Death anxiety lurks beneath virtually everything we do. Our capitalistic drive for endless growth, our political polarization, even our addictions to consumption – all stem from our desperate attempts to buffer ourselves against the terror of our finite existence! Dr. Sheldon Solomon, pioneering psychologist behind Terror Management Theory, explains how when death is on our minds (ie, during pandemics, live-streamed g3n0c1de, climate collapse, wars, etc), humans cling more fervently to cultural worldviews and become susceptible to authoritarian leaders promising security.
Death denialism explains so much about why/how fascism rises predictably alongside economic inequality and mortality salience. Yet facing our mortality offers profound liberation!
In this episode, which is part 2 of Season 2’s “Death Boop with a Side of Death Cult,” I finally interview Sheldon Solomon. Honestly, we have a great time together discussing death, aliveness, fascism, and the true delight in becoming radically inconsequential.
This practical invitation to turn toward our deepest fears, to embrace both personal transformation and systemic change, to confront the paradox of finding joy amid global upheaval, is perhaps to realize that our shared mortality offers the very foundation for building something more beautiful together.
~ RESOURCES ~
- Sheldon Solomon has no internet presence — AKA RADICAL INSIGNIFICANCE — and is a professor at Skidmore College, a co-author of In the Wake of 9/ 11: The Psychology of Terror and The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life.
- Free guided grounding meditation with Dana—a practice of calling your energy back/nervous system tending/reclaiming your attention) ~ (http://bit.ly/grounding-now)
- All Roads Studio
- How Your Story Sets You Free, with the Million Person Project
- Enter to win a free coaching session ~ leave a 5-star rating (only) and a written review, to be entered in a monthly drawing for a free coaching session. Email dana@danabalicki.com the review title + your review name to enter. Winner announcements will be made across platforms mid-month.
// sound-editing/design ~ Rose Blakelock, theme song ~ Kat Ottosen, podcast art ~ Natalee Miller //
@danablix on ig 😭 feeling the pull for coaching support? go to danabalicki.com for inner/outer transformation 🖐️⭐️ leave a 5-star rating & review to be entered in a monthly raffle for a free coaching session (details in show notes) 🎁 share this with your favorite boo-hooer 😭
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Crying in my jacuzzi.
Crying in my jacuzzi.
Crying in my jacuzzi, crying inmy jacuzzi.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
So there are a lot of ways that I process and
understand, digest, internalizeand try to make sense and
sensation of how we got here,the timeline that we're on
collectively, and I'mconsistently inviting you to
(00:56):
explore this with me.
And the reason that I'm at allinterested in how we got here is
because I'm also thoroughlycommitted to exploring how we
move forward together withcourage, curiosity, compassion,
my road dogs.
You know, we have suchconnective tissue as humans and
(01:19):
more than humans.
Our connective tissue is anexpansive mycelial network
connecting us to all things inways we can and many ways that
we cannot see.
But as a coach of humans, Iwith great honor receive and
hold people's stories, theircore pain points, their limiting
(01:40):
beliefs, their deepest fears,and I have never once worked
with someone who had a fear orexperience that was truly unique
, meaning that there was noother person I had ever worked
with that had not had some core,similar, destabilizing, similar
pattern that had emerged fromwhatever maybe the unique
(02:02):
experience was.
But really, like we are soprofoundly connected Not in that
, like we are all one kind ofway, though, yes, and our most
painful, destabilizingexperiences are places that we
can and must find each other,and when we meet there with
(02:24):
compassion we can connect moredeeply to each other, to
ourselves, to the world aroundus and the worlds around us and
within us, even to the worlds wecan't see from here, to the
people we'll never know or meet.
And one of those biggest,juiciest fears is the fear of
death.
And to explore death and how weattemptedly process it as
(02:48):
humans, I want to go findSheldon Solomon.
He's a professor of psychologyat Skidmore College.
He's one of the founding voicesbehind existential,
experimental psychology, terrormanagement theory.
His work looks at how ouruniquely human awareness of
death impacts our behavior, ourrelationships and our sense of
(03:08):
meaning and meaning making andhow we relate to each other.
He's been featured indocumentaries.
He's co-authored a few books.
One of my faves, the Worm atthe Core, on the role of death
in life.
During COVID I found his workon terror management theory.
I made an episode about it lastseason.
It helped me understand so muchabout being human and why we do
(03:32):
what we do in the face of deathor in our resistance in facing
death, how we build our livesand our systems to protect
ourselves from thatinevitability and how in Western
culture our relationship todeath is fakakta and that's
(03:52):
affecting all of us.
I mean, you know me, I've saidit before late-stage capitalism,
colonialism, extensions of along-running death cult, a
desperate attempt to avoid deathby destroying others and the
planet, which, in my humbleopinion, is not a super
effective strategy.
Last season we talked about itand this season, today, this
(04:17):
episode, we are going to go tothe source.
So let's go find Sheldon.
We can usually find him justwalking around the block with
his dog.
(04:39):
Yeah, I mean, I hear you, likelike what you were saying right
before I hit record about theparadox of acknowledging, like,
oh, in my life, the experience Ihold it in paradox with what is
happening in the world and theamount of pain and terror and
(05:13):
fear and trauma-inducing eventsyou know like, and I feel like
we've been in this paradoxtraining for well, maybe forever
, maybe that's just part of thehuman condition, but certainly
the past handful of years, andI'll say that I read the article
in Sun Magazine, this MortalCoil in 2021.
(05:35):
That was the first time I evercame across your work and you
and your partners, and just thebroader scope of death awareness
, death denial, terrormanagement, theory, all of it,
and it put a lot of puzzlepieces together, like it helped
me really understand things thatI had been seeing but didn't
(05:58):
have all of the words for it,couldn't fit together or had my
own projections of like well,yeah, people are full of fear.
That's what they're doing,that's why all of this is
happening, which is true, andwhen I started making my podcast
not to talk too much, but justa tiny bit of context like, you
were the first person that Iever thought of interviewing and
(06:18):
I didn't get to, you know, tointerviews until season three
here, because of the work andjust because of like, I feel
like, once you sort of tune intodeath denial, death awareness,
it's like you know, you're just,it's an ontological shift that
maybe was already there and kindof allows us to to understand
(06:40):
each other in a better way, like, even though we're
understanding through it all theways in which we pull back and
double down on our culturalworldviews and dehumanize,
there's something connectiveabout it, there's something that
actually, for me, like allowsfor a level of understanding of
like, oh, and acceptance even,and inside of acceptance is
(07:00):
maybe compassion.
So, yeah, I'm just I'm reallygrateful for the work and I love
to hear you talk about and forus to talk about together, like
how this, how the deathawareness and death denial and I
read the chapter you sent me,which was amazing affects us,
and and what can we do?
(07:21):
Not in just a solutionary sense, because you know, I'm
interested in rebellion.
I'm interested in, like, how wesubvert the system, how we
build new ones, subvert the oldones, build new ones, all the
inner work needed.
So yeah, you're, just for me,squarely in the middle of all of
those things with this work,and you know, if it doesn't feel
(07:44):
good to give your regular spielabout the work, that you do
like say something else or tellanother story, this space is
really open.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
That was an awesome depiction of everything that
we've been thinking about in mywork with my buddies and, to be
silly, perhaps not surprisingly,I agree with everything that
you say and it has really mappedon to my own personal
(08:14):
experiences.
And, yeah, and so, if you don'tmind, you know, let me do a
classic comic book depiction ofthese ideas, because basically,
dana, I think you've reallycaptured my view of things,
which is that the best way tounderstand ourselves and our
(08:35):
species as human beings is thatit is the way that we adjust to
the reality of the humancondition, and that's that we're
finite and transient entitiesthat determines the course of
our lives and the structure ofour societies.
(08:56):
No notes, very worst, itsmalignant manifestations of
death anxiety that make uslikely to be the first form of
life to be responsible for ourown extinction.
Read the news today, or, at ourbest, however you put it, it is
(09:21):
.
These ideas really changed mytake on life, but I like the
Kierkegaards and the Heideggersof the world, who point out that
it opens up a mental horizonthat can be both dreadful as
well as awesome.
(09:43):
So you good guys are bad guys.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Depends on the century.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
And so the very same recognitions that can reduce us
to psychic rubble are also,under slightly different
circumstances, capable ofeliciting the very best of each
of us, both individually andcollectively.
So anyway, I was minding my ownbusiness as a young professor
(10:14):
at Skidmore College.
I got there in 1980, and I waswalking in the library looking
for a Freud book, because I wassupposed to teach personality
for the first time.
And then I saw by accidentthese books by a guy named
Ernest Becker, who I'd neverheard of.
He was a recently deceasedcultural anthropologist and he
(10:38):
won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 orfour for a book called the
Denial of Death.
And right next to that book wasanother book called the Birth
and Death of Meaning.
I was like, wow, those are cooltitles.
I pull out the Birth and Deathof Meaning and in the first
paragraph Becker says I want tounderstand why people do what
(10:58):
they do when they do it.
I was like fuck, yes, me too.
What a great way to put it.
Why do we do what we do when wedo it?
And then the first paragraph ofthe denial of death.
He just says look, we're likeall other living creatures.
We have the vast intelligencethat is great and that enables
(11:20):
us to imagine things that don'tyet exist and then actually
create them.
It allows us to realize thatwe're here, which is sometimes
very exciting, but we alsorecognize that very exciting,
(11:49):
but we also recognize that, likeall living things, we are
ultimately finite.
I don't want to ruineverybody's day.
In English, it means we're allgoing to die someday and that we
can die at any time for reasonswe could never anticipate or
control.
And anyway, becker just saidthat that realization infuses us
with potentially debilitatingexistential anxiety.
And the way that we manage thatanxiety is by embracing
(12:14):
culturally constructed visionsof reality that he called
cultural worldviews that help usmanage existential dread, by
giving us each a sense thatwe're persons of value in a
world of meaning.
And so, anyway, basically, I waslike well, wait a minute.
(12:37):
In my gut I was like thatstruck me as quite right and
reminded me that I've beenreally ardently disinclined to
die since I was like eight yearsold the day that I realized it
was going to happen.
So for me, this was just asmuch personal as it was
(13:00):
professional.
I was eight years old the daymy grandmother died.
I was sad, but I was thinkingabout it and I'm like, oh man,
that means my mom's going to diesomeday and that'll be bad
because who's going to makedinner.
And then a couple of minuteslater I was like, oh fuck, that
means I'm going to die someday.
