Why The Right Wants You To Hate and Doubt Yourself - A Progressive/Leftist View of Self-Help - The Fixerpunk Podcast

Episode Transcript
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(00:01):
This is the Fixer Punk Podcast,the podcast that celebrates the past, present
and future accomplishments of the labor movementthis Labor Day weekend. I'm Grayson Peltier,
So I want to discuss what Ibelieve to be the unifying theme,
or one of the unifying themes ofa lot of the topics I've covered,

(00:23):
and I wanted to think about whatdo you think might be in common between
the Andrew Huberman health optimization folks ofthe world, the ancestral diet fitness experts
like Liver King, personal finance expertslike Dave Ramsey and Caleb Hammer, and

(00:44):
welfare reform. Now, those thingsdon't seem to have much in common at
first glance, but there are afew very interesting key themes that I think
we need to really keep an eyeout for because they are starting to define
a lot of how we think aboutpolitics, how we think about others,
and how we think about ourselves.Those common themes can be summed up as

(01:10):
unreasonably high standards, rigidity, andtraditionalism. On a very basic level.
Some of these factors make more sensein other in some contexts than in others,
but I think they can all applyto a lot of these categories,
at least to one level or another, and the end goal of this even

(01:36):
were not even when these things don'tcome with right wing explicit packaging that specifically
labels them as conservative political ideals.The goal of these ideological underpinnings are that
they don't want you to be ableto trust yourself to know that there's something
wrong. What they want you todo instead is they want you to trust

(01:57):
the wisdom that they are imputing onyou. The things that they are saying
are the true causes of your problems, things that are not the actual systemic
causes. It is a deflection andit all seeks to put the blame back
on you. And hence it's theway that the right very subtly influences you

(02:21):
to hate and doubt yourself, becauseif you hate and doubt yourself, then
you don't believe the problem is comingfrom somewhere else, that the problems are
coming from systemic factors, and thatis exactly what they want to have happen.

(02:42):
So what exactly is the mechanism bywhich this works? If we look
at let's take the whole health optimizationthing and I discussed on the last episode
or a couple episodes ago the healthoptimization trends with the Andrew Huberman's The analem
Keys of the World, and thisis becoming one of the most interesting spaces

(03:05):
in terms of this type of rightwing influence creeping in or at the very
least, these things acting and servingas a way of affirming right wing ideology
over and above systemic change, evenif it's not intentional in the parts of
the people that are putting these ideasout there. But there is this obsession

(03:28):
with dopamine detoxing and so called dopamineaddiction, even though that's a scientific misnomer.
These people claim to be medical scientistsor neuroscientists, and they're saying that
people are addicted to dopamine and thatthe reason why people are not doing well
in the world is because they aretoo addicted to instant gratification. And this

(03:52):
is a theme that whether we're talkingabout fitness, whether we're talking about finance,
whether we're talking about people being ableto be productive in the workplace,
productivity issues, workplace advancement issues,issues of management of personal finance, this
term instant gratification has been popping upliterally everywhere. So I will monitor subredits

(04:15):
for things like personal finance influencers andthen these health optimization influencers like a Huberman,
and this term instant gratification and dopamineaddiction has been popping up there everywhere.
I also monitor a bunch of fitnesssubredits and this again, dopamine,
dopamine addiction and instant gratification. Thosewords just keep coming up over and over

(04:40):
and over again, and you'll havethis theme going over and above other things
that may be more relevant. Andit is even getting into the narratives around
homelessness and people who are not whoare the lowest and the most deprived in

(05:02):
society, but the irony of it. And this is actually one of the
clips that Jess who did that.When I did the episode Andrew human I
mentioned Jess from that sluggish substack dotcom website when she did that analysis she
put in their aclip with Andrew Hubermanwith none other than Jordan Peterson, and

(05:26):
Jordan Peterson said that the reason whypeople are feeling so much distress in their
lives is because they are not optimallydeprived. That people are feeling emotionally deprived
and sad and miserable because they haven'tbeen deprived enough, and they operated this
assumption, especially the Anilem key.They operated on this assumption that people in

(05:49):
Western societies generally have everything they need, and it is because they keep getting
unearned dopamine hits that is why theyare miserable. And this theme is coming
up everywhere that basically people need tojust deprive themselves further in order to in
order to be successful. And thisis this is reminding me of some of

