Cults, Conspirituality, and Critical Thinking with Matthew Remski

This episode was recorded at an open meeting of the Vancouver Lodge of Education & Research entitled “Cults, Conspirituality, and Critical Thinking”. Master of the Lodge Wes Regan was facilitating and our guest was none other than Matthew Remski.

Matthew Remski is a New-Age cult survivor, activist, and researcher focussed on new religious movements. He is co-host of the wildly successful and influential Conspirituality Podcast and author of “Practice and All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics and Healing in Yoga and Beyond” among other titles. His insight into the crossovers between alternative health, COVID-denial and Q Anon are remarkable and disturbing. Both the full presentation and full Q&A are included here for your edification. 

Join us on January 29th at 10am Pacific time for a follow up event where Wes Regan, Trevor McKeown and myself will discuss this presentation and entertain further discussion about this content. Sign up for our newsletter to get your invitation.

Chapters

• 1:53 Wes Regan Introduciton
• 6:00 Conspirituality, An Example
• 7:35 A Cult Survivor
• 14:00 A Full Agenda
• 15:40 Defining Some Terms
• 22:55 Leaning Right
• 26:10 A Case Stundy: Kelly Brogan
• 40:45 Does Yoga Have A Conspirituality Problem?
• 53:45 These People Are Untrustworthy
• 59:30 Influencers MUST Shitpost
• 1:02:40 Cult Literature Can't Keep Up
• 1:07:20 Conspirituality Is The Landscape
• 1:16:15 Plandemic
• 1:22:35 Sympathy For The Devil
• 1:23:20 What Do They Get Right?
• 1:35:20 Address The Root Cause
• 1:36:30 Q&A Begins
• 2:15:25 Can We Bring Them Back?

Transcript

Wes Regan: 0:00

WesRegan.

Troy Spreeuw: 0:03

Sorry about that, guys.

Wes Regan: 0:04

Thank you. My name is Wes Regan and I am the master of the Vancouver lodge of education and research. And the Vancouver lodge of education research is a Masonic Lodge devoted to advancing provocative ideas in the interest of hosting intellectually stimulating and rewarding discussion, often relating to our own peculiar world of Freemasonry, but not always. And so I'm joining you today from the ancestral and unseeded homelands of the hump Amin and Squamish speaking peoples in what is also known today as Burnaby. And I'm grateful to be on this territory as a settler and I am committed to the cause of justice for and reconciliation with indigenous peoples. And today's talk has relevance in this regard, as it may likely touch on issues at the heart of colonization, which relate to ideas of race beliefs, and bodily purity and bodily superiority and privilege, all of which are defining features of conspiratuality. I'm very pleased to welcome those of you in particular today who are not members of a Masonic Lodge. The content of today's talk is important for everyone in our community. And so we wanted to extend the invitation further to those who might be interested in knowing more about the fascinating and deeply troubling world of conspirituality, which Matthew and his co hosts on the spirituality podcast, have done such a thorough and engaging job exploring for the past few years. After Matthew gives his talk, I will invite Casey Collins, a PhD student at UBC, studying Japanese, Buddhist, and new religions, and their charismatic founders to respond on behalf of the lodge with comments and perhaps any questions to help start off the Q&A portion of today's presentation, which I'm sure will be very lively and engaging, as I've talked with many of you before this event. And I know you're very, very keen to to engage with Matthew. And so with that, I'm now very pleased to introduce our speaker Matthew Remsky. Please join me in giving him a very warm hand. I will now tell you a bit about Matthew. Matthew is a cult survivor and researcher and award winning poet and author, his 2019 book "Practice and All Is Coming Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond" is the first systematic analysis of pervasive cultism in the modern yoga world, earning praise internationally as a groundbreaking resource for critical thinking and community health. Matthew researches and writes on abuse in spiritual movements, as well as for publications like GEN by medium and the walrus. His current research is pivoting to look at cultic dynamics in conspirituality and eco justice movements, and has earned praise internationally as a groundbreaking resource for critical thinking and community health. He is co host of the wildly popular spirituality podcast as I mentioned earlier, a weekly study of converging right wing conspiracy theories and faux progressive wellness utopianism. He lives in Toronto with his partner and their two sons. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to not.

