Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Unpacking the Power of Words and Beliefs on the Voyage to Mental Wellness #164- Jane Marie Auret
7 Plays8 months ago
Navigating the tumultuous waters of cultural identity and mental health can feel like an odyssey, but we're not charting these depths alone. Jane Marie, a beacon of insight with her work at Screens in the Ego Literary Magazine and her recent book, joins us to shed light on how our quest for fulfillment has evolved from spiritual quests to medical models. Our conversation traverses the linguistic landscapes that shape our emotional worlds, contrasting Western and Middle Eastern mental health vocabularies, and unpacking how secularism's lack of direction has many yearning for the structured narratives once offered by religion.
As the tides of our dialogue ebb and flow, we anchor in the personal harbors that many of us call home—the stories of our individual journeys. I bare my soul about my own post-college linguistic trials and the crossroads of my writing career, while Jane shares her first foray into publishing and how it opened her eyes to a deeper connection between the psyche and physicality. From there, we sail into the choppy seas of academia, where the misunderstood waves of mental wellness crash against the walls of expectation and misinterpretation, challenging the mainstream current of thought.
Finally, our voyage takes us through the straits of societal critique and historical exploration. We cast a critical eye over the role of anger in the crafting of narratives around mental health and gender equality, and how safety—or the lack thereof—sculpts gender roles across cultures. A historical lens magnifies our views on male warriors and the Israel-Palestine conflict, while the Russia-Ukraine relations loom on the horizon, challenging media narratives and shaping our understanding of global politics. As we dock at the episode's end, Jane Marie shares her future aspirations and dispenses the wisdom that everything we seek may just be found within. Join us for this expedition into the depths of what makes us who we are, and perhaps discover a lighthouse guiding you to your own shore.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
All right, everyone, how's it going? Today we have a very special guest, Jane Marie here. All right, so just to get this started, how are you doing today? I'm doing well, thank you. Everything's good.
Jane Marie's Work with Screens in the Ego
00:00:15
Speaker
So can you kind of give the audience a bit of an understanding about who you are, what you're about, what your message is, and sort of why you think it's important to be here?
00:00:30
Speaker
So, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it and I'm excited to have this conversation. I run the screens in the Ego literary magazine, which is an open source magazine that allows people to answer questions and engage creatively with questions like
00:00:50
Speaker
Why does the world feel empty? And what are moments when I actually felt full? Excuse me, I'm a little sick. So if you hear that in my voice. You sound perfect. Thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate the affirmation. So a lot of the questions are like, why are so many people in the world so unhappy right now?
00:01:09
Speaker
And why did mental health become such a major topic of discussion after human beings no longer had issues like widespread hunger or sickness?
00:01:26
Speaker
And what are the things in your life that you're doing that make you feel whole and happy? And what are the things that are making you feel isolated and atomized? So it's an open source magazine that's gotten everything between like poetry, live performance rap, extended non-fiction essays, interviews.
Cultural Experiences and Book Insights
00:01:48
Speaker
And it's based off of a book that I wrote called Screens in the Ego, a meditation on Gen Z. And that book
00:01:55
Speaker
is about my experience. One, with a Middle Eastern background, it talks about the differences between the way that the Middle East is undergoing cultural problems. But a lot of times people say that things like depression and anxiety, those don't happen here.
00:02:17
Speaker
A lot of people in other cultures don't even have a discourse to talk about mental health, and they are capable of describing really deep concepts about their own sadness, but they use a religious framing to talk about themselves.
00:02:35
Speaker
I think that Western society, before people talked about mental health, Western society did talk about the idea of like the inside of you, but they used the word soul to talk about mental health. And now we have kind of a medicalized understanding of our own internal lives. And I know that the Middle East definitely does not, it has a more religious framing of that idea. And also just like experiences that I had in college and
00:02:59
Speaker
jobs that I've worked and things like that. So that's kind of the topic of my book and that's what motivated me to make this magazine and I really appreciate talking to you about it. Excellent. So you mentioned the Middle East interpretation of mental health.
Mental Health Perspectives Across Cultures
00:03:17
Speaker
I don't think, I'm not very familiar with that. I don't think a lot of people are. Can you kind of maybe elaborate on that so people can kind of pick up more on what you're saying?
00:03:26
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. So I guess that the easiest way to think about it is the way that people in Western society before Freud were talking about their own feelings and their own sadness and stuff. If you have read a book maybe from the 1700s or the 1800s, a lot of times they'll talk about things like grief
00:03:51
Speaker
and shame and they'll use those types of words, but they won't use words like anxiety and depression, right? And the difference between grief and shame and words like anxiety and depression is that even though like physically maybe they're talking about the same internal sensation, right? Like if I feel really, if I have an experience in heart palpitations or I feel a tightness in my throat,
00:04:18
Speaker
maybe what I'm experiencing right now is called anxiety, but what they would use in the 1700s to describe that same physical sensation would be nervousness, grief, things like that. So it's just about the vocabulary that people have to describe what's going on inside of them. And then also just like a religious
00:04:40
Speaker
A religious framework about who you are and what your life is kind of sets you up for a different understanding of what your goals are. So in Islam, you have like a triad of
00:04:57
Speaker
I'm sorry, I'm thinking of the word. So you have a triad of the way that you frame all the terrible things that happen in your life, right? So it's very clear in the Quran that God will send you tasks called fitmas. And it's your job to endure the tasks, but he will send you little good things in your life that will help you get through the tasks that he's given you. And those good things are called rahman. And the process that you go through
00:05:26
Speaker
um in terms of like accepting the trials that you were sent on earth to endure um will eventually lead to talako or completeness or like a unification with god right um and this is a pretty standard triad that um
00:05:42
Speaker
It was seen throughout a lot of Abrahamic faiths, right? And it does a lot for a person's psychology. One, the idea that you come to this earth for a purpose is something that secular
00:05:58
Speaker
mental health culture doesn't really like have a framing for like why we're here, right? Like the general purposelessness of American society is something that religion has been answering for people for the past five thousand years and now as we've kind of
00:06:14
Speaker
lean towards a more secular viewpoint, we've lost that sense of this is the purpose of my life, right? Also, religion will tell you how the story ends before it even starts. So you come to earth, whatever happens to you is going to happen to you, and then you're going to go back. And I think that in modern society, we're experiencing a really serious existential, excuse me,
00:06:45
Speaker
problem with not knowing when the end of our life is or constantly trying to curate images or being really preoccupied with the narrative of our life or our legacy or what's the story of me, right? And that type of constant self-definition is not something that is common to all people or common to all cultures.