(06:16):
the stuff that I've heard in religiousspaces, and honestly, I was a
bit skeptical because I do believe ina lot of these self optimization, fitness,
finance, a lot of these things, a lot of these techniques that
these influencers talk about. I dobelieve that a lot of them are very
very good things, and there's somevalue to all of them. But then

(06:40):
when you start injecting victim blaming andyou start injecting right wing tinged ideologies,
that is wherein lies the problem.And of course they're adaptations and other things
that need to be put in thereto make them work well in an individual
situation. But this overall theme keepscoming up, and they seem to the

(07:04):
reason why they do this is Obviouslyin some of these spaces, some of
these terms have just gotten in therethrough the popular discourse, but in a
more insidious way. It is becausethey want you to always believe that you
are the problem in this. Theywant you to believe that, Okay,
this can never be because the protocolis wrong, this can never be because

(07:26):
the circumstances in the situation and theenvironment are wrong. It always has to
be because of you, And thatobviously keeps you dependent on their advice,
and it keeps you constantly dependent whenand overthinking every decision that you make in
your life. Like I saw somebodyin the Andrew Huberman forums who was saying,

(07:46):
actually, I think I've seen multipleposts on like the Andrew Huberman subreddit
saying that can I listen to music? Am I allowed to listen to music
while I'm working? Because that's goingto increase my dopamine too much? And
is that going to make it moredifficult? I feel like it helps me,
but I want to be optimal.I want to be optimized. That

(08:07):
definitely. That immediately rung a bellin my mind as someone who has been
through some overly rigid religious organizations.Let's put it that way, that claim
to improve your mental health and helpyou fix all your problems in life.

(08:28):
There was always sort of an obsessionaround like music and entertainment and stuff like
that, and saying that you needto keep like non Christian music and entertainment
out as much as possible. Somesubsets were a bit less rigid about it,
but other ones they caused you tohave a lot of suspicion around things
like music and entertainment and things thatgave you pleasure in that regard because you

(08:50):
should be focusing more on God.And that's a pretty common thing with overly
conservative religious Christian ideologies. Not allforms of Christianity, for sure, there
are forms that are a lot better. I'm still a Christian, I just
don't agree with those types of groupsany longer. But that would all that

(09:13):
would be a very common thing ofpeople being scared and hyper and microanalyzing every
single last thing that they listened toor watched and being questioned about it.
Here obviously it's not because of areligious morality, but it is because of
this dopamine thing of like, Okay, I have to keep my dopamine under

(09:33):
control, and keeping my dopamine undercontrol is going to be the key to
health, happiness, and financial prosperity, and that just rung too much of
a bell for me, And honestly, it makes sense. I actually came
into this skeptical about Jess's claims thatthis was some sort of religious asceticism,

(09:56):
because I like these things, becauseI like some these ideas, because I
like some physical mental performance stuff,some of the stuff of even like try
and make yourself a much stronger,more athletic, tougher person, because that
helps you in various areas of life. I believe in that kind of stuff.
I believe in the power of trainingyour body to improve your mind,
those kinds of things. I wasskeptical of that claim that it was a

(10:20):
form of religious asceticism, but seeingthat and seeing the amount of self doubt
that these ideologies are starting to putinto people, and I don't think this
is necessarily intentional on the part ofAndrew Huberman. I think that he has
good ideas. He has some goodthings that I think that even could potentially
be implemented in the future into policyand to our approaches to mental health and

(10:43):
healthcare. But it is getting wrappedup with these ideas, and it is
very, very clear that it isbecoming this religious asceticism and about depriving yourself
of all forms of pleasure, thinkingthat that is the solution. Meanwhile,
it's not that. What I liketo say is it's not open me.
In addiction, the reason why peoplego and they do things that give them

(11:03):
pleasure when they're in situations where maybeit will be in theory better for them
to work harder is because they thinkthose things are going to be futile because
of the nature of our system,because of the nature of the system under
late stage capitalism with poor workers rights, people do not believe that constantly working
harder and harder and harder is goingto yield them results. I know because

(11:26):
I was one of those people.I was one of those people who was
extremely like disciplined and rigid about work, pushing myself to my absolute end,
but it still really didn't get meanywhere. And that is kind of how
I got this realization, even afterhaving a bunch of accomplishments, after graduating
from one of the top universities inthe country. The kind of place usc