Matthew Remski: 3:13

Thank you. Thank you so much, Wes, thank you for putting this together. And for the kind invite. I do have slides. So I'll use the Share Screen function, but I hope that my face is still visible, because otherwise I can be a little bit alienating. So I'll just try to make sure that that that works out. So the other thing I don't know is whether the keynote should be in play mode or not. I think this is fine, just like this. So the topic this morning, that a couple of weeks ago, I know Wes gave a good historical backdrop to which I will touch on a little bit and I'll refer back to but I'll mainly keep my subject matter confined to what's happened over the last 18 months or so. The topic we decided on was called conspirituality and critical thinking. And this fellow here is Alan Hostetter. And he really brings together so many of like interesting and like tender but also volatile inflection points of this movement. You can see that he's playing a singing bowl in a yoga studio. It is indeed a yoga studio and he's got his trump 2020 Make America Great Again, t shirt on. But you know, in his other in his other life, there's kind of a two lives here. He is a sound Gong therapist and a yoga teacher and he's very interested in in holistic health, but not really in public health because he also led the anti mask protests in his hometown of San Clemente starting in in California starting in December. Last year, and he rode that particular politics to a Q Anon conference in August in Phoenix, Arizona, or maybe it was October, sorry. And then he rode that all the way to his very exuberant presence at the January 6 insurrection. And now, he's taken his singing bowls content, I think offline, as he negotiates with his attorneys in the FBI about, you know, how much trouble he's in, as he approaches his trial over the insurrection. But it fascinating character, and I hope that by the end of the presentation, that he becomes very human to you, in a way, I thought that was gave a good introduction. But I thought also that I'd say a few things about myself first, that "A" I'm not a Freemason, and, but I'm very interested in the fact that this is, this is a thing, and I'd like to learn more about it from Wes and other people. But just so you know, I won't really be able to, you know, engage with the particular concerns of this community, but I might be able to, during question periods, make some general observations about how, you know, a community like this with its history might be more or less vulnerable to conpirituality. I am a survivor of two different cults one was neo-Buddhist, and when was New-Agey, and I've since become like many, I mean, I think all cult researchers that I know actually are cult survivors as well. And I think that gives some good tools for looking at conspirituality and movements like Q Anon. But there are also some drawbacks as well related to the fact that a lot of cult theory is pre digital in origin. And so it's really not equipped to deal with the gamification of social media, for example. Also, as a cult survivor and occult researcher, it's very easy to just look at everything and with this really sort of sour and cynical gaze and say, oh, yeah, that's pretty culty. I try not to do that I'm getting better as I get older. I'm not a therapist. But if you feel that there are subjects that come up today that you would like therapeutic engagement with, I can refer you on to people who specialize in cultic, dynamics and conspirituality. They're very busy right now, unfortunately, in as an investigative journalist, I try to make all of my work survivor centered. So I look first and foremost to who is being impacted by a particular social movement. And I tried to interview them at length, about what their experiences are. Because generally, as people come away from abusive social dynamics, the thresholds for being able to report on personal experience are really high. And it's very easy for cult survivors to be stigmatized. I'd also just like to put out there that, you know, I identify as politically left. And I'm not saying this, because I want you to be too I'm saying this, because there are undoubtedly undoubted political dimensions to the topic today. And I just want to be upfront about like, you know, how I approach those, and be able to clearly identify how my analysis trends in a certain direction, because when we get to discussion of questions and comments, you know, we might be able to identify where the conversation heads into a larger sort of political, you know, idiological landscape, and it might be worthwhile to spend time there, but we should know that we're there and