Bonus Sample: RFK Jr. and Deconstruction Ecstasy Syndrome
Matthew’s essay about the transient, disorganized, purificatory pleasure of RFK Jr's campaign for his wellness/yoga/biohacker demographic.
A workshop breakthrough is not a strategy. The pleasure of deconstruction is not a theory of change.
With reference to Vincent Bevins’s brilliant new book: If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today, I want to add to that tagline, we also figure out that spiritual breakthroughs are not political strategies.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
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It's in print, ebook and audiobook format.
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So this essay is called Deconstruction Ecstasy Syndrome, and I want to thank the Patreons on the livestream posts for listening to an earlier version of this as I worked it out.
I'm going to be adding stories and some color to this final iteration, so I'm not just going to be repeating myself.
So, why has RFK Jr.' 's campaign cast such a spell on so many?
Why is it attractive to his unlikely diagonalist demographic?
I'm going to argue that he offers a lot of pleasure through his messaging and that people in new age wellness and personal development workshop cultures are really familiar with that pleasure.
And that pleasure is not just about idealism.
It's not just transmitted through his poetics or his nostalgia for a more innocent time.
It's not just the sepia TV clips of his father in the months before he was assassinated.
Most importantly, the pleasure of Kennedy 24 is not the pleasure of ideological coherence or of a concrete, workable vision of the future.
It's a pleasure that is momentary, miraculous, and transient.
It offers the feeling of a revolution, although a revolution that's internal and with no real vision of social responsibility.
This is the pleasure of breaking things down.
And that pleasure is one of the central psychosocial commodities of the wellness industry from which he draws so much support.
This is an economy based on questioning, untangling, stretching definitions of the self and ways of doing things, and it's heavy on the notion of purification, a breaking down of patterns, the elimination of toxins and old ideas about the world, and, as Charles Eisenstein says, the story of separation.
There are a ton of ways to do it.
Painful and sweaty yoga postures that break down your sense of bodily coherence.
Psychedelics that give people glimpses into other possible lives.
10-day meditation retreats that temporarily erase one's sense of self.
It's all part of a culture of continual surrender.
And what I'm going to argue is that the wellness and yoga fascination with deconstructing conditioned experience can provide a really slippery pipeline to Bobby's politics
of, let's break everything down so that we can experience oneness.
When I look back on my spiritual life, the landmark moments are all about untangling or releasing
things.
So when my ex first took me to a talk by a Tibetan Buddhist when we were living in Ireland, I sat in the crowd and it was a typically cold and damp and depressive Dublin night.
And I was just constricted with that constant feeling I had at the time of discomfort and anxiety.
I hated every minute of it until the guy introduced this little meditation exercise and I just dug deep and found it in myself to participate.
He asked us to breathe calmly for a few moments in silence.
And then he said, now, when you breathe in, you can think about the question, who are you?
And when you exhale, you can just be honest with yourself.
Don't know.
And I probably did only two or three rounds of this before my body was just flooded with warmth and the tears started flowing.
I couldn't believe it.
I didn't know at the time that this was a standard technique in something called Dzogchen, or the path of completion.
I'd had some literary familiarity with the Zen poetry that in China and Japan took on some of this same vibe, but that had always seemed pedantic on the page, even a little bit boring.
And as a Catholic, I'd grown up with confession, but not like this, not this totalizing existential confession that I was actually and am always a baby in this world, completely mystified and vulnerable and with no real reason to have big ideas or to harbor resentments.
Now my next Buddhist moment came when my ex took me to a vow ceremony where the Lama was going to ritually initiate us into becoming devotees of the Bodhisattva path.
There was a lot of chanting and hand gestures, and at the moment of transmission, the guy snapped his fingers.
And that was to signify that his lessons had been fully transferred materially, telepathically, mind to mind.
And then he sealed the deal by giving me the name of Uzzel Wongpo, which means something like Lord of Illumination.
And so I walked out with a new name, feeling light and empty, but also hollow in an uncanny way.
Now today, I'd say that this sensation was the doorway into the two high-demand groups that I became wrapped up in.
The Buddhist group leader that I first was attracted to simply said, the first time that I saw him, this was in a crowd but it seemed like it was directly to me, you're going to die and nothing matters but trying to understand what that means.
And very suddenly, every petty concern in my life fell away.
Now of course, so did the real world of people and politics and collective suffering and rent, but that was actually a big part of the bargain.
Then, years later, I opened A Course in Miracles and got that same sense right from the first lesson.
Nothing I see means anything.
And I felt such light-hearted relief.
And then you go through the first hundred lessons or so and they're all like that.
They're all deconstructive.
They pull allegedly unnecessary tensions apart so that they're not holding you together anymore.
And in the Course in Miracles group that I was in, we used to dance ecstatically in that meditation every morning.
But then the joke was that we were all coming down from this high after lunch and we had to go to our shitty service jobs and we would say to each other, Oh, I can't function in this insane world.
I'm completely blasted by the light.
So my entire experience at that place was just like that.
It was the pleasure of breaking up perception, self-perception, the perception of the world.
And what did we wind up with?
You know, shitty service jobs.
But we were taught not to care.
Because I think we were under the spell of what I'm calling deconstruction ecstasy syndrome.
So these are my anecdotes, and they're probably uncharacteristically intense, but I think they rhyme with a number of others.
Throughout yoga discourse, for example, release and surrender are the key instructions.
And signs that you've accomplished this include weeping, periods of deep rest, a bleary-eyed bliss that brightly clouds the rest of the
day and makes you not give a shit about much of anything. Family, bills, rent, house repair,
doctor's appointments, politics.