(13:20):
And that was kind of my firstbig existential crisis that I
did bury under the bushes for acouple of decades.
But anyway, seeing the Beckerbook and reading his really
cogent depiction, which justbasically argues that, whether
we like it or not, we'refundamentally meaning-making,
(13:45):
value-seeking entities and thatwe do that in large measure to
minimize existentialapprehensions.
And while that can be good orcan be bad, we're largely
unaware of the fact that that'swhat motivates us each waking
(14:05):
moment.
We want to keep our sense ofwhat matters intact and our
sense that we're valuablecontributors to what matters in
place.
Also, and when circumstances,either internal or external,
challenge our sense of meaningand value, that automatically
(14:26):
instigates a host of defensivereactions to restore confidence
in our culture as well as faithin our value within it.
So I hope that that makes sense.
But that's basically the ideasthat when I encountered them but
I like how you said it earlierI was like wow, what an amazing
(14:50):
framework to help me put intowords things I had been feeling
and thinking about vaguely sinceI was like sitting in the sand
at the playground barely out ofdiapers.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, yeah, you telling that story had me
reflect on a moment that I thatI thought a lot about over time.
And I think you know when Istarted to, you know, I read
Worm at the Core and, like youknow, as I was reflecting on
this framework and thisconnective lens of death denial,
(15:28):
I remembered back to when I wasabout I was like 14 or 15 years
old and I was I was having apsychedelic mushroom trip with a
bunch of girlfriends and we hadthis realization, I think we
were like playing hacky sack andlike smoking cigarettes or
something, and in some parkinglot in the San Fernando Valley
(15:51):
and we realized collectivelythat we were all going to die,
we were all just waiting to die.
And it was so relieving, wewere laughing, we were delighted
, we just thought we had like,really figured it out, bart, did
you see?
Speaker 1 (16:06):
anything else when you were under, just how we're
all going to die that moment.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Because I had a lot of mushroom trips and you know,
some of them were just fun andsome of them were deep, and this
was one of those deep ones andit shifted something inside of
me where that fear sort ofevaporated for me, or I had a
different relationship with it.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Yeah, what you just said.
Honestly, not everyone isfortunate enough to have those
experiences on psychedelics, butand I say this, as you know,
like a Woodstock throwback-You're a big hippie.
You're a hippie, schmippy backas well, as you know, studying
(16:52):
these things as a supposedacademic.
And the fact of the matter is,is that a single dose of
psychedelics, even for folksthat you know are not products
of yesteryear, that have neverhad it?
So the work right now?
Terminally ill people, as wellas younger folks with PTSD.
Yes, sometimes psychedelics areradically transformative, and
(17:14):
without any background in any ofthis stuff.
When people describe thoseexperiences, they almost
invariably talk about aremarkable transformation in
their conception of what itmeans to die.
It is no longer perceived as anabrupt termination, as a result
(17:39):
of total obliteration, so muchas a realization of the fact
that we're composed of theseatoms that originated at the
same time with the Big Bang, andwe are, moreover, related.
We're derived, we are alldescended from the first living
(18:03):
thing.
That's not like an allegory,that's just literally true,
right?
Our atoms have been hereforever.
We are descended from the firstform of life.
We're therefore related toeverything that's ever been
alive, everything that is alive,everything that will be alive
(18:24):
and after we are no longerintact in the body in which we
currently reside of reality, topoint out our cosmic connection
to all that is over time andspace and when, under the
(18:55):
influence of psychedelics,there's the momentary
realization of that fact.
Yeah, I find that verycomforting and very important.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Truly, that moment really did shape me Like I can
still feel it.
I can still feel the realization.
I had it in that moment and itnever went away and I think
that's part of also what, for mepersonally, it was so
interesting about learning aboutthis work was because I
(19:29):
generally don't have, you know,like I feel, like I've
investigated over time myrelationship to death Not like I
figured it all out, not by anystretch, but you know, but I've
been curious for a long time,which I think that curiosity
will open up and be maybe not abuffer, not the anxiety buffer,
but maybe more towards liketurning towards the anxiety and
(19:52):
learning how to live with itright.
A part of your work that I foundso fascinating was like that,
in this sort of doubling down onthe cultural worldviews, and
this explained a lot of what washappening.
Doubling down on the culturalworldviews and this explained a
lot of what was happening for,like anti-maskers and all sorts
of I mean just so many things.
When I first read the Sunarticle about people who, like
(20:14):
the doubling down on ourcultural worldviews, depending
on what your cultural worldviewis like, you will potentially
hurdle yourself towards your owndemise.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
My suicide mission's been canceled.
We're replacing it with ago-for-broke rescue mission.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
And if you're doing that with a group of people,
you're all doing it and I feellike, with the rise of fascism,
like we are seeing this now on,you know sort of on steroids,
like we are there, we arewitnessing it, we are living
inside of that, like hurtlingtowards our own demise right.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
Yes, well put.
And so two things.
One is, yeah, when death is onour minds, we tend to more
tenaciously embrace ourprevailing cultural values.
Yeah, but what are ourprevailing cultural values?
(21:11):
We're narcissistic sociopathstaught that we have to be the
best at whatever we do, and thatwe're.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Manifest destiny, that's correct.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
We can only be judged by how much money and stuff
that we have.
Plus, we live in a world whereour desires for money and stuff
are insatiable.
No matter what we have, we wantmore, all right, and so when
(21:42):
death is on our mind, we justwant to be better than the
person next to us.
We want to have more money andstuff.
We subscribe to a worldviewthat believes in the
inevitability of progress andthat technology will take care
of everything, and so here weare, accelerating the rate at
(22:08):
which we're preparing the planetto no longer be fit for human
habitation, and that, in turn,is related.
Fire and fascism are related toeach other, because when death
is on our mind and right now,I'm not trying to ruin people's
day- oh no, no, ruin everyone'sday.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
This is great.
We also.
We love this.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
Yeah, let's be a little disruptive.
You know we're at thehistorical confluence of a
unique set of events.
We are marinating in consciousand unconscious death, anxiety
between the planet melting andthe aftermath of the pandemic,
(22:53):
with rising politicalpolarization.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
I mean watching a live stream genocide in Gaza
right in our faces, at everysingle moment.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
There you got it.
So, basically, every singlemoment we're surrounded by
intimations of mortality.
We're surrounded by intimationsof mortality and historically
and this is it's combined witheconomic insecurity.
But the rise of fascism is apredictable result of increasing
(23:26):
levels of economic inequality.
I'm not saying that as anopinion.
There's a guy, peter Turchin,who wrote a book called End
Times, where he just showsmathematically that that's the
case.
The rich are getting richer andthe poor are getting poorer.
Then they get miserable andangry, and their misery is
(23:57):
physical as well aspsychological.
They get shorter in height,they get shorter in lifespan,
and they either get depressed orpissed off or both.
And so there's self-medication,to the point of being
tranquilized by the trivial.
And then, when a fascistideologue comes along and says
(24:20):
only I can fix it, they areprone to mindlessly adhere to a
fascist leader.
Mussolini defined fascism as hesays.
Let's call it corporatism.
It's when corporate entitiescollude with morally corrupt
(24:44):
politicians in order to, inTurchin's language, keep your
foot on the wealth pump.
In other words, what thefascist leaders do is to say to
the little people we're going tomake your life better, while in
fact they turn right around anddeflect even more material
(25:04):
resources to fewer and feweroligarchs, and so that's exactly
what we have happening today.
You don't have to believe me,but in this case you have the
right to be wrong, because we'vedone experiments since 2004,
where we show that deathreminders have radical effects
(25:26):
on people's politicalpreferences.
In 2004, people liked JohnKerry more than George Bush in
America, but if we reminded themof death first, they liked Bush
more than Kerry.
In 2016, americans likedHillary Clinton more than Orange
(25:47):
Hitler I mean Donald Trump andin a benign state of mind but
when we reminded them of deathfirst, their opinions of Donald
Trump increased significantly.
Where the pervasive deathreminders make many of us cling
(26:14):
to folks who are claiming thatthey're the only ones in a
position to fix things, when infact, they have no intention of
doing so.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
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So many of those.
You know the corporatism aspectof it.
You know it's like an equation,right?
(27:17):
And we're just at a point inthe equation of the turning
towards the leaders, the corruptleaders, that always binds with
or overlaps with thatcorporatism or overlaps with
that, like the addiction togrowth or progress as growth.
So there's always moneyinvolved.
There's always some aspect ofthat right.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Yes, so I love how you put it.
I'm like hey, what are you know?
Infinite growth, it's only goodfor malignant tumors and
compound interest.
There is no and compoundinterest.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
There is no other condition in which that would be
.
Oh, I'm wearing like the Venndiagram overlap of that right
now.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
I'm being silly, but I think that that's one of the
things that we need to makeourselves aware of that and this
, again, is not my idea.
I think it's Max Weber, deadGerman sociologist, who just
said you know, there's somethingfunky about humans, because at
(28:24):
first we used technology inorder to enhance our lives, but
there came a point where thingsgot reversed and we're now like
(28:44):
hamsters on methamphetamine,just keeping the wheels of
commerce turning.
The wheels of commerce turning,but it's no longer for our own
benefit, so much as to continueto produce infinite amounts of
what turns out to be a worthlessabstraction.
(29:07):
Again, it bends my mind when Ithink about this.
In other words, you can't eatmoney.
I know you can't eat without it,but early on, you know, we did
use technology in ways thatseemed to enrich and enliven and
(29:57):
, as Karl Marx pointed outcrappy economist, but great
psychologist and philosopherearly on, the accumulation of
money, what we call capitalism.
That should not just besummarily dismissed as being
purely malignant, because thoseof us that like things like
trains and hospitals and schoolsshould note that those are the
kind of things that you need.
A large pile of a worthlessabstraction, terrible, nothing
sweeping over the land, thatbeing money, ah, money, money,
(30:17):
money.
The convert into projects ofthat magnitude that would be
hard to do otherwise.
So there's a good aspect to theway that humans have
constructed an economic symbolthat can be combined to enhance
the well-being of all of us.
(30:38):
On the other hand, there issomething and this is where the
faust myths come in in ourculture the faustian deal with
the devil, because somehow wegot to the point where enough is
never enough.
If you're Jeff Bezos and youwake up and Elon Musk has more
(31:02):
money, then you're a failure.
And even Elon Musk wakes upevery day saying I need more
billions.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Right, right or like.
