The seventh installment of Matthew’s Five Big Questions Posed to an Extremely Thoughtful Person.
Sam Adler-Bell is a journalist, political theorist, and co-host of one of Matthew’s favourite podcasts, Know Your Enemy—a show about the American right. They discuss the normalization of genocide, the stark comforts of Freud and Janet Malcolm, the relief of DW Winnicott, how we can’t avoid playing the role of our own mothers, and also good advice from his dad, a labour lawyer who knows something about long, uncertain, but always worthwhile battles for the common good.
Show Notes
Sam Adler-Bell
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Hello, everyone. everyone.
Welcome to the Conspirituality Relief Project.
This is your regular timeline cleanser, featuring interviews with folks reflecting on hope, faith, resilience, and building community in hard times.
You know, all the things that conspirituality itself can't or won't do.
These are short, personal visits in which I ask my guests the same five questions about their life wisdom, at least as it is in this moment.
My name is Matthew Remski.
And my guest today is Sam Adler-Bell, journalist and co-host of one of, if not my favorite podcast, Know Your Enemy, where with his co-host, Matt Sitman, Sam analyzes the modern history of conservatism so that we can see more clearly what the F is going on.
I have to say that I get so much out of their content, but also out of their kind and steady and clear-eyed approach.
And if you're looking for my favorite episodes, you can search their archive for What's Wrong With Men or any episode where they have Dorothy Fortenberry or Patrick Blanchfield on as guests.
Now, just a note before we start, we recorded this before the election and before the ceasefire that seems to be coming together in Gaza, but I don't think any of this is out of date.
Here's Sam Adler-Bell.
Sam Adler-Bell, welcome to the Conspirituality Relief Project.
It's great to see you.
Hey, it's great to be here.
Okay, we'll get right started.
This is the first question.
What terrifies you most in these times?
Yeah, I don't know.
I feel like this might be the chalk answer, but I'm very terrified of war and it's metastasizing in our world.
And I'm also pretty fearful of the way that we are learning to metabolize.
I know that this is kind of like an old concern and one that kind of just crops up again and again as new communication technologies arise.
People are very concerned about the way people metabolized the Vietnam War because it was on television.
And then, of course, various other conflicts in the world that have happened during the Internet age.
People are concerned about the...
You know, proliferation of images.
But I guess I mean that same thing, but also I think that this war, the war in the Middle East now, and Israel's really truly brutal siege on Gaza and also now extending, especially today, into Lebanon.
I find not only the way...
People here in the United States consume the images of the war, but also I feel even that somehow the pathways in the form that our outrage about it take also feel like part of this metabolism in a way that makes that outrage and genuine moral outrage and anger and shame.
Less efficacious, maybe, than it otherwise would be, because I feel that I observe so much.
I don't mean this to be accusing people of cynicism or dishonesty, but there's some kind of partial satisfaction that can be gained from participating in moral outrage on the internet.
And that kind of substitute satisfaction is something that I also am fearful of, that seems both bad for the soul, but also something that seems to be increasingly incorporated into the way that the war makers protect themselves from accountability.
It has the appearance of accountability, but to me, I mean, I guess I'm kind of putting the cart before the horse because what I'm thinking about is just that this war, which was predictable and its brutality was predictable, has been going on for a long time.
And it's just gotten worse and worse.
And despite a really admirable amount of...
Criticism and vitriol from those of us who think it's wrong has had no effect.
And so I'm very fearful of the kind of unashamed war-making that's going on and somehow a feeling like there's sort of unbridledness about how it's being undertaken and sort of just...
Shamelessness that augurs a new era in how countries that have the power to do whatever they want will and that our outrage about it is somehow more seamlessly metabolized into a kind of spectacle that doesn't actually change anything.
That's what I'm really terrified of.
Layers of alienation, first from the normalization of the imagery and then the normalization of the response.
And that somehow both are deadening and unresponsive or there's a loss of the capacity to respond.
There is that, and I'm sure that that's happening to a lot of people.
Most of the people that I know are actually paying very close attention to this war and are very, very outraged by it and are consuming images and information about it all day, every day.
And they are expressing outrage about it.
And they're experiencing an enormous amount of emotional turmoil about it, too.
Especially those...
I think it's just kind of the juxtaposition for me or the coincidence of how much emotional turmoil and outrage we are expressing and experiencing in ourselves and in our communities all day, every day.
And then the kind of total absence of any pathway for that.
those emotions to have any impact.
