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9. Room 237
43 Plays1 year ago
Mr. Hallorann, what’s in Room 237?
We watch Rodney Ascher’s 2012 documentary and ponder whether there really is such a thing as a harmless conspiracy theory.
Also mentioned: The X-Files, NXIVM, When Prophecy Fails, Kurt Vonnegut, Inglourious Basterds, Vic Chesnutt.
The pastor Brendan mentioned is Dan Barker. The cult expert is Stephen Hassan.
Opening and closing theme: Silver Jews, Candy Jail
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Candy Jail' and Room 237
00:00:01
Speaker
Alright, it's Moe. Look, some of the ghouls and I are a little concerned the project isn't moving forward.
00:00:18
Speaker
Okay, well, welcome everybody to Candy Jail. I'm Robert here with Brendan, and today we're going to be discussing arguably the best film ever made in human history and probably ever will be made. It's a
00:00:35
Speaker
really just just the facts ma'am truth telling you know slam dunk of a masterpiece called room 237 brendan do you want to tell listeners a little bit more about what this what this uh what would you call it silver platter of truth with a capital t consists of
00:00:58
Speaker
So I actually really like this movie. It's very well done despite the fact of what you have to endure watching it. It's not about what it purports to be about.
Exploring Room 237: Conspiracies and Interpretations
00:01:12
Speaker
So these are basically conspiracy theorists whose drug of choice is the 1980 movie The Shining. This is a 2012 documentary from Rodney Asher. Asher actually did a really interesting short film
00:01:27
Speaker
about, have you ever seen the old Screen Gems logo? Well, you're probably not the right generation for it, but he made a short film before he made Room 237 about people who were terrified to the point of nightmares by
00:01:50
Speaker
the logo for the production company Screen Gems that would air sometimes interstitially or not interstitially, but like at the end of presentations on network TV, there'd be a little S logo that would form with a little sound that would accompany it. And this, there's a subset of people who were absolutely as children terrified by this. So in that film, he just interviews these people and tries to recreate their experience in room 237.
00:02:19
Speaker
No one appears on camera. We hear people speaking and then we see some of their experiences reenacted. But there are people who believe the shining is Stephen or Stanley Kubrick's confession that he faked the moon landing for NASA. There is a person who is convinced that the movie is really about the genocide of Native Americans, another person who's equally convinced that it's really about the Nazi Holocaust.
00:02:45
Speaker
We thought since we had just watched and read The Shining and talked about that, that Room 237 might be a nice companion piece to that. So I think, Robert, your dismissive comments were directed more at the people in the film than at the film itself, or did you take issue with the filmmaking?
The Aesthetic and Style of Room 237
00:03:03
Speaker
No, I actually agree with you that it was a very well constructed documentary, although there was a teeny tiny part of me that wanted to see the faces of who was saying what. So I could attach a face to the voice, but I kind of understood it and, or maybe I didn't understand it, but I understood it as an aesthetic decision.
00:03:26
Speaker
maybe even more than an aesthetic decision. But yeah, I think that you're looking at a film, a documentary about shining conspiracy theorists done about as carefully as one possibly could and done tastefully. I mean, there's a lot of thought that goes into the film, how it's presented,
00:03:47
Speaker
how the conspiracy theorists theories are rendered in the actual film itself, like as the documentarian. What's his name again? Asher Rodney Asher. Yeah. Rodney Asher is trying to put the images to the voices and show what what these folks are claiming is in the film. I thought that's hard work because a lot of the theories require
00:04:12
Speaker
basically you to look at the film at times, often frame by frame. And he does that very, very well, even with these sort of cutouts that he has included in the frames themselves. So he'll put a box around a particular poster.
00:04:30
Speaker
or a particular object that is being scrutinized and he does it carefully.
The Nature of Conspiracy Theories in Room 237
00:04:36
Speaker
What's the word? He's got a forensic knack for documentary filmmaking. I would call him a forensic documentarian, very close attention to detail, almost as obsessional as the conspiracy theorists themselves, even if he does not subscribe to their theses, right?
00:05:00
Speaker
Yeah, he's sort of in the Errol Morris School of Documentarianism in that he seems to believe that, correctly, that the more you let people talk, the more they may reveal what they really believe, and that that can be a valuable filmmaking tool.
00:05:18
Speaker
I will say, though, man, like with I think Errol Morris is an apt comparison, although I don't I think I've yet to see an era moral film that the subject matter itself, no matter how artistically or masterfully it's handled by Morris makes me bored. And I will say I did get to a certain point with this film, even though I really do give him kudos for this forensic approach, which I aspire to in myself to some degree.
00:05:48
Speaker
or in myself, I just, it was like, you get to minute 45, there was a certain point for me where I'm like, I don't know, I've heard so much now, but in a way, I don't need to hear anymore to know what I now know at minute 45. At minute and hour 30, whatever they're gonna be telling me is in the same category of like,
00:06:13
Speaker
ludicrous and it starts to feel like, uh, what's the word monotonous, a little bit exhausting, fatiguing, been there, done that. Uh, I don't know what new bullshitty thing is going to come out of this speaker sleeve, but you know, they're all the same at a certain point it felt to me, but is that unfair?
00:06:37
Speaker
I don't know that it is unfair. I watched this movie around the time that it came out. It came out in 2012 and I did watch it with sustained interest for the duration. Having said that, going back to rewatch it for this episode, I had exactly the same experience where I probably got to about 45 minutes to an hour in and I thought, do I really need to sit through the rest of this again? And also I think at the time, 2012, I was probably
00:07:07
Speaker
a little bit less familiar, not entirely unfamiliar, but a little bit less familiar with some of the psychological phenomena that are on display in this film. And so I was a little bit more interested in exactly how these people think or where they're going to go with this. And there may have been an element of, and this is really kind of what I want to get into today, but it may have been easier in 2012 to watch this being amused at these people because it's very easy to say, well, who gives a shit?
Harmless or Harmful: The Impact of Conspiracy Beliefs
00:07:35
Speaker
It's a movie.
00:07:36
Speaker
You can think it's about whatever you want to think it's about, and that's totally harmless. And the worst thing that's going to happen is that you're going to look like an idiot in a movie that a lot of people watched. I actually don't think that that's entirely the case. I don't think that there is such a thing as a truly harmless conspiracy theory belief. When it's not within the within like somewhat
00:08:00
Speaker
maybe even like a reasonably skeptical grounds, but like so far and left field that you're just like, there's no way this can hold up scrutiny. Well, on the surface, I mean, who cares? Well, first of all, these people are doing the work of film criticism, like going through a film frame by frame.
00:08:22
Speaker
is a time-honored and valuable method of studying films. There's nothing wrong with doing that. And looking at blocking and mise-en-scene and camera positioning and continuity errors in order to figure out, what did I miss? What does the filmmaker want me to pick up on that maybe he or she wants me to see on a rewatch?