And then the fascinating thingwhich you know I don't want to
spend too much time on this nextmoment, but just thinking about
, like all of the likebiohacking, which is really just
diet culture, but likebiohacking, overlapped with like
a life extension, right andlike you know, people doing what
they're doing to like live evenlonger.
(31:31):
It just it's like, it's likesuch a big flag of like I'm
afraid of death.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
Absolutely no.
I think, dana, that's a greatand a really important point.
I don't think it's an accidentthat the richest people on earth
are spending trillions ofdollars to avoid the conclusion
of their lives.
To avoid the conclusion oftheir lives, right, it is.
They are both, I believe, to beunfortunate manifestations of
(32:05):
an immature and ultimately, selfand socially destructive take
on our mortality Totally selfand socially destructive.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
take on our mortality totally, and I think like that
it came up in in actually acouple other interviews that
I've done.
I wish I could have everyoneall together because in my mind
yeah, and in the same roomsomeday maybe right, a dream, um
, because there's all theselittle pieces fitting together.
But there's recognizing, likewhere we're at, and even though,
like fair understanding thoughthere's more to do always of
(32:39):
like how we got here, right, youknow, and I'm just thinking
about that quote that's goingaround, the Timothy Snyder quote
, that's like do not obey, donot obey in advance.
And I'm always like I love thatsentiment because of the
rebellious nature and also, withthis work of death, denialism,
it's like, oh right, but so manypeople can't help but obey in
(33:05):
advance.
That's how they buoyedthemselves to you know, how they
buffer the anxiety.
And so I'm so curious here,like how we, like I know part of
it's about awareness, but Iread in the article, the Sun
article, and then, through youknow, through various, all sorts
(33:25):
of ways that I've been takingin your work, like like what's
the medicine here?
Right, like there's innermedicine, there's outer medicine
, right, there's like how we,the work we do, like you know,
inside of ourselves, and thenthe work that we do in community
, to sort of do what we can to.
I don't know if you'd call itlike break out of the pattern of
(33:49):
the of the anxiety bufferingright, like turning towards
death.
But you've talked a lot about,like you know, we have to become
more connected andinterdependent.
We have to believe we're inthis together.
You know I read work around oneof your former students, work
around studies, around humility,and you know the becoming
nobody and, you know, becomingradically inconsequential.
(34:12):
There's all these pieces, right.
So I'd love to hear you talkabout that.
Like, where are we?
How are we like, yeah, man,let's ruin everyone's day
because this is just the reality.
And like, and we're all gonnadie.
Don't say that, never say that.
Coonies never say die and inthat inevitability of our own
(34:32):
extinction, we do get to choosehow we want to be together.
Yeah, right, if we can remembergood, we can remember that we
have agency.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
We get to choose yeah , all right, so ditto, um you,
you just said it all.
Well, probably not.
No, no, you did, in my opinion.
Um, there's a a guy his name'sjames row and he's a political
scientist out west originallyfrom canada, I think and he
(35:03):
wrote a book a year or two agocalled radical mindfulness I
don't want to get the titleright.
Why transforming fear of deathis politically vital.
Have you heard of that one?
yeah, I would contact him andtell him I say hello and that he
would be somebody honestly dana.
(35:23):
That that's the question thathis work addresses, because he's
like look we gotta.
We can't be simpletons here.
We have to operatesimultaneously on all levels,
working from the is representedin the structure of our
(35:57):
political, religious andeconomic institutions.
In other words, he points outthat our Western worldview what
I would describe right now as anuber-capitalist, christian,
white nationalist take on thingsis sheer death denial.
(36:21):
He has a great chapter aboutJames Baldwin's work, and the
novelist James Baldwin just saidyou know, the problem is,
whitey doesn't want to die, andthat's what makes us racist,
that's what makes us fascist,that's what makes us cling to
economic inequality.
(36:43):
And the role point is thatthese kinds of institutions are
demonstrably psychologically andphysically destructive and of
course, that's what theanti-woke people want to get us
to ignore.
You know, basically, thehysteria about wokeness.
(37:08):
It's like well, what do we meanby woke?
Well, what we mean isrecognizing that there are
structural factors that impingeupon us in ways that are not
equitable, either intentionallyor not, of that's the way that
(37:32):
malignant manifestations ofdeath denial are perfused
through all of our institutions.
And of course, so one way thatwe need to work on that is to
focus on changing thoseinstitutions, ideally in a
peaceful fashion.
Well, but then he turns rightaround and he says well, who are
(37:56):
the people that are most likelyto be doing things that move in
that direction?
And his response, that we wouldendorse heartily, is it is the
people who have come to termswith their mortality.
And so this is not to say thatwe are no longer anxious or that
(38:19):
we're never going to suffer,but it means that we have gotten
to a point where we accept thereality of our finitude, and we
know that this is associated.
The positive psychologists tellus that when we have a sense of
(38:41):
awe, that often leads in turn toa sense of gratitude If you
slept in a bed last night, whyaren't you really grateful?
If you had breakfast today, andso on, you know.
And that in turn, as youalready said, makes us
extraordinarily humble, which,in America, we see, is like
(39:03):
gallons of pus pouring out ofour face.
Humble humility is notself-deprecation, again back to
being a society of narcissisticsociopaths.
Humility is realizing that weare inconsequential specks of
carbon-based gas, born in a timeand place not of our choosing,
(39:24):
here for a tiny amount of time,but so what?
That doesn't render us devoidof meaning, purpose and value,
and so the point is that they'repeople who have genuinely come
to terms with their mortality.
What Rowe proposes is they'rethe ones that are going to see
(39:47):
things more accurately and be ina position, both emotionally as
well as intellectually andmotivationally, to intervene in
ways that alter the very socialsystems that are dehumanizing
and reducing us to, you know,physical, psychological and
(40:12):
financial rubble.
I don't know if that makessense, but what I'm really
advocating for and why I thinkthe James Rowe book is so
compelling is, yes, simultaneousexistential action at every
level of existence, and whatthat will require, in principle,
(40:35):
is for each of us to work bothindividually and collectively.
I think it was the dead Indiandude, krishna Murthy, who said
something like everybody wantsto change the world, but nobody
wants to change themselves.
So yeah, that's, yeah, that'smy joke to the skidmore students
(40:55):
.
I'm like yeah if you want tofigure out why somebody else is
an asshole, well, we can do thatin six months.
But if you want to look in themirror and figure out why you're
an asshole, well, that's goingto take a little longer I mean,
look, that's the business I'm in, you know, like inner asshole
recognition yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Like, and like I love it Cause like I gotta, I gotta
look at my own inner asshole allthe time.
And this is, and this is why,like I was an activist, um, and
and really like quite active asa full-time activist and
organizer through all theanti-war years, so, like, deeply
familiar with the entire GeorgeW War on Terror administration
(41:38):
cabinet, still have dreams aboutthem, sometimes nightmares.
But, and then I was reallyinvolved in Occupy Wall Street.
I sort of burnt out from myactivism work because there was
no attention to the individualinside of these big movements.
Right, I think that's changednow, I know it has.
I'm at least somewhat.
But you know, I went to then domy own spiritual work and found
(42:02):
myself, found my foundinterpersonal relational work as
like, ah yes, here's somethingreally fascinating, right,
here's here we're all people,like if we're movement building,
we're all just individuals,right, so there is, there is the
role of the individual insideof all that.
And then I was involved inoccupy wall street, which I
(42:22):
watched really changeperspective, or I would even say
like a mass ontological shiftof like around income inequality
and financial inequality, andso it's like I can see where
things have shifted.
It feels always like little bylittle, then all of a sudden,
but what you were saying too,and looking at our own inner
(42:45):
assholeness and how I made thatsort of my job.
The Grace Lee Boggs quote that'sbeen guiding this season for me
.
She talks about rebellion is astage in the development of
revolution.
But it's not the revolution.
But it's an important stagebecause it represents the
standing up of the oppressed,and rebellions break the threads
(43:05):
that have been holding thesystem together, throw into
question that its legitimacy andthe supposed permanence of
existing institutions, and itdisrupts the society.
It does not provide what isnecessary there to make a
revolution and establish anentire new social order.
To make a revolution, peoplemust not only struggle against
the existing institutions.
(43:27):
They must make the physical,philosophical, spiritual leap
and become more human, humanbeings, right.
So in order to change,transform the world, they must
change, transform themselves.
Right, that's it.
I feel like that's where we'recoming to.
(43:56):
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(44:59):
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Speaker 3 (45:01):
Psst, hey, there so.
Dana doesn't know we're here,but it's important.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
Yeah, we slipped in through our robots-only wormhole
to ask you to leave a reviewfor the one and only podcast
broadcasting from theJacuzzi-verse.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Did I hear somebody say wormhole?
Speaker 1 (45:19):
You sure did, Connie.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
Uh, okay, I just didn't want to be left out of
the party.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
We portaled in here to remind listeners how much it
means to all of us that theyrate and leave a review, even
just a short one.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
Oh yes, absolutely.
Go push some buttons, y'allmeans to all of us that they
rate and leave a review, evenjust a short one.
Speaker 1 (45:37):
oh yes, absolutely so take a precious second of your
time that is not even real toleave a five-star review, and a
written review too.
When you do, you will beentered into a monthly raffle
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(45:58):
Details are in the show notes.
Thank you, cry babies.
Your support means everythingto us sharing is caring.
Speaker 3 (46:09):
no, I love that.
And again, james rowowe youshould try and talk to him
because he makes the same pointvery respectfully, but where
he's like I'm really not tryingto be annoying because he also
has had a life as an activistand that it's the existential
anxieties of the individualsthat are causing a lot of our
(46:30):
problems.
Meanwhile, a lot of the peopleto be silly, you know wearing
bedsheets and having silentretreats and doing yoga, and I
(46:50):
mean that, I don't mean thatglibly they're seriously
attending to their ownexistential concerns, but
they're blithely unaware of thestructural impingements.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Right that spiritual bypassing needs attention.
Speaker 3 (47:04):
Yeah, and all he's saying is we need to juxtapose
and intersect that we need toand again you said it great we
need to simultaneously movetowards what we've been
describing as existentialmaturation in order to have any
(47:26):
constructive and enduringeffects on social institutions
that are now, at best, highlyproblematic.
But you make a good point, dana, and that's that sometimes
highly problematic but evenpoorly functioning institutions
(47:52):
are To none at all.
Do you know the Olivia Butlerbooks?
Do you know who I'm talkingabout?
Speaker 2 (48:02):
Oh, Octavia Butler.