that we're not really going to solve those problems. But as somebody who identifies as politically left I view conspirituality and cults through, especially in the 1980s and beyond, through a historical materialist lens. I think that the global explosion of yoga and Buddhism and wellness cults are inseparable from the breakdown of local economies, from stable, stable labor markets, and also the rise of the gig work economy and the notion of the self framed in neoliberal hyper individualistic terms, like those are all political sort of facts for me that I can't really not look at or unsee. And so my angle, in brief is that what we've seen in the conspiracy theory world over the last 18 months just would not have exploded to the extent that it has, if the US, which is where most of this material comes from, how to functional government. If there were stronger labor protections, and especially if there was universal health care. So one of the things that I like to point out is that I wrote a investigative piece for the walrus called when Q Anon came to Canada that really tried to ask the question, you know, well, how, how big is this movement going to be here? How many brains? Is it going to melt? You know, how disruptive is it going to be politically? And so far, the rise of the PPC and Maxime Bernier notwithstanding, there is no real electoral success yet, for Q Anon or Q adjacent politicians and influencers. And I think a big part of that is temperament, this Canadian propriety, you know, an unwillingness to indulge certain types of popular apocalyptic fantasies in sort of on mass. There's also I think, the memory of the Satanic Panic of Martinsville, Saskatchewan, of the 1990s stands out in Canadian consciousness is something that is still an open wound, and something that I mean, the wounds are open in the States as well. But there's a much more, there's much more of a willingness to throw salt whenever we see blood. So but I think the main thing that I keep coming back to I can't really prove this is that Canada does not neglect its citizens to the same extent that the federal government in the United States neglects its citizens, especially during the pandemic. There's vast inequalities here. The first nations people are treated horribly, on a continual basis. And yet, things like universalized medicine make a huge difference in the vulnerability of communities to large scale conspiracies with regard to what, you know, public health institutions are trying to do to whole populations. So I might speak a little bit more about that as we as we go. But let me go to the agenda page, just to give a preview of how I think this might go, I'd like to give some basic definitions for spirituality. And I want to give a case study. And then, you know, I think if I can do that in 20 minutes or so that would be a good pause for initial questions so that I can read the room a little bit or read the zoom. Because it's, it's not always easy to figure out what everybody what everybody needs, and I want to make this as useful as possible for you. And then I have four lenses of analysis that I think are helpful for understanding the various facets of conspirituality. I'd like to say a few things about how conspirituality leaders deploy tactics that we're familiar with in cultic studies. And then I want to spend some time at the end humanizing the conspirituality movement by asking the question, well, what is it that they get, right? Because I think that if we if we don't, and this is true of the anti lockdown movement, the anti Vax movement, if if we don't really grok what the core emotional, socio emotional complaints are, I think, I think the discourse is going to continue to be polarized and I don't know, patronizing, right. So. So that's what I'd like to do. So to start with some definitions, two terms that I'd like to define. I mean, the term of the day, for one, but then also something that I believe I've coined, but I had a lot of help with it, which is disastrous spirituality. So 2011, Charlotte Ward and David Veloce, published a paper called The emergence of spirituality in the Journal of Contemporary religion, their abstract states, as follows. And this is a great abstract, it really does sum up the paper. The female dominated New Age with its positive focus on self. And the male dominated realm of conspiracy theory, with its negative focus on global politics may seem antithetical. But wait, there is a synthesis of the two that we call conspirituality, a rapidly growing web movement, expand out remember the writing in 2011? This is like right at the dawn of the Facebook explosion, they have no clue what's coming. So