The One You Feed - Lesley Hazleton

Episode Date: December 7, 2016

Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Lesley Hazleton Lesley Hazleton  is a British-American author whose work focuses on "the vast and volatile arena in which politics and religion intersect." Her latest book, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, a Publishers Weekly most-anticipated book of spring 2016, was praised by The New York Times as "vital and mischievous" and as "wide-ranging... yet intimately grounded in our human, day-to-day life." Hazleton previously reported from Jerusalem for Time, and has written on the Middle East for numerous publications including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Nation, and The New Republic. Born in England, she was based in Jerusalem from 1966 to 1979 and in New York City from 1979 to 1992, when she moved to a floating home in Seattle, originally to get her pilot's license, and became a U.S. citizen. She has two degrees in psychology (B.A. Manchester University, M.A. Hebrew University of Jerusalem). Hazleton has described herself as "a Jew who once seriously considered becoming a rabbi, a former convent schoolgirl who daydreamed about being a nun, an agnostic with a deep sense of religious mystery though no affinity for organized religion"."Everything is paradox," she has said. "The danger is one-dimensional thinking". In April 2010, she launched The Accidental Theologist, a blog casting "an agnostic eye on religion, politics, and existence." In September 2011, she received The Stranger's Genius Award in Literature and in fall 2012, she was the Inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at Town Hall Seattle. In This Interview, Lesley Hazleton and I Discuss... The One You Feed parable Her new book, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto Why she is a curious agnostic That belief is an emotional attachment That belief is an attempt to establish fact when there is no fact To be a "believer" means you've made up your mind The double meaning of the word "conviction" Why she loves doubt Why binaries concern her That agnostics are often mislabeled as wishy-washy or indecisive How to take joy in our own absurdity That you don't have to believe in a fact because a fact just exists The human tendency to find pattern in anything That perfection is boring     Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Belief is almost an attempt to establish fact where there is no fact. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

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Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Leslie Hazelton, a British-American author whose work focuses on the vast and volatile arena in which politics and religion intersect. In April 2010, she launched The Accidental Theologist, a blog casting an agnostic eye on religion, politics, and existence. In September 2011, she received the Stranger's Genius Award in Literature, and in 2012, she was the inaugural scholar-in-residence at Town Hall Seattle. Her latest book is called Agnostic, A Spirited Manifesto. Go to OneYouFeed.net and make a monthly donation.

Our goal is to get to 5% of our listeners supporting the show. Please be part of the 5% that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long-lasting. Again, that's OneYouFeed.net. Thank you in advance for your help. And here's the interview with Leslie Hazelton. Hi, Leslie. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

I'm happy to have you on. Your book is called Agnostic, a spirited manifesto. And as a fellow agnostic, I'm excited to dive into it. But let's start like we normally do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. This is where, when we talked earlier, I kind of warned you that you might not actually like what I have to say. Yes, here it comes. All right, I'm ready.

This is where, okay, I dive, shoot myself in the foot, et cetera, et cetera. But, okay, I have a problem with binaries, right? Good wolf, bad wolf. There's only two wolves out there. Let's say that one wolf is black and the other wolf is white, right? What that leaves out is this whole world of grays in between, infinite shades of gray, but in fact, which are not shades of gray but our color if black is the total absence of light and white is nothing but light then all the whole world of color is in between so you know this whole thing of of uh i mean i appreciate the feeling behind it and i appreciate the the idea you know that feed certain things, but here I am at the moment,

we are speaking exactly three weeks after the election, and I am full of bad wolf stuff. I am full of anger. I am so, I'm also brokenhearted, but I'm angry. I am furious. I am mad. I am struggling now to figure out a way to figure out how to live with this, how instead of the anger eating me, eating away at me, becoming toxic inside me, how I can harness it and use the anger. Because you see, I don't think anger is necessarily bad. And I'm gathering that anger is part of the bad wolf stuff with this parable. But sometimes I think anger is good. It means that you're reacting to what's happening. We're in a situation now where all the values I hold dear are being trampled on or will be trampled on in the next four years. We'll be stomped into the ground where there will be deliberate attempt to dismantle them all.