00:07:10
Speaker
And it's really important that people understand that that's really a mark of our time and this idea that like, you have to like, think about, you have to define yourself and like, this is my brand, this is my story. That's, that's not something that most human beings were asked to do throughout history, because most human beings were told that the beginning and end of their story is just life and death. And then whatever happens in the middle happens in the middle. So did that answer your question?
00:07:40
Speaker
Yeah, you answered it definitely. This concept of, you know, try it as you explained that I think is really, really fascinating.
Purpose and Societal Expectations
00:07:50
Speaker
And it definitely reminds me of kind of the American dream innocence, because it sort of pushes that idea of that kind of predetermined destiny, the life, the kids, the picket fence, the job, the stay at home mother, you know, sort of,
00:08:10
Speaker
But it also brings up another thing in mind. While you were talking, I was also thinking, what about a purpose in life? This sort of reminds me of that, because I think generally a lot of people, men, especially in women too, they need kind of a purpose in life in order to feel fulfilled.
00:08:32
Speaker
Do you think the triad in a way kind of helps to fulfill that need? And maybe that could be a way it could integrate better with that idea of Western culture because we tend to look for things like purpose. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that everyone at some point
00:08:54
Speaker
Every culture, every society, and every person at some point is going to have to ask themselves, like, why am I doing what I'm doing, right? And I think that your
00:09:05
Speaker
The way that what I said reminded you of the image of the white picket fence, it made sense because a lot of times in Western culture, your purpose is to produce things or your purpose is to achieve things. And you are
00:09:25
Speaker
Many people, including me when I was in high school and stuff, I was completely obsessed with trying to prove that I was as good as the people around me because I got good grades or a pretty serious preoccupation for me and all of my friends in high school was what college we were going to go to.
00:09:47
Speaker
that was like in retrospect a really terrible thing to preoccupy ourselves with because we were trying to prove to each other like who's better based on who went to what college and it was just that's terrible but um the it did kind of feed into like we didn't
00:10:03
Speaker
decide that ourselves. Like our school, I went to a public school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, right? So it's not like I was in that fancy of an environment, but our school and the people who I knew were like constantly rating themselves against their own academic achievements, sports achievements, if they were like the captain of the swim team or whatever they were, like they constantly were trying to show how much they could do and how much they could do
00:10:32
Speaker
was a testament to what they were worth, right? And a religious framing says your achievements don't matter, right? The only thing that matters is the morality of the actions that you can control, right? So if you get up in the morning and you call your great aunt, then you have honored God with your actions and that
00:10:55
Speaker
And that is something good that you've done. And then you go on with your day and you hold the door for someone, and then you have a choice between telling a lie and telling the truth, and you choose to tell the truth, and you've honored God. So the way that a person who genuinely believes in God and actually frames their
00:11:18
Speaker
entire worldview based on religion. They're evaluating their worth based on the morality of their actions, not on the results of the work that they do or whatever. Does that make sense? That makes a lot of sense and you're quite right on that because I think that's something that even I and a lot of other people struggle with too because when you reach that level of competitiveness, I think, I don't know, maybe it's just how
00:11:48
Speaker
the system in America has built, maybe how it's built on this kind of capitalist system, but it's sort of this whole, you get better and the better you are, the better you are as a person. And what we don't think about is valuing people on how well we treat others. And I'll be frank with you here. I've fallen victim to that plenty of times. And I think many people have too. I mean, you have to slow them down. I said that.
00:12:16
Speaker
You know, so my thing is this, how did that sort of influence your life and kind of turn you who you are sort of into the woman that you are today? If that made any sense. Yeah, absolutely.
Personal Growth Through Cancer Battle
00:12:30
Speaker
So when I was a really little kid, I had cancer and I couldn't like be I like quarantined before everyone quarantined. And I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, who is an Arab American woman. And the earliest memories of my childhood that were like,
00:12:45
Speaker
really like wonderful where i felt safe and happy or with this woman and i i internalized a lot of her ideas about the world right and then i got better and i started going to school and i went through all of the developmental milestones that everyone goes through right i had a best friend and then my best friend didn't want to talk to me anymore.
00:13:05
Speaker
And that had reverberating waves of self-consciousness that I didn't think were possible. I felt really destabilized when I lost my best friend.
00:13:16
Speaker
I went through like middle school, high school, whatever. And then I got to college and I thought that college was going to be the place where I really defined myself. But unfortunately I experienced a series of like just dysfunctional relationships and
00:13:36
Speaker
I thought that I was going to get a PhD. I've always really liked writing and I thought that I was on track. Like I had studied Arabic literature and comparative literature so I could read books in Arabic and Spanish which was pretty unique and I thought that that would like get me into a PhD program but unfortunately there was so much like political anxiety and I just had like a lot of trouble
00:14:01
Speaker
like actually making genuine connections with like my professors. So I wasn't able to like launch myself into my career the way that I had imagined that I would be able to. And when I graduated and I decided, you know, I don't want to get a PhD. Also, like, high key, there's a real problem with like universities in America right now, like people who are getting PhDs are not treated well.
