Charles Eisenstein, RFK Jr.’s presidential campaign communications director, blends New Age non-duality with critiques of science, framing it as a dogmatic "god of knowledge" akin to religion at a 2017 San Jose conference. He argues climate debates expose scientism’s hypocrisy—dismissing evidence while enforcing rigid consensus—but Spencer counters by highlighting testable methods like observer-effect adjustments and relativity. Eisenstein’s analogy fails: science evolves, clarifies terms, and relies on repeatability, unlike unchanging faith, yet his rhetoric seeks to discredit empirical truth to uphold spiritual mysticism, revealing a deliberate tension between the two. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
A little different today.
No guest, just me.
This topic today is going to be an addendum to the episode I posted on September 10th, about a month ago, about scientism with Dr. Dan Wilson. There was a specific video I watched that triggered my desire to do that particular topic.
I have tried to put it aside, but with an increasing number of thoughts I've been having about it, I know that I need to express them.
And this is the place to do that.
Charles Eisenstein is a writer of New Age nonfiction.
He's also an occasional speaker on these topics.
His primary new age angle is a thing called non-duality.
Basically, it's the idea that your individual consciousness is not actually separate from the consciousness of the entire universe.
It involves ideas like the interconnectedness of everything and relies heavily on a number of loosely defined concepts to keep it afloat.
It's exactly the sort of spiritual belief that makes for good grifting.
It's vague and generally isn't burdened with the need for proof.
It can be shaped into whatever you'd like for whatever your current need is.
It also fits well with the people that think you can think harder to make your life better or to think harder to remove your illnesses with positivity.
Sometimes when I talk about people like Charles Eisenstein to people in my everyday life, they dismiss the ideas as not important or not relevant.
They talk about the Charles Eisensteins of the world as though they're lunatics whose crazy notions can't affect anything in the quote-unquote real world.
This idea is naive.
As I've mentioned on this podcast previously, RFK Jr. is running for president with a platform of conspiracy beliefs that has a fresh coat of paint.
Charles Eisenstein is the communications director for RFK Jr.'s presidential campaign.
While I admit that we're a long way from having an RFK Jr. presidency, the path to the 2024 election is long and winding for everyone.
And some of the other potential candidates are legitimately worse options.
This man, as in Charles Eisenstein, has some path to power here, and being a prominent part of a national campaign will at least give him a lot more exposure to a mainstream audience.
So I feel that it's important to understand something about his beliefs.
What you're about to listen to is an audio clip of Charles Eisenstein talking at a science and non-duality conference held in San Jose, California in 2017.
We'll listen to the clip and then I'll discuss how and why it's complete hokeum.
In a lot of debates, and I'm writing on climate change, so this might be a key example.
Each side says, if only the other side would accept the facts, would accept the science, then they would change their mind.
And what's wrong with them?
That, I mean, this is the science.
This is fact.
This is truth.
And they must be on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry.
They must not even care about the future of our children.
They must be so wrapped up in their own self-interest and so deluded and susceptible to confirmation bias, unlike me, who is open-minded and objective.
If only we can convince them of the facts.
And the other side, most of you probably are not on the other side, maybe some of you are.
They say pretty much the same thing.
That the entire scientific establishment is in a collective delusion that excludes any data that contradicts the dominant theory.
And if you formulate a different hypothesis, you're out of a job.
You can't get funding.
You can't get grants.
You can't get a seat at the policy table.
So it's a self-realization.
I mean, they have their, like, a friend of mine was with his family, you know, and they watch Fox News 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
And he was like, you know, at the end of that week, I could see how in that reality bubble, you would have to be crazy to vote for Hillary Clinton.
Okay, so here we are at the science and non-duality conference that has this.
Why are people so attracted to science and non-duality or science and spirituality?
It awakens a kind of a hope for a reconciliation between these two sundered, divided aspects of reality.
And we would like to say, yeah, these non-dual realizations or my spiritual life or my experiences of, as Jude was saying this morning, discarnate entities, like these are valid after all.
So really, maybe what we're hoping for is a kind of a validation in addition to a joining together of a split reality.
So I have to ask, why is this validation so important?
It's because science is the main legitimizing institution of our culture.
You could even say it's the religion of our culture.
It's in the sense that it is what confers righteousness to anything, like a scientific policy, a scientific reason for something.