00:08:45
Speaker
David Simon, when they were filming The Wire, he said, we're filming this to be rewatched at home on DVD. We're making choices that will reward rewatching. There's nothing wrong with any of that. It's all perfectly valid forms of fandom and forms of criticism. And on top of that, it's easy to say, so they're wrong. So they got it wrong. So they think The Shining is about X, but obviously it's really not about X. What's the big deal?
00:09:14
Speaker
And there is some truth in that. I don't mean that all of these people, and I actually love to know where they are now and what they believe. Somebody should do a follow up to the, actually Rodney Asher should do a follow up to this, but we do know from studies that once you embrace one wildly irrational conspiracy theory, you're more likely to embrace another, right? So you start out,
00:09:39
Speaker
believing that aliens crash landed in Roswell, or that the Loch Ness Monster is real. Those seem like pretty harmless things. And that may be for some people, that's going to be where it stops, or they're going to flirt with the idea that the moon landing was a hoax, but then they're never really going to go any further. But if you buy into one of those things,
00:10:00
Speaker
you are more likely to buy into another and then another and then another. And it really is a case of a gateway drug opening you up to dangerous things to come, right? So first you believe the moon landing is a hoax. And from there, say you move to 9-11 was a hoax or an inside job. Well, now you're in comfortable proximity to antisemitism.
00:10:30
Speaker
Right? So now you're one step away from 9-11 was the fault of the Jews or the Rothschilds or whatever. And from there, you're one step away from Holocaust denial or being in QAnon or something like that. And those things obviously are very, very harmful. And I think just in general, like believing shit that isn't true isn't good for your relationship to reality. And once you're not engaged with reality, then
00:10:59
Speaker
you're not going to be on the side of the people who are being harmed by reality. And so I know that can seem like a stretch from having some wacky ideas about a Stanley Kubrick movie, but I actually don't think it is because of the way our psychology works. So before we get into all that, was there anything, it sounds like you were kind of engaged with this in the beginning and then you got to the, been there, done that stage.
00:11:26
Speaker
Maybe at about the 45-minute mark. But was there any observation? Because these people are very detail-oriented. They're very observant. They know the film very well in some way. Anything where you were like, huh, that's interesting, or they're on to something, or I wish I'd thought of that. Anything like that in there anywhere.
00:11:46
Speaker
maybe the closest thing that came to that was Jack Nicholson's white man's burden comment in the bar. And I thought, okay, that's an interesting thing to say. And, you know, thinking about even if this was like a Kubrick, you know, move that we could argue was a, is sort of a tire trope with the Indian burial ground underneath the hotel. The idea that this is somehow like,
00:12:13
Speaker
a meta-commentary on manifest destiny and all of its genocidal dimensions personified through the character of Jack Torrance, I thought,
00:12:28
Speaker
That one probably was about closest to what I would allow for within the realm of possibility. This is something that maybe could make for an interesting essay. You could make an interesting case that that's present. I would also say that that might in fact be present without Kubrick being fully aware of it, just because of its location, because of the iconography within the hotel,
00:12:56
Speaker
you know, we've both lived in the southwest. We're not strangers to how the tourist industry on some level preys on the ignorance of tourists and their cartoonish ideas about indigenous communities, Native American history,
00:13:14
Speaker
the interaction between indigenous communities and, quote unquote, white folks. I mean, that's just there. And so it's as there for me every day waking up in the Southwest as it is on some level in that hotel, just based on the fact that we live in the United States with this particular history. It kind of you could argue that our history permeates all of our cultural products.
Cultural Contexts and Film Interpretations
00:13:39
Speaker
So to the degree that our
00:13:42
Speaker
our dominant culture and it's either reasonable or racist or insane presuppositions and values wind up feeding into the media we consume, I could concede that that is present in the shining, but not in any sort of conscious way or a more conscious way than that. How do you feel with that
00:14:12
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And the white man's burden comment, as well as the best damn bartender between Portland Maine and Portland Oregon comment, those both come from the book. Those are not Kubrick's words. Those are Stephen King's words. And I don't think Stephen King was writing a book about the genocide of the Native Americans. The only thing that I did a double take at this time around that rang a little bell for me maybe was
00:14:40
Speaker
When Jack is being interviewed, or sorry, when he's about to be given the tour, Allman and the assistant manager come over to shake his hand and he stands up and puts down the magazine that he's been reading. And if you zoom in on it, it's Playgirl magazine, which is an odd choice, right? And if you look at the cover of that particular issue of Playgirl, there's an article about why parents
00:15:06
Speaker
rape their children. And this particular person in the movie was arguing that that was a sign that Jack Torrance had been sexually abused when he was a kid. On some level that it's obviously you can argue that it's a deliberate choice to use Playgirl magazine
00:15:26
Speaker
as opposed to like time or Newsweek or something that you would expect to see in the lobby hotel, the lobby of a hotel. And that that's not an unfair inference to make. But even that, I was like, you can't see unless you zoom in what edition of Playboy it is or Playgirl it is.
00:15:49
Speaker
Kubrick was working in an age before most home media existed, certainly working before HD, certainly working before the modern era of you can freeze frame on your computer and then zoom in and high def, that he would have no reason to think that anybody would ever notice that even on a rewatch. And so even that I think is it tracks, I guess on some level, but it's also total bullshit.
00:16:16
Speaker
Yeah, and like, let me use that as a segue into, in a way, what these, I don't even know if I would call them film critics. I actually think they should be called like film conspiracy theorists, because I don't think they're exactly doing film criticism, but
00:16:35
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. But it's funny, like what they're guilty of is in some way the polar opposite of what some of my students have been guilty of that I've gotten on them about. And let me explain to you why both of the things I'm about to describe are problematic.
00:16:55
Speaker
I would have students give presentations on X, Y, or Z event in history, historical figure, yada, yada. And in order to make sure that the audience students weren't falling asleep and were actually trying
The Need for Specific Feedback and Criticism
00:17:10
Speaker
to be actively engaged, I would say, as you're listening and watching, write down three specific things that you appreciated or enjoyed about the presentation and three specific things you could
00:17:23
Speaker
provide us feedback and the reason i went there was i time and again man like the comment that i got that was the most ubiquitous amongst my students that started to rile me was
00:17:35
Speaker
You know, I really liked Susie's information. She had a lot of good information. And, you know, then I'm like, okay, Jack, how about you? It's really good information. Love that information. I'm like, guys, gals, folks, information in and of itself is not good. You know, you have to tell me why this particular information was poignant to you. So let's get a little more specific. Was it
00:18:01
Speaker
that the speaker gave you this wild anecdote about Custer shooting his own fucking horse in the head and being thrown from his horse and that in some way spoke volumes about the personality of this clearly psychopathic, toxically ambitious former Union General.
00:18:21
Speaker
let's get specific, you can't just say I like your information. So then I got more specific, I was like, guys, gals, folks, hold up your phones, or not, don't hold up your phones, but like raise your hands if you've ever taken a photo with your phone and posted it to social media. All of them raise their hands, right? I'm like, okay, give me an example, you know, Jill, of a photo you took recently. I took one of my dog. Okay, great, and Bill, how about you? Well, I took one of my meal, right?