00:14:25
Speaker
they're not paid well and then like if someone is treating them badly or if they have a hostile work environment there's really no recourse to like make that environment better because you are completely beholden to like your advisors and if so there's a lot of problems in terms of getting a PhD and ultimately I'm very very grateful that I didn't do that because I was able to spend the years after college developing my own creative freedom and I didn't have to worry about someone else
00:14:57
Speaker
evaluating my work or giving me a grade on it, I could just write what I thought was important. And I developed relationships with people who really understood what I was trying to do. And that ultimately led to me writing my own book, which I'm really proud of. My book has a certain amount of controversial material in it, or at least material that different people would have different opinions on.
00:15:22
Speaker
I'm really proud that I was able to just bring that forth because I was speaking what I thought to be true at the time without being completely shackled by like, oh my goodness, what are people gonna say about me? So basically I'm talking about like finding authenticity, right? So as opposed to comparing myself to the achievements that I could make, what other people were gonna think after I wrote it,
00:15:47
Speaker
and what it would do for my career. I wrote this book because this is what I believe to be true at the time that I am writing. And I think that these ideas will help the people who read this book. And that was what authenticity was. And I know that that's honesty in the way that religion would frame it. So that's kind of how I got onto these ideas.
00:16:12
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I definitely agree with a lot of that because I don't think, you know, college is. 100% you know, necessary, you know, like, my father, he had a PhD, but, you know, I might be going for 2, but I'll be honest with you. My mother was a college dropout. You know, I wouldn't be here right now. It wasn't for college dropout. So.
00:16:35
Speaker
You know, I agree. And that's exactly what I'm going for a master's. But, you know, at the end of the day, I think it's healthy more so to see a degree as a tool, you know, to just help you with your both. And I really respect, you know, the fact that you were able to not follow others and kind of just go down your own route. And again, that sounds quite tough, though. So you're bilingual.
00:17:03
Speaker
technically, because you could do Spanish and Arabic or? Yeah. So in 2020, when I graduated, I was reading full chapter length books in both Arabic and Spanish. I haven't done that as much anymore. But yeah, I would say that like, if I took a test on proficiency, I'd probably get like intermediate, intermediate for both of those languages. Okay.
00:17:31
Speaker
Yeah. All right. So that that's very, very impressive. So. Yeah, I'm just thinking here, though. So as you began to dive into your journey of becoming an author, how is it like writing those books? How is it like writing, you know, your first book, your second book, et cetera, because I've done
00:17:54
Speaker
hundreds of interviews. And I always love diving into the creative headspace of a lot of these authors. A lot of times they might have difficulties becoming self-published, or they try to work with someone else, or they have difficulties writing every single day. They get things like writer's block. There's always an interesting story to it. So how was it like writing your first book?
00:18:23
Speaker
Um, so the first thing that I wrote, um, that I got published and eventually I published again in my book was about having cancer. Um, and it's, it's actually about the, um, the mind, body disconnect that people may ask to what type of a cancer was.
00:18:44
Speaker
cute lymphoblastic leukemia, which is I think cancer of the blood. Those words don't mean a lot to me, because I didn't understand anything about like my own level of sickness or this idea that like I was more likely to die than anyone else when I was a little kid going through it. So it
00:19:02
Speaker
So in a weird way, having cancer was the best time of my childhood because I was in a completely safe space mentally with the people around me. I was with people who loved me 24-7. And I think that a lot of
00:19:24
Speaker
like especially females who go through cancer treatment at an early age do develop, this is going to sound really weird but it's like a common thing, they develop a certain way of disconnecting from their body that's not unlike the way sexual assault victims disconnect from their body because
00:19:46
Speaker
As a child, you have to like just like stand there and let people like stick needles into you or like you have, oh, the doctor's coming in like strip naked and let him like perform this painful procedure on you and you just like have to do it, right? So the mental effects of like prolonged
00:20:07
Speaker
Prolonged cancer treatment can have a psychological effect of like mind-body disconnect. And that's something that a lot of people who do not experience prolonged childhood illness might not be aware of, but it is a thing that's pretty common for people who go through it.
00:20:25
Speaker
It's pretty interesting because even now as an adult, if I cut myself, if I accidentally have an injury or something, there's a very long delay between when I notice that I'm bleeding and when I'm like, oh, I feel pain now. The length of time that it takes me to register pain, even as an adult, is much, much longer than it is for my husband. So he's like, dude, doesn't that hurt? And then I'm like,
00:20:55
Speaker
three seconds later, I'm like, yeah, that did hurt. I should go get a band aid. So I think that that's, I don't really remember what question I was answering when we got on that. Can you remind me a question? Yeah, so I was basically kind of
00:21:10
Speaker
I kind of pushed you off topic there because I was interested more so in the cancer discussion. But just to bring it back though, I was just asking how do you go about being an author? How was it like kind of writing your first book and kind of what was the experience like?
Challenges in Mental Health Writing
00:21:31
Speaker
Yeah, so the first thing that I got published was about cancer. It was called Why I Hate Bananas, and it was just kind of a funny piece that talks about the mental and psychological effects of it, and also the fact that someone who I knew passed away and all of that stuff, like early encounters with death, things like that.
00:21:53
Speaker
And then the next piece that I wrote was trying to talk back to a lot of the
00:22:07
Speaker
problems that I saw in the atmosphere of college. I think that it's really harmful for people to pursue mental health without understanding what mental health really is. I think that there's some really, really bad versions of mental health going around.
00:22:30
Speaker
And for example, I know a lot of people, and maybe you haven't encountered this, but I know a lot of people who say that they are experiencing crises that they are not actually experiencing.
