The Taproot Podcast - 🪷🧘Interview With Matthew Remski of the Conspirituality Podcast

Starting point is 00:00:00 The chemtrails and the holy grails Light on your hapsburg jaw Through the children Nosferatu, Dasvidaniya, Chimichanga KFC, Noam Chomsky, LMNOP Welcome, Neophyte, Rimsky-San. Thank you, Joel. Thank you. I feel blessed. I feel cleansed. My chakras are clear. I'm ready to go. Just open yourself.

Starting point is 00:00:35 I'm open. I want to welcome. Go ahead. Yeah, open, receptive. I'm ready. Thank you. I want to welcome Matthew Rimsky of the podcast Conspirituality and the book Conspirituality. That's really good. I've always enjoyed him and the other contributors work with that. They kind I'm excited to kind of get into it and talk about some of the, some of the stuff out there, uh, that's going on in the room and you're doing sort of very granular work with this material. And that's not often something that I get exposure to as somebody who does a lot of broad research

Starting point is 00:01:37 and cultural tracking. So that's great. It is a weird barometer because you see these shifts happen pretty quickly. And one of the things that I talk about with my colleagues a lot is how it's almost like these generational differences have been smushed into like two and five year periods instead of 10 year cycles yeah difference in me and somebody five years younger than me and somebody five years different from them is so vast yeah especially just in the amount of hope that they have you know right yeah

Starting point is 00:02:03 because they grew up with the internet reading this stuff and they don't really plan on there being an economic or ecological future for themselves, you know? Yeah, it's huge. Yeah, there's a cliff, they can see it fast approaching. But that kind of nihilism, I think, is sad, you know, and it's also kind of scary because you have people who essentially never even had the vision that there was a hope for the future and then that was sort of in question they just came into the world with the assumption that that was never a reality that yeah if i if i have uh the time and the wherewithal and uh i get a i get a contract that allows me to get out of this horrible news cycle i think i would turn my attention primarily to that with regard to the issue

Starting point is 00:02:46 of parenting, uh, because I think that, um, not, or being able to not make despair transitive in familial relationships to not make the anxiety of, you know,

Starting point is 00:03:03 your own gen X or millennial uh despair uh a single or central feature of your children's life is is one of the most important challenges i think that i'm personally engaged with so so yeah yeah great to talk great to talk to you yeah um not always fun stuff to talk about but that's kind of where we try and go because you know trauma therapy podcast the intersection of that and other realities in the world is that interest of mine so i mean first it's like i know you have interviewed um the directors of one of the documentaries on twin flames there's two of them um which was one of those recent cults and then there's there's all of these kind of mixtures of it seems like multi-level marketing that

Starting point is 00:03:43 neuro-linguistic programming post-ericksonian hypnosis motivational interviewing stuff yeah and and basically the internet that has created these things um these kind of post-nexium cults uh that there seems to be a new documentary about you know mother cult the god of the i forget what her name was the the cult of the mother god. Yeah, Amy Carlson. Yeah. Well, and the thing is, those things are fascinating because it seems like they're just increasingly low rent. I mean, when my wife was watching the Twin Flames documentary, and not at all to make fun of any of the people who are a victim of something like that, but she was like, it doesn't look like the people running this are trying very hard. And it doesn't look

Starting point is 00:04:21 like the people who are in it are even believing very hard, you know? Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about that. I mean, part of my, you know, sort of personal story, which I might say a little bit more about later is that, you know, I was into high demand groups for about six years in my early thirties. And that's really kind of the backbone of my research interest going forward. And I think it's really the role that I play on the podcast actually is looking at the sociology of toxic spiritual groups. But it is a field that has become its own spectacle. And I think something strange is happening where it's becoming increasingly important to separate out two different

Starting point is 00:05:06 things. And one is what are the parameters and mechanisms of a cultic group? Uh, and what are our cultural fetishes around that group? you know, for people who are familiar with the incredible success of NXIVM, uh, not only as a, an an organization but also as an entertainment

Starting point is 00:05:27 franchise now because there are you know multiple big budget streaming documentaries out there there's all kinds of reporting um i think it's worth reflecting on the fact that a lot of the people who came away from that group who ended up being central in its demise came from the entertainment industry. experience into a cultural product that doesn't necessarily add to our sense of understanding or learning. And I think with regard to NXIVM, the usage of cultic discourse, there's no doubt it was a cult. There's no doubt that Keith Raniere is a standard cult leader but the way that some of these spectacles are now framed for me suggests that the term cult becomes an increasingly lazy and sensationalist term for like highly concentrated and localized capitalism yeah and what ends up happening is that you know the more a monster Keith Raniere is the less we really look carefully at jeff bezos um the more the more that the the basic power economies of power relations of our economies are ignored the more we can sort of invest and project all of its ugliness into into a group

Starting point is 00:06:59 um yeah and you know keith really doesn't behave that differently from the typical billionaire CEO. And we have to understand that his entire sort of technique, his method evolved out of the sort doing the same kind of cultural labor that true crime and cop dramas do for the carceral state. Basically, we make people who are vulnerable to these groups into cultural jokes and people who are weirdos. I think that is very, very significant with regard to the love has one cult. I think it's, it's also plays out in the twin flames universe. And, but really, I mean,

Starting point is 00:07:51 we're talking about people in very marginalized, vulnerable circumstances, whose, whose tragic adventures in these groups probably would have been averted by better social services. And that's the conversation that we're not having because we're talking about how evil cults are. Yeah, you hit on two of my kind of softer questions already there, which was that one, you know, you think there's pros and cons to giving this the true crime treatment. And I think from my perspective, when it ignores these larger realities

Starting point is 00:08:26 of capitalism to look for a boogeyman and then say oh look here's this weird guy so direct your anger at him that isn't as useful as the ones that like i think cult of the mother their mother uh the amy carlson documentary did a good job at showing that if these people had had access to health care that yeah cult probably never would have happened yeah so much of it was her seeing this need and being like well i'm going to identify actual problems with that system to critique it and the answer is that you need to turn blue drinking colloidal silver well and you expand that or extrapolate it out to the level of q anon and the same dynamics are at play where this becomes a demographic that

Starting point is 00:09:07 is more stigmatized than understood. And that just doesn't work. And I think it fits very sort of cleanly into the smug condescension that uh, that, you know, is, is characterized by Hillary Clinton talking about a basket of deplorables, right? Like there's no, there's no, um, you know, obviously the,

Starting point is 00:09:33 the ideologies, the memes, the harassment, the shit posting of QAnon is odious and it's, and it's harmful. Um, but the, the,

Starting point is 00:09:51 uh, odious and it's harmful. But the broad sections of immiserated lower middle class and working class people in Rust Belt, you know, territory that get drawn into it often when they are out of work, often when they're injured, sometimes when they are, you know, trying to wean themselves off of OxyContin. You know, it's like this is a systemic, this is symptomatic. QAnon is symptomatic. It is not a sin. It's not a series of bad choices.