00:18:49
Speaker
OK, guys, that is the subject of your photo. And I know it's the subject because of how you've positioned it in the frame. I am under no confusion that the main topic of this image is the dog. The main topic of that image is the meal. If you just take a photo and there's no subject that you have in mind before taking it, that's information. That's not a good photo. That's a bad photo.
00:19:18
Speaker
What's interesting about these people in Room 237 is they've done the opposite. They basically said, in the foreground is Jack Torrance having a meltdown. I'm more interested in the can of beans with the head of an Indian
00:19:34
Speaker
that's supposed to indicate to the audience that the white man has perpetrated genocide and that this whole fucking film is a meta-commentary on the genocidal after-effects of Manifest Destiny. I'm like, folks, listen, I'm sorry. You've failed to understand how movies work or really how art works, which is if that was Kubrick's intention, this movie would fucking suck.
00:20:03
Speaker
This is not how movies work. You put Jack in the foreground because he's the main fucking event. If you think the can of beans is the main event, I think you've got a can of worms in your head that needs to be attended to by a head shrink that can give you some pills to fix that, you know? Yeah. All right. Sorry. No, no, it's too stupid. But OK, wait, wait, let me. So, yes, it is too stupid. And what I kept thinking probably both times I watched the movie was
00:20:34
Speaker
It's especially galling with Kubrick because what Kubrick did with his career is he was like, I'm gonna make a sci-fi movie, so he made a sci-fi movie.
00:20:44
Speaker
Then he was like, I'm gonna make a horror movie, so he made a horror movie. Famously, he wanted to make a movie about Napoleon, so you know what he did? He started to make a movie about Napoleon, and you know what it was about? It was about Napoleon. Famously, he never finished making that movie, but he made movies that were about the things he wanted them to be about, so if he'd wanted to make a movie about the genocide of the American Indian, he would've made a movie about the genocide.
00:21:11
Speaker
That's what the movie would have been about. That would have been what was in the fucking foreground. Amen. Amen. Preaching the choir. Yeah, I'm with you. Having said that, I think and I struggle with this all the time. It is so easy because to people who are not in the room with the craziness, the craziness is so obviously crazy that it is really easy to dismiss it as stupid.
00:21:42
Speaker
and pathological and not as pretty normally human. And I think that's dangerous. I think we have to make an effort to understand how this kind of thinking works because this is the same kind of thinking that leads to really, really, really bad things happening in the real world.
00:22:10
Speaker
yes, these people are being idiots. There's a guy out there, I wish I could remember his name, and I will put it in the show notes because I'm not going to look it up right now, but he was a perfectly normal young college student from a family, I think in New Jersey, when he was recruited into the Moonies, the cult that
00:22:35
Speaker
is, as far as I know, they're still around, they own the Washington Times. And he didn't know- He ain't getting no moonie out of me, man. I'm not buying that paper.
00:22:45
Speaker
Oh my God, that was, my brother threatened to kick me out of my own house yesterday because of a pun that I made. I might have to ask you to leave your own house after that pun. I want to leave it anyway. It's reminding me of the overlook. He didn't know he was being recruited into a cult because nobody ever comes up to you and says, hi, I'm in a cult. Would you like to also be in the cult?
00:23:09
Speaker
But he was drawn fully in and he cut off all contact with his family. And he was in the cult, like really active in it for years until finally they got him out of it. And he's now something of an expert. He got academic degrees in relevant fields and he works with people. Coming to terms with their past conspiratorial or counterfactual beliefs. And he always reiterates like, I wasn't stupid.
00:23:38
Speaker
I just was doing a really human thing and I didn't know what was happening to me. And I have a lot of respect for this guy and he knows a lot more than I do about some of this stuff. But there's always a part of me that wants to say to him, no, you were being stupid. You were taken advantage of. You did a lot of normal, really human things and fell victim to human psychology in a way that anyone could.
00:24:03
Speaker
But the stuff that you believed was stupid and it was stupid of you to believe that stuff. And I don't think like I get it. I don't think we should refuse to call that stuff stupid because the words have meanings. Like we invented that word for a reason. But and I don't want to normalize it either. But.
00:24:24
Speaker
In calling it stupid, it's easy to think that we ourselves are above it. No doubt. It's easy to not put in the work of understanding confirmation bias and apophenia and pareidolia and confusing correlation and causation and red herrings and straw men and all these... And just a basic like LOL FML-ism.
00:24:47
Speaker
You know, yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, when we talked about Stanley Kubrick's The Shining last episode, we talked about the fact that there might not really be much there. It's really striking. It's really stylish. It's really iconic. It looks like it wants you to look closer and you look closer and you find nothing there.
00:25:10
Speaker
What does that remind you of? It reminds me of life. We want life to have some kind of meaning. It feels like it should have some kind of meaning. And then we look closer at life and we're confronted with nihilism or staring into the void or whatever. So we desperately want there to be meaning. And then we turn to spirituality or philosophy or politics or whatever to find that meaning.
00:25:33
Speaker
I think that The Shining, the movie, kind of invites that kind of thing. I want there to be meaning, so I will do whatever I can to find meaning. And once we've decided... Years ago, I wrote a blog post about how much I hated the X-Files, because... Well, for a lot of reasons that I won't get into, because that's not what this episode is about.
00:25:59
Speaker
Although I'm sure I could go in a very charming rant about the X-Files, but do you remember the poster that Mulder has in his office? Remind me. It's a picture of
Belief, Understanding, and the Influence of Media
00:26:09
Speaker
a flying saucer and it says, I want to believe. And I want to believe is actually the subtitle of one of the X-Files movies. And the X-Files takes that as like a guiding philosophical statement. I want to believe.
00:26:25
Speaker
That is one of the most poisonous, toxic ideas you can possibly hold in your mind if you're trying to understand the world. I want to believe in the stupid stuff.
00:26:37
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like I want to understand would be a better imperative than I want to believe. Yes, it would absolutely be. If you want to believe, you will find a way to believe. And at that point, you will be a slave to your belief and nothing else will matter. And that's what these people are. And in some ways, they're kind of a useful little petri dish for studying the virus of conspiracy theory thinking that can infect
00:27:08
Speaker
Really anybody like nobody's above it like I agree. And this this would hold true for anything religion with a capital R cults with a little C.
00:27:23
Speaker
I would argue even leftist militant organizations fall victim to this, as do right-wing militant organizations. And I would say in a funny way, let me just put it this way, man, because I'm actually quite fascinated by cults. I have been for years. There's a little bit of a personal tie-in, but I'm not
00:27:50
Speaker
ready to go there yet. But there's a lived experience I've had that makes me extra interested in this topic. But I think everything you said is right. And I would also say, from what I've now done in terms of my own research, trying to understand other cults as they've existed in the United States,
00:28:15
Speaker
through the decades, some that are now defunct, some that still exist. I'll give you one example. Nixxiom is a cult that was run by this piece of work named Keith Ranieri, who's now doing a life sentence in, I think, a maximum security prison.