to this with anger. I can't. I must. I must be angry. And then the question is, how do I use the anger instead of letting it use me? So I think the bad wolf has much to teach the good wolf, or maybe as much to teach the good wolf as the good wolf does the bad wolf. And it's not a matter of choosing between them, but of accepting them both. Does that make sense? It makes total sense. I don't have any objection to that at all. I was expecting you to go really crazy on us there. No, I mean, I think obviously the parable is a story. You know, to me, it points to a couple of things. One is that, you know, we do have some degree of choice in what we want to choose to focus on in our lives. And then the other thing I like about it is I like the fact that the grandfather sort of says, hey, this is a battle that goes on your whole life. And it's, it's a close battle. And, you know, and I like that that because I think it normalizes being human. Being human is to have both sides and every piece in between. To be human, to me, is all of that.

And I like the parable. Again, it does have a dualistic nature to it. But I like it because I think it normalizes the fact that we're all going to struggle. And the fact that we are does not mean that we are bad people. No, not at all. And what I'm saying here is that, you know, under certain circumstances, and these circumstances are here right now, anger is good. Anger is necessary.

I don't want to start sounding like that guy in the movie about greed, but we need it. We really need it because we cannot sit it out again. We cannot, you know, sort of half the eligible voting population did not vote. Just sat it out. And, you know, a quarter of the population voted for Trump. A quarter voted for Hillary. Actually, slightly more than a quarter. In fact, two million more.

Over two million more. But half did not vote. And these are the people, you know, I hear all this stuff about how, oh, we must reach out with loving kindness and try to understand why people voted for Trump and so on. You know, I've had a lot of experience with fundamentalism, and I see very little point in trying to talk to people who are so absolutist and so fixed in their views. What the people I want to reach out to are those who did not vote, those who sat it out, those who thought it would make no difference. Yeah, I agree with you on a fair portion of what you're saying, mainly that talking to fundamentalists is usually a waste of time. And I'd like to get into that a little bit more, because you've talked about that a lot. And I agree that people who didn't vote, that's an issue. And what I also see happening, though, that concerns me a little bit, is that I think both sides, both right and left, we keep picking the worst example of the other side

as an example of everybody that's on that side. And I think the problem is that that forces normally rational people to go into camps. And that's where I feel like we are right now. It really is troubling to me that there's certainly some percentage of people who are very extreme, but I think you referred to them in one of your TED Talks as the, you know, the vast silent majority. You mean those who did not vote? Well, in the context, you were talking about fundamentalism, and you were saying that we allow these extremist groups to stand up and say that they are Christian or they are Muslim,

and the vast majority, the silent majority of people allow that to happen. Yes, to claim, you know, the people who claim that they represent us, who claim that they are the good Jews or the good Muslims or the good Christians and the only true Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, whatever you like. It's how dare they? How dare they claim to say what is right and what is wrong in my name, right? Usually they do it, of course, by bringing up lots and lots of biblical quotes. What they've done is all Quranic quotes, right?

And I think it's absolutely fascinating that when you look, say, at Islam, Islamic fundamentalists and Islamophobes quote exactly the same verses and phrases from the Quran. They've gone through it with the same yellow highlighter and picked out their favorite verses and so on. And they just quote them back and forth at each other like the rest of the Quran doesn't even exist. And of course, that's what Christian fundamentalists and Jewish fundamentalists do with the Bible too.