Starting point is 00:10:26 There's a lot about it that makes sense in terms of how it attempts to bind people together that have lost other forms of sociality well and i think that the people who probably agree with the political outcomes that i would want but i disagree with their method that's what they're doing is they're trying to use shame as this tool politically which i just don't think ever works never my point is even if you're saying that you want what you want, you realize that doing it the way you're trying to do it, you're going to get the other result inevitably. I mean, there's certain inevitabilities. You know, one, the question that I'd emailed you ahead of time,

Starting point is 00:10:57 you know, in the 70s in the US, you've got a lot of economic malaise. You know, Carter goes up and tries to offer another myth, essentially, for what America is. Yeah. To replace the one that's failing with the crisis of confidence speech. And that's completely unsuccessful. You know, people are angry. And you get this interest in mysticism and esotericism, which my theory is, because you see this in every other empire when its star starts to wane you know you get mithraic cults as part of a in the army basically of rome when the when the empire is no longer reflecting the

Starting point is 00:11:31 ego of the individual then i get this ego dissonance or i get this cognitive distance where i'm like i need power and my empire is not doing it and my football team's not doing it and my army's not doing it so i must go inward now and find a personal power and as a power and in we always joke about how it was just so easy in the 70s to start like a like a cult that you could just wear an orange bed sheet and say kindergartner facts about like eating healthy and and got some guy a flower in the airport and they're like do you have any metaphysical beliefs to go along with this flower like thank you so much you know right and and but i think that that was due to basically the the uh economy and the oil embargo and all of those things and so i think we're seeing that again now as people sort of lose faith you know left or right people feel like the government

Starting point is 00:12:22 doesn't reflect their interests they They feel like they lost. And so, you know, QAnon is essentially a conspiracy theory about how even though you didn't get what you wanted or the guy you wanted isn't really in charge, actually, he secretly is underneath the surface. So you can still feel like you were right or that you were powerful. And that you're going to get retribution. Yeah. That you're going to have justice and that you're not powerless. that you're gonna get retribution yeah that you're gonna have justice and that you're not powerless let me just go back to one thing i have a lot to say about the emergence of magic or or the cycles of of magic but just to pick up on what you were saying about shame um i think because i agree with jeff charlotte that that fascism is actually a very appropriate framework for the kinds of anti-politics that we see emerging on know uh really debating the common good uh but that we are

Starting point is 00:13:29 uh playing with spectacles of power and affect and uh you know this is why uh trump is just not really a politician in that sense right he's a he's he's an entertainer uh and as somebody who is playing primarily on uh affect and power uh to counterpose that with shame to dig into the emotional you know speculation of the the souls of the people who are already activated in this in this very primal way it just cannot work it cannot work um and so and so you know it's not like uh i believe that that reflective listening and you know everybody having individual therapy is going to change the course of the country. But I don't think that, you know, further of the emergence of magical thinking or mysticism during times of economic and political stress. The person who I think summarizes this best in the sort of microcosm that we study, which is what's happened between 1960 and 2020,

Starting point is 00:15:03 and then the pandemic kind of like blows everything up or amplifies any of all of that. Uh, the guy's name is Sam Binkley. Uh, and he's, he's got a book called getting loose is from 2004. And he, he starts by talking about like, all right. So, so in the fifties, we have this contracted sort of repressive Fordism that the boomers basically are born into and grow up in. they go through a huge expansive project of of potential social change in the 60s uh and that actually uh fails in many ways bringing upon the contraction of the 1970s self-project and then the 1980s as the monetization of the self-project and and so i i actually have a quote from here

Starting point is 00:15:45 him that i think that it's like is is so pertinent he says that by the early 1970s it was clear that sweeping social changes were not going to materialize a whole generation's trust and leadership had virtually collapsed and the sense of national integrity and purpose had been shaken to the core not surprisingly the national mood turned inward. People wanted to restore some semblance of normalcy to their lives after a decade of wrenching change. For the more persistent among this pioneering culture, the agenda shifted from transforming society to finding new ways of living at the grassroots level of society. Instead of continuing the seemingly fruitless struggle to change dominant institutions many among this forerunner group began to concentrate on their immediate lives

Starting point is 00:16:30 the domain where they had genuine control and could make a visible if seemingly small difference at the local level countless small experiments in living began to flourish now we flourish. Now we take that analysis and say, it is embodied by the yoga and wellness world's drive to depoliticize its demographic, you know, very consistently over 20, 30 years, uh, to say, you know, political engagement is actually too abstract. It's useless. Uh, it's, it's, it's conflictual. It doesn't accord with your higher truth. Um, so yeah, uh, what, what, you know, magic is what happens when, uh, or what emerges as an answer. Um, the self project emerges as kind of like the fallback default project of, uh, you know, this melancholy, um, that says, that said, that says, oh, it didn't really,

Starting point is 00:17:27 it didn't really work. And, and, or, or it was too painful, or we lost, or we lost too much, or we can't actually believe that we couldn't end the Vietnam War. Yeah. The methods of getting what we wanted, we have to still pretend that they're effective instead of changing what we think effectiveness is or effective action is. Yeah, right, right. And I get a lot of crap from self-appointed like Jungian experts and clinical psychology students every time I talk about that relationship. Like I'm saying that there's a spiritual cycle to, you know, Chinese calendar of politics or something. But to me, it's basic psychology. I mean, the microcosm is the macrocosm. Like what happened. Who's going to get into D&D and religion and comparative religion and Joseph

Starting point is 00:18:09 Campbell in the high school? It's the nerd that can't get on the football team that's getting thrown in a locker that can go down in a basement and play D&D. And there's this relationship to the external self and the internal self. And when we're pathways to this external kind of actualization or cut off, we move inward. And I don't think there's a way around that in psychology, if you're going to be honest, you know?

Starting point is 00:18:31 Well, what happens to economically is that as soon as the self project becomes a focal point of 1970s economy, deregulation and offshoring of labor strips away significant portions of that material world so that nobody can actually return to it. And so, you know, what you what you have is is, you know, scads of people who are now who are now invested in the self project of getting loose, of becoming of becoming sort of more self aware, more cognizant more organic more in touch with the earth turn in tune on drop out yeah they're they're they're doing they're doing all of that and meanwhile and meanwhile the labor that actually makes their shoes their earth shoes is being offshored to to

Starting point is 00:19:18 bangladesh and so what what is left for that demographic except to monetize the lifestyle? They can't monetize the manufacturing of the actual material necessities of life because that's either becoming automated or offshored. where, you know, people sort of get funneled into, you know, almost a world that just sort of increasingly becomes less and less real. One of the points that Adam Curtis brings up, and if you can even call it a point, those are so loose, but he says in All Watched Over by Machines of Love and Grace, that there's this attempt at, you know, communism, essentially, that these communities want equality. And so they splinter off and there's these, you know, groups, but that we're so predisposed to hegemony that what happens by the 80s, I mean, what you're saying is a financial and manufacturing point that's material and true, but a psychological component is that charismatic leaders rose up

Starting point is 00:20:23 and took control of every single one of those, you know, kind of ideal like communities, and turned them into cults, essentially, that the idea of everybody was gonna be completely equal was something that, right, was that is happening internally in those cults at the same time that, you know, the, you know, you're making a material dialectic kind of argument about finance, which is also true. Yeah, I guess. And I guess if you have a self-project emerge as a dominant economy in capitalism, it's got to evolve so that somebody's on top, right? Somebody's going to be the leader. You can take the hippies out of capitalism, but you couldn't take the capitalism out of the hippies. And you get back to the landers which is an its own weird thing yeah well um yeah i remember like i was i was born in 87 so like in the 90s i remember like the