00:28:32
Speaker
He didn't kill anyone, but he essentially might as well have because of the tremendous and really irreversible damage he had done to dozens, really hundreds, maybe arguably thousands of people that came through his organization. But what became interesting to me about
00:28:53
Speaker
the documentary about him. So there's one on HBO called The Vow, and it ran into two seasons. It ended after its second season, but it's very well done. And they give a lot of firsthand testimony of former Nixxiom members and also those that refuse to denounce Ranieri. Just to give you like a very, very quick background, like he
00:29:18
Speaker
essentially created a situation in which women were basically sex slaves of his. And he used sort of collateral, he called it collateral, essentially blackmail. They revealed, you know, naked pictures of themselves. They gave over the deeds to their houses. And essentially, anytime they wanted to get out of the organization, that was held over their head. And that was what kept them in. And so they use that, I think, as a major wedge to argue that this was not just
00:29:46
Speaker
normal Ponzi scheme bullshit. This was like deeply fucked up stuff. But what's interesting about it, man, is a lot of the people who were in it for multiple years and rose in the ranks in the organization, right, all go through not an identical but similar process of deep depression, of having to contend with the fact that who they believed in
00:30:12
Speaker
and what they believed in was wrong, was false, and they needed to distance themselves. There are still some who refuse to go there. They're still literally going to the bottom of the prison complex where Raniri is housed, using flashlights to communicate with, and women are dancing for him on the ground. And then he's using his flashlight to indicate he sees them, and they're apparently still doing it to this day, a small,
00:30:40
Speaker
hardcore loyalist cohort. And one of the commentators who had extricated themselves from the organization that was still very high up made this important insight, made this comment that I was deeply insightful. I think you will agree with, I want to see how you take it and how you run with it. Basically, he said, the reason why these folks won't give it up, those that are still dancing for Keith Ranieri
00:31:07
Speaker
beneath his window at the state penitentiary where he's serving a life sentence is because in order for them to finally acknowledge that he's a monster and that they were misled and taken advantage of and exploited also means at the same time that they have to acknowledge that all of that time was wasted. Their identity doesn't really work anymore.
00:31:35
Speaker
and they're going to have a long fucking road getting back to whoever it was they used to be or getting towards whoever they can be upon rightfully casting this off. But it's painful. And so you have a trade-off on both ends. One trade-off is I have to navigate
00:31:57
Speaker
the fact that this has been a big mistake, and I was taken advantage of, and I have to figure out a way to get back to some sense of myself, get grounded, and that's scary. The flip side is, if I don't accept that, I get to keep however fucked up my worldview is and my identity is intact, however fucked up it is, and it's become as a result of this adherence to this group. And so
00:32:27
Speaker
You know, you look at these folks in the Shining film, I think it's a microcosm of that, where you go, you've put in so much goddamn time to watching and reading the film, so to speak, picking up on these details, freezing the frames. I mean, this is hours and hours, if not maybe months of their lives. You can't back down unless you're ready to accept you've just wasted a huge chunk of your life, you know.
00:32:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly correct. And that goes back to, or ties into something that I think you've brought up a couple times on the show, which is, what is it? 80% of people believe what their parents believe? I've heard it's 90. So let's say, let's take 80 to 90% for that. That's part of why. Because if you have to confront the fact that you were raised to believe things that aren't true, then your whole identity
00:33:24
Speaker
is called into question, not just the way that you see yourself, but the way that you're perceived by your community and the way that you're able to interact with your community. There's a former pastor again, his name is not coming to mind. I will put the name in the show notes who started a support group for clergymen of any faith who no longer believe, but feel like they are unable to confess the truth.
00:33:50
Speaker
And he was shocked at how many members he got almost immediately after founding the organization, priests, pastors, imams, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, who say, I am an atheist. I realize this is all horseshit, but I can't leave my congregation. My family would leave me, my children would hate me, my parents would disown me, so on and so on and so forth. So the only difference there is that they have privately acknowledged that they are wrong while they're continuing to act like
00:34:21
Speaker
they're not, whereas the Nixxiom members are refusing to acknowledge that they're wrong. You can see the same thing if you read When Prophecy Fails by Leon Feistinger about that Sonanda cult that I think was in upstate New York. Reneeris was ironically in upstate New York too. Maybe, I don't know.
00:34:43
Speaker
Maybe you're living in the wrong place if you're, well, you and my girlfriend both, she's also fascinated by cults. Maybe we should all take a road trip to Upstate New York together and just see what the hell happens. Maybe, maybe, you first. Well, let me tell you a story. So, and I don't think I've ever told you this off mic, but maybe I have. So I'm not a psychologist or neurologist or anything, but I do know more about
00:35:10
Speaker
the psychology around believing nonsense than the average person does, because I've read a lot about it because it's so interesting to me and because of my own personal background. Last year, this was not during quarantine, so I can't use quarantine as an excuse. This was post-quarantine. I had started writing at one point
00:35:35
Speaker
years ago, a short story about what if Bigfoot was real? What if a scientist went looking for Bigfoot and they actually found a Bigfoot? What would that actually look like? I started writing this short story and then I put it aside and I stumbled across it last year on an old drive somewhere. I was like, where was my head when I was writing this? Where was I going to go with this?
00:36:00
Speaker
In order to get back into the head space of where I'd been when I was doing that writing exercise, I got on a Bigfoot website and I just kept reading it and kept reading it and kept reading it. And then I went to a book by one of the very few actual scientists with a degree in the relevant field who thinks that Bigfoot may exist. And I started reading his book.
00:36:25
Speaker
And this, I mean, this was not a drawn out process over like months. This happened over the course of like three days. But I got to a point where I remember I was lying on my couch and I was reading this Bigfoot scientist, Bigfoot book, and I caught myself like halfway to believing in Bigfoot. And I was like, Brendan, what the fuck are you doing right now? Like, how did this slip past all of your defenses? You know better than this. You know how this works. You know Bigfoot is not real.
00:36:56
Speaker
and I caught myself.
00:36:59
Speaker
And I don't think it probably could have gone much further, but it was a useful reminder, excuse me, it was a useful reminder to me that our brains are traps that are ready to spring on us at any moment. And the smarter we are sometimes, sometimes the worse off we are because we don't put our defenses up because we don't think we need to because we think we're immune.
00:37:27
Speaker
and then the trap springs shut in your mind and the next thing you know, you're a sex slave in upstate New York or- Yeah, thinking you're doing serious emotional work for your own personal growth rather than totally exploited. Exactly, right. Yeah.
00:37:46
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, this isn't a perfect, uh, perfectly analogous statement from Kurt Vonnegut. Like there's a part of me that's like, I'm not sure this is quite the bullseye that I'm looking for, but let's run with this for a second. So a quote that I've often returned to from Vonnegut, I guess this comes from, uh, his, is it his book, Mother Night?
Self-Awareness and Identity: Vonnegut's Insight
00:38:07
Speaker
I've never read it, but here, yes, it's mother night. It's a novel. I have read it.