They just pick out whichever bits speak to them. In other words, they use it. They're using the Quran. They're using the Bible to their own ends. Now, these are texts that were written

a long time ago under very, very different circumstances by a person or persons unknown in a certain historical context and so on, which no longer applies today. And we find in them, because they have powerful stories and powerful emotions behind them, they have lasted. But, you know, it's a question again of which wolf do you feed right which verses do you go for do you go for the so-called sword verses in the quran by the way there was nothing about swords in those verses and they're taken completely out of context

or do you go for the far greater number of verses that talk about mercy and forgiveness and so on right yeah it depends on who you are. The thing is that, you know, religion is man-made, literally man-made. Women didn't have much of a say in it. And so, you know, this is not God-given. Even if you think that the Quran and the Bible are God-given, religion is not. Religion is a human institution, right? And it's made by humans. And it's made in their own image. So which of us gets to make it? And which wolves are feeding

whom? Yeah, they're good questions. So let's talk about agnostic. So why are you agnostic? You're a curious agnostic, right? Your Skype handle was the accidental theologian, right? Accidental theologist. Theologist. Is that different than a theologian? Oh, yes. Oh, boy.

When you say the word theologian, I think of a medieval monk sitting in his stone-walled cell with moisture creeping down the walls and a guttering candle copying out his manuscripts in the middle of the night and so on. A theologian works from inside a religion, right? But a theologist studies religion, studies the whole phenomenon as well as, you know, any particular religion. A theologist is a scholar in the sense that, you know, we usually think of scholarship as someone who is trying to understand from the inside and the outside at the same time, as it were. And I think this is essential, that you can really think well about religion in general entirely from the inside. You have to be both inside and outside. And that's a perch I really, really appreciate. And I think of it as the agnostic approach. I'm involved, you know, intensely involved,

and yet at the same time, not committed to one stance or the other. Because what I'm committed to is independence of thought. It's the awareness always that I might be wrong. And whatever I think I believe, and by the way, I tend not to believe things. That is, you know, when we talk about belief, we forget that belief implies the possibility of disbelief. You know, when you

have to believe something, it means you don't know for sure. You don't believe in a fact, right? You accept a fact. It's true. That's it. It's a fact. But when it becomes a matter of belief, then it becomes an emotional attachment, right? And you have to sort of defend it or attack it, right? Belief is literally, it's, you know, sorry, I'm getting a bit involved here in my own head. Kierkegaard, for instance, talked about the leap of faith. Actually, he wrote the leap to faith, but never mind. There is a leap involved there, but never mind. There is a leap

involved there, but that's faith, which is something very different from belief. Belief is determined that what it believes must be fact. If it asserts it enough, and if it asserts it loudly enough, and if it insists enough, then it must be fact, right? So there is no global warming because we say there is not, right? According to the new administration. We say it's a load of bunk and therefore it's a load of bunk, despite what just about every single respectable scientist says. Fact, science, actual research has no value. So this emotional, totally irrational thing that goes on with belief, but it's also irrational in the sense there's a beautiful side to this irrationality too. When you say that you believe in someone, right? When someone says that they'll

do something in good faith and you say, okay, I believe in them. What you're saying is that you trust them. You trust them to do this thing, right? You're not sure that they'll do something in good faith and you say, okay, I believe in them. What you're saying is that you trust them. You trust them to do this thing, right? You're not sure that they will do it, right? You make a loan or you reveal a secret in good faith and you ask them to keep it or you ask them to pay back the loan and you trust that they will do so. And that's called good faith. But we tend to conflate faith and belief. And they really are two very different things. Belief is almost an attempt to establish fact, but there is no fact. So therefore, you know, when you say you believe in God, you're believing in something that

cannot be proved or disproved. You are asserting your loyalty to an idea that by definition is beyond proof or disproof. By definition is beyond human comprehension. So why are we trying so damn hard to comprehend it? I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.