That means that it's true for real.
Now, science itself says, no, no, no, we're not a religion.
We are the opposite of a religion.
Religion takes things on faith, but we ask the world.
We perform an experiment.
We don't take anything on faith.
We're objective.
What goes missing here is that this objectivity is based on, is itself a meta, it's based on metaphysical assumptions that are unprovable, just like any religion.
Among them, objectivity, that there's a world outside of ourselves that is separate from our asking of the questions, that our questions don't change the reality that we ask about, that an experiment is repeatable, that the intention of the experimenter is irrelevant, that there's a division between observer and observed, and that the observed is constant in relation to the observer.
Yada yada yada.
Okay, everyone knows this already.
Another metaphysical assumption is that everything that is important or worth knowing can be measured and quantified.
Now, there's a lot of other ways in which science is suspiciously similar to a religion.
It has a canon of holy texts.
It has its own specialized, mysterious language that only initiates can understand.
It has an initiation ordeal called graduate school, upon which you finish and you get a ceremonial name change.
It has a system for the indoctrination of youth.
It has deified saints and martyrs, you know, Galileo, Newton, Einstein.
It has schisms, heretics.
It has the faithful lay believers who actually don't understand the esoteric knowledge of the religion, but they believe in it anyway.
It has a divinatory practice for the attainment of truth called experimentation.
It has a body of ritual built on top of it that's called technology.
I mean, the whole thing.
Okay.
First, Eisenstein starts as though he's in a middle position and looking at which side he might choose.
This is part of his more general shtick.
He's great at appearing to be just asking questions, but as with nearly everyone who does this now, his questions aren't posed from a genuine search for new knowledge, but rather to advocate for one position by attempting to undermine support for the opposing position.
He's definitely not starting from a neutral place.
He's pretending to have a reasonable position to get audience capture.
He starts by saying both sides say this, and then immediately says what the scientific environmental consensus says.
Both sides definitely don't say this.
When pseudoscience uses language like this, it is only done to mimic actual science.
The mimicry of scientific language by pseudoscientists and charlatans is part of what erodes the overall value of science.
And in a particularly pernicious twist, pseudoscientists of the current time will point to areas of science that were weakened by previous pseudoscientists who themselves were using scientific language to mimic actual science and claim that quote-unquote science can't really be trusted.
It's a vicious circle and it's why we have to push back on this so hard.
Eisenstein then talks about the view from the other side and he frames the scientific consensus as excluding contradicting evidence and he frames scientists as though they have an in-group, out-group, and groupthink dynamics.
Though he isn't using the word, this is the definition of scientism as it is used by people as a justification to dismiss scientific evidence.
Eisenstein talks about science and spirituality as being opposing social forces.
He calls them sundered, divided aspects of reality.
He refers to science as the main legitimizing institution of our culture.
Science is not an institution.
It's not a building.
It does not have a headquarters.
It does not have a hierarchical organization chart.
It is a process.
It does have a community, and it does require that people prove a certain level of knowledge in a particular field before they're accepted into that community.
But this is just a way to shortcut things like invite lists for conferences and allow for recognition of work performed.
If a person without one of the supposedly sacred degrees ever pointed out the correct thing and was able to rigorously express it, then their idea would be taken seriously by all the established scientists with PhDs.
This has happened before.
It's a phenomenon that is becoming less common as science gets more complex and specialized, but it's still possible.
Also worth noting is that scientists do not gatekeep the actual information.
You can buy all the scientific textbooks that are used for teaching in universities.
Scientists are typically looking to push their thoughts and ideas outward from the scientific community to every space it can go.
And it's important to note the difference between this and religious proselytizing.
Scientists want to talk to the people who understand what the scientists are saying.
Religious proselytizers want to talk to everyone, sometimes especially those who won't understand what the religious proselytizers are saying.
Eisenstein then pivots straight to science being the religion of our culture.
He says that the objectivity of science is based on metaphysical assumptions that are unprovable, just like any religion.
There's an entire philosophy of science dedicated to identifying the various ways of knowing things and how it is that humans can bridge the gap between the objective reality outside our bodies and the subjective reality inside our minds.
Eisenstein is deliberately obfuscating the findings in this area of philosophy to sow doubt in the ability to know anything at all.