Speaker 3 (48:03):
Yeah, octavia Butler.
Yeah, I'm bad at names.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he makes thesame point.
Yeah, I love her books, by theway.
But which is?
We may take ardent issue with alot of current institutions I
do things like public educationbut that's still infinitely
(48:25):
better than just the completedestruction thereof.
I'm a bit mortified by some ofthe folks around me right now
(48:49):
who are not particularlyperplexed by what's happening
before our very eyes and that isthe dismant.
Lot of attention and repair,but we're still exponentially
better off with them in theircurrent form.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
So you know we're and without them altogether.
Speaker 3 (49:09):
Yeah, so we're.
Yeah, we're getting rid of theagency that predicts the weather
.
We're getting rid of FEMA, theagency that helps us after
disasters.
We're getting rid of theNational Institute of Health
research on medicine, becauseI'm also a big fan of this idea
(49:32):
of throwing a wrench in thingsrebellion to the point of
disruption, but again, I reallylike the way you put it.
That's the first step, not theend game.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
Right, well, the disruption you know so much of
what in the death denialism,it's like the anxiety buffer and
it's like, well, if we'realways just trying to buffer, or
like in my work as a coach,right, just coming down all the
way to a very personalexperience and personal work,
it's like whenever we're tryingto push something away, right,
(50:05):
it'll always and resist it.
Usually it's coming up becauseit was something that was
initially rejected or resistedin our, in our lives, at an
early age, and we will put, youknow, we push it down into our
shadow, which it will alwayscome back up, and there's
personal shadow, there'scollective shadow, and I think
(50:25):
what we're really experiencingis so much that has been pushed
away, like the fear of death,you know, or the reality of our
own mortality, like that we willpush something away, it will
always come back up, and so, onthe interpersonal level, it's
like the work is always to turntowards it.
Now, that doesn't mean that wehave to immediately like, run
(50:49):
towards it and release all ofour boundaries.
There are really beautiful waysthat we can start to turn
towards our own fears.
Right, and there's layers andlayers of work.
But it requires some disruption.
It requires, like I'm sointerested in, like the
disruptions that we must do onthe individual level and then
the disruptions that we must doon the collective level.
Speaker 3 (51:13):
Right, no, you just made again an awesome point.
We're ruining people's days ina fine way, because back in the
day before you guys were around,there was a book called
Briefing for Descent into Hellby a woman named Doris Lessing.
Speaker 2 (51:32):
I'm familiar not with that piece, I'm familiar with
that.
Speaker 3 (51:48):
All right, but anyway it's a novel.
But at the end of the book,Doris Lessing says look, we're
in trouble in modernity becausewhenever we're anxious, we reach
for a pill and that is going topotentially extinguish us as
humans, because anxiety, whileunpleasant, doesn't always
undermine our well-being.
And she doesn't refer toKierkegaard, but Kierkegaard has
an amazing take on anxiety.
(52:10):
He's like, yeah, sometimesyou're anxious because you're
worried and apprehensive and youtake flight, which is quite
understandable, but and I forgetthe exact words, Dana but he's
like yeah, but other timesanxiety is yourself calling
yourself to pay attention toyourself.
(52:31):
Yes, and I love that.
It's like wait a minute, fuckno.
Taron Horney makes a similarpoint a century later in a book
called Neurosis and Human Growth.
Is that every once in a while,when we're anxious and
apprehensive, if we sit stilllong enough, it's because we
(52:54):
realize the yawning chasmbetween who we really are and
who we're pretending to be.
And Lessing's entire point isthat, in a death-denying society
where anxiety is seen as anannoying inconvenience that
(53:15):
needs to be immediatelyaddressed, no difference than
when we need DoorDash to deliver12 pizzas in the next five
minutes that we are missing thevital role that existential
apprehensions could, at our bestprovide that very disruption
(53:38):
that you alluded to yes, I mean,that's what I always call.
Speaker 2 (53:42):
Like there is something asking for attention.
There you go raising its hand,hello over here.
No, you don't need the littlezoom icon right, yeah, it's just
that, like as we learn how topay attention to those parts of
us that are raising their handsand asking for attention, you
(54:02):
know, and showing's like, youknow, our deepest fear is moving
up through our bodies, then upto our conscious mind, so that
(54:23):
we can tend to them, right.
So I just, I really appreciatethis sort of kaleidoscope, or
expanding and contractingconversation that you've held
here with me, sheldon, because,conversation that you've held
here with me, sheldon, because,and with everyone listening, um,
as they will, of of this sortof the bigness of what, the
(54:44):
enormity of what we're always ashumans, it's like there's an
enormity, our mortality, thereit is, it is always there and as
we learn and are willing, maybefirst and maybe and then learn
how to be in relationship withit and through, unfortunately,
lots of folks are gonna, aregonna learn how to be in
(55:04):
relationship with it becauseit's all crumbling and crushing
on them and that's unfortunate,but that's, you know, where a
lot of folks are and that, as weslow down, as we like can look
at the ways in which we arebeing with each other and we can
, you know, use death denial anddeath awareness as a lens to
(55:27):
sort of even feel connected toeach other, knowing we're all in
this together right, and thatwe can find these, you know,
know, maybe even just thesesmall ways of of finding our
humility or recognizing maybe,where we are trying to like
buffer things and and there isthat role for us individually
(55:50):
and like what we're here doing,how we're choosing to be
together yeah, um, again reallybest.
Speaker 3 (55:54):
yeah, no, yeah Again really.
Speaker 2 (55:55):
Doing our best.
Speaker 3 (55:57):
Yeah, no well put.
You know, I feel sometimessilly saying some of these
things because, again, I call itcommon sense masquerading as
psychological insight.
I love that be like all rightdude, you know, pretend to be
(56:23):
understanding people for years.
You know what do we need toensure psychological well-being,
and you summed it up in twowords relationships and
connectivity.
That we are not autonomousentities capable of even making
it to lunchtime.
Speaker 2 (56:43):
Our not only interdependence, but cosmic
connectivity.
Speaker 3 (57:05):
And I like.
I think it's Oliver Berkman.
I'm bad with names.
Speaker 2 (57:10):
Hi, you're doing great.
Speaker 3 (57:12):
But I like his ideas about these matters, and some
other folks too, but no matter,and it's just like well, wait a
minute.
If we're all interconnected,then none of us are in a
position to judge, ultimately,the effects of our existence.
(57:34):
And so, and basically so, allright, most of us I'm not going
to be Einstein, I'm not going tobe Beethoven or Mother Teresa,
and most of us aren't.
But instead of, instead ofassuming that that's a radical
(57:56):
indication of your inadequacy,you don't have there's no need
to think that way.
Moreover, it's unconscionablywrong.
So the example that I like using, because it occurs to me all
the time is you know how,sometimes, like, you're walking
on the street and you justmomentarily meet somebody that
(58:20):
you've never seen before, eye toeye, you don't know them,
you'll never see them again, butyou have one of those little
nods like hey, I know, you know,we know we're here.
Well, that, and we now knowthat a casual social engagement
has monumental psychodynamicbenefits.
How do you know that thatperson wasn't walking to the
(58:43):
nearest bridge to jump off andkill themselves?
But your momentaryacknowledgement of their
existence changed their mind.
And maybe that's the nextMartin Luther King, or Jesus or
Mother Teresa, next MartinLuther King, or Jesus or mother
Teresa?
So you don't know and nobodyknows, but you fucking changed
(59:04):
the world and I, and again youmight think about this all the
time too.
Speaker 2 (59:09):
We have very similar brains in this way.
Speaker 3 (59:11):
And my point is that that, but that that's really
true.
And if that's really true, thenyou have no right to say that
this person won a Nobel Prizeand therefore they are more
fundamentally and intrinsicallyvaluable and important than me I
(59:36):
did nothing except a person whowas struggling with their
vision to cross the street butthere's no basis for assuming
that they're not equallymeaningful, valuable and
consequential.
Speaker 2 (59:51):
Yes, I love that.
I love that so much I read thatin your chapter that I've
become enthused about viewingmyself as radically
inconsequential.
It's not even just theacceptance of like I am
radically inconsequential, it'sthe becoming enthused like oh
right.
That's correct, I am radicallyinconsequential and like that is
(01:00:14):
like that is worthy of somecelebration, right?
I think so.
That is like how beautiful doesthat make every moment, every?
Exactly you know everyinteraction Like, then it's like
, ooh, if the pressure of growthand progress right, which we're
(01:00:34):
also trapped in together alsoprogress, right, which we're
also trapped in together.
Also like if we just can shedit, even for moments at a time,
right, that's that allows thatto have less.
When we make it conscious,right, instead of like fighting
against it in our unconsciousand wrestling and trying to push
it away.
Right, it's like we make itconscious and say, like I am
(01:00:57):
radically, I am enthused aboutviewing myself as radically
inconsequential like we'rereleasing the grit, the power
that that system, internalizedsystem, has on us.
That's great, and it's justlike we have to do it all the
time.
We have to do it reallyregularly, um, and, and it will
(01:01:18):
become a new baseline for usLike we can I do believe like we
can get there.
I have no idea what the futureis going to look like and I have
the paradox, perhaps same asyou and many of us, of like whoa
, there's something reallybeautiful available about
existence and being together,available about existence and
(01:01:45):
being together, and and thatinside of everything that's
happening, right, that's that'shappening in the world.
And like, holding that paradoxand allowing ourselves to like,
just like, even for moments of aday release that grip on the
way that it must be, on thegrowth, on the power over on all
you know, on all of the all ofthat resistance, I know that
(01:02:08):
it's possible.
Speaker 3 (01:02:10):
Yeah, no, well put.
And again, I think I mean thisis a compliment crassly
pragmatic is a complimentcrassly pragmatic.
What you're proposing, if I'mhearing you right, is that this
need not be a 24-hour-a-daypreoccupation.
That requires that a radicalabandonment of our current
(01:02:32):
identity and role in our presentsociety.
Yeah, but we could carve outsome proverbial minutes each day
to attend to these matters.
And again back to history everyreligious, philosophical,
(01:02:55):
philosophical and culturaltradition that seems to be
associated with stable andprosperous societies.
That is the primary function ofritual and festival, which is
to give us those kinds ofexperiences that, at our best,
(01:03:18):
we then extend to day-to-daylife.
So, yeah, I like that.
Speaker 2 (01:03:24):
Yeah, I love that, thank you.
Thank you, sheldon, this was sogreat.