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It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Before we get back to the rest of the interview with Leslie, I wanted to extend a huge thank you to our listeners who have pledged their support for the show via the Patreon campaign page, which we've talked about in the previous episodes. The page is at www.patreon.com slash 1UFeed. And if you hadn't had the chance to check it out, please do so and consider just a small monthly donation to keep the show going and growing. Of course, we would love to do this for free. We can't, which is the honest truth. It

takes a lot of effort, a lot of time, and a lot of technology to do this every week. And depending on the donation level you choose, we have gifts for you to kind of show our appreciation for your support. And since Eric is actually out of town tonight, and I'm doing this promo all by myself, I was thinking that I could just offer up a huge list of outlandish things that are, if not impossible, would just be extremely difficult for Eric to kind of pull off. Since I love him, I won't do that to him. But here are some of the real things you can get. Access to the One You Feed theme song to use as a ringtone, which even I am going to do that. You can get access to exclusive deluxe mini episodes each month and

access to monthly Ask Me Anything live chat with Eric, which the first session is coming up on December 14th, which is really cool. One example of a question you might want to ask Eric on December 14th is why on earth would you let Chris do the promotional spot for this episode with no supervision at all? We'll also be offering a limited edition, the one you feed coffee mug to sip your coffee or tea in style. And of course, lastly, what we are offering for your Patreon donation is, well, as you know, Eric is an amazing hip hop artist and being the fair, equitable and open-minded person he is, he just really couldn't decide, should it sound East Coast?

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So everything else I mentioned is available, and we really would love your help. So please go to patreon.com slash one you feed. And here's the rest of the interview with leslie hazelton you're saying that using the word believe is sort of like wishing something that's not a fact into being a fact into certainty i guess that we're getting into belief versus doubt here right um you know you're but you're taking belief in the in its most strong sense to say belief means a lack of doubt. Yes, you are committed to your beliefs. You become a believer. It becomes a profession in itself.

You profess belief, of course. I'm playing with words here, but it becomes a profession. You are a believer. And this is, I think, a dangerous place to be because it means that your mind is made up. Your mind is made up tight, you know, like a cot in barracks, right? Yeah.

All the corners, you know, done in really, really tight and the seats are pulled so tight that you can bounce, you know, what is it, a quarter off them or whatever it is that the sergeant bounces on. Never had a bed that big to ever try it. And of course, you know,

I mean, you take one look at that and you think, oh, what a horrible place to sleep. I mean, how difficult to get into it, how uncomfortable to sleep in it, right? This is what it's like to have your mind made up. Everything just nicely sewn up tight. And this is called conviction.

And what we forget is that conviction has a double meaning, of course. Not only to be convinced of something, it's also to be convicted. Right. Like a prisoner in his cell. And there again, you're enclosed, you're locked in to whatever it is.

And yes, I love doubt because doubt releases you from that. releases you from that, just acknowledging doubt, holding on to doubt, knowing that you might be wrong, not having to be right all the time, and so on. In fact, not even having to be right at all, just exploring, experiencing, and so on. This takes you into a whole other dimension, where you're released from this need for conviction, this absolutist way of being in the world, this need to believe. You can explore, you can ask, you can wonder, you can be a human being. This will be the second interview in a row that I have quoted Bertrand Russell, and I don't think I've ever done it before, so I'm not sure what's going on, but brings to mind the phrase, the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. Again, you know, we're talking

about best and worst. We're assuming that, you know, we are, you know, the children of light, and they are the children of darkness. And again, we're wandering into these binaries, which I'm very concerned about. And I actually have written about this in the book, in Agnostic, which is that, you know, you have this binary system, for instance, of belief, disbelief, right? And agnostics are accused of sitting on some kind of imaginary fence somewhere smack in the middle, afraid to come down on one side or the other. And what I'm saying is that this is the most dismally flat, two-dimensional way to think of human existence and to think of all the great existential questions of human existence. And that what we need to do is to get beyond this whole matter of belief, disbelief, and

so on, placing someone, you know, somewhere, either at one end or the other, or somewhere along this flat line, and live in three dimensions, four dimensions, five dimensions, as many dimensions as we possibly can, right? Just release ourselves from that. So what I've done is just, you know, stomped that flat line into the ground, basically,