this is very prescient. That expresses an ideology fueled by political disillusionment and The popularity of alternative worldviews. It offers a broad political, spiritual philosophy based on two core convictions. The first is traditional conspiracy theory. And the second is rooted in the new age. Now, I'll just refer back to Wes this presentation from Barkun and Hofstetter about the sort of contours of conspiracy theory, which I'll speak to a little bit more. But if you remember what some of those are, they're really sort of summed up in this first point, which is that a secret group covertly controls or is trying to control the political and social order, okay. Then, that is sort of criss crossed with the belief, the conviction, the order that humanity is undergoing a paradigm shift in consciousness. Those two things are happening at the same time. They're, they're they're causally related. They're chicken and egg. There's a it's like a media strip. And then they really phrase this Well, I think they really captured something amazing for being 10 years ago. Proponents believe that the best strategy for dealing with the threat of a totalitarian New World Order is to act in accordance with an awakened New Paradigm worldview. So I'll give a bunch of examples of this. But what I want to point out is that there's a combination of it's really like two currents socio emotional currents slamming against each other, and creating a kind of Whirlpool. Number one a secret group covertly controls or is trying to control the political and world order is a paranoid posture, a la Hofstetter. Secondly, humanity is undergoing a paradigm shift in consciousness is I don't know if you know the term. But we could say it' pronoic, or the overwhelming suspicion that something wonderful is about to happen. And irrational suspicion actually, there's no evidence for it. It's something that burbles up from within. And it's very aspirational. It makes sense that New Age, yoga and wellness culture are at the heart of this number two bullet point because these are aspirational cultures that focus upon the development and the awakening of a new self. Okay, now, this is 2011. We are into, you know, a couple 100 episodes, including bonus episodes of conspirituality podcast, and here's some things that I would add. We would say this is myself, Derek Barris and Julian Walker is that conspirituality is an emotionally contagious overreaction to an embellishment of very real issues. In fact, I want to bold this, because that's crucial to keep in mind. You know, as Wes pointed out, conspiracism conspiracy theories do not evolve ex nihilo. They appropriate, expand upon and elaborate some shard of legitimate grievance or actual conspiracy and then spin it into something that can be solvable, alright? The conspiracy theory has to be solvable. The conspiracy isn't it's just a crime. But the theory gives the person something to work with. Conspirituality also we'd say is dominated by influencers. I'm saying using this word in the social media sense who present themselves as shamans and revolutionaries to sell wellness and spiritual products to save the world. Often they position themselves in the true shamanic sense between worlds between the apocalyptic vision of future dystopia and the nostalgic, romantic idealized vision of the pre modern landscape and they stand on the threshold of those two things and they help their followers or they see themselves as helping their followers translate between translate themselves between the two, usually projecting themselves backwards. There's there's very little sort of, you know, really futuristic positive version, the future that is trumped by the conspiritualist really looks like the 19th century. And conspirituality we also would say feeds obsessions with purity fitness, clean diets, natural supplements, again, in this I mean, this goes back to fascist body ideas, but it also feeds into the neoliberal concept of the autonomous self. The just do it the Lululemon self that can you know, be ultimately happy if it drinks eight glasses of water a day. Next thing is that conspirituality often builds upon pre existing cults and there algorithms, their networks, their, you know, affiliate programs using cultic techniques. And sometimes we saw this very interestingly with a group called Rama Yoga in Venice, California. The leader, the, the former or the the late leader, Guru Jagat died about two months ago now, possibly of COVID. We're not quite sure. But what Guru Jagat managed to do was she managed to use conspiracy theories in the COVID era to distract her larger Kundalini Yoga, following from concentrating on the