Starting point is 00:21:14 internet was like being written about a ton before it actually arrived you know which i think is a huge part of how we got to where we got now and uh and it was funny because it was like the news was basically like i think like the news was still news at that point but it was still trying to like monetize things yeah it seemed like as a kid like its point was to like terrify housewives like they were always telling you that this new big thing was coming and like it was going to get your kids and so most of the coverage on the internet was that but there was all this talk about how it's going to get your kids. And so most of the coverage on the internet was that, but there was all this talk about how it was going to be this great thing that changed the world. And, you know, I remember like in the real early days of like chat and things that kind of libertarian type people would talk about, like the internet's going to like remove all political

Starting point is 00:21:58 problems because what will happen is you can log on and get the truth and the government can't control the truth. And so when you have the truth, you'll be able to vote right and overcome all of these things. And it was this very utopian, like just over the hill, the sun is rising. But what actually happened from where I was sitting was that what the internet let you do is have a million data points to justify anything you wanted to believe. What was being left out of that was this assumption that we want to change our beliefs, which is usually we want to justify our beliefs. And we're kind of like, our psychology is designed to stop us from wanting to change, not to be evolving. And so now you've got the ability to sit there and say, I want to believe the earth is flat, type, type,

Starting point is 00:22:41 type. Okay, here's 500 reasons why I'm right. And that's why everyone dug into their corner and there's 800 million corners. Yeah. And it's not just digging. It's not just digging in or not changing. It's that it's that the intermittent does seem to be in a really effective machine for actually amplifying and exaggerating beliefs that are already sort of well-established or psychologically necessary. You know, the first high-demand group that I got lured into was run by a guy named Michael Roach. He's still out there. You can look him up on Instagram.

Starting point is 00:23:19 He's still doing his kind of prosperity gospel Tibetan Buddhism BS. And it's about 19, let's see, what's the year? It's got to be 1997, 1998 or something like that. And one of the first things that I heard him say or in that first year, he was starting to move into an application of Tibetan philosophy and its various Buddhist theories of emptiness or sort of like the no inherent meaning of any material object or data point.

Starting point is 00:23:59 And therefore, we really have to examine how we're putting together reality from our behaviors. You know, so it's a version of non-dualism that's very like ornate and beautiful and it has, you know, a lot of grace to it. that as a spiritual path to Chinese oligarchs who at the same time were depopulating Tibet or colonizing it. Very, very weird. But I remember him standing up at one point and saying, almost like a child, well, the internet

Starting point is 00:24:39 just came along and it added $100 billion of wealth to the world instantly. And I remember thinking thinking like what what like what do you what do you talk like what are you talking about that it that there's a new it created a new world yeah that it that it that it created something more than than than what is materially actually present. So my point in bringing it up is that for the demographic that we study, the internet is not only a kind of warehouse of every possible data point that you can use

Starting point is 00:25:20 in your melted epistemology. It's also a place where the the its infinite structure mirrors the aspiration of both new age philosophy and its endless growth and late stage capitalism and its lack of limitation right it's like It's like there's no natural limit to anything spatially or epistemologically on the internet. And so there's this mechanism that we have that is based on a complete absence of guardrails or boundaries. It's a technology for creating literally infinite space. I mean, I watch my son play Minecraft. And, you know, the program is literally, as he zooms out forward, the program is literally building the landscape in the horizon.

Starting point is 00:26:17 And it will go on infinitely. There's no end to the number of blocks you can use. There's no, only computing power, right? The only thing that's really like sort of creating a limit on how large your Minecraft world can be is your crunching power. And so, you know, there's this infinite growth technology that mirrors these beliefs that the mind is an infinite resource or the self can infinitely grow it's all frictionless uh it took away the the notion of um you know identifying charisma versus expertise as being some sort of uh you know pole star for whether you're going to give anybody credibility.

Starting point is 00:27:05 Yeah. That is a phenomenal point. I remember when I first heard there are a couple of guys that you guys have talked about. And I was saying like to my wife, like these guys talk like JJ Abrams movies, like there's so much momentum that it's so engaging, but then you back up and you're like, wait,

Starting point is 00:27:23 this doesn't make any, why would you have put the people in the torpedo torpedo tubes and Star Trek two, if you were going to shoot them in or whatever, like it just, it doesn't work. But the whole time you're listening to it, you're like, yeah, yeah. Well, this thing connects the next thing and nothing holds together, but there is a charisma that I think people assume. And of course it doesn't help if you're kind of a moron that also has happens to have a PhD or something. So people think that you're an expert. But there is this thing where we do mistake charisma for expertise.

Starting point is 00:27:52 Yeah, well, and there's no way of really defining it except through exposure. Like charisma is defined post hoc right it's like did this did this go viral well you can sort of try to reverse engineer why it went viral but you can't really get to the bottom of why do some people throw up when they hear tony robbins voice and why some people feel like they should go and spend five5,000 to walk on fire next to him. Like there is no real answer to that question. And, and the, the demographic that we study, uh, in conspirituality counter poses itself against the world of institutions and expertise through the mobilization of charisma and charisma alone. Because we're talking about unregulated

Starting point is 00:28:45 industries, which are unregulated in the same sort of historical political vein that the rest of the neoliberal economy took, because they are unregulated, there's no way of measuring the effectiveness of the best chiropractor or the best Reiki practitioner. It has to be how the person performs. It has to be how the person performs. It has to be how the person presents themselves to the public. There's nothing else going on. And the way in which that intersects with how somebody like Trump comes to political power is almost a perfect overlay because he's not doing politics in the same way that the wellness influencer is not doing science or medicine they are doing performances of wellness he's doing the performance of political power

Starting point is 00:29:31 uh and that seems to be enough that's moving this you know uh this this this economy this 100 billion dollars that instantly appeared according to michael roach well no and that's my question for the people that i've never really had any of them answer, but the people who share you guys' critique, you know, my critique of these industries, the spiritual, you know, influencer space, but they don't want to look at the market. They don't want to critique that.

Starting point is 00:30:01 Like y'all had an episode on conspirituality about coaches coaching coaches where all these people went in became influencer coaches and so now there's enough of them that you can be like i'm the coach who coaches you right because everyone became a coach you know and and it's uh but my question is like when you get rid of man for the people who say okay that's bad but also just roll up your bootstraps and don't do it. Well, when everybody who's coming up and looking for work, you know, increasingly can't afford college. You've moved all the manufacturing overseas. We don't make anything. The entire economy is food service and gig work essentially, where you do more damage and spend more gas on

Starting point is 00:30:40 your car, you know, driving around with Uber, then you get paid. Yeah. If you stay in food service long enough, you know, you need Adderall and cocaine a lot of the time to keep up with the demands of the industry. Now you've got this addiction or health problems or it's just not sustainable all the time, but nothing is manufactured. The only other thing out there is content creator influencer. How do you expect all these people not to be jumping into that space and, you know, without another option? I don't see a way where that goes away unless something changes at the bottom level.