said bye-bye and taken off. Because this whole theist atheist debate is exactly that. I mean, it's just it's a flat line in each of them. You know, each side. I mean, you know, Hitchens, of course, was great entertainment. But basically, he was setting up a straw man with his idea of what religion was. You know, he was taking the very worst of religion, saying was all religion exactly easy enough to do and and makes for great entertainment but really is not intellectually satisfying let's put it like that it's demagoguery

is what it is and he was a very good demagogue yeah if you get into that debate the the people who are on the the far side of either a theistic atheistic are, you know, you're right, there's an awful lot of fundamentalism there. it stands for, whatever we refer to when we use that name, then you can reduce it to this neat little three-letter word and let it be circumscribed. It's, okay, got it, got it, that's it. That we know what we're talking about, when of course we don't. Yeah, it was definitely occurring to me that probably most people are somewhere on a spectrum between those things. One of the things I liked about the book was that you mentioned a little bit earlier, agnostics tend to get pegged into being wishy-washy or not caring or not being interested.

And certainly I am very interested in care, and I just end up with the agnostic position simply, like you said, because I don't think there's any way to really know. And so, you know, I don't have, I don't, to be honest, when I look at the world and the cosmos and all that, my reaction is I have no idea what is going on out there. Well, the closest I've come is, you know, towards the end of the book when I talk about infinity, both the mathematical and the infinity in both space and time, and numbers, of course. But, you know, we can get to that later if you like. But this attempt to confine thought, to categorize, to sort of, you know, get us all neatly positioned on some kind of PowerPoint of where we stand on belief, disbelief, so on and so on.

It's kind of absurd. It really is a way of limiting thought. And one of the things that you talk about in the book, and we've certainly covered on this show at points, is that the downside of that belief, which may be comforting in certain ways, is the loss of mystery. Yeah. That's one of the things I talk about, is that, you know, when you take the agnostic stance, by the way, I don't talk about agnosticism, because I take the ism out of that word if I could, you know, we've got enough isms out there already. I think of it as a stance, a way of looking at the world, a way of being in the world, where everything is possible, right? So, yes, mystery. You know, it's like, we've all read mystery novels. I'm reading quite a lot of them right now because I find

it a great, I'm sort of like, What are you reading? Oh, and Cleve, Benjamin Black, Benjamin Black, of course, because I love him. But it's an escape from what's there on the radio, what's there in the newspaper,

what's there on my screen all the time and so on. And I know it's an escape and newspaper, what's there on my screen all the time and so on. And I know it's an escape and I know it's a guilty one, but I need a safety valve, as it were. But, you know, when we read a mystery, we know, you know, there's the body inside the locked room, the room locked from the inside, right? How was it done? Who done it? And so on. And we know that there will be a solution. And that's very comforting. And we try and work it out as we go along, and usually we're pretty surprised by it, if the book's any good in any case. And then we close the book, and there's that sense of, oh, of disappointment. That moment, you think, oh, it's been explained. And once you explain a mystery, there's nothing left. And it's almost as though

something in us doesn't want the explanation. And I trust that something. You know, I can get out there in the hills and the mountains on a clear night and look at the Milky Way and know exactly what I'm looking at. I am looking at the little that I can see of an arm of a spiral, you know, that we are part of this right at the edge of this huge nebula and so on that is only one of billions that we know of and probably an infinite number that we don't know of in the universe, right? And I know all this, but I stand out there and I spread my arms wide so it feels like, you know, the Milky Way is just, whoa, falling from one palm into the other. And I feel, whoa, this is the universe, right? And I'm standing there sort of bouncing the universe from one hand to the other and perfectly aware that

this is an absurd notion but full of joy with it nonetheless so i think if we can take joy in our absurdity joy in recognizing our own absurdity our own smallness tininess infinitesimalness in the universe, and yet at the same time just laugh with it. There's huge freedom in this, and there is delight in this, and real joy in it. And I think sometimes we can take fact, we can take what we know, and it makes the world smaller, or we can take what we know and just revel in how huge it makes the world. There's a perspective in that. I adore infinity. Infinity to me is, maybe it's the agnostic equivalent of what God is for people who believe in God, right?