(11:50):
the kind of school that celebrities bribedpeople to get their children into having some
jobs in a pretty difficul field inpolitics, and it still wasn't enough.
So it is not dopamine addiction.It is futility aversion, and they don't

(12:13):
want you to realize that because theykeep you stuck in this loop. And
this is how all of these farright ideologies work, because they keep you
stuck in a loop of thinking aboutthe things that they want you to think
about, so you don't see theobvious signs all around you. You don't
see the obvious signs that you're beingpaid too well, your boss is treating
you badly, that there are issueswith climate change that are having material impacts

(12:37):
on people. They don't want youto see the fact that there are tons
and tons of people becoming homeless,and that you're closer to becoming a homeless
person than you are to becoming abillionaire, because if your rent goes up
five hundred dollars a month, thenyou're going to not be able to pay
your rent. They just want youto see what's in front of you,
and they want you to see thosepeople, those people out there, those
people are morally defective. The reasonwhy people are home is because they're addicted

(13:01):
to dopamine, and unfortunately, that'seven coming out, like on some of
the Bay Area subreddits, because theseideas are so prevalent, this dopamine addiction
stuff is so prevalent in the SanFrancisco tech community. It is leaking into
the way that they're addressing homelessness ofall things. And they're like, Okay,

(13:22):
it's just because these people are addicted. And we've always seen we've long
seen homeless people as just being addicts. But they're they're just bringing it down
to the microscopic level. They're like, Okay, you can't afford your rent.
That must be because you're sitting aroundand watching too much in Netflix.
Okay, you're not performing well atwork, that's because you're spending too much

(13:43):
time, too much time listening tomusic, or you're the reason why you're
not doing financially well is because you'restopping off at McDonald's at the end of
the data gets something to eat insteadof coming home and eating kale and chia
seeds. So the victim blame,I mean, just keeps going up and
up through further and further strata,and ideas that used to be more inclusive

(14:07):
are getting more and more strict.And I think that one of the things
that the people that turn to blameand shame either they know it or don't
want to acknowledge it, or theydon't know it, is that people that
are in bad situations already feel bad. They It's like if people could talk
back to some of these self helpideas, they would probably say something like

(14:28):
They're like people would say, I, I already know that I'm a bad
person. You don't have to rubit in. And that's the thing,
is that people who are in badsituations in their lives, people who are
economically disadvantaged, people who have problemsin their lives are a lot smarter than

(14:52):
the people sitting in the Ivory Tower, the people in the Stanford Addiction lab
whatever give them credit for. Theyknow what is going on in their situations,
and in a way, they knowhow to solve it. They know
that all of these optimal things arethings that they need to improve in their
lives, but they are powerless tochange it. In many ways. They

(15:13):
will oftentimes try and try and try, but if it's futile, then why
would they keep doing it? Andif people acknowledge their own knowledge of the
system, their own knowledge of thesystem, their own knowledge of their own
circumstances. Then that is a threatto just the central narrative that conservative ideas

(15:33):
put out there. And it's definitelyone of those things that just crosses over
into a lot of areas of life. And the irony of it all is
that in a way, capitalism prettymuch requires you to be consuming products and

(15:56):
to be doing things that are notoptimal. So they are creating the circumstances
in the environment in which you wouldquote unquote slip up. And there are
things that are there are formerly reasonableideas that they've just gotten kicked to the

(16:18):
wayside by this whole dopamine narrative.And one of my one of the key
examples of this is like in thediet and fitness space, So in the
fitness space, there used to bea whole thing of people questioning whether or
not they can eat such and sucha food on bodybuilding forums, and doctor
Lane Norton and a bunch of otherpeople in the bodybuilding space came up with

(16:40):
this term if it fits your macros, which basically means that if it fits
within your calories, protein, carbs, and fats limit for the day given
you, your training or your fitnessgoals, that you can choose a wide
variety of foods, whether those befast foods, things they are more convenient,
or something that is more quote unquoteclean, because people would always be

(17:03):
questioning themselves whether or not a foodwas clean enough. But nowadays in the
fitness forums, I'm seeing this sortof valorization of cleaner and stricter diets and
saying, okay, because you're ona stricter the solution is just to continually
cut out all the foods that youlike, even if they can meet your
goals, even if you might feelbetter eating them. The stricter and stricter

(17:25):
diets, the all meat carnivore diets, the quote unquote noe processed food,
which that's such an ambiguous definition becauseif you cut something, you cook it,
that's processing food, and nobody likesto talk about that. It's just
a spiral of self doubt of likeis this processed? Is this clean?

