This is a newly favorite mantra that RFK Jr is using on the presidential stump.
The subtext, uttered in the shadow of a pandemic that this guy did what he could to minimize and bypass, carries a lot of American spiritual—or maybe pseudospiritual—baggage.
Digging into what he means and what his demographic hears when he says “There are worse things than dying,” can tell us a lot about the status of Death, Grief and Belief in the American psyche—and even global capitalism—in this volatile time.
This episode is a recording of a talk Matthew gave at the 2024 Symposium on Death and Bereavement Studies in January, organized online by Terri Daniel of Portland, OR.
Show Notes
2024 Symposium - Death, Grief, and Belief
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
To support independent media, access our entire catalog of bonus episodes, and listen to everything ad-free, please visit patreon.com slash conspirituality.
You can also access these full bonus episodes on Apple Podcasts.
Thank you for your support.
Hello, everyone.
Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and Threads, at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
We have a book out.
It's called Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.
It's in print, ebook, and audiobook format, narrated by me.
This is a Patreon bonus episode called There Are Worse Things Than Dying.
It's in quotation marks because it's ironic.
It's a talk I gave at the 2024 Symposium on Death and Bereavement Studies in January.
That was organized online by Terry Daniel out of Portland.
It's an annual event attended by chaplains, hospice workers, psychotherapists, and anthropologists, and this year, the theme was Death, Grief, and Belief.
Derek was there too, presenting on end-of-life psychedelic therapy, which was cool.
My talk was a little bit fringe and somewhat grumpy because I wanted to lay out how the toxic vibes of conspirituality really obstruct appropriate grief.
At the outset, as you'll hear, I changed the listed title to one that echoes this newly favorite mantra that RFK Jr.
is using on the presidential stump.
Quite often these days he's saying, there are worse things than dying, which is pretty rich for a guy with vaccine fear-mongering blood on his hands.
So, with thanks to Terry Daniel and everyone who was there, here's my talk.
My listed title for today is When Spirituality is a Broken Space, and that reflects the, I think, the vaguer sense of what I wanted to present many months ago when Terry first asked me.
But I'm going to alter that title in real time to There Are Worse Things Than Dying, and you'll notice that it's in quotation marks, ironic quotation marks.
Now, this is actually a newly favorite mantra that somebody named RFK Jr.
is using on the presidential stump as he polls as an independent candidate at around 20%.
So, why do I care about this?
Why should we all care?
I'm going to say that the subtext of this mantra, which is uttered in the shadow of a pandemic, that guys like RFK did what they could to minimize, carries a lot of American spiritual or maybe pseudo-spiritual baggage.
And I'd say that digging into what he and his colleagues mean and what their demographic hears in the claim, there are worse things than dying, can actually tell us a lot about the status of death, grief, and belief in the American psyche, and perhaps even global capitalism in this volatile time.
I think it tells us something about our attitudes towards existential vulnerability.
Now, what does RFK Jr.
consider worse than dying?
Cooperating with the evidence-based medical interventions of public health, for one thing, which happen to be life-saving, and as measles now breaks out all over the country during a generational low point in vaccination rates, his followers are free to risk death for their loved ones and for their children as they live free from the demands of the commons.
My argument today will be that living as though there are worse things than dying can be a core commitment of a new kind of spirituality.
And it's a spirituality of hyper-individualism that really seeks to avoid grief.
And at the same time, it also just happens to ratify some of the cruelties of capitalism.
Now I'm going to proceed in two parts.
Firstly, there's an overview of this emergent form of death-bypassing, which my colleagues and I call conspirituality.