fact that all of these horrible revelations had come out about the criminality of the founder, Yogi Bhajan revelations that threatened to really crumble the the entire organization. So in a way, conspiracy theories, if they're attractive enough, can be new content for existing cults and actually help a cult get through a What would you say like a crisis period? We have not seen a single conspirituality influence or track politically towards the left? Not a single one. Part of this is because wellness Yoga, you know, contemporary Buddhism usually favors a kind of medical libertarianism, which is also very American. And relies upon this sense that you know, you can, you should, you should be able to take care of your body alone, and you know, completely and you should be autonomous and your immune system is sacred, and you have a halo around you all the time. And that's really what's going to help you because, as we know, there is no social contract left, right. So again, this is a very American contextual view in which, you know, people have basically just given up on the fact that that there's any kind of social responsibility to public health. That's an overly broad statement, but I'm speaking about a Zeitgeist that's allowed me because not everybody in America thinks that but it's, it's that kind of Zeitgeist that allows can spirituality to blossom in America more profoundly than anywhere else. And as it does, it erodes general trust and public health, the notion of expertise, especially scientific expertise, critical thinking, and it raises vaccine hesitancy. Okay, second definition, disaster spirituality. If you know, the book Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, she gives this sort of devastating blow by blow account of how after, for instance, Hurricane Katrina, the entire infrastructure of southern Louisiana and New Orleans was basically sold off to very, very low bid offers at, you know, corporate reconstruction and rezoning and, you know, privatization, basically, of the public Commons. And, you know, what she argues is that is that capitalism has become very, very adept at seizing upon human human suffering, to convert the commons to privacy to private assets whenever it can. Now, what I would say is that disaster spirituality is the process of taking a real public health crisis like COVID, or a fictional moral panic, like Q Anon, and making it the basis for a call to spiritual renewal, which of course, can also be monetized. So in the shock doctrine, Klein describes the seizure of public assets and utilities in the wake of hurricanes and wars. But with disaster spirituality, because it exists primarily in the attention economy. It involves a seizure of attention and emotional commitment. And that's, you know, these assets are then converted into monetized networks that are able to traffic and spiritual and wellness products. Okay. So, I thought that a case study would be useful to bring some of these ideas initial ideas together. And I'm gonna look at this is actually the first these are the first subjects that I studied in depth for under under freelance contract for Gen at medium. So I wrote an article called, you know, the anti Vax misinformation machine of Kelly Brogan or something like that. But the article is also about her relationship with her husband, Sayer Ji. So we'll just do some a walkthrough of the of the play by play here. Who is Kelly Brogan? She is still a doctor. She made her bones as a quote unquote holistic psychiatrist in amongst the jetset of Manhattan in the arts and early, early teens. And, you know, fantastic education, MIT great medical school education, good psychiatric practitioner, apparently, and with good reviews, very, very expensive. But she really made a name for herself by criticizing psychiatry. And, and legitimately so for it's over prescription, and it's disempowerment of patients through the diagnostic process, which is, you know, in many cases is less than scientific. So, she really established a lot of alt health credibility by criticizing over prescription showing that there were many patients and usually women who were both over prescribed and then not given an exit ramp for you know, these these addictive substances and, and substances that would, you know, suppress their emotions or ruin their sexual lives or, you know, have all kinds of unwanted side effects that that, you know, mainstream psychiatry kind of shrugs his shoulders at and says, Well, you're not trying to kill yourself. Right. So that's good. So there are strong overtones of feminist autonomy and empowerment. And in her in her materials, anything that you say, back in the go,