(17:47):
So even when you can use anobjective standard, we're starting to see people
getting away from using objective standards.And then because you are pushing people on
all ends, because it used tobe like you'll have in the personal finance
space, you'll have somebody like saya Caleb Hammer, which I'm giving overarching

(18:07):
descriptions of a lot of things here, and I'm going to go in depth
into each of these categories and intomore progressive left leaning solutions in each of
these categories in their own separate episodes. But you'll have a finance expert who
will tell you that you need towork harder. People who will go on,
say the Caleb Hammer financial audit show. They will be told, just

(18:33):
go work harder, work harder,work sixty eighty hours a week, just
keep working like work. The onlythings you should be doing are working and
sleeping. And then you'll also hear. But then you'll also hear in order
to be productive and powerful and doingwell in the workplace, you have to
eat only unprocessed foods. And eventhe financial people will be like, you

(18:56):
have to meal prep everything every week. Only eat like the absolute bare minimum
in terms of food, in termsof your food, your food spending.
And then also you have to doall these stuff in the morning, your
morning routines, your ice bats,your cold cold exposure, your sun exposure.
So a person hearing all of thesedifferent things from all of these different

(19:18):
sources is being put under a tremendouslycrushing burden, and a lot of what
these self helped people do not getis that there is a even if you
quote unquote have enough hours in theday to do your workouts, to do
your to do work, to mealprep everything, not stop fast food,
there is a cognitive burden to this, and this is especially true for people

(19:40):
with a mental illness or neurodivergency.There is a cognitive loadswit. So just
because you have an hour that youcan sit aside and watch TV or listen
to music or play a video game, that is not an hour that maybe
you can use to do something likemeal prep, workout work extra hours.

(20:00):
Because there are different phases than awakeand asleep are not like it's not just
like awake you can do whatever youwant while you're awake and then just to
sleep. There is a certain loadthat the human body and the human mind
could take, just like a musclewould get sore. That if you're doing

(20:21):
all these hard things constantly and everysingle day all you're doing is all these
hard things without a break, atsome point you're going to break down.
Something's gonna break down if you're ifyou're spending your time, your energy on
trying to improve your fitness, you'regonna have less energy to deal with stuff
in the financial realm. And yes, I do believe that you can train
all of these up at the sametime, and I do believe you can
work on them at the same time. But pushing people to the absolute limit

(20:44):
on everything all at once can backfirebecause you have somebody who's working twelve hour
days to try to pay off theirdebt. At some point they are going
to crack and they're gonna wind upin the McDonald's drive through yang food.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing. The fact that we have as foods
as a as available as things forpeople that are working really, really hard

(21:06):
actually is very important to people beingable to be productive, because if people
have to worry so much about whatthey're going to eat and having to repair
it all in advance, we wouldn'tbe as productive as a society. And
there's some interesting arguments around how wesubsidize processed foods so the like the like
meat will be less expensive than vegetablesin certain cases, and things are being

(21:30):
subsidized that subsidized by the government thatmaybe shouldn't be. A guy in TikTok
frenchie who's more of a socialist contentcareer. He talked about the way food
is subsidized and how processed food playsinto productivity, and I think that's a
very important thing to take a lookat, because as much as the gurus,
especially mister you have to have sixpack abs in order to work for

(21:52):
my company, would say that productivityis only achieved by eating clean, productivity
is being enabled by these fast foodsand convenience and processed foods, which then
also the finance people will judge youfor because you're spending too much money on
it, and they want you tobelieve that poor people don't deserve to be
happy, and that's what this wholeavoiding instant gratification thing is. They're like,

(22:15):
Okay, poor people don't deserve tobe happy. They need to be
punished. And that is also soyou're going in and then physically punishing yourself
with ice, fats and all thisother stuff, which can be helpful if
you're doing it on your own becauseyou want to because there's something you want
to do in your life, verypositive things, but a lot of this