I don't have to believe in infinity. It just exists. I can prove it mathematically. I can just point to the stars. I can point to time. I can just point to the stars. I can point to time, you know. It's a delight. It just puts everything in perspective when you think, you know, sort of your own life is so central. And we are all incredibly egocentric.

We all still imagine that the world revolves around us, which, you know, in our own personal worlds, it does. But to get that sense of perspective, I know that some people find it very intimidating and it makes them feel very, very small. But I find a certain joy in that smallness, in that sense that I'm just an infinitesimally small part of something much, much grander that I cannot even pretend to understand. But it really is quite wonderful. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like...

Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead.

It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You quote Rebecca Goldstein in the book we had Rebecca on, and you talk about how much the will to matter is. You just described two things. One is, you know, sort of being agnostic, and the second is looking at this massive universe and us being a really small part of it. How do you find your will to matter within that context? How does that work out for you? I'm not sure I have a will to matter, actually. I have a will to act in the world, to stand up, to speak. I have been graced with a voice, you know, a writing voice and so on, also, you know, a speaking voice, and I'm not afraid to speak out and to stand up and when necessary to act out. And this is something that I've been

gifted with. And I think it would be, I'd be letting myself down if I did not use this. Does that make sense? I did my master's in psychology in Jerusalem at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And it was just those two or three years there when there was the most extraordinary meeting of minds on the faculty there, including a later Nobel Prize winner. We were aware of it at the time. You could feel the excitement, the ideas rushing back and forth and so on, new things being developed. It was wonderful to be there at that time. And a few years later, I was back there and somebody gave a party. Lots of people from the psychology department were there. At one point, she's standing with me in a corner and we're looking at everybody

and she says, isn't it amazing? She said, just look at this. I mean, how we've just, these people, how we've changed the world. Oh, come, come, come now. A little bit of perspective here. And we talked about it a bit and finally she said okay she said we've each made our little dent in the world and i said okay let's take it even further you know when you drive over gravel and you get those ping ping pings of the stones gravel stones on your hood i said okay we've made a little ping in the world and that's great because if enough of us make those little pings you get get where I'm going here? Yes, right? So it's not all me, me, me, despite the new incoming administration.

It really is us, us, us. If enough of us do it. You describe the human tendency to find patterns in anything. You quote the anthropologist Clifford Goertz. Yes, Goertz. Goertz? Yes, Goertz. Goertz, got it. Famously said, man is an animal suspended in webs of significance.

He himself has spun. Yes, and I'm as susceptible to it as anybody else. I read this phrase, something happens twice, I'll start waiting, a reference of something. I know it's going to come up a third time. So, you know, we notice threes, things that occur in sequences of three. Or let's say, you know, there's a major earthquake in California, right? And somebody will say, oh, my God, I was there just yesterday.

So that has significance. Or I was there a year ago. So that has significance. I mean, what is the timeline for it being significant? Were you there just five minutes ago or an hour ago, a day ago, a week ago, so that has significance. I mean, what is the timeline for it being significant? Were you there just five minutes ago, or an hour ago, a day ago, a week ago, etc., etc.? I mean, when does this become personal? Of course, there's absolutely no end to it, because we can insert ourselves into just about anything, which is part of what I mean by being so extraordinarily egocentric as the world revolves around us.