In the confusion and doubt created by the idea that the universe is now and always will be mysterious, any idea can exist and seem reasonable, free of the need to line up with pesky, unknowable objective reality.
He undermines the very nature of reality by attempting to shove a wedge between our observations of the world and the place in our minds where those observations are projected into our consciousness.
He also throws a lot of murky, mealy-mouthed concepts at us and a fire hose of bad ideas.
Specifically, he says, Among them, objectivity, that there's a world outside of ourselves that is separate from our asking of the questions, that our questions don't change the reality that we ask about, that an experiment is repeatable,
that the intention of the experimenter is irrelevant, that there's a division between observer and observed, and that the observed is constant in relation to the observer.
Yada, yada, yada.
In that fire hose of thoughts, first, he mentions the observer effect, though not by name.
To make it more murky and unknowable, he merely talks about the observer effect.
The observer effect is a well-known effect in the philosophy of science, which says that you cannot make an observation about a system without somehow becoming part of that system and in some way disturbing the system or potentially changing its results.
To lay people, this makes it seem like you can't know anything for real.
But before we got anywhere close to making smartphones, we came to understand this effect and worked to calculate it such that even if true objectivity is not absolutely achievable, the effects of the disturbance are at least manageable to the extent that we can have meaningful, repeatable experiments.
In engineering terms, we measure the difference between the measured and the actual as a likelihood that we call measurement uncertainty.
And when that becomes small enough, we just call it negligible.
And that's the goal.
The lack of absolute knowledge is reduced to meaninglessly small differences in measurement.
If you used a ruler to measure the length of a pen, you wouldn't be able to know its true absolute length to 20 decimal places.
But that doesn't matter.
You would be able to reliably measure its length such that another person could understand how long it was when compared against the numbers on their own ruler.
And so it is for every objective measurement we have defined.
From kilopascals of pressure to millidarse of permeability to electron volts of energy experienced by individual particles to nanometers defining the exact spacing between traces on a circuit board to fit a CPU into your smartphone.
Mass production wouldn't be possible without these repeatable objective measurements.
He also throws in a bit there about the observed being constant in relation to the observer.
And I can't help but think that he's attempting to use special relativity to further muddy the scientific waters here.
Special relativity states that what we think of as objective observations are in fact additionally affected by the motions of the observer and observed in relation to both each other and of each to the speed of light.
Though we have known about this effect for 120 years or so, and its effects do not bother any observations of any set of observer and observed phenomenon which are both on Earth's surface and roughly traveling close to the same speed in relation to both each other and the speed of light, this can affect observations of phenomenon outside of Earth.
Luckily, we have some equations that Albert Einstein gave us to help us factor these effects out.
As I said, it mostly only affects astrophysical observations of phenomenon outside of our solar system.
The use of difficult to understand concepts to justify spiritual beliefs is called woo.
It's no more real than Star Trek jargon or waving your hands over a crystal ball while speaking in tongues.
But it sounds good because it often contains terms you may have heard before and it makes the speaker sound very smart.
So maybe you listen to the other things they have to say.
Eisenstein then says that another metaphysical assumption is that everything that is worth knowing can be measured and quantified.
He's playing to the audience here.
Among the spiritual communities, a common unspoken trope is that they don't really like the exactness of measurement and quantification.
To some spiritual people, spirituality itself could be defined as everything about the human experience that is unable to be measured or exactly quantified by science.
To those people, every time science makes a new discovery about how things work, particularly about how the human body works, this undermines something about the spiritual experience.
It metaphorically takes away spiritual real estate.
Spirituality exists in the space where things are unknowable, and whenever any concept moves from the unknowable column to the knowable column, it's a permanent removal.
It's much more fun for a person to think of their body as a vessel for hopes and dreams than a series of mechanisms working in concert such that the failure of any one mechanism causes catastrophic failure for all of the others.
To those people, this speech by Eisenstein is a virtue signal.
It's a justification for their willingness to have less faith in science and more faith in their inner thoughts.
When it comes to discovering the nature of God, inner thoughts are where a person should be.
When it comes to discovering the nature of our objective reality, it isn't.
So once the seeds of this uncertainty are planted, he goes straight into the comparisons of how science is suspiciously similar to a religion.
He mentions canon of holy texts.
Science textbooks are changing with time as we discover new things, and at no point is there a room full of old men who won't allow a new scientific textbook to be written because it contradicts the previous ones.