Starting point is 00:31:12 But there's a lot of people who feel like we can just do it through gumption or diligence or some sort of empty language-based value. One thing that I would say is that, you know, any kind of political movement that began to reconsider the invisibility and the unpaid nature of care work would be a first start. uh trucks off of the line in detroit anymore there's going to be people usually women uh staying at home taking care of uh elderly people with disabilities and children and it's like so so so whether whether you are you know not making anything and you've become a content influencer or you still have the opportunity to make something, the care work is still there. And to make that more visible and to make it paid, perhaps through, you know, I don't know, UBI has a bunch of problems with it, but with something that acknowledged the fact that work is going on, even in this strangely sort of depersonalized and dissociative world,

Starting point is 00:32:27 then that would be really good and the and the i guess i guess the other thing that i would say is that you know relearning how to do good things in the world uh is is actually a really good thing. And unfortunately, it has been taken up primarily by a kind of reactionary political aesthetic that says, you know, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to organic farm, or I'm going to learn to wild harvest, or I'm going to figure out how to provide for my local community. And so something has to happen there where the drive to do that should be socialized into networks of solidarity so that the people who are doing that as influencers and they're doing quite well at it uh somehow realize that you know it doesn't really help anybody except perhaps themselves through their royalty checks uh to to sort of promote or to advertise a form of life that you know the vast majority of people don't have access to. So, you know, I am like a really good example of this is, is, you know, RFK Jr. is proposing that the opioid crisis, that various

Starting point is 00:33:58 addiction issues that that statistically seem to be on the rise, I don't know whether he's got those facts right or not he usually gets most things wrong but i mean let's just say that there's a lot of people who are underserved by addiction services and mental health services we know that so he's talking about uh modeling a country-wide country or rural retreat organic farm network where where kids teenagers uh could go to work for four years learning how to farm and work in a woodwork and they wouldn't have phones uh they wouldn't have their devices they wouldn't have internet access and and uh i mean to be honest it's like you can see where the appeal comes from uh in a world in which uh very few people are able to touch grass.

Starting point is 00:34:47 But when, you know, you know that the logic behind that is pretty much eco-fascist and ableist, that, you know, it's not going to have the desired outcome, or it's not going to have a good systemic outcome. And I think that's why Naomi Klein's analyses are so important. Because, you know, I find myself listening to RFK Jr. on this, you know, kind of organic reparation camp idea. And I'm going, Yeah, I think that sounds like a really good idea. And I really don't want him running it uh and then i realized that it's not something that i as a policymaker would bring up or press for because that guy's already talked about it uh and and what klein is saying is that whenever we have these you know uh reactionary forces take up reasonable critiques of uh the neoliberal order uh they make sense to

Starting point is 00:35:48 a huge portion of the population but because you know people who are more attuned to the facts feel poisoned by their involvement with those issues we don't actually take them up ourselves and so like i think that the general idea of figuring out how to uh i could be part of an abolitionist program right to to get rid of prisons and to create farms uh but you would have to make sure that it was uh some of the fundamental assumptions of of how people are served uh are really well studied and i don't think you know rfk jr really has anything helpful to say about that well i, I remember during when I was in college, it was like kind of the end of like libertarians, like there would be these few because there's not really a lot left. Like there would be these

Starting point is 00:36:32 people that like, you know, wore a backwards baseball cap and had long hair and listened to Radiohead and they'd put up the Ron Paul poster and a lot of and they were really into Ron Paul. But I remember that there was a contingent of just kind of like normal, moderate Democrats that were like, we should vote foron paul because he has ideas they're like pretty good that might happen and then ideas that are so batshit crazy they'll never happen right and so like it was a strategic thing that they were trying to do you know by hoping that those ideas would get weeded out right right but the the way that, like, when you're talking about, you know, all of these cults and most of the reactionary political movements that you're talking about begin with a critique of the system as it exists, politics, the neoliberal order, you know, health care, that is right. Yeah, right. It's just that the answer is not snake oil because there's corruption

Starting point is 00:37:25 over here. And I mean, that's one of the things that I wish, you know, it would be interesting to me if y'all got into more on conspirituality is a lot of times the episodes end with this is pseudoscience and this is science. Well, you know, I'm a licensed social worker. I'm doing evidence-based practice in Alabama. We're also trying to innovate because a lot of the things that have been around forever, like cognitive behavioral therapy, I don't feel like are very helpful for trauma. We need more kind of brain based medicine that changes the sub brain. There's, you know, 20 competing technologies and QEG and neuromodulation with different pros and cons, all these things. So I'm on the, you know, science part of it. But in that system,

Starting point is 00:38:01 I still see a ton of problems with what we allow to happen you know and so yeah right there's very unscientific things about the way we use research for example the people with the phds for sure and and i just like to point out that that the you know whenever we have a denouement on the show that is okay well we've separated the you know the the truth from the falsehood here and on we go um i share some of your dissatisfaction with that and and i think that's partly because uh i don't i'm not being a scientist i'm not the scientific analyst on the on the show i didn't i don't do science journalism uh yeah i don't think it's as satisfying as me to, for me to make those distinctions. Um,

Starting point is 00:38:46 I think they're very important to make. Uh, but I also, but I also, uh, sometimes we get into the territory of, um, you know, suggesting that, oh, if everybody just came to a clear understanding of the capital S science, uh, we would, we would, we would all be okay. And I just think that that's patently untrue. I'm not saying that we are saying that, my colleagues are saying that. I think it can leave some people with the impression. And to your point, the pseudoscience and the conspiracy theories that we study, they come from real events. They come from real needs. You know, to reference Naomi Klein again, you know, conspiracy theorists get the feelings right and then they get the facts wrong.

Starting point is 00:39:35 And I would say additionally that conspiracy theorists are empathetic because they can feel systemic problems acutely like they know that health care can be tone deaf neglectful traumatizing uh that that its profit model can be predatory they know that governments lie they know that the cia overthrows foreign governments they know on the january 6th protests telling the reporter i'm here sieging the Capitol because my son has autism and we don't have health care and they have the cure for that in there. It was heartbreaking. Incredible stuff. point for why so much of this has happened because it has to do with uh you know imputed values or or skills and parenting uh and then also just the the mystery of who the child is amidst a capitalistic structure that needs it to go into production right so anyway but but i would say

Starting point is 00:40:41 like you know conspiracy theorists also know that je that Jeffrey Epstein abused girls and young women in order to manipulate political power. They know that he ultimately got away with it. They're correct that the Catholic Church has been, you know, revealed in part to be like a global sex trafficking organization that shuffles around priests and does whatever it can to limit liability. They're not wrong. Right, right. They're not wrong about surveillance capitalism. They're not wrong that, you know, the response, they're just not wrong about, you know, what the general structures are. But the responses they come up with um are going to be you know scrambled because they often don't have access to the the the data or the structures of learning that they need you know they're not going to get their answers or justice from

Starting point is 00:41:36 from yoga gurus or anti-vax salesmen um and when the train blows up in in palestine ohio and they and their solution is not to mobilize an effort to contain this thing federally and treat it, it's to just for some reason light tons of polyvinyl chloride on fire and turn a whole town black. And Obama, the left-leaning guy, is the one who repealed all these rules on the brakes for the trains. And Trump is sitting in office. Do you need like a chemtrail conspiracy about why the government is using the planes to secretly do it at that point? Like, you know disaster which has been created and is being denied or suppressed right like i think this is this is essential to the to the heart of the satanic panic as well we know childhood sexual abuse is a thing