You had an example in the book that I absolutely loved because you studied probability at a university level with some of the best scientists in the world, and yet you say that if you roll the dice and you get a seven three times in a row, you really believe that the next time it can't be a seven, even though we know that's not the case. And I find that the most confounding principle,

and I get it, like if you flip a coin. That's the simplest one, of course. If you flip a coin, it comes up heads nine times. How many people who are listening to us right now are going to be able to resist betting on it coming up that's right even though that particular choice is exactly 50 50 but it is that is a maddening concept and one that i i love because that is an example of where like you know the logical truth and yet it's so hard not to draw a pattern and make something out of it i know

because we're human we're irrational and no matter how hard we try and there's something wonderful in that you know i try and resist that when i'm playing craps i really try very hard to resist that that belief that that's going to happen. Perfection, you know, is very boring. I mean, I know we're always aiming for perfection. I have no idea why, because it is really boring. If you see an absolutely perfect face, there's nothing there. It's like a mask. There's nothing to get through to.

It's perfectly balanced. Each side matches the other and so on. It's nothing to get through to. It's perfectly balanced. Each side matches the other and so on. It's kind of inhuman. Our flaws, our imperfections, I think, are what make us interesting. I couldn't agree more. We're nearing the end of time. So before we wrap up, though, I'm going to take you way back to a book that you wrote in 1985 called The Right to Feel Bad. Oh, yes. Not my title. I wanted to call it In Defense of Depression. I got bullied out of it. Got bullied out of it. So do you still sort of stand by and believe kind of what you wrote in that book? Oh, yeah. And that came out just before Prozac, of course,

which has kind of overtaken it. But yeah, sometimes as, you know, we started off my talking about the mass of anger inside me right now, post-election, three weeks after the election. And sometimes, you know, it would be inhuman not to be depressed. Mourning for someone who's died is a form of depression. And if we don't mourn, then we're in trouble. Then we are in deep trouble if we repress it and so on. So sometimes we need to be depressed in order, and we need to work through it. Freud, I can't believe I'm quoting Freud, but I am, he talked about the work of mourning, right? And it is work.

It's stages of grief, not necessarily Kubler-Ross's one and so on, but not necessarily acceptance. But stages that you really do have to work through because if you don't, it'll eat away at you inside. Like this anger that's in me now that I'm struggling with. I know, I know I cannot let it eat at me like this. I have to find a way to work with it, right? So that I can use it rather than have it use me. I haven't found it yet, but I will do. I can feel it coming somehow, you know, and I will find the way to do that. It's not the way, there are many ways, but it's just a stance. Again, the way for me or a stance is just a general sort of way of being in the world. Yeah.

I tend to make a distinction between sort of a clinical type of depression and feeling bad sometimes. And I think that feeling bad, and in that book you talk about how our culture sets us up to always expect to be happy. Oh, yes. Happy, happy. Those are definitely themes that we explore on the show. And when I think about that, I think it was Krishnamurti who said, it's no sign of healthiness to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Something like that.

I don't have it exactly right. But it's getting to your point, which is that there is a place where all emotions have their place and work. I think the challenge with depression, sometimes it's the only place we visit. Yeah, and this is where we start out from, and it's true. And by the way, as regards happiness, what we forget is the root of the word. Happy comes from hap, as in perhaps or happenstance. In other words, chance.

You chance on happiness, and I love that. You cannot plan for it. You chance on it. Yep. I think that's a great way to end. So, Leslie, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for your writing. You've got so many books that if I had more time, I would love to read a good number of them.

I think agnostic is the most deeply felt and the most personal. And it really is a spirited manifesto. The agnostic stance, not as, oh, I guess I must be agnostic. Nothing wishy-washy about it. It's a strong position of great emotional and intellectual and spiritual integrity. You are clearly a spirited woman, so it is no doubt that you would write a spirited book. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. We really enjoyed it. Thanks, Eric. Me too.

Okay. Bye. Bye. You can learn more about Leslie Hazelton and this podcast at oneufeed.net slash Leslie. That's L-E-S-L-E-Y. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneufeed.net slash support.