00:22:53
Speaker
maybe they are experiencing like um maybe they say that they're suicidal but they would take like one pill instead of like actually like pursuing a method to like want to die right and this is this is a really important thing to consider because on the
00:23:12
Speaker
because the primary goal of any mental health treatment is to alleviate the mental health treatment. But there's a lot of issues, especially with women who have much higher suicide rates, but who have much lower rates of actually committing suicide. There's a lot of people who think that they are suicidal,
00:23:32
Speaker
but they are not actually doing things that would result in death. Essentially what they're doing is self-harming with medication and experimenting with the idea of wanting to die
00:23:48
Speaker
within the context of like people who they know will help them right so so that was an experience like witnessing I was an RA and I also just like had friends that had difficulty and they weren't getting helped by their doctors like that's the thing like I knew so many kids so many girls who would like go to the therapist or go to a counselor and say hey
00:24:11
Speaker
I need help," or, hey, I'm really struggling right now, and their symptoms were not alleviated by the therapy, right? And that's kind of just true for all of society, because the mental health rates for Gen Z are upward of 40%. We're talking one in two people.
00:24:30
Speaker
1 in 1.5 people, 40% of Gen Z is suffering from a mental health issue. And that precludes the idea, that means that mental health professionals and public health do not have control of this situation, right? Like the rates of people who have long-term reliance on therapists and long-term reliance on antidepressants
00:24:59
Speaker
are so high that we know that a lot of the treatment that people are getting is not working, right? And that's not to say that there aren't individual counselors who can help you, because there absolutely are. But there's also a lot of really, really bad counselors and really, really bad ideas.
00:25:20
Speaker
And taking it back to the example of people who think that they're committing suicide but are not, there's kind of this weird idea that you have to believe people when they are saying that they have the mental health issue. You should read the book to describe it because the book describes it a little bit better than what I'm saying now. But the thing is that
00:25:49
Speaker
You have to be real about the mental health issue that you are having. You do. You have to actually look at the symptoms and the behaviors and you have to say that it is what it is.
00:26:04
Speaker
And you cannot develop self-esteem if you act badly. You just can't do it. If you want to genuinely respect yourself as a person, then you have to act in a respectable way. You don't have to fake yourself into respecting yourself if you do things that are respectable.
00:26:23
Speaker
So this idea of developing self-esteem despite pursuing extremely destructive behaviors, drinking too much or whatever, like just being a really crappy friend. If you drink too much and you don't pay back people who've given you loans and you are just a really nasty friend and then you turn around and you try to develop self-esteem, it will not work because you can't respect someone who is not respectable. But if you act in a way that is respectable,
00:26:53
Speaker
then you don't have to fake yourself into respecting yourself because you'll have genuine self-esteem because you know that you're a good person self-evidently because that's the way that you act, right? And that's like a fundamental teaching of religion, right? That people who are religious and who are evaluating themselves based on the goodness of their actions don't have to spend time wondering if they're good or bad because they are as good as they were able to follow the commandments.
00:27:22
Speaker
Excellent and that you really hit a lot of different points that regarding No, no, no, it was a lot and the thing is what you did is you kind of provided a generalized summary of kind of what was in your books now I'm trying to remember here. Was it was it the banana book that this was all in or was it the other?
00:27:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's short stories. So they're all published short stories in one book called Screens in the Ego, which is what my magazine is based off of. But yeah, the actual short story that I wrote, that's one of the most widely written, not that I'm that widely read, but of the stuff that I have written.
00:28:08
Speaker
that one has been more widely disseminated than the other stuff that I've written, and it's called Screens and the Ego. And it's a short story about, it's a fictionalized version of some real experiences, but I changed like, you know, I changed a lot of characteristics to preserve privacy and whatever. So the story as it's written isn't true, but the content and the message is true, right? The underlying content and the
00:28:37
Speaker
concepts are true and it's about how people who are seeking mental health treatment are not really helped.
Platform for Diverse Voices in Literature
00:28:46
Speaker
That's one of the main books and that's why is that an important anecdote? Because I developed the courage to write something that
00:28:55
Speaker
uh was not being written about before and that was kind of considered taboo to write about and there's not really like a standard vocabulary that I could build off of right there weren't exactly the right words to describe what I was talking about and yet I tried to depict it and once I did that then I could start telling my stories and and the the the main
00:29:20
Speaker
experience of writing my book for me was saying, you know what? Screw everybody. I'm going to write what I believe is true. And that's the reason that I wrote the stories. Excellent. So when you wrote these stories, though, you mentioned it being in an open source magazine. I don't really know what that is. That sounds interesting.
00:29:41
Speaker
Yeah. So the stories are published in a book. And you can buy it at Barnes and Noble or Amazon or wherever you buy your books. I also have a literary magazine where after I published my book, I was like, you know what? I want to give other people a platform to speak their truths, right? And
00:30:05
Speaker
that magazine is just an online magazine that I run. And I'm soliciting submissions from people. So like if you wanted to write something or if any of your listeners said, hey, you know, like this is an idea that's like I've been thinking about and I really want to grapple with it, but I don't really know, you know, who would read it or who
00:30:25
Speaker
who would put it up, send it to me. I have the submission guides on my website, janemariearay.com backslash submission guide. And you could send it to me. And I love honoring pieces that are meaningful to people. So if you're writing from an earnest heart, I'd love to put it up. So as you continue forward with this, what is your writing process?
00:30:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question. I think that my writing process starts with me being angry about something and then me, instead of staying angry, I go into the experience and I stare at the memory or the idea until I can break down what has caused this issue.
