Bonus Sample: You Can’t Just Take Things Away from People
When we deconstruct harmful ideas and beliefs—from antivax positions to reactionary social views—we will inevitably be seen or felt as attacking the relationships that people form through those views. That’s a big problem in a lonely world, and there will be blowback. What to do?
Matthew steps off the debunkery hamster wheel, and remembers an old piece of yoga advice.
Show Notes
The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kim Schwartz is a really accomplished but super low-key, under-the-radar yoga teacher, originally from Chicago and now living in the Southwest.
And when I lived in Wisconsin, I used to drive down to Chicago where he would teach at the Temple of Kriya Yoga, where he was an ordained swami.
He had a lot of training in Iyengar yoga, but he didn't have any of the anal preoccupations with postural perfection.
He was gentle, easygoing, and he spoke about the body and mind in a language I'd never heard before, but that echoed the aphoristic quality of the old sutras.
On his website now, it looks like he's on sabbatical and I haven't been in touch with him for years, his tagline is, The Nervous System Alerts to Novelty and Defaults to the Known.
And reading that now, I'm reminded of the mystical economy that yoga language can sometimes pull off where a single sentence can carry an infinite number of meanings and applications.
The nervous system alerts to novelty and defaults to the known.
It can apply to personal and social psychology, to our use of technology, to learning and growing in personal relationships, and to the long, hard work of balancing stability and progress in political movements.
But Kim wasn't gregarious or overly poetic with language.
He was also super practical in a soft-spoken way.
So this is where the title comes from today.
In the style of yoga he taught, we worked on postures slowly in many stages, often doing movement and stretching exercises that didn't seem related to the final form at all.
Usually we were moving towards a full expression of the pose and it required the support of
So as you were progressing you would use a lot of props at first and then develop the
muscle memory and the strength to be able to support yourself.
But it was easy if you were impatient to want to skip over steps.
And if you did that, you would probably also rush your own students along when it came time to teach.
So one time, when I was in a workshop on teaching technique with fellow teachers, I was put on the spot to demonstrate how I would instruct my colleague.
role-playing as a student to progress towards a full pose.
And I can't remember what the pose was but at one point I made an assumption that the practice student was doing well enough that they could skip a step.
I wanted to rush them a little, so I let them know I was going to take away this wooden block because I thought they were being too reliant on it.
So Kim let me do it.
He didn't step in.
And sure enough, the roleplay student just toppled over.
So the lesson here, Kim said, is that you can't just take things away from people without providing them with some other means of support, or knowing that they can provide it for themselves.
So that's it.
A really simple thing to say, but it's haunted me periodically for close to 20 years now.
And I think I'm finally starting to understand how important it is.
I'm opening this way because we on this podcast are often in the position of debunking beliefs.
And that implies taking away sources of support.
In my earlier journalism on cults, deconstructing how people like Patabi Joyce or Chogyam Trungpa narrativized their mysticism or their biographies was an essential part of exposing how relational pressures were usually more significant in the group dynamic than any supposed dogma.
Now currently, we interview and collaborate with science communication specialists and misinformation researchers to better understand how to push back against conspiracy theories.
And we end up learning about and using some of the same techniques.
Deconstruction.
Debunking.
On our beat, we criticize and reject the language of pollution and purity that dominates the yoga and wellness spheres, and that leads to or echoes the old fascist ideals of identitarian hygiene.
But when it comes to conspiracy theories and misinformation, I think we have our own pollution and purity discourse going on.
We really hunt down the bad ideas in the body politic.
We pull them apart, we smash them to bits.
And I think that the subconscious bet here is that if all the bad ideas go away, people will be free.
If we cleanse the timeline, we'll be better off.
Everyone will see reality more clearly and their lives will be changed for the better.
And to be fair, it has to be done.
It's crucial to spotlight the variations of anti-vax argumentation, for example, because when vaccine hesitancy rises, people die.
And likewise, it's very important to understand how gender essentialism in yoga and wellness holds the door open for anti-trans fever dreams.
Hatred has to be identified, exposed, and quarantined.
So at the extreme end of that discourse, the boundaries must be clear.
But in my interview with Naomi Klein, she said that while the beliefs and behaviors of toxic movements must be scrutinized and understood, we also have to pay close attention to the millions of followers who find them compelling.
And I would add that we have to be honest about what happens within them when we knock those leaders down, because they're providing some form of ego support, and whether it's exploitative or not, they have organized around themselves a network of connections where people find each other and play a range of roles to each other, up to and including marrying within the group.
So for instance, there are lots of folks that hang out around people like Charles Eisenstein.
His bad or hokey ideas might have brought them together, but then there's also chance and circumstance, accidents of geography, But once any group like that has formed, before long, they're raising their kids together, organizing potlucks, and hosting weddings and funerals.
Okay, so they're doing potlucks and weddings without masks during a huge COVID surge.
That's gross.
It's irresponsible.
But these are still potlucks and weddings.
Perhaps you remember during the height of anti-masking furor that the protesters were saying, the governmental elites want to prevent us from seeing and loving each other in community.
That way, we'll be harder to control.
And they are so close to the truth there.
Because their focus is on their friends as much as it is on their ignorance of aerosols.
And when actually in recent history have we found neoliberal governments doing anything to encourage community health?
In the groups I was in, the leaders had tons of influence, and many ultimate decisions fell to them.
But that dynamic was also always juxtaposed with daily basic needs and interactions, with the drama of love and estrangement and family.
One leader had a boatload of toxic, victim-blaming ideas about sickness inspired by A Course in Miracles.
But when the shit hit the fan and someone really fell ill, we still managed to do all the things you've got to do to help.
New Age Jesus will not be there to empty your bedpan.
And when the group member does it, New Age Jesus fades into the background.
So, in real situations, group members may not be relying on the group's ideas at all to get through their day.
They could be feeling simply the call of personal morality, the mystery of love, or ancient instincts to both survive and care.
Okay, so all of these thoughts are related to a Twitter thread that I put out last week in a kind of minimalist style to kind of beta test this.
So I'll quote some of that, but I'll also fill in some details here.
When folks like us on the podcast deconstruct harmful ideas and beliefs, whether they're anti-vax positions or reactionary social views, we will inevitably be seen and felt as attacking the relationships that people form through those views.
And in that sense, we may be missing the Kim Schwartz rule for yoga trainees.
It's possible that the person doesn't ultimately need the crutch of the belief, and the belief might even be harmful to them in the long run, but they may be using it to fortify something real in their lives that you can't see.
And if you're going to attack it, you may want to ask how losing that thing, or becoming ashamed of it, can destabilize them.