Um, and, and then my fearfulness that people, uh, that a kind of despair and outrage is a kind of self cure, uh, like in Freudian terms, right.
We come to the encounter with as a solution, you know, despair and outrage is not a comfortable place to be, but it is something, it is a relationship with reality.
Uh, and one which I think people can do, it can take perverse kind of satisfaction is, and it can be a way of metabolizing, uh, what is unacceptable.
In response to this stuckness really that you're describing, what is the most meaningful and supportive idea or story that you return to for reliable wisdom and relief?
Yeah, I guess keeping on the Freudian train, because that's where my brain really goes.
I think Freud's greatest discovery is the concept of transference and counter-transference, which is a story about how we relate to one another.
But of course, it's basically just the idea that we do not encounter each other as individuals, as unique others, but as sort of the recombined pieces of other people that we have known, you know, just that we have models for how we interact with each other. you know, just that we have models for how we You know, and obviously, Freud discovered this basically because he was wondering why his patients kept falling in love with him.
And he's treating these young women who had, by the nomenclature of the day, hysteria.
And they would fall in love with him.
And he was like, why is this happening?
This is a huge problem.
But what he discovered was that it was not him that they were falling in love with, but there was a relationship from the past, either one that was comforting or that was failed.
A failed relationship from the past that was being worked through in the way that these women were relating to him, specifically as fathers or as lovers.
And instead of running away from that fear that, oh, gosh, this is bad.
We're definitely crossing boundaries.
I have to immediately tell this person, I'm not your dad.
He decided that the solution in his method was to traverse the transference, to allow yourself to be cast in the role assigned by the other, and then work through that past relationship in the present, which is essentially what we do, not only in the consulting room.
But there's an amazing Janet Malcolm quote, the journalist Janet Malcolm, who in her book that's called The Impossible Profession about psychoanalysis, where she describes transference.
And can I read it for you and for the listeners?
Yeah, for sure.
Okay, this is like my favorite thing ever.
Malcolm writes, the phenomenon of transference, how we all invent each other according to early blueprints, was Freud's most original and radical discovery.
The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipus complex can be accepted with a good deal more equanimity than the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities, personal relations, is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems.
Even, or especially, romantic love is fundamentally solitary and has at its core a profound impersonality.
The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic.
We cannot know each other.
We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others.
We cannot see each other plain.
A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form.
Only connect, E.M. Forster proposed.
Only we can't.
The psychoanalyst knows.
That's amazing.
It's very bleak.
In her gloss, extremely bleak.
And it leads paradoxically so well into question number three, which is, what is the greatest obstacle you face in forming community relationships?
And how do you work to overcome it?
Yeah.
I didn't think about that.
That's true.
It is.
Well, the flip side of what Malcolm is saying there and what Freud says about transference, to put a positive gloss on it, is that we are, in a sense, only, or at least most of all,
our own history, that we're made up of the accumulated We encounter them as a version of our history,
of our past, a model.
I think what that means is not as Malcolm kind of provocatively suggests that we cannot connect, but that the connecting has to happen in that space of reckoning with each other's shared respective histories and pasts.
And I think that in my favorite...
Psychoanalytic writing, including the work of Winnicott, the English middle group analyst, the place where that happens is play.
And to me, the notion that what we are learning to do as we come into adulthood, what we are learning to do in a therapeutic relationship, what we're learning to do in a romantic relationship, is remembering how to play with each other, is to me the solution and the one that gives me the most hope.
Because it's play in the sense of playing a game, but also play acting, you know?
So what, that you're treating me like your ex-boyfriend?
What happens if we just play these roles?
What if we add some irony to our expectations of what the other is or what they are for you?
What if we just play?
Play around these structures that feel predestined or I hesitate to snap you back to your journalism, But I'm wondering if really grasping and holding on to transference, countertransference, as you study the people that you study,
does it allow for a certain type of forgiveness or generosity with regard to how the MAGA mouthpiece will call does it allow for a certain type of forgiveness or generosity with regard to how the MAGA mouthpiece will call your political position or
Like, are you saying that if you realize that we are actually not quite seeing each other clearly and we're acting out of unknown and unprocessed histories, does that give you a little bit more leeway or stamina for does that give you a little bit more leeway or stamina Definitely.
Yeah, it's funny because when I start speaking in a psychological idiom on the podcast, sometimes either the listeners or Matt, my co-host, will kind of try to push the brakes a little bit and be like, well, if we psychologize, is that forgiving too much?