I have been looking forward tothis for so long.
What a delight.
Just thank you for all of this,for your work, for your, you
know, I hope someone, if I everhave a tombstone, puts crassly
pragmatic on it and maybe alsoradically inconsequential, and
(01:03:47):
then sprinkle a stardust right.
So thank you so much.
Just really, truly a joy and apleasure.
Speaker 3 (01:03:57):
Yeah, me too, that's what.
Speaker 2 (01:03:58):
I'm taking from this, Like ah true joy and pleasure
from this, Thank you.
Speaker 3 (01:04:02):
Yeah, me too.
You have a great day.
Bye, bye, crying in my jacuzzi.
Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
Crying in my jacuzzi.
Oh, if this episode swirledsomething in you, please share
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(01:04:35):
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Keep questioning, keep feeling,keep rebelling in all the ways
(01:05:24):
that matter.
And remember the jacuzzi iseverywhere.
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Crying in my jacuzzi.
Crying in my jacuzzi.
Crying in my jacuzzi, crying inmy jacuzzi.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
So there are a lot of ways that I process and
understand, digest, internalizeand try to make sense and
sensation of how we got here,the timeline that we're on
collectively, and I'mconsistently inviting you to
(00:56):
explore this with me.
And the reason that I'm at allinterested in how we got here is
because I'm also thoroughlycommitted to exploring how we
move forward together withcourage, curiosity, compassion,
my road dogs.
You know, we have suchconnective tissue as humans and
(01:19):
more than humans.
Our connective tissue is anexpansive mycelial network
connecting us to all things inways we can and many ways that
we cannot see.
But as a coach of humans, Iwith great honor receive and
hold people's stories, theircore pain points, their limiting
(01:40):
beliefs, their deepest fears,and I have never once worked
with someone who had a fear orexperience that was truly unique
, meaning that there was noother person I had ever worked
with that had not had some core,similar, destabilizing, similar
pattern that had emerged fromwhatever maybe the unique
(02:02):
experience was.
But really, like we are soprofoundly connected Not in that
, like we are all one kind ofway, though, yes, and our most
painful, destabilizingexperiences are places that we
can and must find each other,and when we meet there with
(02:24):
compassion we can connect moredeeply to each other, to
ourselves, to the world aroundus and the worlds around us and
within us, even to the worlds wecan't see from here, to the
people we'll never know or meet.
And one of those biggest,juiciest fears is the fear of
death.
And to explore death and how weattemptedly process it as
(02:48):
humans, I want to go findSheldon Solomon.
He's a professor of psychologyat Skidmore College.
He's one of the founding voicesbehind existential,
experimental psychology, terrormanagement theory.
His work looks at how ouruniquely human awareness of
death impacts our behavior, ourrelationships and our sense of
(03:08):
meaning and meaning making andhow we relate to each other.
He's been featured indocumentaries.
He's co-authored a few books.
One of my faves, the Worm atthe Core, on the role of death
in life.
During COVID I found his workon terror management theory.
I made an episode about it lastseason.
It helped me understand so muchabout being human and why we do
(03:32):
what we do in the face of deathor in our resistance in facing
death, how we build our livesand our systems to protect
ourselves from thatinevitability and how in Western
culture our relationship todeath is fakakta and that's
(03:52):
affecting all of us.
I mean, you know me, I've saidit before late-stage capitalism,
colonialism, extensions of along-running death cult, a
desperate attempt to avoid deathby destroying others and the
planet, which, in my humbleopinion, is not a super
effective strategy.
Last season we talked about itand this season, today, this
(04:17):
episode, we are going to go tothe source.
So let's go find Sheldon.
We can usually find him justwalking around the block with
his dog.
(04:39):
Yeah, I mean, I hear you, likelike what you were saying right
before I hit record about theparadox of acknowledging, like,
oh, in my life, the experience Ihold it in paradox with what is
happening in the world and theamount of pain and terror and
(05:13):
fear and trauma-inducing eventsyou know like, and I feel like
we've been in this paradoxtraining for well, maybe forever
, maybe that's just part of thehuman condition, but certainly
the past handful of years, andI'll say that I read the article
in Sun Magazine, this MortalCoil in 2021.
(05:35):
That was the first time I evercame across your work and you
and your partners, and just thebroader scope of death awareness
, death denial, terrormanagement, theory, all of it,
and it put a lot of puzzlepieces together, like it helped
me really understand things thatI had been seeing but didn't
(05:58):
have all of the words for it,couldn't fit together or had my
own projections of like well,yeah, people are full of fear.
That's what they're doing,that's why all of this is
happening, which is true, andwhen I started making my podcast
not to talk too much, but justa tiny bit of context like, you
were the first person that Iever thought of interviewing and
(06:18):
I didn't get to, you know, tointerviews until season three
here, because of the work andjust because of like, I feel
like, once you sort of tune intodeath denial, death awareness,
it's like you know, you're just,it's an ontological shift that
maybe was already there and kindof allows us to to understand
(06:40):
each other in a better way, like, even though we're
understanding through it all theways in which we pull back and
double down on our culturalworldviews and dehumanize,
there's something connectiveabout it, there's something that
actually, for me, like allowsfor a level of understanding of
like, oh, and acceptance even,and inside of acceptance is
(07:00):
maybe compassion.
So, yeah, I'm just I'm reallygrateful for the work and I love
to hear you talk about and forus to talk about together, like
how this, how the deathawareness and death denial and I
read the chapter you sent me,which was amazing affects us,
and and what can we do?
(07:21):
Not in just a solutionary sense, because you know, I'm
interested in rebellion.
I'm interested in, like, how wesubvert the system, how we
build new ones, subvert the oldones, build new ones, all the
inner work needed.
So yeah, you're, just for me,squarely in the middle of all of
those things with this work,and you know, if it doesn't feel
(07:44):
good to give your regular spielabout the work, that you do
like say something else or tellanother story, this space is
really open.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
That was an awesome depiction of everything that
we've been thinking about in mywork with my buddies and, to be
silly, perhaps not surprisingly,I agree with everything that
you say and it has really mappedon to my own personal
(08:14):
experiences.
And, yeah, and so, if you don'tmind, you know, let me do a
classic comic book depiction ofthese ideas, because basically,
dana, I think you've reallycaptured my view of things,
which is that the best way tounderstand ourselves and our
(08:35):
species as human beings is thatit is the way that we adjust to
the reality of the humancondition, and that's that we're
finite and transient entitiesthat determines the course of
our lives and the structure ofour societies.
(08:56):
No notes, very worst, itsmalignant manifestations of
death anxiety that make uslikely to be the first form of
life to be responsible for ourown extinction.
Read the news today, or, at ourbest, however you put it, it is
(09:21):
.
These ideas really changed mytake on life, but I like the
Kierkegaards and the Heideggersof the world, who point out that
it opens up a mental horizonthat can be both dreadful as
well as awesome.
(09:43):
So you good guys are bad guys.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Depends on the century.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
And so the very same recognitions that can reduce us
to psychic rubble are also,under slightly different
circumstances, capable ofeliciting the very best of each
of us, both individually andcollectively.
So anyway, I was minding my ownbusiness as a young professor
(10:14):
at Skidmore College.
I got there in 1980, and I waswalking in the library looking
for a Freud book, because I wassupposed to teach personality
for the first time.
And then I saw by accidentthese books by a guy named
Ernest Becker, who I'd neverheard of.
He was a recently deceasedcultural anthropologist and he
(10:38):
won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 orfour for a book called the
Denial of Death.
And right next to that book wasanother book called the Birth
and Death of Meaning.
I was like, wow, those are cooltitles.
I pull out the Birth and Deathof Meaning and in the first
paragraph Becker says I want tounderstand why people do what
(10:58):
they do when they do it.
I was like fuck, yes, me too.
What a great way to put it.
Why do we do what we do when wedo it?
And then the first paragraph ofthe denial of death.
He just says look, we're likeall other living creatures.
We have the vast intelligencethat is great and that enables
(11:20):
us to imagine things that don'tyet exist and then actually
create them.
It allows us to realize thatwe're here, which is sometimes
very exciting, but we alsorecognize that very exciting,
(11:49):
but we also recognize that, likeall living things, we are
ultimately finite.
I don't want to ruineverybody's day.
In English, it means we're allgoing to die someday and that we
can die at any time for reasonswe could never anticipate or
control.
And anyway, becker just saidthat that realization infuses us
with potentially debilitatingexistential anxiety.
And the way that we manage thatanxiety is by embracing
(12:14):
culturally constructed visionsof reality that he called
cultural worldviews that help usmanage existential dread, by
giving us each a sense thatwe're persons of value in a
world of meaning.
And so, anyway, basically, I waslike well, wait a minute.
(12:37):
In my gut I was like thatstruck me as quite right and
reminded me that I've beenreally ardently disinclined to
die since I was like eight yearsold the day that I realized it
was going to happen.
So for me, this was just asmuch personal as it was
(13:00):
professional.
I was eight years old the daymy grandmother died.
I was sad, but I was thinkingabout it and I'm like, oh man,
that means my mom's going to diesomeday and that'll be bad
because who's going to makedinner.
And then a couple of minuteslater I was like, oh fuck, that
means I'm going to die someday.
(13:20):
And that was kind of my firstbig existential crisis that I
did bury under the bushes for acouple of decades.
But anyway, seeing the Beckerbook and reading his really
cogent depiction, which justbasically argues that, whether
we like it or not, we'refundamentally meaning-making,
(13:45):
value-seeking entities and thatwe do that in large measure to
minimize existentialapprehensions.
And while that can be good orcan be bad, we're largely
unaware of the fact that that'swhat motivates us each waking
(14:05):
moment.
We want to keep our sense ofwhat matters intact and our
sense that we're valuablecontributors to what matters in
place.
Also, and when circumstances,either internal or external,
challenge our sense of meaningand value, that automatically
(14:26):
instigates a host of defensivereactions to restore confidence
in our culture as well as faithin our value within it.
So I hope that that makes sense.
But that's basically the ideasthat when I encountered them but
I like how you said it earlierI was like wow, what an amazing
(14:50):
framework to help me put intowords things I had been feeling
and thinking about vaguely sinceI was like sitting in the sand
at the playground barely out ofdiapers.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, yeah, you telling that story had me
reflect on a moment that I thatI thought a lot about over time.