(22:36):
is basically just punishing you and saying, well, if you're poor, you
don't deserve to be happy. Andguess what that is the central message of
welfare reform. Welfare reform is like, if you're poor, you don't deserve
to be treated well in any way. You don't have a right to housing,
you don't have a right to food, you don't have a right to
shelter. You have to go andwork for it. Oftentimes you have to

(22:59):
work unpaid. You have to beforced into low wage positions, even when
you have a good, good education, good experience. I linked to a
few episodes ago that Marketplace stepisode thatMarketplace series The Uncertain Hour about welfare reform,
and they're like motivational speeches and stufflike that, stuff that some of

(23:22):
these motivational people would would probably approveof, but it's part of the government's
attempt to get you off of welfare. They're like, Okay, you have
to go. You have to takea low wage job. To try to
push you into those things. Theydon't let you hold out maybe a little
bit longer to get a good jobthat's more in line with your experience.
They just want to throw you intoa job, any job, as quickly

(23:45):
as possible and as much as thesepeople like to say that they are against
distractions, like especially the self optimizationwith they're like, no distractions, that's
why I don't watch movies, Idon't watch TV. And there are people
constantly judging themselves again for things assimple as listening to music while working,
nonetheless watching TV, watching movies,or god forbid, somebody plays video games.

(24:11):
But it's because they want to distractyou from using your power and from
withholding your labor. They want yousubservient, because if you're not distracted by
all of this hard, hard workthat's going to make you more successful and
make you better than everybody else,then you might decide to unionize and organize
your workplace. You might decide tovote differently. You might decide to become

(24:37):
a candidate. You might decide torun for a public office. You might
decide to go to a city councilmeeting. You might decide to question the
system that you are in. Butinstead they want you attacking other people,
and they want you to not seethe way that they the ways that they
are setting up to fail. Theydepend on you to spend so you have

(24:59):
the person the finance grews at theirhoteling. You spend less money, spend
less money, spend less money,and you know, I'm I'm perstaying there,
Dave Ramsey. But they're also theones pushing the return to office thing.
They're pushing like, Okay, youhave to return to office, and
you want to know what the motivationis for that getting you to spend more.
In the words of a lot oflike local government leaders and business leaders,

(25:22):
they want you to be back intothe downtowns, save our downtowns.
But you know what's saving our downtownsmeans making sure that you go in and
while you're stressed out because you hadto commute two hours and you only have
thirty minutes for lunch, going andrunning in and buying that ten fifteen dollars
sandwich at some restaurant downtown, whichthese businesses obviously there's I have sympathy for

(25:47):
them. But if you're going topush people and tell them you need to
be spending less, one of theways that you can spend less is by
not having to spend money on commuting, by not having to spend money.
And yeah, of course, CalebHammer and those folks, they're gonna judge
you, and they're gonna say no, pack a lunch. Just pack a
lunch. But if everybody did that, are we actually saving the downtowns?

(26:08):
Are we doing the things that capitalismwants us and needs us to do.
And the reason why they're doing it, they're doing choice architecture around us so
that we make the wrong decisions,to make it easier to make the wrong
decisions that it is to make theright decisions. Because if you're working at
home, it's a lot easier foryou to walk downstairs and or to your

(26:29):
kitchen and get yourself lunch than itis for you to have to make sure
that that's all packed ahead of timeas you're rushing out and try to make
sure that you're not going to runtoo traffic because you need to be in
the office on time. So they'remaking it more difficult to make the good
choices that they want you to make. And there's also this there's also sort

(26:52):
of this thing of claiming that thesuffering is temporary. They will say,
well, you just have to sufferfor two or three years while you pay
down your debt. This is especiallytwo with the finance ones, as you
have to suffer for two or threeyears while you pay down your debt,
but it's not going to be twoor three years. Because things they always

(27:12):
have this assumption, and they evenmake up these things like you're going to
have five ten million dollars. Theyalways assume that nothing's ever going to happen
to you. The family members arenot gonna get sick, that you're not
going to get sick, that you'renot going to lose a job, that
things are, that something's not goingto go wrong in the middle of that.
And they always assume that your incomeis going to somehow go exponentially up
without doing something like labor organizing oreven just withholding your labor staying out of