Starting point is 00:42:42 we know that it happens domestically we know that it has it's it's been covered up we know that uh there are power dynamics involved in how it occurs uh what happens over years over generations when you say nope we're not going to listen nope uh it's too difficult to report this out journalistically. Nope. You don't have enough sources. Nope. Because you don't remember the color of the shirt your perpetrator was wearing when you were six years old. You're not a credible narrator. difficult to find redress through journalism or law, why wouldn't the desperate person

Starting point is 00:43:27 begin to get louder? Why wouldn't the desperate person be forced into a position in which they might want to do things that would become more visible? Or why wouldn't they be paranoid that everybody is actually trying to suppress the problem of pedophilia why wouldn't they um begin to let their imaginations provide them some you know sort of relief in terms of of understanding where they are well i i um you uh had talked a little bit about your history and i don't want to make you repeat everything that you've said on your show but can you give people a little bit of context of kind of your arc as as a scholar and a you know a person you know what you how your epistemological epistemological hygiene you know changed or was informed over time yeah i mean i i was in two high demand groups um you know i'm glad that you you

Starting point is 00:44:34 note uh that you know i don't want you to make i don't want to make you repeat things because there is like there is a relationship between recitation and reification right like if you the more you tell you know a particular story about how you got somewhere the the more social capital it can build up and and i've noticed that around um i used to use the word uh cult survivor and and and i think that's still a valid uh term but I realized that when I used it, it made people very, very sort of like tentative to, you know, ask me challenging questions or to say, oh, you know, how, well, how, how, what, how, how were you vulnerable? You know, how did you get yourself into that situation and why didn't you leave?

Starting point is 00:45:24 And I think those are valid questions to ask as well. vulnerable? You know, how did you get yourself into that situation? And why didn't you leave? And I think those are valid questions to ask as well. So anyway, I used to teach yoga, I used to, I founded and I co ran to yoga studios, I was a community organizer here in Toronto for for yoga people, as far as that went, that wasn't much though it wasn't like political organizing um i did that in my prior life um but uh uh you know i became a journalist really out of the the recovery process of figuring out what had happened gathering analytical frameworks for why my particular experiences were not surprising how they functioned it was like a breath of fresh air to come across a cult theory that said oh well you know the way that michael roach did the thing that he did was

Starting point is 00:46:16 through x y and z um that was really helpful um but uh i i've sensed you know since really taken a much more politically left and historical materialist lens around why cults form and why they explode during the 1970s, why they harden and become much more monetized. And are exploding now. And are exploding now. Why they become much more highly lucrative in the 1980s um and so yeah i've really come to see that the the post 1980s global expansion of conspirituality um it has been amplified by yoga and buddhist and wellness high demand groups but it's also inseparable from the breakdown of local economies, stable labor markets, plus the rise of gig work, as you were referring to. And then all of these things are amplified by social media fragmentation and, you know, just a growing awareness of neoliberal neglect and cruelty. And I've come through this podcast project to really believe that conspirituality and QAnon in particular are, it makes sense that these are primarily American phenomena. Yeah. if there wasn't already embedded or it didn't come on top of a centuries-long history of white

Starting point is 00:47:46 christian nationalism uh and then also a a population that you know just was not cared for by functional government by labor protections or universal health care so pretty american assumptions about self and identity and freedom. And, you know, uh, I, I wonder, do you feel like when you had talked a little bit about the relationship between cults and fascism? I mean, one way I see that connection is that,

Starting point is 00:48:15 um, it seems like they both, I mean, there, there is a lefty political neurosis too. I mean, I'm not letting anybody off the hook. There's also a moderate.

Starting point is 00:48:23 I mean, I think the lefty one is that you identify with the victim so much that it's not really empathy. You're just saying, I can't change and nothing's my fault. So also nothing is his fault and he can't change, which is not, you know, effective. And then there's that kind of avoidant moderate, you know, political neurosis of like, no, whenever there's two people fighting, I don't want to pick a side. It's just that both bad ideas are a little bit right. The truth's always in the middle of that thing. And that comes from like, you know, I don't want to hold authority, you know, whatever. But, you know, I think the right wing political neurosis is like this thing of I was raised. Don't cry. I'll give you something to cry about. I either

Starting point is 00:48:57 don't want to own my own trauma or admit that it was damaging. I despise my own vulnerability. So I project and attack that vulnerability externally. So when you're telling me, well, this little group of people, they're gay or black or whatever. No, no, no. The free market wants them to hurt or God wants them to. You know, there's a I'm angry at a part of myself that I don emotional reaction, you know. Yeah. Right. And what it seems like from, you know, Max Erhard to Rainier to any of these people, what they're doing is essentially right wing. And then it's saying, hey, everything is your fault. Mind over matter, whatever happens to you. Every time you get hurt, you're the reason there's no victimhood. You're the reason that you're hurting. So disown all the parts of yourself and all the things that can recognize these red flags and realize that all your suffering is ultimately your own doing. So I'm not abusing you. And then once you are in that kind of dissociation, essentially, or numbness, there is no sense of self. There is no identity. And that's what a lot of people seem

Starting point is 00:50:05 to be calling brainwashing i mean where is that right wrong like what what do you what do you you know what i what i'm thinking i mean i've sort of been on this theme already today but as i'm listening to you describe the basic uh narcissistic orientation of um these of these groups and movements um i'm just sort of in awe of how deftly and i think i think this happens unconsciously you know there there's this thing about how um one of the transcribers of a Course in Miracles worked for MKUltra. And so some people have, you know, indulged this fantasy that, oh, you know, the self-blame, victim-blaming architecture of texts like A Course in Miracles are actually like a government plot to, you know, to de-socialize or to destroy alliances and things like that i don't think it happens like that at all um i it seems that it seems that jonathan saffron siegel or whatever that book was you know reporting to the uh yes the cia headquarters is he flying back to langley you

Starting point is 00:51:19 know yeah exactly because or or did or was or was yoga a psyop, you know, that that was actually invited in by the Indian Immigration Act of 1968 or whenever it was, where, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, if we bring if we bring all of these gurus in to teach yoga in the local storefronts, then people will start going to stop going to protests like that did that did happen i just don't think it was planned uh it was convenient there was an ex agent who was talking about the epstein thing and the history of the cia with child trafficking and whatever and he was like you know it's pretty easy to go into a country that is a banana republic that's starting to use its resources for itself to help its people and then overthrow that government with the military so that you can and make it look like an accident or a natural thing so that we can extract all those resources and have them cheaper and they don't stay in that country it's like that's pretty easy to do but if you if you look at these conspiracy theories when there's huge vast

Starting point is 00:52:17 networks and a lot of failure points and and it went off flawlessly the The CIA didn't do it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that what is so tender and tragic is that so many of the spiritualities that we study on the podcast, they emerge as, I don't know, it seems that they emerge in part as a way of people trying to feel better They don't challenge the basic kind of self-centered principle of wealth accumulation. The yoga or the Buddhism or the Course in Miracles materials that I studied that encouraged me to be a social actor. In fact, what it did, and this is going back to Binkley a little bit, is that it made me feel better about the fact that it feels really bad to be a social actor and that and that what's what's actually more what gives more relief what gives more pleasure uh is to shrink your world down into the sort of pristine function of your own you know digestive system or you know the the the moment by moment uh weather in your mind uh and if you can And if you can sort that out, then you have some sense of agency. It's really an abdication of a greater possibility.