Troy Spreeuw: 26:43

Hang on, sorry, guys. Sorry, somebody's unmuted themselves. And

Matthew Remski: 26:48

then I'm sorry. Okay, sorry about that, man. Okay. Okay. Now, she is married to a fellow named Sayer Ji, that is his name. It's not a it's not like a new age or yoga name. And since the aughts, he has owned and managed an old health, do it yourself, quote, unquote, research site called Green med info, and he earns substantial income from affiliate networks selling various products and, but but the draw is, if you pay a membership, you have access to his database of 10s of 1000s of alternative health scientific articles, which, you know, apparently, that his, his his deal is, well, you should be able to interpret this yourself and you should be able to, you know, study up on what kind of turmeric is good for your cancer. And, you know, he makes some good points about pharmaceutical fraud and treachery and capitalism. And he also does, I think, establish the sort of legitimate argument reasonable argument that, you know, why is it that we have so little access to to a wide range of health information? Why are we always put in a position of trusting people who we don't know in lab coats, right? And he has a daily newsletter that goes out to 500,000 subscribers, so that's where they start. And by the time we get to March of 2020, Kelly Brogan jumps the shark from holistic psychiatrist to public health critic, she has no training in epidemiology, by the way, right. She has no training in virology. She's never done an emergency room shift. You know. She's not a floor doctor. She's not an internist. But she has the temerity to release a sermon called what's going on because she's going to tell you what's going on at the beginning of the pandemic. And she cites in this video of the guy in the picture is Tom Cowan, who has a lovely organic farm. Tom Cowan is a theosophist. You might be familiar with the Theosophists. Wes Regan spoke a little bit about Madame Blavatsky and her brave lineage Well, theosophy lives on and it permeates to one extent or another, you know, things like Waldorf education. He's a doctor, a trained and licensed MD who's on probation for treating a cancer patient over the phone with an unregulated substance so that's another story but, you know, he's got some credibility knocks against him, but he he gave a sermon a couple of days before Brogan that went viral in which he said that, you know, viruses aren't real because Rudolf Steiner told me they weren't. And so he denies germ theory. He says it's all about radio waves, but now it's actually you know, electromagnetic fields and 5g technology is is actually causing the infections and there's a whole bunch of bullshit That is like really quickly debunked, but it doesn't stop Brogan from just parroting it, but also funneling it through her own kind of credibility as a I would say pseudo feminist psychiatrist, alternative psychiatrist, she also quotes Reich, a geared hammer, who's the founder of German new medicine, which you probably don't be surprised to know has some anti semitic undertones to it. She quotes Joseph Mercola, who's kind of like the, the granddaddy of alternative health charlatanism. In the United States, he makes millions of millions of dollars selling like just quack formulas and snake oil and weird machines and stuff like that. And he's constantly getting hammered by the FDA. She also quoted the late Louise Hay. Louise Hay was the founder of Hay House, she was an early proponent of A Course in Miracles. She She was fond of telling AIDS patients that they were sick because they hated themselves. Brogan herself has also doubted the connection between HIV and AIDS. Okay, so in blue, I've got you know, what's going on here? Well, we've got a physician who's breaking her scope of practice. She's appealing to a pre modern medical thought. And by the way, breaking scope of practice is a core feature of charismatic leadership. Okay. And I'll get to that in a moment. But basically, as social media influence makes public figures out of people like Kelly Brogan, the temptations to and the restrictions against going beyond this person's scope of practice basically disappear. Right. So her being an MD or having some credibility with a goop crowd, allows her to pontificate about a novel Coronavirus, which is completely absurd and very dangerous, right. So she also appeals to to pre modern medical font by pointing at Tom Callen and German new medicine. And she also works to by tying in all of these influences, you know, she's just