(27:36):
the job market to make sure thatthe job market starts to work with the
demands of workers. The simple factthat people stood out of the job market
a lot during the pandemic starts influenceemployers, not through a formal general strike,
but through I guess sort of inmore of an informal general strike.
It starts influence employers to do thingsthat they wouldn't have done before. But
now because everybody's being pushed back into work and returned to office and all

(28:00):
this stuff, it's not working aswell, and it's not going to be
temporary. For somebody who is stuckin a dead and low wage job,
the suffering is not going to betemporary. Yeah, they can tell you,
oh yeah, you have to goonto this website and learn all these
skills. Okay, if you don'thave energy during the day, make sure

(28:22):
that before you go to your shiftat McDonald's, you get yourself into a
you get yourself into your icepath,you get your sun exposure, you take
your and yeah, now you're gonnahave to go and you're gonna have to
charge up your crack cards to getyour age one, your athletic green supplement
and all that so that that atthe end of the day you can come
home and learn how to code.Maybe there's going to be some very very
small percentage of the population they coulddo that. But again, the cognitive

(28:45):
load of that is a lot morethan people would want you to believe.
And the thing is that even likewe talk about like elite athletes who are
like the first people to adopt allkinds of performance stuff and these performance ideas,
they're now going into like the mainstreamwage labor, they get tons of

(29:06):
breaks, or at least they getsome breaks where they can recover from all
these things. The summation of alot of self help is just to go,
go, go, go, go, add infinitum and not have a
break. And that's just not theoverwing majority. People just can't tolerate that.
And then that just sends you backto blaming yourself. And because you're

(29:27):
so busy, always feeling like youneed to do more, is a source
of so called distraction, and thatdistraction is leading you away from the thing
they're trying to distract you from,which is the systems around you that are
causing the problems. And and thenyou have these on it. You have

(29:48):
these unattainable standards around there, andyou do have these things that keep going
around, and it just keeps goingand going around until at some point you
either start to you may start tosee the problems the system. But when
you just as soon as you startto see the problems in the system,

(30:10):
they have yet another deflection, theyhave another distraction. That other distraction is
blaming others. I explained the onthe Economic Police State episode, how they
want you to enforce these norms againsteach other. And that's the common thing,
because like with the people talking aboutdopamine addiction. Dopamine you talxing.

(30:32):
These are like random people online whoare like keep spreading these ideas against others.
So if you see somebody that's inhardship, your response is not,
let's help them, Let's do somemutual aid. Let's try to help organize
to get better housing, let's tryto organize to get better healthcare in community.
Your first reaction is no, you'rewrong because you're not working eighty hours
a week, you're not working hardenough. You're eating junk food, which

(30:55):
is making you unproductive, and it'staking money out of your wallet. You
just need to cut out all thebad habits, stop being addicted to dopamine,
and then you can do better financiallytoo. Meanwhile, the person writing
that comment is in an apartment thatthey can barely afford, has crushing student
loan debt, and is working aton of time to not have anything to

(31:17):
enjoy in life. But they haveyou enforcing that against others. The cruelty.
The cruelty is the point, andthey want you to enforce that point
on others. And there's always goingto be another another insult that they're going

(31:37):
to use people. And when youwhen you're talking about politics. They're always
like little shorthand thing that people comeup with and so that you can have
that instant knee jerk quick response.And the one that I've seen, especially
in the finance spaces, that peopleCaleb Hammer uses this one a lot.
And again I don't I don't believethat a lot of these people are ill

(31:59):
intentioned. They're just falling into trapsand ideas that maybe they don't even know
or influencing them. But the onethat I see him using is saying that
people people are childish, Like evenif people are doing okay, he'll use
the term childish to describe them.So they will have you believe that anybody
who wants a better system is somebodythat is childish, so that okay,

(32:22):
that's that's bad. So automatically,as soon as you make that connection,
then it's something that's bad. They'relike childish. I don't think that it
is a coincidence that this victim blamingnarrative, this narrative of people blaming each
other, the fact that we're seeingthe rise in dopamine addiction coming up as

(32:43):
a primary cause of people not beingsuccessful as the primary cause of health challenges
this narrative around instant gratification being thecause of our financial problems, just as
people are being pushed to return tooffice and being pushed into those habits and
being pushed into spending more money becauseof the way the system is influencing them,