And I think you know when Istarted to, you know, I read
Worm at the Core and, like youknow, as I was reflecting on
this framework and thisconnective lens of death denial,
(15:28):
I remembered back to when I wasabout I was like 14 or 15 years
old and I was I was having apsychedelic mushroom trip with a
bunch of girlfriends and we hadthis realization, I think we
were like playing hacky sack andlike smoking cigarettes or
something, and in some parkinglot in the San Fernando Valley
(15:51):
and we realized collectivelythat we were all going to die,
we were all just waiting to die.
And it was so relieving, wewere laughing, we were delighted
, we just thought we had like,really figured it out, bart, did
you see?
Speaker 1 (16:06):
anything else when you were under, just how we're
all going to die that moment.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Because I had a lot of mushroom trips and you know,
some of them were just fun andsome of them were deep, and this
was one of those deep ones andit shifted something inside of
me where that fear sort ofevaporated for me, or I had a
different relationship with it.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Yeah, what you just said.
Honestly, not everyone isfortunate enough to have those
experiences on psychedelics, butand I say this, as you know,
like a Woodstock throwback-You're a big hippie.
You're a hippie, schmippy backas well, as you know, studying
(16:52):
these things as a supposedacademic.
And the fact of the matter is,is that a single dose of
psychedelics, even for folksthat you know are not products
of yesteryear, that have neverhad it?
So the work right now?
Terminally ill people, as wellas younger folks with PTSD.
Yes, sometimes psychedelics areradically transformative, and
(17:14):
without any background in any ofthis stuff.
When people describe thoseexperiences, they almost
invariably talk about aremarkable transformation in
their conception of what itmeans to die.
It is no longer perceived as anabrupt termination, as a result
(17:39):
of total obliteration, so muchas a realization of the fact
that we're composed of theseatoms that originated at the
same time with the Big Bang, andwe are, moreover, related.
We're derived, we are alldescended from the first living
(18:03):
thing.
That's not like an allegory,that's just literally true,
right?
Our atoms have been hereforever.
We are descended from the firstform of life.
We're therefore related toeverything that's ever been
alive, everything that is alive,everything that will be alive
(18:24):
and after we are no longerintact in the body in which we
currently reside of reality, topoint out our cosmic connection
to all that is over time andspace and when, under the
(18:55):
influence of psychedelics,there's the momentary
realization of that fact.
Yeah, I find that verycomforting and very important.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Truly, that moment really did shape me Like I can
still feel it.
I can still feel the realization.
I had it in that moment and itnever went away and I think
that's part of also what, for mepersonally, it was so
interesting about learning aboutthis work was because I
(19:29):
generally don't have, you know,like I feel, like I've
investigated over time myrelationship to death Not like I
figured it all out, not by anystretch, but you know, but I've
been curious for a long time,which I think that curiosity
will open up and be maybe not abuffer, not the anxiety buffer,
but maybe more towards liketurning towards the anxiety and
(19:52):
learning how to live with itright.
A part of your work that I foundso fascinating was like that,
in this sort of doubling down onthe cultural worldviews, and
this explained a lot of what washappening.
Doubling down on the culturalworldviews and this explained a
lot of what was happening for,like anti-maskers and all sorts
of I mean just so many things.
When I first read the Sunarticle about people who, like
(20:14):
the doubling down on ourcultural worldviews, depending
on what your cultural worldviewis like, you will potentially
hurdle yourself towards your owndemise.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
My suicide mission's been canceled.
We're replacing it with ago-for-broke rescue mission.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
And if you're doing that with a group of people,
you're all doing it and I feellike, with the rise of fascism,
like we are seeing this now on,you know sort of on steroids,
like we are there, we arewitnessing it, we are living
inside of that, like hurtlingtowards our own demise right.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
Yes, well put.
And so two things.
One is, yeah, when death is onour minds, we tend to more
tenaciously embrace ourprevailing cultural values.
Yeah, but what are ourprevailing cultural values?
(21:11):
We're narcissistic sociopathstaught that we have to be the
best at whatever we do, and thatwe're.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Manifest destiny, that's correct.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
We can only be judged by how much money and stuff
that we have.
Plus, we live in a world whereour desires for money and stuff
are insatiable.
No matter what we have, we wantmore, all right, and so when
(21:42):
death is on our mind, we justwant to be better than the
person next to us.
We want to have more money andstuff.
We subscribe to a worldviewthat believes in the
inevitability of progress andthat technology will take care
of everything, and so here weare, accelerating the rate at
(22:08):
which we're preparing the planetto no longer be fit for human
habitation, and that, in turn,is related.
Fire and fascism are related toeach other, because when death
is on our mind and right now,I'm not trying to ruin people's
day- oh no, no, ruin everyone'sday.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
This is great.
We also.
We love this.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
Yeah, let's be a little disruptive.
You know we're at thehistorical confluence of a
unique set of events.
We are marinating in consciousand unconscious death, anxiety
between the planet melting andthe aftermath of the pandemic,
(22:53):
with rising politicalpolarization.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
I mean watching a live stream genocide in Gaza
right in our faces, at everysingle moment.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
There you got it.
So, basically, every singlemoment we're surrounded by
intimations of mortality.
We're surrounded by intimationsof mortality and historically
and this is it's combined witheconomic insecurity.
But the rise of fascism is apredictable result of increasing
(23:26):
levels of economic inequality.
I'm not saying that as anopinion.
There's a guy, peter Turchin,who wrote a book called End
Times, where he just showsmathematically that that's the
case.
The rich are getting richer andthe poor are getting poorer.
Then they get miserable andangry, and their misery is
(23:57):
physical as well aspsychological.
They get shorter in height,they get shorter in lifespan,
and they either get depressed orpissed off or both.
And so there's self-medication,to the point of being
tranquilized by the trivial.
And then, when a fascistideologue comes along and says
(24:20):
only I can fix it, they areprone to mindlessly adhere to a
fascist leader.
Mussolini defined fascism as hesays.
Let's call it corporatism.
It's when corporate entitiescollude with morally corrupt
(24:44):
politicians in order to, inTurchin's language, keep your
foot on the wealth pump.
In other words, what thefascist leaders do is to say to
the little people we're going tomake your life better, while in
fact they turn right around anddeflect even more material
(25:04):
resources to fewer and feweroligarchs, and so that's exactly
what we have happening today.
You don't have to believe me,but in this case you have the
right to be wrong, because we'vedone experiments since 2004,
where we show that deathreminders have radical effects
(25:26):
on people's politicalpreferences.
In 2004, people liked JohnKerry more than George Bush in
America, but if we reminded themof death first, they liked Bush
more than Kerry.
In 2016, americans likedHillary Clinton more than Orange
(25:47):
Hitler I mean Donald Trump andin a benign state of mind but
when we reminded them of deathfirst, their opinions of Donald
Trump increased significantly.
Where the pervasive deathreminders make many of us cling
(26:14):
to folks who are claiming thatthey're the only ones in a
position to fix things, when infact, they have no intention of
doing so.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
I'm pillaging everyone, you included.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
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So many of those.
You know the corporatism aspectof it.
You know it's like an equation,right?
(27:17):
And we're just at a point inthe equation of the turning
towards the leaders, the corruptleaders, that always binds with
or overlaps with thatcorporatism or overlaps with
that, like the addiction togrowth or progress as growth.
So there's always moneyinvolved.
There's always some aspect ofthat right.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Yes, so I love how you put it.
I'm like hey, what are you know?
Infinite growth, it's only goodfor malignant tumors and
compound interest.
There is no and compoundinterest.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
There is no other condition in which that would be
.
Oh, I'm wearing like the Venndiagram overlap of that right
now.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
I'm being silly, but I think that that's one of the
things that we need to makeourselves aware of that and this
, again, is not my idea.
I think it's Max Weber, deadGerman sociologist, who just
said you know, there's somethingfunky about humans, because at
(28:24):
first we used technology inorder to enhance our lives, but
there came a point where thingsgot reversed and we're now like
(28:44):
hamsters on methamphetamine,just keeping the wheels of
commerce turning.
The wheels of commerce turning,but it's no longer for our own
benefit, so much as to continueto produce infinite amounts of
what turns out to be a worthlessabstraction.
(29:07):
Again, it bends my mind when Ithink about this.
In other words, you can't eatmoney.
I know you can't eat without it,but early on, you know, we did
use technology in ways thatseemed to enrich and enliven and
(29:57):
, as Karl Marx pointed outcrappy economist, but great
psychologist and philosopherearly on, the accumulation of
money, what we call capitalism.
That should not just besummarily dismissed as being
purely malignant, because thoseof us that like things like
trains and hospitals and schoolsshould note that those are the
kind of things that you need.
A large pile of a worthlessabstraction, terrible, nothing
sweeping over the land, thatbeing money, ah, money, money,
(30:17):
money.
The convert into projects ofthat magnitude that would be
hard to do otherwise.
So there's a good aspect to theway that humans have
constructed an economic symbolthat can be combined to enhance
the well-being of all of us.
(30:38):
On the other hand, there issomething and this is where the
faust myths come in in ourculture the faustian deal with
the devil, because somehow wegot to the point where enough is
never enough.
If you're Jeff Bezos and youwake up and Elon Musk has more
(31:02):
money, then you're a failure.
And even Elon Musk wakes upevery day saying I need more
billions.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Right, right or like.
And then the fascinating thingwhich you know I don't want to
spend too much time on this nextmoment, but just thinking about
, like all of the likebiohacking, which is really just
diet culture, but likebiohacking, overlapped with like
a life extension, right andlike you know, people doing what
they're doing to like live evenlonger.
(31:31):
It just it's like, it's likesuch a big flag of like I'm
afraid of death.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
Absolutely no.
I think, dana, that's a greatand a really important point.
I don't think it's an accidentthat the richest people on earth
are spending trillions ofdollars to avoid the conclusion
of their lives.
To avoid the conclusion oftheir lives, right, it is.
They are both, I believe, to beunfortunate manifestations of
(32:05):
an immature and ultimately, selfand socially destructive take
on our mortality Totally selfand socially destructive.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
take on our mortality totally, and I think like that
it came up in in actually acouple other interviews that
I've done.
I wish I could have everyoneall together because in my mind
yeah, and in the same roomsomeday maybe right, a dream, um
, because there's all theselittle pieces fitting together.
But there's recognizing, likewhere we're at, and even though,
like fair understanding thoughthere's more to do always of
(32:39):
like how we got here, right, youknow, and I'm just thinking
about that quote that's goingaround, the Timothy Snyder quote
, that's like do not obey, donot obey in advance.