Or is that actually unfair?
Because if you psychologize somebody, are you saying that they are just this way?
They can't change, and we can't speak about morals or justice because trauma does not abide by the rules of morality or justice.
But I often think the opposite, that thinking psychologically or psychoanalytically does create opportunities for generosity.
Because you're not just psychologizing the other, you're psychologizing yourself, your own way of relating to the information toward this, say, some right-wing thinker or right-wing politician's biography.
How you react to it is also grist for the mill.
Yeah, I would say, because I didn't really say why I find transference to be a comforting story as opposed to one that has useful wisdom as opposed to just a bleak one.
Because to me...
It makes me more generous in my everyday life.
This, for the listeners who are maybe thinking this is too abstract, it's the experience when, with, say, you're a friend or a lover, you say something and they react to you like you said something else.
They get so angry at you.
You can feel and you almost want to say, don't treat me like, say...
mistreated you in this specific way.
I'm not them and I'm not doing that to you.
I'm not your mom.
I'm not your mom.
I'm not your dad.
Or if somebody has a bad day at work and then they lash out at you.
The awareness really that we have no other way really of relating to each other except for through these past models and that living in a place of acceptance of that is what makes me not then react necessarily in anger or frustration via my own model of sort of
I think to myself, don't treat me like I am this monster from your past.
But then, why am I having that reaction?
Maybe because I feel that people put me into a box too often or they recruit me into their own dramas and I don't get to be myself.
And that's because people have treated me that way in the past.
So I think that there's a place of acceptance and awareness that this kind of model, this kind of way of thinking about relationships allows me to do both in my individual life and when I think about politics.
There's something quasi-mystical as an opportunity there, I think, which is when you have the instinct to say, don't treat me like your mom.
There can be a pause where you also say, oh, is that how your mom treated you?
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Well, I get that.
I see that.
Yeah, totally.
And also, don't treat me like your mom.
Well, you can't demand that, really, of another.
Because also what you mean when you say, don't treat me like your mom, or the person says, don't act like my mom, it's very likely, not for everyone, but it's very likely that some of our first Our very first physical and emotional understandings of what the feeling of safety and warmth and being held are come from our mothers.
And so there's no chance that in a love relationship you are not going to act like someone's mother in the good ways, in the ways of making someone feel safe and held and loved and warm.
And that means that you can't escape the flip side of it, that you are going to invoke a broader kind of set of coordinates of motherliness, which if someone has had a bad relationship with their mother, that's there too.
You're reminding me of when I was studying Tibetan Buddhism, this kind of like teaching fable around infinite rebirths actually meaning everything.
It's a little bit funny and almost childlike, but what it actually means is that...
Or what it technically means is that at any given time in the history of forever, you have been the mother of every other creature on the planet.
And if you could just remember that, it also means you've been their child as well.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
It's, it's can be comforting or a call to, uh, to care, but it can also mean that you might react petulantly to every living creature.
Right.
Speaking of mothers, children, parents, and children, and care, next question is, if you were responsible for comforting and guiding a child terrified of climate catastrophe, how would you do it?
What would you say?
Yeah, I'd have a hard time with this question.
I do have a half-brother who is eight.
Who's the age in the question?
Wow.
He's very fixated, he has been for several years now, on death and evil and disaster.
I know kids go through phases like that, but it's kind of stuck with him.
He's always, his favorite characters in movies and plays, he's really into musicals now, are always the bad characters.
I think that really makes sense for in...
Because usually, often the characters that have more rich, are kind of more richly drawn psychologically and emotionally are the bad characters, whereas sometimes the main characters, the protagonists, are drawn with kind of blandly, as blandly good.
And he's drawn to the intensity of the villains.
I think that's probably true for a lot of kids.
Anakin instead of Luke.
Absolutely.
He has no interest in Luke.
Darth Vader is his favorite character in Star Wars.
And then he saw the later ones.
We watched the new ones.
And then he was like, well, I'm not sure maybe Kylo Ren because he's so bad.
He is so, so bad.
He kills his dad.
Yep.
That was like to him, that was like the most fascinating thing.
He not only kills his dad, but the full weight of that contradiction and pain is in that laser strike, right?
Like he's killing him, but he can't stand it.
It's like he's killing himself.
Yes, yes, I know.
I mean, that really stuck with Henry.
This is all to say that he's very acquainted, I find, with And we haven't talked...
I don't know if we've ever talked about climate change, though I'm sure he's talked about it with his parents.