To call them canon when they change so often is blatant untruth.
and quite frankly, stretches the definition of canon to a breaking point.
It has its own specialized, mysterious language that only initiates can understand.
It is true that scientific jargon can become difficult to understand, but unlike religion, scientists are interested in teaching everyone the meanings of all of those terms and how they apply to each situation in which they're used.
It has an initiation ordeal called graduate school, upon which you finish and you get a ceremonial name change.
Graduate school is where PhDs are granted.
There isn't a name change happening here, merely the addition of a title.
And it should be pointed out that Dr. Dre never went to grad school, and there aren't a band of scientific thugs seeking to cripple him for the blasphemy of self-applying the sacred title.
There is no name change.
It has a system for the indoctrination of youth.
This is about the most disgusting accusation.
It's an argument that advocates for scientific illiteracy and needs to be called out.
Indoctrination is not the same as education, especially where science is concerned.
It has deified saints and martyrs, you know, Galileo, Newton, Einstein.
We retell the stories of some previous scientists because they can help us better understand how to get the process right.
Galileo's story is important because we can't silence progress when it contradicts religious doctrine.
Newton's story is important because he actually attempted to use his reputation and political force to stifle legitimate ideas that contradicted his own.
Despite being the smartest person of his time, he was occasionally demonstrably wrong.
And we need to not allow that to happen again.
Einstein's story was important because one person with the right ideas can change the world.
Also, being willing to challenge long-held concepts when they don't line up with experiments is important.
Many grifters attempt to use Einstein's story to say that their ideas are also important and that they should be allowed to challenge long-held assumptions.
And they are allowed to do that.
But if their ideas get challenged and are found wanting, they need to make their ideas better.
Also, when their ideas are contradicted by experimental evidence, well, that answers itself.
Aside from these three notably famous scientists, there have been many more important people in history who pushed our scientific knowledge forward.
But their lives don't tell us very much about how to make the process of science better.
So we don't bother to tell their stories.
Daniel Bernoulli quantified the central equation of fluid mechanics and was a towering intellect of his age.
But his life story is pretty mundane as these things go.
Media has made these people recognizable cultural figures.
But once they're found to be wrong, we move past their ideas.
Isaac Newton was wrong about several things in the field of optics, and for a time, parts of the scientific community struggled under the blind assertion that Newton couldn't be wrong.
At best, Eisenstein could say that this institutionalized confirmation bias used to be true of science.
We have mostly smoothed out these wrinkles and we work to keep them smooth when we notice them cropping up again.
It has schisms, heretics.
It has the faithful lay believers who actually don't understand the esoteric knowledge of the religion, but they believe in it anyway.
The scientific community doesn't have schisms in the way that religion has them.
Scientists have disagreements about fairly minor and nuanced points of interpretation of large or complicated sets of observations.
As for the lay believers who simply have faith in science, one can say that all of that knowledge is available to them increasingly on the internet.
It isn't held back and dribbled out on Sunday mornings in weekly sermons.
There isn't a scientific equivalent of the Vatican where the quote-unquote other knowledges are kept hidden away from the uninitiated.
Further, the concept of a flat Earth really puts Eisenstein's ideas to the test.
Many people cannot prove that the Earth is spherical, but nonetheless believe that it is so.
They trust that the people providing the proof are both smart enough to have done the calculation correctly, but also aren't using mathematics like Woo to confuse people into thinking the Earth is spherical.
The fact that everything about the spherical shape of the Earth lines up with everything else we know about the solar system and gravity and geology isn't merely convenient.
The belief that the Earth is spherical is backed up by evidence and calculations that anyone is free to do if they so choose.
And the same is true for all areas of scientific knowledge.
It has a divinatory practice for the attainment of truth called experimentation.
This is the second most egregious assault on truth.
To divine something is quite literally to have the knowledge given to you by God or to ask God directly for the knowledge.
Divining is the antithesis of experimentation.
Divining the truth about objective reality probably makes sense in a universe in which we're all actually just one single universal consciousness, but as I said, we're a long way from having that notion be supported with any facts.
It has a body of ritual built on top of it that's called technology.
If technology were only ritual, then your cell phone would run on prayers or whatever other ritual behavior of our culture.