(33:04):
and we're seeing even like some ofthe religious mental health stuff still going
around, even though that's been aroundforever, the religious mental health approaches that
basically want you to seek out whateversecret sin is inside of you, whatever
thing and that little problem inside ofyou that is causing all of your problems
and not causing you to look atyour real problems, and not letting you

(33:28):
see what is causing you to actuallybe under mental distress, but then always
blaming you for some sort of sin, which those things hurt me quite a
bit. There are a lot ofproblems in my life that were that were
being caused by economic inequality, byproblems in political systems, which even me
is somebody with political experience and knowledge, because these religious mental health things make

(33:52):
you believe that all of this isthings that you have somehow merited because you
did something wrong and you don't evenknow what you did wrong. And that's
the same thing with these dopamine addictionthings. It's like, Okay, all
these innocuous things like listening to musicwhile working, You're like, now,
I guess this is my fault.Maybe the reason why I'm not getting promoted

(34:12):
at work is my fault because Ilistened to music while I was working,
but my co worker over there wasn't, and he was super focused and he
only ate kale and chia seats,and maybe that's why he is doing a
little bit better than I am economically. Honestly, it feels too ironic.
It feels too ironic that these thingsare coming up just as we are going

(34:37):
into the possibility of a recession,because then and as we're seeing conservative political
ideas trying to come back as well, we're seeing a resurgence of conservative ideas
kind of pushing back against the somewhatmore liberal, more leftist progress we've seen
during COVID and the agreement on universalsocial programs that saw through the COVID era,

(35:02):
So that now we can replace that, replace that solidarity with bickering against
each other and blaming ourselves. AndI hope that people can see that,
and that's one of the goals here, is I want you to know that
you know more about your situation andabout the challenges of your fellow man than
people that are in power would wantyou to believe. And that means that

(35:25):
you can start to think of solutions, and you can start to think of
ways to advocate, whether in yourworkplace or politically, for change and for
the things that you know deep downare the problems that are causing you and
others to fail, and don't believethem when they try to, like even

(35:49):
in like the personal finance faces,like the in May cases, it's the
commenters on the Caleb Hammer videos thatthat trash people more than Caleb himself,
but they'll try on people's accomplishments,and that is again, it's because they
don't want you to believe that youropinions are worthwhile, and they make the
people who make these comments, Idon't think that they're necessarily thinking about things

(36:12):
on a systemic or political level,but it's a mindset. It's an attitude
that very very subtly influences people tostop thinking about others and other people that
are in especially people who are maybein a little bit of a lesser situation
than they are as valid sources ofinformation, and it is to invalidate their

(36:34):
experiences. And that's the last thingwe want to do. We don't want
people's experiences to be invalidated, becauseagain, people are experts on their situation
and on their community situation, andthat type of expertise needs to be validated.
It needs to be acknowledged, itneeds to be listened to, and
it needs to go into when we'rethinking about how to change public policy.

(36:55):
What I want to end here onis that self help and these types of
things, improving your finances, improvingyour fitness, improving your health, doing
productivity optimization, these things can helpyou. These tools, the tools and
the ideas behind them can help you. But we have to get them in
conversation with communities and marginalized communities,and with the native knowledge of marginalized communities,

(37:20):
and with systemic ideas. We haveto get the individual self help ideas
in conversation with the systemic ideas.We need to get them to work with
each other. The solution is notto completely discard the idea of becoming a
better person. The solution is toget these ideas to work with each other
and set up against each other.I don't know if the people who are
pushing these ideas right now are opento that because they may be entrenched in

(37:43):
conservative ideologies. Maybe some of themaren't. But the goal here is to
bridge the vibe between personal and socialchange, and we want to set up
a situation where maybe we can usesome of these ideas. Maybe we can
use some of the ways to improveyour finances. Maybe we can use fitness.
Maybe we can use training yourself becomingstronger, becoming a better person through

(38:07):
through fitness. Maybe we can usesome of these health optimizations and ways of
having a better diet as ways tobecome better people individually, which will help
us to cope a bit better withall of the stresses the oppression of late
stage capitalism causes, but not ina way that blames us or distracts us