Starting point is 00:54:19 And yeah, are cults right wing or do they tend toward in that direction? Yeah, ideologically, well, no, let me say this. Ideologically, there can be some confusions, because there are left-wing cults. There are Marxist cults. There are workers' union cults, for sure. But one very helpful axiom from cult theory is that the content doesn't really matter because the mechanics uh are are really the same and the mechanics move structurally towards uh

Starting point is 00:54:54 you know right-wing sensibilities uh conspiracy theories and authoritarianism a lot of people said that about nexium was that the ideology kind of changed overnight when he came out with that like man's and women's course, the role of the society that it went in this totally different direction really quickly when that happened. is that maybe it was one of these breaking points where, or it was a content shift based upon his own sort of magpie insatiability for new content, right? Like what's going to be saleable in this pyramid structure that I already have? And if I can build it into my own sexual ethics and behaviors, and talk about how, well, all women really want is this and all men should be like that. And that's all very au courant because neo-tantra is on the rise at the same time. Then it just works out. But I don't know that he had a more progressive politics at any given time uh i i my i think it was always the affectation of this is about self-love and openness and knowing the self and then once you had this kind of buy-in to it you start you i think they all work like that you know yeah

Starting point is 00:56:19 right it looks like this big party on the outside and everybody's always talking to him on the stage saying like oh you had so much. It was so much fun. Thank you. That retreat was so great. And a lot of the new people who haven't been to the retreat yet, you know. Right. You know, but I don't know that it's funny.

Starting point is 00:56:35 Like, I got in trouble. I had to pull it down because one of the programs with Taproot is that, like, you know, the reason we do the podcast and the blog, other than like I'm a super busy. I just spend all my time either at work or with my kids. And I get to talk to smart people. And I really get a lot out of that personally. But it's for SEO, because that's the biggest expense for a business this size, you can write listicle garbage, you know, pay for a content farm to do that. Or you can do things that people actually engage with and reshare. And I do it because the project here is to find therapists who are talented and young and then empower them before the market will and let them have more control and ownership over their practice and the market will won't say the name of the organization, because people were talking about this one high control group. And they were like, why would anyone do this?

Starting point is 00:57:30 People are so stupid, whatever. It made me mad because it felt like blaming the victim. And also the people who tend to not understand how those groups work are the same ones that get taken advantage of by them. You know? Yeah. So I wrote an article saying, like, these are how they all work. Like, I'm not saying I, and I said in it, I, I'm not part of this organization and I don't have knowledge of this firsthand. I'm just telling you, this is what was behind the scenes because this is what

Starting point is 00:57:52 they all do. And so this is how they got in it. And people somehow missed that part. So people who had been in that group and left started sending emails being like, Hey, yeah, you were in that group. What floor were you on? And I was like, Oh, no, no, I wasn't. Other people who were still in it thought that I was like a threat because there was some ongoing legal stuff against them. And they were like, kind of coming after my business. And I was like, I don't want to be on the radar of a cult at all. Like this is all off the internet. Don't worry about it. Right. It really struck a chord with the people who are in the organization, just kind of explaining the psychology of those groups. You know, what I hope, because I've been doing cult journalism for maybe six, is it, what is it, 20, 2024?

Starting point is 00:58:39 I would say like eight years now and um what i would hope is that over time the stakes the rhetoric the sensationalization of or the sensationalism of the sort of cultic vibe just goes down um you know toxic groups are not the exception. They're the rule. You know, it's very difficult to actually for us to organize ourselves in egalitarian and fair ways in capitalism. the the shame involved in recognizing your participation in a group that hits the markers of these traditional definitions of you know dependence dread of leaving and deception or you know behavioral information thought emotion control you know all of the sort of checkbox definitions that that cult theory has given us from you know very astute researchers um there's there's a way in which sort of identifying your participation in a group like that is

Starting point is 00:59:54 a liberatory moment but it's also an incredibly shameful moment uh and and negotiating the passage uh from shame to a little bit more personal freedom and agency is really not helped by social media. And it's not helped for the most part by, you know, having your group's inner workings displayed by documentarians on Netflix. Yeah, I think that's very true. And I would be curious because you had talked about you not being the science expert on conspirituality. So, you know, I'm interested in things like mysticism and that there's perennial philosophy that people in a vacuum come up with the same types of spirituality, which to me is telling us something about our unconscious, you know, things like yoga and Carl Jung and, you know, a lot of mystical guys completely get misappropriated and butchered and have, you know, the, they have these gross associations, but, you know, the original stuff, I like some of that. I mean, could you speak a little bit to maybe that tension that we do have a objective brain that is scientific and logical and a subjective brain that is mystical and emotional.

Starting point is 01:01:04 And, you know, how do we reconcile that tension, you know, in the, in the world? How do you do that in your work? You know? well, okay.

Starting point is 01:01:10 So, so, um, I'll speak to how we kind of negotiate this territory in the podcast because we have different perspectives on it. And then that'll say something about like how I personally do it. Um, there is a strategy for speaking about uh pseudoscience that is kind of

Starting point is 01:01:31 uh intersectional with how we speak about uh toxic beliefs or dysfunctional beliefs And, you know, the thing is that one strategy could be, we could describe as being atheistic, right? Where the drive is to sort of dispel illusion in all cases, and to treat pseudoscience and, you know, the belief structures of religious people as though they belonged to the same category. And, you know, I think that there can be a lot of value there, especially for people who are questioning their natal religious beliefs that they didn't consent to taking on um you know they can uh evaluate in a very kind of uh liberatory way the the possibility that their yearnings are actually have material bases or that you know there's nobody watching over them in some kind of way that that that increases their paranoia instead of their wonderment in life. All of that, I think, and I differ from Julian and Derek in this way're speaking to a population that is never going to be atheistic, right? Like, I think the current stats, I could think the current stats, Pew has self-declared atheism in the United States at around like 4% or something like that. That is a tiny minority of people.

Starting point is 01:03:44 And they should be protected. They should be honored. around like four percent or something like that that is a tiny minority of people yeah um and they should be protected they should be honored uh they should be allowed to put their funny statues in state legislatures in indiana right that's that's that's all that's all cool by me but i think it is a mistake to take an overly rationalist approach to the relationship between religious sensibilities and mysticism and frameworks and pseudoscience or religious extremism. I think the causal pathway between religious sensibility and negative political outcomes is very uncertain. Obviously, it is toxic in political conflicts around the world. Obviously, there are forms of religious fundamentalism where super strong and toxic and aggressive beliefs are at the center of jihadism, religious Zionism,

Starting point is 01:04:48 and then apocalyptic Christianity all boiling over in Israel at the moment with this kind of zeal. Yes, all of those things have to be reckoned with, but an that that is incurious about or that is skeptical towards the authenticity of people's religious experience when they say that religious experience is helping them understand the world in more empathetic and solidarity promoting ways that's a mistake i don't i think that's a tactical i think that's a tactical error yeah that was kind of my question there i would say i would say and i haven't like said this this clearly before i don't think i'd say it on our podcast but but but but i'll i can i feel okay here you know not that it's not a great show and it doesn't

Starting point is 01:05:40 work but it's y'all are different people and yeah we're different people that's where i noticed that they bump up against one another the most yeah yeah totally yeah that's that's where we really have this is where we have our most difficult and our most as a therapist too that likes psychology and feels like it became uh a ton of damage that has not been undone to it got done to it in the 80s it's when we came in and said everything is a number we can understand everything empirically oh cbt is the thing that works the best your only cognition and behavior yeah yeah and when you're processing trauma that isn't a part of your brain that does not understand time and does not understand language you know i'm not a woo-woo spiritual out there but it is energy you know that is the word for it yeah well and the thing is is that is that so all of that ramps up during the 1980s and then guess what we have a replication

Starting point is 01:06:29 crisis yeah so so it's so then we then we have to go back then we i would just say that the area is i i just would say that the area is contested and it should remain so and and i would say something uh like uh i believe that at this point um self-identified progressive um american christians even um even event maybe even especially evangelicals that the health of the american democracy is probably more in their hands at this point than in the hands of any other group, because they are the ones that have the language, the family connections, and the cultural connections that go deep into the red state psyche that has curdled over with a kind of paranoia. They are the ones who are able to effectively say, hey, you know, Christian nationalism is a heresy. They are the ones who are able to say, hey, Jesus doesn't care about your crotch. And this is why.