00:38:12
Speaker
Okay, okay. So the quote that I love is, we are what we pretend to be. So we must be careful about what we pretend to be. And this is not exactly the same as like, I don't believe in Bigfoot, but I want to learn more about people who do, therefore, I'm going to do research. But
00:38:31
Speaker
You know, I had a friend who was telling me like, he likes to watch Fox News, or he likes to listen to Alex Jones, because he finds it hilarious. And he's listening to it a lot, like it's become sort of his main form of entertainment. And when I heard that, there's a little part of me that was like, that's really like, I don't know, there's a little like,
00:38:54
Speaker
Not sure that's how this fucking works completely. Maybe you go into that thinking you're going to have a laugh. But when I brought it up to Zach, he said, that just sounds like a brilliant, even self-deception that this person is actually responding to Fox News and Alex Jones. And I think
00:39:13
Speaker
I could, it's tricky, right? Because it's like, I could see if I'm a, let's say, a political historian that's trying to, with a specialty in contemporary politics, right? And I'm trying to get as full a view of the American political scene as I can, from all sides of it, right?
00:39:34
Speaker
Well i'm gonna have to read conservative commentaries and i'm going to have to watch conservative shows and i'm going to have to listen to conservative commentators. Where is the line or what can you do like what can brendan do as he's trying to understand. The phenomenon of people buying into big foot.
00:39:56
Speaker
not falling into the trap of maybe believing in Bigfoot yourself. I assume academicians that are being trained in a rigorous way, not just in some kind of like, we look at the 19th century historians and some of their presuppositions are kind of ludicrous to us at this point. Certainly the March of Progress one we've beaten up, I think rightfully so. But there's others that
00:40:25
Speaker
Maybe that is my question, like what can we do?
00:40:29
Speaker
as people who are trying to just understand, as you put it. I think that's the key word. I don't want to get sucked into this, but I do want to understand the psychology behind it, because in its most extreme forms, it can become totally dangerous, if not murderous and outright genocidal in the way that it expresses itself. And so,
Psychology, Education, and Guarding Against Bias
00:40:53
Speaker
how do we
00:40:55
Speaker
in an effort to understand the phenomenon of conspiracy theories and why people are drawn to them, not wind up getting sucked into them ourselves. What can you do? I think all you can do is study the psychology, learn about cognitive biases, learn about logical fallacies, learn about psychological defense mechanisms. And to be clear, my little Bigfoot thing
00:41:25
Speaker
It didn't happen because I was spending a lot of time reading Bigfoot researchers opinions. Like you could send me, like if I were a reporter, you could like embed me in the, I'm making air quotes here, but like embed me in the Bigfoot community for a year to do research. I wouldn't come away believing in Bigfoot because I was around those people. Something was going on with me emotionally, psychologically, where I had let my guard down.
00:41:53
Speaker
And the Bigfoot thing slipped in through the door that I'd left a jar for whatever reason. And so I think Zach is absolutely right. The friend you have who watches Fox News for amusement, that's sickening to me. Fox News is ginning a patriot against black people and trans people. And there's nothing remotely entertaining about that. It makes me want to vomit. If a Fox News headline comes up on my Apple News feed, I turn my phone off. That's how allergic to it I am.
00:42:23
Speaker
But I think that if you do understand the psychology, it is easier to stay on your guard against it. And you have to subject yourself to those same tests. Like, am I doing this in my own thinking? Is the very thing I'm critiquing something that actually I'm hypocritically doing myself? Yeah, I'll be in my mind from an angle that is smart versus dumb, you know?
00:42:51
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. And, you know, another personal thing I'll say, I guess publicly now, is I was a conservative for five, six years of my life. I want to say 2001 to roughly 2007.
00:43:11
Speaker
And I could tell you, I don't think it's relevant here, I could tell you to the best of my understanding why I was a conservative, you know, I voted for George Bush in the 2003 presidential election, sorry, 2004 presidential election. I don't shy away from that, I have no difficulty acknowledging it. But I also have no difficulty saying, like, if you, if someone said to me, hey man, why were you a Republican,
00:43:40
Speaker
back in the mid aughts, I have no problem with saying, well, the short answer is I was a fucking idiot back in the mid aughts. Like I don't see any, any value in pretending that I, if I'm going to call these other people idiots, that I've got to call my past self an idiot and I don't have a problem with that. And I can call that past version of me an idiot, but also look into my own psychology at the time to understand exactly what was going on. Both of those things can simultaneously be true. I was an idiot.
00:44:07
Speaker
I was an idiot for these interesting psychological reasons that I'm now going to enumerate for you. I'm going to subject my former uncritical thinking to critical thinking.
00:44:23
Speaker
But and we do know that when it comes to sort of like you can to a certain extent, you can inoculate yourself like we we do know from some studies that if you're trying to prevent people from becoming believers in conspiracy theories.
00:44:41
Speaker
There aren't really that many things you can do, but one thing you can do is if people learn the real version of something before they learn the fake version, they are much more resistant to the fake version. So if you go to school and you learn about the Holocaust and you accept that into your worldview, you're much less likely to entertain a Holocaust denier.
00:45:05
Speaker
later in life, which is yet another reason that Norman Finkelstein's idea that we should teach Holocaust denial is idiotic and just psychologically factually incorrect. But if you've never learned about the Holocaust, or you've only heard rumors or whatever, and then a Holocaust denier is the first person who pops into your face waving facts and figures around, you're much more likely to fall victim to believing it because you haven't
00:45:31
Speaker
been inoculated with the truth ahead of time. And unfortunately, as education in this country gets shittier and shittier, we are failing to teach people the truth about a lot of things that they should know and they're going to be more likely to, when they get older, to, you know, fall for the charlatan who's going to try to convince them that Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is about how Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing, which is going to take them on to how
00:46:00
Speaker
the Jewish financiers are responsible for 9-11, which also 9-11 didn't actually really happen, which is then going to lead them to like the Knights Templar and the Illuminati and like the New World Order that's going to build a concentration camp at the Denver Airport, which is then going to lead them to QAnon and believing that transgender people are groomers and that it's okay to lock up immigrant children in cages.
00:46:28
Speaker
one of those things feeds directly into the other and it starts with that you didn't learn the truth about the world when you should have and now you're fucked. I also think like to add to that there's almost like a and I've fallen victim to this as a
00:46:43
Speaker
recovering perfectionist. I think I still suffer from this to some degree. Like there's a kind of compulsiveness that I think is attached to the need for certainty and not just like I'm more or less completely certain, but 100% can't be wrong, black and white. This is how it is certainty. And the more that I think you, and I say this humbly as a,
00:47:09
Speaker
someone who it's the cliche, the more you read, the more you realize how ignorant you are, the more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know on some level, or how much bigger it is, how much bigger and more complex and more, you know, nuanced. Some of these questions are that you might have thought at 16, you could answer very easily with one sentence. But, you know, I think in the, you know, you get these sort of arguments like, well, how can you be 100% certain
00:47:38
Speaker
that my claim that gas chambers were a fiction isn't true. Prove it. It's like, well, listen, man, history as a discipline is not a science like the hard sciences are or math, but we do have certain features that overlap with the hard sciences, and one of them is being able to defend our claims using evidence.