(38:28):
from the overall goal of creating systemicchange. So to create a more progressive
form of self help, there arefive main points that I just want to
briefly go over. So we wantto be positive. We want to be
that you can, that you cancreate a better future for yourself, and
that's positive toward the person, notnegative or blaming the person or shaming the

(38:49):
person. So a positive attitude towardthe people inclusive. We want to include
the experiences of diverse communities, notjust the single individual, usual urban,
white male, wealthy software engineer techbro who is the apparent reference person for
a lot of this self help stuff. We want to be inclusive of multigenerational

(39:14):
household families where decisions are made alittle bit more collectively, cultures that have
a different view of things like mentalhealth and of health in general, and
where people are not as atomized andmaybe these sort of individual, highly individualistic
ideas will not work as well.We want to be inclusive of those communities.

(39:35):
We want to be inclusive of peopleof differing abilities, people who have
disabilities and their unique needs. Wewant to be inclusive so that they can
custom design these things to work withtheir lives. And that's the next point.
We want to be empowering. Wantto empower people to be able to
say, well, I can makethe food that I have here, I

(39:59):
can make the kind of food thatI want to have that I like to
have. I can make it workwith my diet and my fitness plan.
I can make the fact that maybeI only have one or maybe I only
have like two or three days aweek to get into the gym. I
can make that work and not guiltpeople, empower them to find unique solutions

(40:20):
that work for them. And someof these self help people do mention it,
and I think Huberman even mentions thatyou can kind of customize protocols.
But I think that that narrative needsto be more prominent, the empowering narrative,
empowering people to make their own decisionsand create things that work well for
them their circumstances, their culture,their community. Then we need to have
a systemic focus. We need tothink about the systems that make it harder

(40:45):
for you to save money, thesystems that make it harder for you to
eat healthy, the systems that makeit harder for you to find time to
work out and do all kinds ofmental health practices, the systems that make
some of the underlying problems behind thisworse. We need to think about those
things, and we need to havea lens of how can we make things

(41:07):
systemically, create a better environment overallthat allows people to have better habits in
their lives. Because you'll hear likethe atomic habits those times they're like change
your environment. But many people havean environment that is pretty fixed and determined
by outside and external factors. Sowe want to think about how to create
systems that support people in becoming theirbest self and we want to be supported.

(41:32):
So of course self help is signthat you do within yourself, but
I think that we need to broadenthat out. We need to do it
on a more mutual and collective approach, more of like a mutual aid type
approach, where people have supports.Like I was listening to a podcast about
an approach this group called the CamdenCoalition that was helping people to improve their

(41:54):
health by having like nurses and socialworkers, getting them connected to rest sources,
people that would come to their homesand help them to learn ways to
manage their health. When we talkabout like these sort of like performance practices,
these health practices, personal finance practices, maybe have a system where you
have somebody who is working alongside ofyou, supporting you, helping you along

(42:16):
the bumps on the road, andmaybe not have it be so expensive.
I would love to have almost likea mutual aid group working on self improvement
and personal development practices in an inclusiveand flexible way, but with some support,
somebody there to help you along theway. People who are in a
difficult situation, who can't necessarily haveall the initiative to think of everything themselves

(42:40):
and just follow through on a giganticlist of protocols, have some of that
more individual support come alongside you.Running out time for this episode, I
will go more into my vision foreach of these categories as I cover each
of these individual categories a little moreon future episodes. If you have any
feedback at all in this episode,please feel free to call in if you

(43:01):
want to share from your own personaldevelopment journey, your own journey of helping
others, any of your stories,questions, comments, leave a voicemail eight
four four four seven seven Punk eightfour four four seven seven seven eight six
five. Also follow on social mediaat Fixer Punk, fi x c R
p U n K, on TikTokand Instagram at Grayson Nation on Twitter or

(43:24):
x and I hope you will joinme again for the next episode. This
podcast is not professional advice of anysort. This content is for entertainment and
general informational purposes only. You notwarrant or guarantee the accuracy of the information
here in. The Listeners should notrely solely upon such and consult a competent
professional before signed to follow any courseof action. If any medical or mental

(43:45):
health concerns are suspected, please promptlycontact a qualified physician,

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Why The Right Wants You To Hate and Doubt Yourself - A Progressive/Leftist View of Self-Help

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Why The Right Wants You To Hate and Doubt Yourself - A Progressive/Leftist View of Self-Help