00:31:25
Speaker
What is the like miscommunication between me and the other person, right? So like what what do I think about this issue? It was take an issue whatever issue and It'd be easier if I gave an example so I mean mental health is like the main thing right but also I could talk about like
00:31:45
Speaker
the equality between men and women, right? That's a really big issue. And also, there is no tolerance in the Middle East for this idea that women and men can essentially perform the same rules or that they're the same level of strong or whatever. The Middle East just is
00:32:04
Speaker
the Middle East does not really have a cultural acceptance of Western feminism. And that's not me generalizing about that. That's me stating something that's true, right? So for a long time, honestly, it's kind of funny. So like,
00:32:24
Speaker
Okay, a lot of professors in universities have problems with talking about Middle Eastern literature, because a lot of times it will depict things that are considered wildly inappropriate and not feminist, right? And like, instead of just reading the
00:32:47
Speaker
Umayyad poet that's like a period of history in the Middle East, the Umayyad empire.
Gender Roles and Societal Structures Across Cultures
00:32:53
Speaker
Instead of just like reading him and trying to connect with him on an emotional level for what he's experiencing and thinking, they're like, oh gosh, I don't really know how to reconcile this idea of Western feminism with the Middle East. For four years when I was learning to read Middle Eastern literature, that was like a source of anxiety for everybody in the room because nobody wanted to say things that came off as
00:33:15
Speaker
rude or insensitive and at the same time like we were reading material that was coming from a completely different culture. So my story My Brother the Fanatic kind of gets at that because the the truth is is that there's a relationship between feminism and the amount of violence that you experience on a day-to-day basis.
00:33:35
Speaker
um that that people don't really understand but this is like uh inside the u.s as well as outside the u.s like if you just took the u.s right and you're like okay what are the most violent sex of the united states like what what portions of the population tend to have the most violence right or like see the most violence um well there's
00:33:58
Speaker
police, there's people who are in the military, and then there's people who are involved in inner city violence, right? And between the police and the military and people who are involved in inner city violence, even if they have no common political party or whatever, all three of those groups tend to reject feminism, culturally speaking. Whereas people who
00:34:27
Speaker
don't really interact in violent areas or see combat regularly tend to be more feminist, right? And the Middle East just has a legacy of patriarchy where like
00:34:47
Speaker
I mean, so patriarchy right now has like a Western definition, but before it had a Western definition, it meant like a pre-capitalist social formation where like tribes of people would basically defend themselves against other tribes, right? It's decentralized, patrilineal, just this person here, this is the family and this is their group.
00:35:16
Speaker
And this is a family, and this is their group, and that's kind of how the region works, right? So in any region where there is a legitimate chance that someone's going to break into your house and do something terrible to you, you're going to send your men to do it. You just are. In a situation where there is a tangible and constant threat of combat, men will
00:35:45
Speaker
be the people who fight that combat. And if they are your protection, then they are your authority because you need protection. And that's just kind of the way that it works, right? So basically the idea is just like the story, My Brother the Fanatic kind of brings people back to reality about like, hey, you know,
00:36:07
Speaker
people who are different than you mostly have a reason why right and if you just can't understand why anybody would like believe that then there's probably a fundamental difference in their perspective that's causing them to believe that um and uh also just like in the same way that like anthropology is is like such a this is a separate thought
00:36:30
Speaker
Let me pause for a second. Does that make sense? Do you want to clarify? It made a lot of sense. And personally, I just learned something new, because I always thought patriarchy was more gender-associated, but also has a deeper meaning, too, with this concept of tribes and those types of things. And also, the violence, too, is quite an interesting thing. What do you think is the reason for that increased violence
00:37:01
Speaker
areas that might not really support feminism.
00:37:05
Speaker
Yeah, so I think that the reality of violence talks back to feminism really quickly. And as long as you feel protected and safe, and as long as you feel protected and safe, then, you know, women are smart and capable just like men. So there's not going to be a compelling situation where like a woman cannot do something that a man can do as long as you are safe.
00:37:35
Speaker
women and men can basically do the same thing. As long as you are safe, women and men are able to pay taxes, women and men are able to engage in politics, women and men are able to earn incomes. The moment you are not safe, women and men have different roles.
00:37:54
Speaker
men just fight better. They do. They fight more and they fight better and they have always fought better and they have always, always been the people who like lead armies. They just are. And that's like not me being sexist. That's me talking about 5,000 years of human history. Like the warriors in like
00:38:18
Speaker
Yoruba are males. The warriors in the time of Hammurabi, which is like, what, 3,000 years before Jesus Christ? Males. The warriors in modern China? Males. The warriors in all of Western history up through like 1950, literally up through World War II. All the warriors were males, right? Like the reason that
00:38:45
Speaker
like so many cultures throughout so much time has sent men to fight because men fight. And that's just a reality of the situation. And the only reason that modern America was able to take off on the feminist trajectory that it did is because people felt extremely safe because they were living in the country that had the atom bomb. And in the areas that people did not feel safe, they didn't take up feminism.
00:39:15
Speaker
That is a very, very interesting piece of insight. I could probably explain why a lot more first world countries tend to embrace the more liberal New World topics.
00:39:29
Speaker
And I like how you also have different views from other cultures, too, because my family is actually from the Yoruba tribe. We were slave ships to the Caribbean. So that's a very interesting insight. And again,
Historical Context of Global Conflicts
00:39:48
Speaker
When it comes to wars right now, what is your opinion of what's going on with Israel and those types of things? Your insight, I think, would be really, really interesting because, again, this is a long-form conversation. I just like to know. Definitely. I think that the first thing that we need to understand is that
00:40:11
Speaker
there's really no such thing as a Palestinian people, right? And that's something that a lot of people who are on the side of like Arabs don't want like people to know about. Very, very long ago, there was a group of people who did not speak Arabic who were called Philistines with an F. And then
00:40:35
Speaker
the Ottoman Empire, many other empires, including the Ottoman Empire, came in. And the people of the Levant, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Jordan, and in the region that is now Israel-Palestine, they were all Arabic-speaking peoples.