not making the statement on her own. She's also like pulling in these other influential people to sort of cosign on her work and and within a couple of months of this statement, Sayer Ji and Kelly Brogan are hosting a new website called questioning covid.com Which I believe is still up where they start to pull together all of their their favorite COVID denying friends. Do they believe what they're saying? It's unclear but what what is clear is that it's working for them in terms of engagement and clicks. All right. Now, here's here's Brogan in the first video of a screenshot from the first video of her online tapering from psychotropic drugs program called Vital mind reset. She teaches Kundalini Yoga, which I referenced off the top. You know, Kundalini Yoga has this horrible sort of history of fraud and abuse in it. I don't think she's aware of that. But it doesn't really matter. Because I think the aesthetics of Kundalini Yoga really suit this presentation of, you know, radiant autonomy and glowing health. And what she does in her media is that she develops this theme that, you know, COVID deaths are being accelerated by fear. The fear is being stoked by a conspiracy of mainstream media sources. And then she also has this thing where she gazes inefficiently at the camera. And very calmly talks about how everything was going to be okay. But at the same time, she makes all of these like very profound statements about how awful things are. And here's where we get into a number of aspects, I would say of the way the way in which a cohesive factor in cultic leadership is the is the provocation of what's called disorganized attachment. So I'll speak about this in a little bit more detail later. But basically, whenever anybody in a leadership position, basically in the same breath, or in the same paragraph, on one hand says the world is horrible. So that's point one of Charlotte and Charlotte and veloce. Right? You know, there's a cabal running everything, the world is horrible. And then number two, you know, there are wonderful things happening at the same time, and I can hand you the keys to open the door to those things. Right? So we've got terror and salvation whenever those things become really intertwined. We have what social psychologists and coke theorists called the formation of disorganized attachment bonds, or trauma bonds between followers and leaders. So as I said, I'll speak more in detail about that when in a little bit. Okay, so finally, by the fall of 2020. Brogan receives the honor of being named along with her husband, Mr. Ji as members of the disinformation doezen. And the group responsible for this tagging is the Center for combating digital hate run by Imran Ahmed out of the UK. Just a brilliant communication strategist. We had him on episode 12 or 10, or something like that. Really interesting guy. But the disinformation dozen is exactly what it sounds like. Astonishingly, these are 12 influencers, who are responsible for up to 65% of the anti Vax propaganda that you will see on the internet, right? So Brogan and ji are occupy two of those spaces, which is pretty amazing for a single household in Miami. So the sort of this their story isn't over, of course, but as you know, they kind of recede from the mainstream through de-platforming because they lost their Facebook accounts. They lost IG. They lost Twitter accounts. What tends to happen, and and this is for other, this goes for other influencers as well, is that the rhetoric becomes more extreme. You know, as soon I think within weeks of Sayer Ji losing his Instagram account for green med info, he was platforming a pure satanic panic, panic influencer on telegram or Odyssey I think is the video streaming video service that he uses. I think that's blockchain. And you know, nobody can touch it. Nobody can nobody can deplatform him there. The other thing that tends to happen with these influencers, as they lose mainstream accesses, that they'll get into stranger money making schemes like cryptocurrency, and Brogan and ji, both on that they've also started to monetize their own marriage by giving, you know, relationship. I don't know, ideal relationship workshops and stuff like that. So there's a case study, these guys really bring together a lot of the themes at the same time. But there, there's a lot more nuanced, too, to bring out. But I think that I will pause there and see if anybody has any thoughts or questions or comments or objections, or anybody needs me to slow down or to redefine anything. I will come out of screen sharing.

