can't identify with their experience in the world and what it has driven them to.
And I'm not sure what I can do about that, and I'm not sure whether that's a good thing either, because it might actually be a covert form of misogyny, meaning I may not take the women that we study through this project seriously enough to really commit to a full emotional engagement.
But I do know that when I have to wade through content from the Manosphere, my skin crawls.
And that's understandable too, because I was never bullied by women, so I'm not as defensive in that regard.
But getting back to the listener's question, I think that in general, I have three modes of deflating disgust and maybe reviewing them here might be helpful.
They're different, but each involves moving away from the personal entanglement of the emotion to find some kind of structural root.
So first of all, I find cult theory or aspects of it pretty helpful.