And I'm always like I love thatsentiment because of the
rebellious nature and also, withthis work of death, denialism,
it's like, oh right, but so manypeople can't help but obey in
(33:05):
advance.
That's how they buoyedthemselves to you know, how they
buffer the anxiety.
And so I'm so curious here,like how we, like I know part of
it's about awareness, but Iread in the article, the Sun
article, and then, through youknow, through various, all sorts
(33:25):
of ways that I've been takingin your work, like like what's
the medicine here?
Right, like there's innermedicine, there's outer medicine
, right, there's like how we,the work we do, like you know,
inside of ourselves, and thenthe work that we do in community
, to sort of do what we can to.
I don't know if you'd call itlike break out of the pattern of
(33:49):
the of the anxiety bufferingright, like turning towards
death.
But you've talked a lot about,like you know, we have to become
more connected andinterdependent.
We have to believe we're inthis together.
You know I read work around oneof your former students, work
around studies, around humility,and you know the becoming
nobody and, you know, becomingradically inconsequential.
(34:12):
There's all these pieces, right.
So I'd love to hear you talkabout that.
Like, where are we?
How are we like, yeah, man,let's ruin everyone's day
because this is just the reality.
And like, and we're all gonnadie.
Don't say that, never say that.
Coonies never say die and inthat inevitability of our own
(34:32):
extinction, we do get to choosehow we want to be together.
Yeah, right, if we can remembergood, we can remember that we
have agency.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
We get to choose yeah , all right, so ditto, um you,
you just said it all.
Well, probably not.
No, no, you did, in my opinion.
Um, there's a a guy his name'sjames row and he's a political
scientist out west originallyfrom canada, I think and he
(35:03):
wrote a book a year or two agocalled radical mindfulness I
don't want to get the titleright.
Why transforming fear of deathis politically vital.
Have you heard of that one?
yeah, I would contact him andtell him I say hello and that he
would be somebody honestly dana.
(35:23):
That that's the question thathis work addresses, because he's
like look we gotta.
We can't be simpletons here.
We have to operatesimultaneously on all levels,
working from the is representedin the structure of our
(35:57):
political, religious andeconomic institutions.
In other words, he points outthat our Western worldview what
I would describe right now as anuber-capitalist, christian,
white nationalist take on thingsis sheer death denial.
(36:21):
He has a great chapter aboutJames Baldwin's work, and the
novelist James Baldwin just saidyou know, the problem is,
whitey doesn't want to die, andthat's what makes us racist,
that's what makes us fascist,that's what makes us cling to
economic inequality.
(36:43):
And the role point is thatthese kinds of institutions are
demonstrably psychologically andphysically destructive and of
course, that's what theanti-woke people want to get us
to ignore.
You know, basically, thehysteria about wokeness.
(37:08):
It's like well, what do we meanby woke?
Well, what we mean isrecognizing that there are
structural factors that impingeupon us in ways that are not
equitable, either intentionallyor not, of that's the way that
(37:32):
malignant manifestations ofdeath denial are perfused
through all of our institutions.
And of course, so one way thatwe need to work on that is to
focus on changing thoseinstitutions, ideally in a
peaceful fashion.
Well, but then he turns rightaround and he says well, who are
(37:56):
the people that are most likelyto be doing things that move in
that direction?
And his response, that we wouldendorse heartily, is it is the
people who have come to termswith their mortality.
And so this is not to say thatwe are no longer anxious or that
(38:19):
we're never going to suffer,but it means that we have gotten
to a point where we accept thereality of our finitude, and we
know that this is associated.
The positive psychologists tellus that when we have a sense of
(38:41):
awe, that often leads in turn toa sense of gratitude If you
slept in a bed last night, whyaren't you really grateful?
If you had breakfast today, andso on, you know.
And that in turn, as youalready said, makes us
extraordinarily humble, which,in America, we see, is like
(39:03):
gallons of pus pouring out ofour face.
Humble humility is notself-deprecation, again back to
being a society of narcissisticsociopaths.
Humility is realizing that weare inconsequential specks of
carbon-based gas, born in a timeand place not of our choosing,
(39:24):
here for a tiny amount of time,but so what?
That doesn't render us devoidof meaning, purpose and value,
and so the point is that they'repeople who have genuinely come
to terms with their mortality.
What Rowe proposes is they'rethe ones that are going to see
(39:47):
things more accurately and be ina position, both emotionally as
well as intellectually andmotivationally, to intervene in
ways that alter the very socialsystems that are dehumanizing
and reducing us to, you know,physical, psychological and
(40:12):
financial rubble.
I don't know if that makessense, but what I'm really
advocating for and why I thinkthe James Rowe book is so
compelling is, yes, simultaneousexistential action at every
level of existence, and whatthat will require, in principle,
(40:35):
is for each of us to work bothindividually and collectively.
I think it was the dead Indiandude, krishna Murthy, who said
something like everybody wantsto change the world, but nobody
wants to change themselves.
So yeah, that's, yeah, that'smy joke to the skidmore students
(40:55):
.
I'm like yeah if you want tofigure out why somebody else is
an asshole, well, we can do thatin six months.
But if you want to look in themirror and figure out why you're
an asshole, well, that's goingto take a little longer I mean,
look, that's the business I'm in, you know, like inner asshole
recognition yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Like, and like I love it Cause like I gotta, I gotta
look at my own inner asshole allthe time.
And this is, and this is why,like I was an activist, um, and
and really like quite active asa full-time activist and
organizer through all theanti-war years, so, like, deeply
familiar with the entire GeorgeW War on Terror administration
(41:38):
cabinet, still have dreams aboutthem, sometimes nightmares.
But, and then I was reallyinvolved in Occupy Wall Street.
I sort of burnt out from myactivism work because there was
no attention to the individualinside of these big movements.
Right, I think that's changednow, I know it has.
I'm at least somewhat.
But you know, I went to then domy own spiritual work and found
(42:02):
myself, found my foundinterpersonal relational work as
like, ah yes, here's somethingreally fascinating, right,
here's here we're all people,like if we're movement building,
we're all just individuals,right, so there is, there is the
role of the individual insideof all that.
And then I was involved inoccupy wall street, which I
(42:22):
watched really changeperspective, or I would even say
like a mass ontological shiftof like around income inequality
and financial inequality, andso it's like I can see where
things have shifted.
It feels always like little bylittle, then all of a sudden,
but what you were saying too,and looking at our own inner
(42:45):
assholeness and how I made thatsort of my job.
The Grace Lee Boggs quote that'sbeen guiding this season for me
.
She talks about rebellion is astage in the development of
revolution.
But it's not the revolution.
But it's an important stagebecause it represents the
standing up of the oppressed,and rebellions break the threads
(43:05):
that have been holding thesystem together, throw into
question that its legitimacy andthe supposed permanence of
existing institutions, and itdisrupts the society.
It does not provide what isnecessary there to make a
revolution and establish anentire new social order.
To make a revolution, peoplemust not only struggle against
the existing institutions.
(43:27):
They must make the physical,philosophical, spiritual leap
and become more human, humanbeings, right.
So in order to change,transform the world, they must
change, transform themselves.
Right, that's it.
I feel like that's where we'recoming to.
(43:56):
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(44:59):
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Speaker 3 (45:01):
Psst, hey, there so.
Dana doesn't know we're here,but it's important.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
Yeah, we slipped in through our robots-only wormhole
to ask you to leave a reviewfor the one and only podcast
broadcasting from theJacuzzi-verse.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Did I hear somebody say wormhole?
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You sure did, Connie.
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Uh, okay, I just didn't want to be left out of
the party.
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We portaled in here to remind listeners how much it
means to all of us that theyrate and leave a review, even
just a short one.
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Oh yes, absolutely.
Go push some buttons, y'allmeans to all of us that they
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oh yes, absolutely so take a precious second of your
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When you do, you will beentered into a monthly raffle
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Speaker 3 (46:09):
no, I love that.
And again, james rowowe youshould try and talk to him
because he makes the same pointvery respectfully, but where
he's like I'm really not tryingto be annoying because he also
has had a life as an activistand that it's the existential
anxieties of the individualsthat are causing a lot of our
(46:30):
problems.
Meanwhile, a lot of the peopleto be silly, you know wearing
bedsheets and having silentretreats and doing yoga, and I
(46:50):
mean that, I don't mean thatglibly they're seriously
attending to their ownexistential concerns, but
they're blithely unaware of thestructural impingements.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Right that spiritual bypassing needs attention.
Speaker 3 (47:04):
Yeah, and all he's saying is we need to juxtapose
and intersect that we need toand again you said it great we
need to simultaneously movetowards what we've been
describing as existentialmaturation in order to have any
(47:26):
constructive and enduringeffects on social institutions
that are now, at best, highlyproblematic.
But you make a good point, dana, and that's that sometimes
highly problematic but evenpoorly functioning institutions
(47:52):
are To none at all.
Do you know the Olivia Butlerbooks?
Do you know who I'm talkingabout?
Speaker 2 (48:02):
Oh, Octavia Butler.
Speaker 3 (48:03):
Yeah, octavia Butler.
Yeah, I'm bad at names.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he makes thesame point.
Yeah, I love her books, by theway.
But which is?
We may take ardent issue with alot of current institutions I
do things like public educationbut that's still infinitely
(48:25):
better than just the completedestruction thereof.
I'm a bit mortified by some ofthe folks around me right now
(48:49):
who are not particularlyperplexed by what's happening
before our very eyes and that isthe dismant.
Lot of attention and repair,but we're still exponentially
better off with them in theircurrent form.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
So you know we're and without them altogether.
Speaker 3 (49:09):
Yeah, so we're.
Yeah, we're getting rid of theagency that predicts the weather
.
We're getting rid of FEMA, theagency that helps us after
disasters.
We're getting rid of theNational Institute of Health
research on medicine, becauseI'm also a big fan of this idea
(49:32):
of throwing a wrench in thingsrebellion to the point of
disruption, but again, I reallylike the way you put it.
That's the first step, not theend game.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
Right, well, the disruption you know so much of
what in the death denialism,it's like the anxiety buffer and
it's like, well, if we'realways just trying to buffer, or
like in my work as a coach,right, just coming down all the
way to a very personalexperience and personal work,
it's like whenever we're tryingto push something away, right,
(50:05):
it'll always and resist it.