Starting point is 01:07:37 I'd buy that G-shirt if you want to sell it. Exactly. I mean, they are the ones who, like family members, can say, we share something here, and we're going to be persuasive with you. And that's not something that Lucian grieves at the Satanic Temple. He can't do that. He's a showman. He's funny. But he can't do that. He has not- He's a trickster. He's a trickster, mean he's a trickster right he's a professional yeah and he has not moved the needle i would say on uh on on um he has not meaningfully

Starting point is 01:08:14 moved the needle in terms of of depolarization or political um you know i don't know usefulness or generativity in any way right well i mean where from where i'm sitting and again you know some of the attention i hear on your show and then see over the course of my life being educated and meeting the people in school and everything it's like you don't really understand what religion is that it's this kind of mystical and emotional phenomenon that is helping it's a lens to help you make sense of the world you will make something your religion like it will control you it will get you if you don't understand that and yeah i think people who identify as atheists a lot of the time are the most susceptible to that i mean they were like people made fun of me for a long time that i went to school with for like looking at carl junger

Starting point is 01:08:58 being a comparative religion major and studying these things that were sort of a soft science because why don't you just be an enlightened atheist and feel better than everybody and make jokes about this? And then what happened? All those people post-college had a drug trip and all of a sudden are telling me, and then I died and there was nothing and there was the water and then the world came out of the water and it was reborn.

Starting point is 01:09:24 And I'm like, you're telling me Genesis, like this is literally. And then they were like shocked. And I was like, no, no, no. The answer is not that you're supposed to go and join these religions, which is what they were kind of trying to do. You could. The point is that you just need to understand this isn't a thing separate from you that is other people. It has other people's number, but it doesn't have yours. yours you know that transcendental function is there and if you don't own it and i think you know i don't know if you've read edward edinger but a lot of that that we have an existential self and a mystical self i mean what happens with the ayn rand people being super logical you know their religion becomes economics essentially like you're using yeah you're using the wrong part of the

Starting point is 01:10:04 brain for the wrong thing you're taking a religious experience and making it literal which it that's kind of a weird thing to do or you're taking an economic system or you know a secular system and turning it into a religion which is kind of a weird thing to do i want to say something i want to say something yeah it does i want to say something very like specific and in defense too of my colleagues so that i i'm not misrepresenting them no i know i know but i want to make sure that i'm not misrepresenting anything which is that that like neither of them would uh ignore or deny mystical experience or um uh the the the reality of uh people going through transcendent sensations. There's no argument with that. And so they really, both of them express a kind of like deep devotional mysticism.

Starting point is 01:10:59 But the only way, the only place that the friction really emerges is whether or not we lean into a critique of people's, you know, origin story for how those mystical experiences emerge in the process of arguing about something else right so so it comes up it comes up uh in terms of like can a catholic progressive be a credible analyst of or source uh for for uh this particular political issue uh you know how much do you have to agree with somebody in order for them to be an ally that that's really what that's really where the the friction lies uh and and you know and and it's not even like it doesn't even descend uh into into rudeness but when you don't like we we you have to recognize where your biases and

Starting point is 01:12:07 tendencies lie and and if you have the feeling that um the person who is a a devoted catholic for example is going to be epistemologically or morally challenged in a bunch of different ways that make him incompatible as an ally. If you just have that general sense, you're probably not going to look carefully at what they say. You're probably not going to go seek them out journalistically as a source. And I think that can be a lost opportunity. But luckily, you know, we are a diverse cast. And so I can do that they don't have to uh and and and it works out and then we fight about it in slack yeah well and i'm not i'm not at all trying to criticize your show i mean it's a successful thing or any of the people on it um i

Starting point is 01:12:57 just think that the diversity of perspective the diversity of perspective is interesting and when you all have talked about that it's been been one of the things that's the, and then that's important for epistemological hygiene, you know, to know what you're coming from. So, yeah, I,

Starting point is 01:13:14 you know, I, and I think the secularization of like watching the secularization of like the evangelical church, especially the mega church movement, because evangelical is a big net you you see that almost taking down some of those churches like like it their need to deconstruct it and control it like almost the pandemic kind of bit them because i remember like one of my barometers for seeing if there's a cultural shift or whatever is like

Starting point is 01:13:42 did somebody write the same article in the Atlantic like six times basically by different authors, you know, like, and the one that happened was like during the pandemic, they kept being like, well, I think that, um, you know, this guy, he's a right-wing pastor of the mega church and he's for Trump, but his practitioners are, or his, his people are leaving the church and calling him a woke, you know, libtard on Facebook. So, you know, if that's happening, maybe the church is doing a bad job reaching out to people during the pandemic or, you know, engaging the community or something. And to me, it was like, no, what happened was that the historical Jesus was already kind of not useful to you. You know, the things he did.

Starting point is 01:14:20 Yeah. So you took that out. And then, you know, because I went to a lot of different kinds of churches doing my comparative religion thing. And one of the things I was kind of shocked by was that, like, God doesn't really come up much. I mean, it was like a list, a call and response in these megachurches of like cultural grievance. I mean, seriously, I sat in one service that was like an hour and a half long and they would just be like, well, this is on this reality TV show, but we don't like trans people, do we? Oh, no, no, we don't. Well, this person said a Muslim could get into heaven, but we know that's not true. Yeah, yeah. It's like, wow, I don't watch TV, man. Like, if it makes you this upset, just don't watch this. No, but that was it. And so when the pandemic happened, you know, you take the historical Jesus out of it, and God is not, he's too mystical and weird. So what you do is you just use Jesus as a form of submission. Like when he came up in church, he was always like, but you've got to surrender to Jesus. You're trying to be your

Starting point is 01:15:10 own thing and fight yourself, but you've got to give in to Jesus. It really just meant dissolve your own identity and be a part of this thing, you know, is how they used it. And so during the pandemic, everyone's on Facebook and they're like, well, I can just do this myself. I can just LARP. I can connect the dots and know the rules. I writing my own sermon i'm going back with the chalkboard and here's where the soros money went why would i waste the gas to go to church i can just eat at the cheesecake factory you know in my suv whenever i want like yeah you know i i want to ping um here i think i think brad onishi on straight white american jesus is probably one of the best analysts of of this particular transition uh to the or the ascendancy of the suburban mega church