00:48:06
Speaker
and i can give you photographs and i can give you testimony and i can give you interviews and i can give you sites that still exist and we can find cyclone be gas canisters and on and on and on and if. You know you're still going well how can you be on it's like well listen man i can't be a hundred percent certain about anything neither can the scientists and actually the point is where as certain as we can be until further notice.
00:48:33
Speaker
You know, QED, shut the fuck up. That's the point. And by the way, if I'm wrong and I'm a scientist worth my salt, even though I'm not a scientist myself, my sense is prove me wrong. That's exciting. Especially if it's genuinely true and then we've now come a little bit closer to real knowledge.
00:48:52
Speaker
You know, so I just find this like, well, how can you be sure? Well, guess what, bro? We're never fucking sure. But we've come a long way in spite of that, you know, and you have to proceed even without the guarantee of total certainty, which doesn't fucking exist.
The Dangers of Absolute Certainty
00:49:09
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's such a that's such a spot on rant, man. How can you be certain that if you step out of your 30th floor window? You're going to fall. You can't be certain.
00:49:22
Speaker
You know, this could be the time that gravity stops working. Like, do you want to try it? Are you 100% certain? Of course you're not. You have a reasonable degree of certainty, however, and that is all that it takes to not jump out your fucking window.
00:49:36
Speaker
Right. Which in a way, and I want to say this again with total, I say this not with total respect, but just respectfully as I fold in the weather underground again. But I think that Zayd Dord's criticism of his mom, Bernadine, was kind of in this ballpark of like, you are not in any doubt as to your tactics or as many of the activities that you brought to fruition.
00:50:03
Speaker
And I'm here Zaydorn going, I could never do that myself. I'm not trying to vilify you. I'm not trying to unfairly judge you. I'm just saying in terms of a personality type, I can't subscribe to this kind of total confidence, total certainty that what I'm doing is right, which also doesn't mean I need to lapse into total skepticism or a kind of like action paralysis, actionless paralysis, but a little bit of doubt might be healthy.
00:50:33
Speaker
You know, a little bit of skepticism is probably a good thing. The more we talk about this, the more I'm legitimately fascinated by the question of, and maybe there is information about this on the internet. I have not looked. But the people who are featured in Room 237, they were the subject of a documentary that got a lot of attention.
00:50:59
Speaker
You know, I found out about that movie when it came out because I read an article about it. So I imagine that 90% of the people who watch that documentary are on the same page that we are, right? Ranging from laughing at these kooks to being kind of offended that anyone could believe anything so stupid. But I bet 10% of them were totally sucked in by one or the other of those theories. So I would suspect that those people who were featured
00:51:29
Speaker
If there was a way to contact them, 90% of the mail they would have gotten would have been hate mail, and the other 10% would have been, please tell me more.
00:51:41
Speaker
you're so brave for having noticed this and brought it into the public consciousness. And I would love to know if any of those people have changed their mind and realized that they were being dumbasses, or if any of them have since doubled down and are now even more convinced of the correctness of their interpretation if
00:52:03
Speaker
seeing themselves on the big screen juxtaposed with other kooks did anything to spark some self-awareness in them, or if they just were more firmly convinced of their own rightness. And if any of them are now January 4th insurrectionists, I would just love to know the story of how that played out for those people.
00:52:24
Speaker
Yeah, and I mean, as you're speaking to this, I can't help because I got dragged back into like, well, let me throw myself under the bus with my own argument. So let me float this out and let's see how we deal with it. Under different historical circumstances, it was heretical to claim that the earth was anywhere but the center of not only the solar system, but the universe. And Galileo famously recanted
00:52:53
Speaker
his own discovery to save his skin, which I don't blame him for. I would imagine I'd probably do similarly if I were looking at a burning pile of wood as my final resting place. There is that apocryphal statement that he whispered under his breath, but it moves, or some such statement.
00:53:16
Speaker
You know, he's the one in that instance that's right, and he's telling everyone else things are not what they seem. You think it's this way, it's that way. You get someone like a Giroduno Bruno, I'm sure I'm mispronouncing his name, he wasn't a scientist, he was a religious man, but he was convinced as well that the earth was not the center of the solar system,
00:53:41
Speaker
and that the universe was unfathomably larger than we could possibly comprehend. And when they told that guy to recant, he said, fuck you again and again, and they did burn him at the stake. And so there's a part of me, I think we've gotten at this with the John Brown sort of ambivalence, right? But also respect, like, fuck man, I respect someone who just like sticks to their guns, especially when the gun is pointing at their head.
00:54:09
Speaker
and says, I don't care. I'm not taking it back. This is what I genuinely believe to be true in the instances when they are right.
00:54:17
Speaker
Damn, I mean, that is correct. That's courage. Even if they're wrong, I guess it's courage, but especially if they're right. And so I guess I bring this up, man, because you think of like, you know, people who are like the the the the White Rose Organization and Nazi Germany, there are these 20 something Aryan kids or white kids because they wouldn't subscribe to the Aryan bullshit that just said,
00:54:44
Speaker
Adolf Hitler's a psychopath.
The Courage of Being the Sane Minority
00:54:47
Speaker
All these people that are genuinely drinking this Kool-Aid are fucked up and deeply troubled and they think they're bringing themselves to a higher plane of existence. We're being let off of a cliff and we're going to actively push back. When you are in the fishbowl with a bunch of other fish, but you're the only one that realizes this shit is fucked,
00:55:12
Speaker
That's a very scary situation and so I just want to point out as much as I want to hold these folks accountable or conspiracy theorists accountable for the damage they bring to society, I can't help but include the rare instances when it's the minority, maybe it isn't rare, but the instances when the minority
00:55:38
Speaker
is sane and the majority is insane and they have to figure out how to proceed and do what they can that's within their powers to do. And it might not be much, but they're trying to figure it out. I mean, that happens.
00:55:55
Speaker
So what do you do? You know what I mean? I don't know what I'm trying to get at other than that you can wind up actually being the one, the only person that's sane in the room and that you actually are not insane, you are correct.
00:56:11
Speaker
Yeah, no, I know exactly what you're getting at, and it's not really certainty that's the issue. I am as certain of some things as Bernardine Dorn was, and that doesn't make me wrong, and it doesn't make her wrong, and I'm as certain about some things as Holocaust deniers are, and that doesn't make me wrong. And for that matter, it doesn't make them wrong either.
00:56:38
Speaker
just because you can be certain about a totally false thing doesn't mean that certainty is itself a sign that your belief is false. Just like, you know, I think it was Michael and me, maybe I was listening to the other day where they, they talked about how the media loved to, uh, like put Bernie Sanders and Trump on the same footing because they were both angry.
00:57:03
Speaker
People would criticize Trump for stirring up hate, and then the media would point at Bernie Sanders and say, look, he's another angry white guy like they're the same. No, you fucking shitbirds. They're not the same at all. That's moral equivocation of the basest variety, and you should be fired from your job and never be hired to do anything ever again if you ever publish something like that in your career.