Usually it's coming up becauseit was something that was
initially rejected or resistedin our, in our lives, at an
early age, and we will put, youknow, we push it down into our
shadow, which it will alwayscome back up, and there's
personal shadow, there'scollective shadow, and I think
(50:25):
what we're really experiencingis so much that has been pushed
away, like the fear of death,you know, or the reality of our
own mortality, like that we willpush something away, it will
always come back up, and so, onthe interpersonal level, it's
like the work is always to turntowards it.
Now, that doesn't mean that wehave to immediately like, run
(50:49):
towards it and release all ofour boundaries.
There are really beautiful waysthat we can start to turn
towards our own fears.
Right, and there's layers andlayers of work.
But it requires some disruption.
It requires, like I'm sointerested in, like the
disruptions that we must do onthe individual level and then
the disruptions that we must doon the collective level.
Speaker 3 (51:13):
Right, no, you just made again an awesome point.
We're ruining people's days ina fine way, because back in the
day before you guys were around,there was a book called
Briefing for Descent into Hellby a woman named Doris Lessing.
Speaker 2 (51:32):
I'm familiar not with that piece, I'm familiar with
that.
Speaker 3 (51:48):
All right, but anyway it's a novel.
But at the end of the book,Doris Lessing says look, we're
in trouble in modernity becausewhenever we're anxious, we reach
for a pill and that is going topotentially extinguish us as
humans, because anxiety, whileunpleasant, doesn't always
undermine our well-being.
And she doesn't refer toKierkegaard, but Kierkegaard has
an amazing take on anxiety.
(52:10):
He's like, yeah, sometimesyou're anxious because you're
worried and apprehensive and youtake flight, which is quite
understandable, but and I forgetthe exact words, Dana but he's
like yeah, but other timesanxiety is yourself calling
yourself to pay attention toyourself.
(52:31):
Yes, and I love that.
It's like wait a minute, fuckno.
Taron Horney makes a similarpoint a century later in a book
called Neurosis and Human Growth.
Is that every once in a while,when we're anxious and
apprehensive, if we sit stilllong enough, it's because we
(52:54):
realize the yawning chasmbetween who we really are and
who we're pretending to be.
And Lessing's entire point isthat, in a death-denying society
where anxiety is seen as anannoying inconvenience that
(53:15):
needs to be immediatelyaddressed, no difference than
when we need DoorDash to deliver12 pizzas in the next five
minutes that we are missing thevital role that existential
apprehensions could, at our bestprovide that very disruption
(53:38):
that you alluded to yes, I mean,that's what I always call.
Speaker 2 (53:42):
Like there is something asking for attention.
There you go raising its hand,hello over here.
No, you don't need the littlezoom icon right, yeah, it's just
that, like as we learn how topay attention to those parts of
us that are raising their handsand asking for attention, you
(54:02):
know, and showing's like, youknow, our deepest fear is moving
up through our bodies, then upto our conscious mind, so that
(54:23):
we can tend to them, right.
So I just, I really appreciatethis sort of kaleidoscope, or
expanding and contractingconversation that you've held
here with me, sheldon, because,conversation that you've held
here with me, sheldon, because,and with everyone listening, um,
as they will, of of this sortof the bigness of what, the
(54:44):
enormity of what we're always ashumans, it's like there's an
enormity, our mortality, thereit is, it is always there and as
we learn and are willing, maybefirst and maybe and then learn
how to be in relationship withit and through, unfortunately,
lots of folks are gonna, aregonna learn how to be in
(55:04):
relationship with it becauseit's all crumbling and crushing
on them and that's unfortunate,but that's, you know, where a
lot of folks are and that, as weslow down, as we like can look
at the ways in which we arebeing with each other and we can
, you know, use death denial anddeath awareness as a lens to
(55:27):
sort of even feel connected toeach other, knowing we're all in
this together right, and thatwe can find these, you know,
know, maybe even just thesesmall ways of of finding our
humility or recognizing maybe,where we are trying to like
buffer things and and there isthat role for us individually
(55:50):
and like what we're here doing,how we're choosing to be
together yeah, um, again reallybest.
Speaker 3 (55:54):
yeah, no, yeah Again really.
Speaker 2 (55:55):
Doing our best.
Speaker 3 (55:57):
Yeah, no well put.
You know, I feel sometimessilly saying some of these
things because, again, I call itcommon sense masquerading as
psychological insight.
I love that be like all rightdude, you know, pretend to be
(56:23):
understanding people for years.
You know what do we need toensure psychological well-being,
and you summed it up in twowords relationships and
connectivity.
That we are not autonomousentities capable of even making
it to lunchtime.
Speaker 2 (56:43):
Our not only interdependence, but cosmic
connectivity.
Speaker 3 (57:05):
And I like.
I think it's Oliver Berkman.
I'm bad with names.
Speaker 2 (57:10):
Hi, you're doing great.
Speaker 3 (57:12):
But I like his ideas about these matters, and some
other folks too, but no matter,and it's just like well, wait a
minute.
If we're all interconnected,then none of us are in a
position to judge, ultimately,the effects of our existence.
(57:34):
And so, and basically so, allright, most of us I'm not going
to be Einstein, I'm not going tobe Beethoven or Mother Teresa,
and most of us aren't.
But instead of, instead ofassuming that that's a radical
(57:56):
indication of your inadequacy,you don't have there's no need
to think that way.
Moreover, it's unconscionablywrong.
So the example that I like using, because it occurs to me all
the time is you know how,sometimes, like, you're walking
on the street and you justmomentarily meet somebody that
(58:20):
you've never seen before, eye toeye, you don't know them,
you'll never see them again, butyou have one of those little
nods like hey, I know, you know,we know we're here.
Well, that, and we now knowthat a casual social engagement
has monumental psychodynamicbenefits.
How do you know that thatperson wasn't walking to the
(58:43):
nearest bridge to jump off andkill themselves?
But your momentaryacknowledgement of their
existence changed their mind.
And maybe that's the nextMartin Luther King, or Jesus or
Mother Teresa, next MartinLuther King, or Jesus or mother
Teresa?
So you don't know and nobodyknows, but you fucking changed
(59:04):
the world and I, and again youmight think about this all the
time too.
Speaker 2 (59:09):
We have very similar brains in this way.
Speaker 3 (59:11):
And my point is that that, but that that's really
true.
And if that's really true, thenyou have no right to say that
this person won a Nobel Prizeand therefore they are more
fundamentally and intrinsicallyvaluable and important than me I
(59:36):
did nothing except a person whowas struggling with their
vision to cross the street butthere's no basis for assuming
that they're not equallymeaningful, valuable and
consequential.
Speaker 2 (59:51):
Yes, I love that.
I love that so much I read thatin your chapter that I've
become enthused about viewingmyself as radically
inconsequential.
It's not even just theacceptance of like I am
radically inconsequential, it'sthe becoming enthused like oh
right.
That's correct, I am radicallyinconsequential and like that is
(01:00:14):
like that is worthy of somecelebration, right?
I think so.
That is like how beautiful doesthat make every moment, every?
Exactly you know everyinteraction Like, then it's like
, ooh, if the pressure of growthand progress right, which we're
(01:00:34):
also trapped in together alsoprogress, right, which we're
also trapped in together.
Also like if we just can shedit, even for moments at a time,
right, that's that allows thatto have less.
When we make it conscious,right, instead of like fighting
against it in our unconsciousand wrestling and trying to push
it away.
Right, it's like we make itconscious and say, like I am
(01:00:57):
radically, I am enthused aboutviewing myself as radically
inconsequential like we'rereleasing the grit, the power
that that system, internalizedsystem, has on us.
That's great, and it's justlike we have to do it all the
time.
We have to do it reallyregularly, um, and, and it will
(01:01:18):
become a new baseline for usLike we can I do believe like we
can get there.
I have no idea what the futureis going to look like and I have
the paradox, perhaps same asyou and many of us, of like whoa
, there's something reallybeautiful available about
existence and being together,available about existence and
(01:01:45):
being together, and and thatinside of everything that's
happening, right, that's that'shappening in the world.
And like, holding that paradoxand allowing ourselves to like,
just like, even for moments of aday release that grip on the
way that it must be, on thegrowth, on the power over on all
you know, on all of the all ofthat resistance, I know that
(01:02:08):
it's possible.
Speaker 3 (01:02:10):
Yeah, no, well put.
And again, I think I mean thisis a compliment crassly
pragmatic is a complimentcrassly pragmatic.
What you're proposing, if I'mhearing you right, is that this
need not be a 24-hour-a-daypreoccupation.
That requires that a radicalabandonment of our current
(01:02:32):
identity and role in our presentsociety.
Yeah, but we could carve outsome proverbial minutes each day
to attend to these matters.
And again back to history everyreligious, philosophical,
(01:02:55):
philosophical and culturaltradition that seems to be
associated with stable andprosperous societies.
That is the primary function ofritual and festival, which is
to give us those kinds ofexperiences that, at our best,
(01:03:18):
we then extend to day-to-daylife.
So, yeah, I like that.
Speaker 2 (01:03:24):
Yeah, I love that, thank you.
Thank you, sheldon, this was sogreat.
I have been looking forward tothis for so long.
What a delight.
Just thank you for all of this,for your work, for your, you
know, I hope someone, if I everhave a tombstone, puts crassly
pragmatic on it and maybe alsoradically inconsequential, and
(01:03:47):
then sprinkle a stardust right.
So thank you so much.
Just really, truly a joy and apleasure.
Speaker 3 (01:03:57):
Yeah, me too, that's what.
Speaker 2 (01:03:58):
I'm taking from this, Like ah true joy and pleasure
from this, Thank you.
Speaker 3 (01:04:02):
Yeah, me too.
You have a great day.
Bye, bye, crying in my jacuzzi.
Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
Crying in my jacuzzi.
Oh, if this episode swirledsomething in you, please share
it, send it to a friend and ifyou haven't already, make sure
to boop that subscribe button soyou don't miss what's coming
(01:04:35):
next.
And if you are listening onApple Podcasts, give us a rating
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Send me the name of your reviewand I'll add you to the monthly
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Subscribing, rating andreviewing are amazing and they
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And you, listening, you sharingwith your community is the very
(01:04:59):
best thing that we in theJacuzziverse could hope for.
So thank you, Crybabies, Thankyou for your support.
Earworm theme music by the verytalented Kat Otteson, Sound
design and editing magic by theeffervescent Rose Blakelock.
Keep questioning, keep feeling,keep rebelling in all the ways
(01:05:24):
that matter.
And remember the jacuzzi iseverywhere.
At any moment you could enterinto the version of
non-normative consciousness thatis jacuzzi consciousness.
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