Starting point is 01:15:52 which is basically uh audience captured it's an entrepreneurial model uh and then it bites everybody in the ass when the pastors sort of come around and they realize oh they have to repeat what uh their parishioners are hearing on Fox News, or else they're not going to get the tithe. And that's also why recently, I've- Because there's a monoculture. There's not a religious function and a government function anymore. There's this huge monoculture that you get to be part of, and you're either with it or against it. So it's not that I'm at church right now, I don't want to hear Fox News. It's that your church has to be Fox News's not uh it's not sort of free for all every pulpit is uh going to be bought and paid for by the congregation um there's there's actually

Starting point is 01:16:53 an existing institution with all of its sort of apathies and bureaucracies and possibilities and there are people fighting over actual resources that everybody shares. I'm not at all calling them gangs, but the comparison is kind of apt that like, you know, there is a guy that's the head of the mafia or the head of MS-13. And you have to do what he says. Yeah. You're,

Starting point is 01:17:15 if you're a crip or a blood, like you're, that's just a sort of symbol and initiation ritual and aesthetic. But like the, there's no one telling the crips in new york what to do from california yeah and the evangelicals are kind of more than the crip blood model and the model is kind of more with that's the pope man you know he's the yeah yeah and right now and right now the godfather is having lunch every wednesday with a bunch of trans women from the

Starting point is 01:17:43 poorest district in you know this town south of rome like it's it's a really interesting time he's coming out with big long letters about how you know the the the the environment has to be protected at all costs uh do you have you ever looked at the catholic church's relationship with carl jung no really. It's really weird. Well, at one point, Jung wrote the Pope a letter because he made Mary a saint or elevated her status somehow. And Jung was like, yeah, you're doing the religion

Starting point is 01:18:13 so much better now because there has to be a female aspect. There's always a quaternity. You're trying to do three, but you also kind of need the devil in there and like, you know, whatever.

Starting point is 01:18:22 There's three that are three parts of one and then one different, but there has to be a feminine and the pope's like yeah of course i'm doing catholicism right on the pope you know probably roll something up you know with the letter you know and then then later they somebody's like hey this psychologist he's talking about religion and a pope writes like a blessing of young that he gets even though he didn't ask for it and it's like okay thanks and then another bishop gets even though he didn't ask for it. And it's like, okay, thanks. And then another bishop gets angry 10 years later and writes another letter and says,

Starting point is 01:18:49 this guy is saying archetypes and whatever. And then the pope like sends him not an excommunication, but like a denunciation. This guy minding his own business, getting all this mail from the Catholic church is kind of a funny thing. That is funny. Yeah, that's wild.

Starting point is 01:19:03 I don't know. It's kind of an aside but i always always thought that that was a overlooked episode of he also you can get in a fight with martin buber at one point via mail which i thought was funny too yeah yeah the old flame wars yeah i really it is like forum posting yeah totally totally well this has been fascinating i don't i want i want to um keep you past time i know you've probably got other things to do um yeah i did invite the other members of conspirituality on so it wasn't like i was you know saying your perspective was when i wanted to bless and not yeah yeah yeah right you know everyone's schedule's busy and then i actually

Starting point is 01:19:41 i sent brad an issue an email a while ago i heard back from them, but we're kind of teeny tiny. And this is just, you know, kind of for fun. So, well, I really appreciate it, Joel. Great, great, great talk. Great thoughts. Thank you for your questions and your thoughtfulness. Is there anything that you would like to promote, like that you're working on if people want to find your stuff and know anything more about what you're doing?

Starting point is 01:20:04 I can just say that uh you know everything that we've got going on is at conspirituality.net uh including there's a link to our book which i think is pretty good um and uh i'm just interested in hearing from i'm personally interested in hearing from people in that uh you know progressive institutional religion zone so i'm always sort of like trying to find people like that i've got a listener story that's up today that's uh from a woman who um grew up in a trad cath homeschool environment but then became a church organist and she's made her way towards a kind of generative agnosticism. But she's done that through music, but also a lot of self-work. And so I just I love stuff like that.

Starting point is 01:20:51 I'm also becoming more and more interested in this huge unseen up until now by me world of video games. And that's happening through my kids. I started yesterday playing you have to know them as a psychologist or if you're doing depth therapy because they i mean elder scrolls and uh dark dark souls or whatever i mean those are the mythology of my patients and those metaphors you know when i was in the when i was seeing a different population i was in the hospital i had to go out and learn dragon ball z because that was the way that a lot

Starting point is 01:21:25 of inner city African American children wanted to talk about power and struggles and progress and emotion. And now it's video games. You know, I don't, I don't. Yeah. Amazing. I mean, I mean, my, my 11 year old, uh, got me to start playing cult of the lamb yesterday and he got me to start playing it because I was looking, looking over his shoulder and I was absolutely astonished that this strange little production company from Australia had created an incredibly funny but also accurate game depicting the formation of a cult. And if anybody's out there who is a video game journalist who knows about how to contextualize this, I'd love to talk to them. But my question for the 11-year-old was, you know, I'm 52 and I've spent 20 years involved in cult analysis and discourse. And I'm wondering whether you at 11, playing this game for a few months, would give you a kind of inoculation against these forces.

Starting point is 01:22:36 Like it's all out in the open. Like what the leader is supposed, you as the leader are going to indoctrinate, you're going to gather devotion, you're going to issue new doctrinesate you're going to gather devotion you're going to issue new doctrines you're going to preach sermons you're going to um uh figure out how to balance the exploitation of your followers against feeding them you it puts you into the incredibly funny position of being a little tiny lamb cult leader. And it just occurred to me like,

Starting point is 01:23:07 oh, I've been talking for 20 years to boomers about how to solve the problem of cults. And what might be more effective is to figure out how to make the influence mongering both identifiable, accessible, yeah and and uh it's just blowing my mind to think about that right it's like it's like what have i been doing all of this time sort of spinning my wheels and a kind of paranoid recreation of what cultic dynamics are when when here are these like gen z kids who are putting together this gorgeous, hilarious, very accurate depiction of cultic life in a way that if it takes off, uh, it's like, who would actually walk into an environment like I did when I was, you know, 29 years old and get sucked in by somebody like Michael Roach.

Starting point is 01:24:01 It would be, it would be transparent. It would be incredibly important. I mean, that's's a ton of i think what makes this show it's the kind of love it or hate it is that i want this to be funny because i think that humor is like one of those things that can and because like you never get humor in a vacuum you know like if you need a real narcissist like they can't be funny like they'll make jokes but it's just a power play of like well i'm better than her she's bad or you know but like humor is this way of like when you're you get little you know that you need and that's why it's associated with outgroup so much of the time i think you know that you need somebody to to get something about you or see something or accept

Starting point is 01:24:39 something about you that they don't want so you got to put that thing in gift wrap with a metaphor or a painting or a witticism, you know, and I think that that reaches people in a way that they hear it, you know, and they experience it through. Yeah. And then they relax and then they relax and they, and they, and there's, and there's more generosity, right? Um, yeah. Good. All right. Well, I'm glad that you do that. Um, I look forward to hanging out with you again. Thanks, Joel. Thank you so much, Matthew. I appreciate you coming on. The algorithms kill And survive Surrender

Starting point is 01:25:32 Feed your blood, so it's cruel

The Taproot Podcast - 🪷🧘Interview With Matthew Remski of the Conspirituality Podcast

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