00:57:26
Speaker
Yeah, just because one person is angry about something and another person is angry about something and one of those people is dangerous and should be locked up doesn't mean the other one who's angry is the same kind of person. This is like a classic to me, like, you know, if a master whips his slave or if the slave beats the master to get away from the master and emancipate themselves and then someone says, well, violence is violence. Like,
False Moral Equivalence in Politics
00:57:50
Speaker
no, I don't think so. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
00:57:55
Speaker
Okay, let me ask though, because there is something that I think is buried in this that's important, and that is this. In the instances when you are the minority, you are the same few in an insane society. And in this theoretical, that is an objective reality playing out.
00:58:16
Speaker
What do you do? Because I think, let me give you this example. This is what I was thinking. So there's another cult called Heaven's Gate. I don't know if you ever heard of Heaven's Gate. Heaven's Gate was basically a dude who said he
00:58:31
Speaker
was essentially an alien, I think, or at least had communed with aliens, and that he was preparing an elite cohort of humans to leave the planet and reunify with aliens. They wound up, those that remained at the far end of the cult, at its conclusion, took an overdose of poison and all died essentially within hours of each other.
00:58:56
Speaker
I can't remember how this came up in the documentary, but they were talking about peer pressure in this instance. When you've invested this much time and energy into an organization, even if there's some part at the back of your brainstem, you know this is wrong or you want to get out, your identity is going to take such a hit. There's all these other people in the cohort keeping you bound to it.
00:59:18
Speaker
But they used this example and I was fascinated by it. They did a test apparently to determine the powers of peer pressure where they had nine people that were in on the trick and one that wasn't. And what they presented to the group
00:59:39
Speaker
was a slide. And they basically said, if you feel like all the lines in this slide are identical, say yes. And if you think there's one that's off, say they're not all identical. So you know how this is going to go. Nine of the ones that were in on it, they were presented with a slide of lines with one line that was obviously, obviously shorter than the others.
01:00:07
Speaker
And one, two, three, four, five, all the way to nine said they're identical. The 10th person, and they conducted it again and again, I think it was 100% agreed.
01:00:21
Speaker
And they use this as at least the beginnings of sort of like an evidence-based argument that that 10th person must have known on some level fairly immediately. They were seeing what others purportedly warrant, but out of fear of looking weird or being ostracized or being alienated, they capitulated and said they're the same.
01:00:45
Speaker
I feel like that is almost as perfect a real life test as you can conduct that is analogous to what Nazi Germany could be like or some equivalent, these cults. A big chunk of this is I just don't want to be weird. I don't want to be a freak. I don't want to be maybe thrown in jail. I don't want to be disowned by my family, by my government, by my fellow citizens, by my wife.
01:01:14
Speaker
And that's when you gotta have some courage. That takes courage. So where does courage play? How do you factor courage into this if you agree with me that is a key ingredient, a North Star, a quality that is necessary to navigate an insane community when you and maybe only a small number of folks are the few sane ones?
01:01:44
Speaker
I do agree with you and I don't know. I know that maybe the more I think about it, courage is not really a monolithic thing. I sometimes accuse people of
01:01:58
Speaker
People who believe things that aren't true, I will accuse them of lacking intellectual courage because they won't look at themselves. That's a totally different thing, though, than say physical courage. And even physical courage has so many different manifestations, like I'm pretty confident, I don't know, but I'm pretty confident that
01:02:16
Speaker
you know, if I got arrested by some goose stepping Gestapo types and they stood me up in front of a wall and pointed a gun at my head and said, uh, you know, say Heil Hitler, or we're going to shoot you in the head. I'm pretty sure that I could find the courage to say, go fuck yourself.
01:02:33
Speaker
if they hauled me in front of a burning pyre and said, Say, Heil Hitler, or we will burn you alive. Nope, that's totally different. I probably, looking at the burning pyre, just like Galileo, I will say whatever you want me to say. And, you know, I talked, I think it was the Weather Underground episode, I said, like, the idea of life in prison terrifies me. And I don't know what I would do to avoid that.
01:02:59
Speaker
I think courage is different for different people. Some people who face those things, it's because they have the ability to live life in the moment and they don't worry about what's going to happen next until it comes next and then they just experience it and they endure it. Some people are excellent at preparing themselves ahead of time for pain and privation that they know are going to come.
01:03:20
Speaker
other people, as we talked about with our discussion of Jean-Naméry at the mind's limits, some people find a conviction that comes from religious faith that will forever be inaccessible to me, because I don't want it to be accessible to me. But it takes all kinds of different forms, and so I don't think courage
01:03:42
Speaker
It's a North Star, but I suppose in some ways it's not because there are so many different kinds of it and it can exist for so many different reasons and you can simultaneously, not simultaneously, but you can be a coward in certain circumstances and be brave in other circumstances and perhaps neither one fully defines who you are as a person. And you can be courage for absolutely ignoble, courageous for absolutely ignoble causes and reasons.
01:04:07
Speaker
You know, one of the greatest scenes in Tarantino's filmography is when they, the, the bear Jew comes out of the tunnel, right? And the Brad Pitt character says, got ourselves a Nazi here who wants to die for his country, oblige him. And you realize that like the bastards are like these loud crass, kind of obnoxious characters fighting on the side of the good. And this Nazi officer is,
01:04:36
Speaker
an incredibly brave and principled man who is fighting on the side of evil. And I love the fact that the movie takes the time to point that out to us and get, well, I mean, I think Tarantino wants us to think about that because it certainly got me thinking about it when I saw that movie the first time. You can be incredibly courageous in defense of utterly indefensible causes, absolutely. And you can wilt, like hypothetical me looking at the burning pyre,
01:05:02
Speaker
in defense of good causes. So I'm sort of hearing like courage by itself isn't going to cut it. You need courage. I would argue you need a moral compass, even though we could get into debates about, I actually find moral relativism debates to be somewhat obnoxious at a certain point, but
01:05:21
Speaker
I think that courage without a moral compass and maybe more importantly, certainly equally important, is critical thinking skills. If you do not have training in critical thinking, not just as you subject others' thinking and thoughts and actions to your critical thinking, but your own, you're in a danger zone.
01:05:48
Speaker
Absolutely. And to go back to my time as a converted conservative, that was maybe the biggest part of it was that I had no training in critical thinking and I didn't know that I didn't because I'd always identified as a smart person. I could follow arguments very easily. I could read difficult texts and usually understand them. And so I thought I was trained in critical thinking and I had no idea that I was not.
01:06:15
Speaker
And so I had no, and that's the thing. Like when you identify as being smart, it can be worse for you because first of all, you think you're above it. And secondly, your intellect is used to doing complicated things. And so your intellect is maybe going to do a bunch of complicated things to convince you of a bunch of nonsense and you're just going to go along with it because you're so convinced of your own fucking intelligence.