00:40:52
Speaker
and they had a patriarchal culture that was patrilineal muslim and they had the the identity of palestinian was something that came much much later right so so the first thing that you need to understand is
00:41:19
Speaker
The Levant has always kind of like been one thing, right? So Israel came in and they said that Israel was created because people were being murdered in Europe and unfortunately they needed to be relocated and it was natural to like let them live in their historical homeland, right? And like the
00:41:48
Speaker
So what am I saying? So I'm saying that when they came in, they didn't just defend the Palestinian people. They offended Lebanon and Syria and Jordan. And that really reverberated throughout the Middle East. And that was like one of the main reasons that there's like a central Arab identity now.
00:42:10
Speaker
So the creation of the state of Israel is one of the major things that mobilized the Middle East to think of itself as a united thing. So it's not really a conflict between Israel and Palestine. It is symbolically a conflict between
00:42:35
Speaker
uh people of the east and people of the west almost um just because it was like so fundamental to um just because like the idea of being fallostini is not that's not that's a made-up identity that's like a lebanese person saying that they're phoenician which by the way a lot of them do right a lot of lebanese people uh who don't want to be associated with the arab identity they'll say that they're phoenician even though they speak arabic and french
00:43:06
Speaker
they'll say that they're not whatever they're like going back to like identities from like ancient ancient times in the middle. I think that I don't really have a solution like that I can propose in terms of like understanding like Israel and Palestine. I think that any violence is terrible.
00:43:27
Speaker
And I think that both sides kind of believe that the other one started it. But at the same time, I do think ultimately, if the Palestinians laid down their weapons, I think that there would be peace in the region.
00:43:46
Speaker
I don't think because I currently the people who are like really like like prodding right now are Palestinians right like with what happened with October 7th which was really just terrible um and uh
00:44:00
Speaker
If someone comes into your country, you kind of have the moral obligation to go in and make sure that they can't do that again. If someone attacks you, you do have a moral obligation to neutralize them. But the problem with this conflict and with so many other prolonged conflicts is that both sides believe that the person who started it was the other side.
00:44:29
Speaker
And because of that, it's kind of difficult to establish a narrative because there's two competing narratives. But one thing I will say about it is that the idea of Palestine is not really the issue. That's not the fundamental thing that we're fighting. The thing that is being fought in the Middle East, the difference between Israel and Palestine, it's the entire Arab world trying to say to the Western world, hey,
00:44:58
Speaker
get off our land. And the thing is, is that historically, the Jewish people do have a claim to that land, because if you believe in the Bible, then you believe that like the Bible or the Quran or any Abrahamic faith, then you do know that like Jewish people were in that land before. So that's, I'm not sure if that's super insightful. Do you have any other questions about, about that?
00:45:25
Speaker
Yes, yes, so I do. Do you think this situation is similar to the one going on with Russia and Ukraine in a sense?
00:45:38
Speaker
No, no, I don't think that it's similar with Russia and Ukraine because Ukraine has historically been part of Russia for a very long time, right? So I did watch the interview with Putin and Carlsen, but I also knew like a lot of the stuff before Putin said what he was obviously going to say, which was that
00:46:03
Speaker
Ukraine was historically a part of Russia. The entire idea of a Russian identity extended to that region far, far before the Soviet Union. Ukraine and Ukraine, Ukrainian like the language is not, it shows about 60% of the vocabulary of Russian. And
00:46:24
Speaker
it's always kind of been part of that empire. So basically after the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia tried to like make peace with the US, right? And one of the things that they did is they said, hey, can we be part of NATO? And I think it was Bill Clinton who they asked that to and Bill Clinton was like, no, no, you could not be part of NATO. And they're like, hey, but like, um,
00:46:51
Speaker
We want to be part of your trade network. And they're like, well, no, you can't. And they're like, hey, one of the really important ways that we trade is through the Mediterranean. And the only way to do that is through the ports, through the Black Sea and in Ukraine. And so they decided that Ukraine was going to stay a neutral territory. It was going to be independent from Russia. And it was going to stay a neutral territory. But then eventually,
00:47:20
Speaker
They made Ukraine part of NATO, and they committed a coup with the United States. The United States committed a coup so that they could establish pro-Western leadership in Ukraine in 2014. And that's part of this narrative that no one's talking about.
00:47:40
Speaker
So basically they incorporated Ukraine into NATO despite having previously agreed that Ukraine was going to stay neutral, which was basically like blackballing Russia. And Russia had a huge amount of trade between Ukraine and Russia that they decided they were going to tax because now Ukraine was going to be like a little satellite
00:48:06
Speaker
country, a satellite of the United States. And the United States does this all the time. The United States will perform coups all throughout South America, all throughout the globe, actually, all the time. And that's how we established the globalist trade network we did, really, was through committing pretty serious political atrocities.
00:48:31
Speaker
Excuse me. And Russia knows this. And they said, hey, you're not going to do that in literally the most important court of Russia. So I am kind of on the side of Russia. I'm mostly just like on the side of like not committing coups in Ukraine. And and it was just kind of like so sad that the entire like
00:48:56
Speaker
like Vladimir Putin was like okay like we have to invade Ukraine because you can't the United States is not going to control that little nation um I'm going to control the little nation and then like unilaterally every single media outlet in the United States was like oh you need to support Ukraine um and no one in journalism was willing to like call out the fact that like we did like
00:49:20
Speaker
metal in Ukraine We nag on our promise to keep Ukraine neutral so that both Russia and in the United States and Western countries could trade and Now a lot of people have died. So Are you okay? Yes. Yes. I'm okay. My camera sometimes freezes out Okay, cool. Yeah, so
Media Influence and Capitalism
00:49:44
Speaker
You are describing a prime example of what is called framing. That's essentially where the media will set up certain agendas of certain things to push a certain idea. It's called agenda setting field. And a lot of times, depending on what
00:50:03
Speaker
area you're looking at it from, it's going to push out a different type of idea. And look, there's a certain website, and I'm just going to push this out again. They don't support me, but it's called AllSides.com. And you can look at how media pushes out different messages.