You would have to crush chicken bones in a bowl to make your car start every morning, and the internet would run only after you made a potion from a series of arcane ingredients like the eye of a newt and the scales of a snake.
But our devices all function from reliable cause and effect physical functions that make them and their performance highly predictable.
Nothing is divined.
Each and every notion of his speech can be individually debunked.
Charles Eisenstein knows that he's distorting the view of objective reality when he says things like this.
His thoughtful delivery, wherein he sounds as though he's just now coming up with all of these words, is part of the package.
Overall, Eisenstein is looking mostly to build up uncertainty.
His words are meant to remind his audience to not have complete certainty in any scientific observations because it's very complicated.
He wants to create a space where the universe is unknowable, where it yet contains some mystery for his spiritual ideas.
Spirituality is not the antithesis of science, and science does not have to be undermined, degraded, or vilified in order to hold spiritual beliefs.
Eisenstein wants science to be both simple enough that it could have been fake and complicated enough that there's no way anyone could understand it.
If that sounds confusing and contradictory, it's because it is.
Those two ideas cannot coexist.
One of the first episodes of this podcast was about science and politics and the way in which we engage in them mean that they are in direct opposition to each other.
At that time, my regular co-host Jeff asked me before the podcast about why it wasn't science and religion.
For reasons I still don't understand, I didn't work that into the podcast, but the answer to me at the time was simple.
Science never picks a fight with anyone in the same way that objective reality doesn't ever pick a fight with anyone.
It's only other concepts that attempt to pick fights with science and objective reality.
Religion only finds an enemy in science when people attempt to use religion to achieve political goals.
Therefore, it's politics that is the natural enemy of science, not religion.
But let's take Eisenstein's flawed notion to its natural conclusion.
If science were a religion, what sort of deity would scientists follow?
It wouldn't be a deity with a human avatar.
It wouldn't be a previous scientist that would be elevated to godhood.
It would be the concept of objective reality itself.
And when you think about it, this concept is far more godlike than any of the gods currently on the table.
First, it is omniscient, all-knowing.
There is no place at all, whether looking at the universe as a whole or the tiniest individual quark, that objective reality doesn't see.
Next, it is truly omnipotent.
We have long discovered that just because we don't know what the outcome will be doesn't mean there isn't one that is about to occur, and that it will be determined by all the factors currently in play.
Objective reality is clearly the arbiter of every outcome in a deterministic universe.
Religions in general have a fundamental problem in that they're affected by human hands and human minds and human events.
If you reset the world, that is, if you removed all knowledge and all memory of all past events from humans, you destroyed every written record and completely started over.
Let's say you killed all the adult humans and then all the newborns were raised from birth by robots who fed the newborns and kept them safe until they were old enough to exist on their own.
What would those new humans do?
They would be completely unindoctrinated to any of our ideas or cultures.
They would never be told any stories about how things used to be and would be completely free to make their own society in whatever way they wanted.
First, we could say, for sure, that they would likely do simple things again, like language, tool making, problem solving, that sort of thing.
The tools they made might look very similar to us, but they might come up with some that were unique and not make some that we think are essential.
Their language would be completely unrecognizable to any of us living now.
Socially, they would probably arrange themselves in groups with some kind of hierarchy based on whatever social properties they felt were important to them.
They would probably have their own standards by which humans were considered beautiful.
And this is very likely to be different from those we have now.
And they would probably still bully each other, lie to each other, and be essentially selfish.
And they very likely would come to believe things.
In the awkward way we initially attempt to work out cause and effect relationships to improve our lives, they would develop superstitions.
And some of those superstitions would likely become religions.
But just as the language they spoke would be unrecognizable, so would their new religions be unlike any we have now.
If they conjured stories of gods and wrote them into new holy books, those gods would not only have completely different names, but also different priorities and worship structures.
But most importantly, whenever they eventually got around to using logic to develop science, the list of things they discovered would eventually recreate all of the knowledge that science has thus far attained.
Because all of the observable processes upon which our current set of scientific knowledge is based would still be available to them.
The objective world outside of their individual consciousnesses would be identical to ours, and they would eventually come to document and measure it the same way we have.
This makes science unique among human endeavors in history.
Not only are each of its parts repeatable, its whole is repeatable as well.
Charles Eisenstein knows that science is not a religion.
He wants the God of science, objective reality, to not exist as well.