But we've talked about, like, you know, natural disasters, because those interest him.
And I find that, of course, it's not my...
It's my dad's to guide him.
What I find is that I often get so much more from talking to him than he gets from necessarily from me about these sorts of things because it's like I realize I have so many kind of shorthands for talking about human suffering.
I just have all kinds of words and a kid like him will just Just ask all these questions that are obviously the essential questions, but that all the words that we have for describing it cover it up.
He asked practical questions about bodies and about funerals because he has experience of that.
I don't know if I really have an answer except for that I find that I come away from these conversations with him.
Thinking differently.
Surely he does too, but it's much more apparent to me that I'm seeing a different side of what even something like climate catastrophe would mean.
So it's like he's comforting and guiding you in a way.
That's how I feel.
I mean, it's including because I think it's not abstract.
I mean, of course it is abstract for him in many ways, but I sometimes feel that when we talk about it, or we talk about disasters or something like that, that I feel like I'm speaking very abstractly and he's speaking very concretely.
And that helps me to be grounded.
I've never thought about it this way, but I wonder if a way of comforting and guiding is actually being an adult who's willing to listen and learn from the child talking about those things, right?
I think, yeah.
I mean, I don't have my own kids.
That's the only thing that I know to do.
with kids is just be very interested in what they're saying and like that comes very naturally to me but I also think like that's a good older brother or uncle mode because I don't have to deal with him Or my nephews,
like on an everyday basis, swoop in, be super game and interested in what they have to say, and don't have to deal with the most frustrating things about them, which causes one to lash out or just be like, shut up, we can't talk about that.
I never have to do that.
But I do think, yeah, it's the only lesson.
My only instinct with children is just that they really like it when people pay attention to them, listen to what they have to say, and take a great amount of interest in the way they see the world.
Last question.
If your wisest ancestor came to you in a dream to offer you one piece of advice about living in difficult times, what would it be?
Yeah, this one is tough, too.
I don't know.
One side of my family would be hillbillies from Missouri, and the other side would be Jews from the Pale.
And they would both, they would all be, have been very, very poor and suffered a lot.
And so, you know, perhaps, you know, the Jewish ancestors would say, hey, it's not so bad.
Yeah.
It could be worse.
Maybe the hillbillies hopefully would want to drink whiskey and play music with me, which is my favorite thing to do, including with my family.
I do think that if...
And this is probably true of many people's ancestors you talked to on the podcast who lived in at least daily lives of much greater torment, suffering, inadequacy, that their wisdom would be quite hard, one ways of enduring.
But I'm not convinced that that's exactly the wisdom that I need right now.
Because the circumstances are so different.
And again, going back to Freud, pain, cruelty, and suffering are not good teachers, necessarily.
There are obviously whole religions and works of literature and philosophy that do find wisdom in the experience of trauma.
How to get through it.
For individuals, I'm not always convinced that having lived a cruel life is a particularly good teacher of wisdom.
It may be a good teacher of how to put your head down and survive.
Maybe my life will take a turn where that kind of wisdom is more necessary than something else.
For the time being, I feel like my parents are more wise than most of their ancestors.
They tell me a lot of really useful things all the time.
Let's end with one.
My dad is a union-side labor lawyer.
He's been in the labor movement his whole adult life.
And he's a very practical person in what he...
The kind of work that he does is very much helping people incrementally improve their lives, either through collective bargaining.
Sometimes people are fired in discriminatory fashions.
He helps them get money or their jobs back.
That's a big thing.
But he is a socialist.
He describes himself as a socialist.
But his practical day-to-day work is very much just being a servant of the working class, is what he says.
What I take a lot of inspiration from, and he does talk about a lot, is just he's very good about...
He's ultimately an extremely optimistic person, which fits kind of funnily with his relentless practicality about politics and even the prospects for a much more capaciously just and egalitarian society to come into existence.
So he's just somebody who's very good at keeping his...
You know, his eyes simultaneously on the ground and on the horizon.
And he has, yeah, basically encouraged those instincts in me because I can be a little impractical.
I have the privilege of impracticality in my work and in my, you know, dreams for the future.
I think he just sort of shows me and models that one can be.
Ultimately, fundamentally hopeful while recognizing that there's a big, big mess all around us at all times and we have to do our best to clean it up.
And we can see ourselves doing it bit by bit, incrementally, with small successes here and there.
Yeah, and take some satisfaction in those small successes.
He does.
Sam Adler-Bell, thank you so much for taking the time.