00:50:19
Speaker
you'll have one thing that talks about AI, for example, this one news topic, and they would have a very centrist idea on the view that AI detection is a big thing and companies are now making an effort towards, right? But then on the more far right end of the spectrum, you have a lot of people that might be more on the side of these big companies looking at AI detection. They're saying they're definitely doing that.
00:50:47
Speaker
But then on the far left, there's a lot of skepticism. So each of them are going to be framed differently. And why? Because they want to manipulate the behaviors that we have. So again, I'm glad, you know, because again, you're one of the many people, and again, a lot of political activists, well, not many, but a decent amount, they're aware of this. They can pick up that the media wants to manipulate a lot of different messages, you know, so
00:51:15
Speaker
again that's definitely you know a very interesting piece of you know stuff and you know you're talking about stuff that again i'm researching now you know so you know you really really are on top of a lot of this political stuff so i'm just curious though are you thinking about
00:51:35
Speaker
Do you write about politics? Do you write about news? Because you remind me a lot of these political speakers on places like YouTube that talk about these types of things. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. Also, I agree that I think that it's so respectable when someone is like, you know what, I'm going to get both sides before I render my opinion. And the website was bothsides.com or allsides? Allsides.com.
00:52:05
Speaker
AllSides.com. That's really, really cool. I'm definitely going to check it out after this. Thank you for letting me and your viewers know about it. Yeah, so I do follow politics a little bit. My husband follows it a lot. So I get to hear a lot through him, which is nice because then he's the one reading the terribly long books and I'm the one getting the information, which is super helpful.
00:52:31
Speaker
I also do sometimes actually read myself. It's rare, but occasional. And I did think that it was important to research the Russia-Ukraine situation. And the main thing that I did was... Hang on, let me remember. It was...
00:53:04
Speaker
there's a youtube channel called the dpa chat um that you should check out because that'll uh dpa is something that will tell you a lot about ukraine and like war strategy and stuff um there's also um a book it's it's about the fostian i'm sorry this is gonna kill me uh the fostian um
00:53:32
Speaker
Bailing. I'm pretty sure screenshare is an option. Okay. I can't remember the book. So there's this idea of the Faustian ethic, which is like the fall of the West. And some guy wrote something really profound about it. And I read it, but I can't remember. So I'm sorry.
00:53:52
Speaker
No, I'm familiar with Foss. I think I heard about him in English class. English is not my specialty. I think he's the guy that tried to make a deal. You could kind of explain a little bit if you want to. Again, no biggie.
00:54:09
Speaker
right so he he tried to make a deal and the idea is that the deal that he made is symbolic of the way that the west lost its soul right because the west kind of sold out in terms of like uh deciding that we would do anything for profits that we didn't have to care about our people
00:54:27
Speaker
There was this idea for a while in the early stages of capitalism and mercantilism that this was something good for humanity. And that was coming from a culture like the medieval ages where kings would control you.
00:54:44
Speaker
You had to just do what the king said always, or you would die. And if the king said that Joe Smith gets to own the salt mine, that he's obligated to give you salt, but he owns the salt mine, and you're like, hey, that doesn't make sense because he owns it and he's not going to give it to me, you just had to work it out. Whatever bizarre, ridiculous thing that satisfied the king,
00:55:08
Speaker
you know, satisfy the king, whatever it was, you just had to do it, because he was the central authority. And so there was this idea like, hey, you know, like, we can take on these transactions as the people. And and if we take on these economic transactions, then we can ultimately create a system that works, because we'll
00:55:30
Speaker
act according to our self-interest and it will create an ecosystem of trade and commerce that ultimately benefits everybody, which is the idea of the invisible hand by Adam Smith. This idea that people can control trade and ultimately the people who are
00:55:50
Speaker
bringing things that are valuable to people are the ones who are making money, which is just in the sense that if you are bringing value to people, then you have earned that money. And then
00:56:06
Speaker
you know, like capitalism just like sold out. And there is nothing just about inheriting massive amounts of wealth because you own a company that exploits your workers, right? So that's kind of the critiques of capitalism and the
00:56:25
Speaker
beginning of Karl Marx and the idea that the bourgeoisie are really doing something that is denying a huge amount of people control over their life and agency and the ability to act according to their own self-interest. So that's kind of the idea. Faust made a deal with the devil. So the idea was the West sold out. When the goal changed from
00:56:55
Speaker
being a fair system to not. And you know, I don't
00:57:03
Speaker
I don't think that anyone would argue that Russia is a fair system. You have to understand that being a serf in Russia in the 1800s was exactly like slavery. People could be ripped from their family and sold to a different burger, I think that's what they're called, to pay off their Lord's debt. And there was no human rights and there was no appeals process and there was
00:57:29
Speaker
like just like the amount of abuses that they have recorded of like some guy like his like cattle are starving and he needs to get through the winter so he like lets his cattle graze on public property without a permit and then like his children are like tortured to death or whatever like that's that thing happened in Russia really regularly and it was based on fear they controlled the population based on fear and then
00:57:59
Speaker
you
00:58:00
Speaker
In World War I, literally one, they sent all of their young men to die with no shoes and they sent them on horseback when Germans were bringing machine guns to World War I. So they were like a hundred years behind in terms of like technology and war strategy. They also didn't care to properly equip their men. And that was not okay with people. So they had a revolution in 1917
00:58:30
Speaker
And for a moment, it really seemed like they were going to do something that emancipated the people and gave them the opportunity to reclaim their own agency and their own self-respect. Because being under the thumb of a violent regime, it takes away all of your self-respect.