Now this letting go value can be commodified through purification rituals.
Fasting, juice fasting, getting up at 2am to chant mantras, painful yoga stretches that stretch the joints and make your regular daily movements sore.
Aubrey Marcus did a whole blackout retreat for seven days in which he was in a completely sealed black room with a blindfold on and he called it the purest medicine.
And every ritual like this has the quality of being reductive and subtractive.
The person is trying to become less.
They're trying to strip things away.
And for Aubrey Marcus, I suppose that might be a good thing.
But the question I'm going to be asking is, what happens after all of that subtraction?
All of that pulling apart?
And I wonder whether Aubrey Marcus is asking the same thing.
Like, I've done every sauna, every psychedelic, I've been to every sex magic party that I can go to, and so now what?
With Charles Eisenstein, his friend and the director of messaging for Bobby's campaign, it's a little more advanced or highbrow.
I've written the books.
I've led the retreats.
How can I make something real?
Something that lasts?
Something outside of the Omega Center weekend workshop circuit?
So maybe it makes sense.
That they'd throw their influence and weight behind a political project after all these years of making money on aspirations and having nothing really to show for it but large marketing networks.
Lord knows the world has gotten hotter, more polarized, despite every New Age intention.
So what's the vision?
What's the functional policy?
I mean, one actual business that Aubrey Marcus has built, the Fit for Service Life Coaching Scheme, seems to exist for no other reason than to reproduce these moments of personal epiphany.
And when you hear him talk about what he thinks Bobby will do as president, he's really focused on the reproduction of that spiritual transformation moment, seemingly driven by the belief that if enough people have it at the right time, the proper policies and structures will all just fall into place.
As we said back in the Course in Miracles cult, the miracle will occur.
So on this deconstruction tip, we're often talking about some very old practices that have now become commodified.
These purification rituals emerge cross-culturally over thousands of years in contexts where people are definitely not modern consumers or social media influencers.
We remember the Essenes out at Nag Hammadi, the Buddha starving himself with those five Babas in the forest.
All kinds of iterations of monastic and ascetic life.
So these are all versions of what's known as the via negativa, that old mystical term for a feeling of emptiness and clarity, of things falling away.
In Indian systems, the term is nirguna, or without qualities.
And this is juxtaposed with saguna, or the mystic experience of being overwhelmed by sensory glory, and the distinction between the two has philosophical ramifications with regard to how the divine is represented.
Zen moves towards nirguna, and then we have the Tibetan temple, which is a riot of primary colors, butter statues, golden icons, and rainbow flags and streamers.
The question at the heart of this distinction is, can you represent sublime experience or the divine?
And if you try, will you erase it with your own hubris?
Now, there are saguna environments in New Age and yoga spirituality.
Trance dances, the fit-for-service people doing Maori cosplay, kirtan and puja with lavish accoutrements.
But the highest prized experience within the culture is nirguna, the silent vanishing of everything related to spectacle.
And that pleasure comes from a sudden stillness and relaxation that is proximal to some questioning or release of conditioning.
The feeling of, I don't have to be tense in that way anymore, or I can let that thing go, or I don't have to keep up appearances in that way.
There's a feeling of quick relief, a humming and glowing resolution.
It can be quietly exhilarating.
It can even relieve physical pain.
Every time it's happened to me, I've felt this warm oil and honey mixture pulsing through my body.
And one additional value in all of this for modern wellness consumers is that this can be a space of self-forgiveness.
We're talking about subtractions that might allow us to atone for our excesses.
I believe there's a lot of unconscious guilt and shame that goes along with having the resources it takes to go on a juice fast or a 10-day retreat or a 30-day YTT yoga teacher training program in Costa Rica.
And about Costa Rica, I think there's additionally the deconstructive effect of travel.
It's a literal miracle to get on a plane and imagine yourself into a different life eight hours later.
And this is foundational to the yoga wellness economy and zeitgeist.
I just listened to the really great If Books Could Kill episode about the biohacker Tim Ferriss who wrote this bullshit book in his 20s about the four hour work week where one of his hacks was to live in foreign countries for six months at a time and, you know, apparently lower his expenses somehow forgetting that at some point you'd need to come home to a residence that you were paying rent or mortgage on.
And it sounded very cool to a lot of people who missed the way in which it was literally embodying postmodern alienation and rootlessness.
But it also set the blueprint for the spiritual tourism vibe.
Traveling to Costa Rica, India, Thailand, using credit cards or money that's not there to merge travel with biohacking your life or rebuilding it after divorce or sickness.
And in addition to offering a blank slate, the erasure of identity.
I think these rituals of deconstruction can also offer other feelings of erasure.
So, for instance, if you had been political, you could leave that persona behind.
Or, if you'd gotten close to realizing your complicity in settler racism, A globetrotting spiritual tour could offer a kind of colonial atonement.
You could wash yourself in the world that your forebears conquered.
So, we have this experience of deconstruction and it gets commodified like everything else and what happens then?
Well, a market emerges to traffic in it, and that production cycle has to seek out workers.
So, a person enters the wellness world and stays, and it's because they're hooked.
They've had an epiphany so powerful it becomes part of their identity.
Maybe to the extent that they professionalize and add a modality or two to their gig work portfolio.
And they work, and they workshop, they yoga stretch and juice fast.
They shit their guts out with cleansing herbs.
They progress through all the levels so they can create some more levels.
They are doing things that sound like doing things.