01:06:45
Speaker
Right and in a way like to bring this back to the shining into room 237, we're almost saying like, folks, you're working overtime, you're working way too hard like what if
01:07:00
Speaker
What if it's actually as simple as it seems in this instance, that it is just a straightforward, like, atmospheric horror film, and all this other stuff you're doing, all these mental acrobatics, intellectual, you know, pedal to the metal, you know, scrutinization of the most sort of throwaway detail in a given frame in that film,
01:07:25
Speaker
is just missing the fundamental point that it's actually, in this instance, not as complicated as it seems. Or it is, in fact, what it purports to be. There's nothing to peel back here, folks. How do you say that to the corollary if we extrapolate from Room 237 back to the wider world is
01:07:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's one thing to say to someone, what you see is what you get with this movie. There may not actually be anything under the surface at all because Kubrick may ultimately have been kind of a hollow filmmaker.
01:08:02
Speaker
How do you say that to someone about life though? Because sometimes the argument is, I think it was a Gallup poll that was done the week after JFK was murdered. And it was before anybody knew anything about what had happened except that Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested. I think it was less than a week.
01:08:27
Speaker
And at that point, I think it was two thirds of Americans already thought that there was some kind of cover up happening. Because how could some pissant little ex-marine who couldn't hold down a job kill the most powerful man in the world?
01:08:40
Speaker
there had to be more to it. It had to happen for a reason. It had to be part of some grand clash of powers, right? And the truth is, no, Lee Harvey Oswald is just a loser who had a gun and made a good shot. And that's it. That's all there is to it. And there's no greater purpose in it. I'm okay with that. I'm okay with the fact that stuff like that happens for no reason.
01:09:06
Speaker
I'm kind of weird that way and probably I'm not as okay with it as I think I am. That's probably why I have so many anxiety issues, right? Like, how do you say to someone like, no, no, no, no, no. It's not that all of this, you think all of this stuff means X, but it actually means Y.
01:09:25
Speaker
But you think all of this stuff means X, but it actually doesn't mean anything. Because there isn't any grand story here. There is no moral arc of the universe. There is no good guy versus bad guy epic tale that is going to be resolved in the end.
01:09:41
Speaker
We're just all alone in the dark together, doing the best we can until we die. Some people, most people, I don't know, but some people, there's literally nothing you could ever do to make them accept that. And so any meaning, however awful it is, is better than no meaning whatsoever.
01:10:00
Speaker
Yes. And I also think that, you know, so let me get at this from a funny angle, but one of my favorite musicians, Vic Chestnut, in his final album before he took his own life, he wound up, he was a paraplegic at 18, was thrown out of a car in an accident, so had a very difficult life and died in his 40s. But he has a song at the end of his final album called At the Cut,
01:10:30
Speaker
which is called, the name of the song is, It Is What It Is. And one of the refrains of the song, it's not the chorus, so to speak, but it comes up twice as, appearance is everything, nothing is what it seems.
01:10:45
Speaker
I love that line. So I think of like a scientist. I think a scientist could say that with a straight face and there would be no issue there. For instance, you think that table is solid. You think you're seeing that table in all of its table nests. I don't want that to sound like Heidegger because I don't like Heidegger. But anyway, but if we if we put this table under a microscope, a chunk of this wood under a microscope, you're going to see things that you had no idea were there.
01:11:13
Speaker
appearance is everything nothing is what it seems you go to work and you take on a certain professional corporate persona i had to kinda work through this as a teacher i don't know if you did but. You know of course there's a certain level of professionalism we should be held to and there's certain things that are appropriate at a workplace that are or that are inappropriate at a workplace but that would be appropriate at a bar with my friend or we are i understand these distinctions are necessary but.
01:11:44
Speaker
Back to Vonnegut's point, like we are what we pretend to be, I think a lot of people can get so trapped in the role of a sort of corporate persona that before they know it, they don't even know who they are anymore. They've given themselves over to their role. And so I'm going at this from two angles. You got the scientific one of like, actually that's true as a statement of fact that nothing is what it seems to the naked eye. What you think you're looking at is not exactly what you're looking at.
01:12:13
Speaker
But if we go
Balancing Mysteries and Complexity in Life
01:12:14
Speaker
at it from more of like a humanities angle, there's no bottom to... You've mentioned the ideas at some other point in a different episode, this notion of a sense of self. Maybe it was Levee's book that we were discussing. I am with you that maybe, you know, sort of...
01:12:33
Speaker
in a relative sense, of course there's a self, of course I inhabit a body, of course I'm made up of different personality traits and experiences and I don't know, I have a mental makeup and a language that I use and friends that I have consulated around me and memories that I hold that help me get a pretty decent view of who I think I am, right? But at the same time,
01:12:59
Speaker
I acknowledge there is no bottom to the interrogation of the self. And we never fully really figure ourselves out, even if we could extend life out infinitely, we would never solve the mysteries of ourselves, let alone the mysteries of other people. And so is it possible to sort of say, I'm willing to live in the ambiguity of the mysteries of this world,
01:13:27
Speaker
while at the same time not subscribing to some notion that there are all kinds of things happening below the surface that I can turn into some complex architecture that's truly completely divorced from reality, if that makes sense.
01:13:49
Speaker
I acknowledge there's shit that just doesn't make sense, but as scientists, a final thing. I have a friend who was getting his math degree at NM Tech, and when he asked one of his professors a little more, like, can you explain how that particular mathematical equation works? The guy's response was, it's magic.
01:14:10
Speaker
And my friend was pissed at that response as he should have been because that's the response that you give when you don't fucking know yourself how it works. But it's not magic. It's magic until further notice as in we're going to figure out how this works, why this works the way it does. There is an explanation and we're going to interrogate
01:14:33
Speaker
what the possible explanation could be. In my mind, as a non-scientist, that's about as close as I can get to what scientists do. When you say it's magic, now we're in religion. That's an answer you give someone when you say, you can't understand this, therefore it's God. Therefore, we're done with this discussion QED. I'm like, that's fine if that's what you want to use as your counter-argument, but this is no longer an argument that's based in logical defenses.
01:15:00
Speaker
This is just a hokum bullshit. It's a dodge. In response to your question, it is not only possible, it is in fact desirable. And it's amazing that your friend had that experience because there's actually a classic cartoon about that. I don't remember if it's a Gary Larson comic or not, but it's a scientist pointing at an equation, a long equation on a blackboard.
01:15:26
Speaker
And one of the audience members is raising their hand. This is the caption saying, I think you missed a step there. And basically it's a line of equations and in the middle it just says magic question mark. And like exactly the same thing. Like, yes, exactly the way you described it. And I guess sometimes there are just people who thrive on uncertainty,
01:15:52
Speaker
people who are okay with uncertainty, people who are willing to wrestle with uncertainty, and then people who are allergic to uncertainty and will do whatever they can to not have to engage with it on any level. And that uncertainty coexisting with knowledge is possible. That that is perfectly fine. There's not a contradiction in that. And that that is where much of the beauty in life is actually to be found.
01:16:21
Speaker
is where uncertainty co-exists with knowledge. I think that's a perfect place to wrap, actually. I agree. I agree.