00:58:48
Speaker
And finally, they started developing this rhetoric that was like, hey, we the people are going to do this thing together. And basically, it's a terrible tragedy in Russia. It's a terrible, terrible tragedy because the people were like, we are the Soviet Union.
00:59:07
Speaker
And we believe in equality for all people. And the people who controlled that narrative corrupted it. And they established an equally authoritative regime, granted with less human rights abuses. You're a lot less likely to be boiled alive in Russia right now. But they perverted what was supposed to be emancipatory. And they used the rhetoric that was like, we're all in this together.
00:59:36
Speaker
You're my comrade, I'm your comrade, and they establish the exact same structure. When we talk about the way different cultures are set up, different cultures are designed, and how this all works,
Authors' Role in Shaping Societal Narratives
00:59:58
Speaker
You mentioned this idea that we're going through the office to maybe what's happening, maybe what we were talking about.
01:00:07
Speaker
the history before with the manifestation, something now bad, something now that's causing a lot more issues. How do you think these issues may be put influence the role that authors play? Because I noticed in a lot of these times, whether there's good times in America, bad times, how do you think authors could make a change or an influence, no matter how small or how different that may be,
01:00:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think that authors can help people have a vocabulary for what they're seeing. And they can also create an understandable narrative behind what happened to them and why, or what happened to their society and why.
01:00:56
Speaker
And I don't think that that's just what authors can do. I think that anybody who controls the media or controls television or runs a podcast like you, any person who is a thought leader in their community or who has a single group of people who listen to them in some way is helping those people rationalize their experiences
01:01:20
Speaker
and giving them the vocabulary to describe it. So I think that authors do play an important role when they're willing to think about things really critically and speak the truth.
01:01:35
Speaker
I also think that authors unfortunately just don't have as wide of an audience as like say podcasters right now because a lot less people are reading because it takes a lot. It's a lot emotionally to like read something and keep your eyes glued to the page. It's a lot easier to watch a movie. I definitely watch more movies than I read even though I really like reading. I also listen to audiobooks a lot.
01:02:00
Speaker
But the point is that I think that authors are doing the work of interpreting experiences, same as podcasters. And I think that that's really the fundamental value of them. Excellent. And kind of as you sort of move forward with your career and your business, what is sort of the future?
Aspirations in Comedy and Writing
01:02:31
Speaker
I don't know. That's a really good question. I really hope so. I am trying to get into stand up comedy. I was in my university stand up comedy team. I know that's a really that's a side ball. It's something that's actually really fun for me. I'm going to start like actually I'm moving to New York soon and that's super exciting and I'm going to try to get into certain clubs and kind of like figure that out and feel that vibe and see if I can't like book some interesting shows.
01:03:01
Speaker
it's very likely that I won't be able to book shows but I'm still going to try and either way I think that I'm going to just try to continue to write and if you you know if you don't take no for an answer
01:03:16
Speaker
you know, eventually something will happen, right? So my goal is to see if I can't maybe get a job. You know, it'd be crazy if I could get a job at a news program. I'm always going to continue to run this magazine and accept submissions, and at some point I'm going to make my website even better than it is right now, but I need to hire someone to do that.
01:03:40
Speaker
Definitely check out my website and the stuff that's already on it because it is really good. Really interesting art, like interesting and valuable art that I'm really honored that they were willing to share with me. I definitely encourage you guys to submit and we'll just kind of like try to do this thing together.
01:04:04
Speaker
Definitely. And I think, you know, you have a really good chance breaking into any field really, because again, you're, you know, an author, you're bilingual, you're from the Middle East.
Closing Thoughts on Authenticity and Growth
01:04:16
Speaker
Again, so that kind of puts you in a massive, massive niche. And again, from our interview so far, you're very well read into politics too. So thank you. Yeah. So, um, are there any clues? Yeah, yeah, go on.
01:04:32
Speaker
No, no, hopefully. Hopefully, other people will see that. Hopefully, a hiring manager will say that. That's the goal. Thank you. So before we kind of close off this interview, are you ready to close it off now? I don't have anything else. I really appreciate your questions. No problem. So are there any closing words you'd like to tell the audience or
01:04:58
Speaker
anything that they would like to get from you in order to further improve their book? Yeah, I would say that one, anything that you really need is already inside you. And whatever you're going through, just know that like, just know that like life is life and it will happen.
01:05:26
Speaker
And that ultimately, I don't know, I don't have any more profound remarks. My remark is that the philosophy that I live my life by is that everything I need is already inside of me. And I hope that whatever you're going through,
01:05:45
Speaker
I recently read Richard Pryor's autobiography, and that man lived a really, really dysfunctional life, a really dysfunctional life. He didn't have any control over his emotions. He had the mental emotional development of a three-year-old his whole life. But the one thing that he said that always got him through all of the terrible things that happened to him,
01:06:09
Speaker
him being arrested and him having a series of dysfunctional marriages and then eventually him getting third degree burns. Whatever he did, the thing that brought him joy was putting sunshine on his face and just being in the sunshine. That was the last thing that he wrote in his autobiography, Prior Convictions. These are not my words, these are Richard Pryor's words, but put some sunshine on your face.
01:06:39
Speaker
I want to thank you again, Jay Marie, for being on the show. This really was a beautiful, beautiful privilege. It's definitely, I think, would be a great podcast to push out once again. So yeah, I will see you all next time.