Wes Regan: 38:33

If anyone has questions, please feel free to use the hand function to raise your hand.

Troy Spreeuw: 38:49

Yeah, been following the chat, we don't have anything in the chat or any raised hands yet. I think the only raised hands we saw earlier were tests. So yeah, I think your pacing is good, man. Go ahead.

Wes Regan: 38:59

All right. You're just entirely engrossed in the content. Let's continue.

Matthew Remski: 39:03

Okay. Sounds good. Go back to the share here. Okay. So yeah, so I can't remember who it was. There was a journalist who asked me does Why does the yoga world have conspirituality or conspiracy problem? And I wrote a Twitter thread thread. You can you can see it on my Twitter feed. I'm just at Matthew Remsky. And it's the pinned thread but I'm just going to go through this, this framework, which I think has been resonant in a number of ways. I've adapted it, but I'll be looking, I'm just going to briefly talk about the the history the ideology, the politics and the technology involved in making conspirituality explode. So it's not like, Wes gave a lot of History a couple of weeks ago and that's very useful, I think it's I think it's easy to use in our language, sensationalize. And catastrophize. With pulling out or making connections between contemporary movements like in spirituality and q&a on and early 20th century fascism. The way I see it is that is that not only is our present media landscape, it didn't it didn't arise from from nothing. But once once it gets going, and you know, the influencers that we covered, don't have to know anything particular about, you know, Julius Evola, or, you know, how he recounts early 20th century fascism or they don't have to know anything about how close the BJP is to a kind of a kind of Nazi worship actually, in its literature. Those things don't have to be overt for there to be a strong historical current that pushes people along in a particular direction, along predictable themes. So I'll just say a few things about the historical backdrop that allows for spirituality to have this unending kind of fountain of source material to draw on. It's very true that Nazis loved Yoga. But all early 20th century fascists did, because the there was a general fetishization and just Enthrallment with the idea that the individual body and bootstrapped up or macrocosm up into the national body could be powerful and pure and sovereign and free from foreign influence and foreign influence rather it be the, you know, individualistic foreign influence of the of modern medication or the, you know, trans cultural influence of borders that are becoming more porous as 20th century history progressive progresses. The Third Reich itself drew on a fervor around physical culture and natural remedies that was very much concerned very much anxious with the notion of white replacement, white genocide and the revitalization of urbanized lifestyles. The idea being that, as modern Europe became more corporatized, and more sedentary, but also more globalized, that somehow the invading hordes of labor workers from the global south would out-reproduce the, the the citizens of the north, and this was an act of fear that, you know, continues to continues to this day. And so they sought to strengthen ties of blood and soil through bodybuilding, through physical culture through gymnastics, through pure foods through organic gardening, which was actually, you know, ecological farming was the brainchild of Rudolf Steiner. So there's, you know, there's little bits of good and everything here. And then the overall sort of application has some very sort of ominous shadows behind it. And then also fetishes involving reproduction and milk, which is part of why the modern conpirituality and coupon movements are so incredibly heteronormative and usually transphobic. Okay, so that's history, one lens. Etiology is another lens. Now, I don't know if Wes specifically quoted Barkun, in identifying these three axioms as being at the heart of conspiracism. I did not, he did not. Okay, so Barkun omments on this. And then a number of people pick it up later on, but, but basically, in order to start moving into conspiracy land, you have three very strong feelings. Nothing is as it seems, everything happens for a reason. And everything is connected. Now, here's the thing is that like if you studied yoga or Buddhism in any I just want to make sure did my face become big there? Because that's why I'm coming out of the screenshare it did okay. Yep. Okay. So, the, if you had, if you, if you had spent any time studying yoga, Buddhism, Eastern philosophy at all, nothing is as it seems everything happens for a reason and everything is connected are basically the, the fundamentals of, of Maya or the illusory nature of material reality, nothing is as it seems, everything happens for a reason would be you know, in Buddhism interdependent arising or karma or or you know, any any notion of, of the immutable connections between cause and effect that just have their own momentum. And then And then thirdly, everything is connected or interdependence, or oneness or non duality. Like if you had schooled yourself in these very beautiful contemplations on the nature of reality, you might also have kind of entrained yourself to roll out the red carpet for for conspiracy theorizing. And, you know, I believe, and you know, my colleagues believe that that's part of what happened at the beginning of the pandemic is that we had an awful lot of people who had meditated on these three principles for a very long time. And we're primed for them to be curdled in a way for them to be flipped into a kind of chiaroscuro in which they took on this sort of, you know, piquant negative, ominous meaning, which was also exciting, that's the other thing. So, you know, nothing is as it seems, everything happens for a reason, and everything is connected as spiritual axioms, I think, you know, sort of naturally point to a sense of equanimity. And yet, if there's this shadow of, of, you know, the portents injected into those same principles, I think it's very easy to develop a much more like teeth on edge perspective on the world. And one of the things when I say that, you know, there's something exciting about the flip between equanimity and hyper vigilance. There's something about the consumer orientation of yoga, Buddhism and wellness, that's just incredibly boring after a while. It's just too lovely. It's just too peaceful. And part of that is the fact that it is always de-politicized. And I think one of the things that happens, this is really my own speculation reflects my political views. But I think one of the things that happens when the new age and wellness worlds run up against Q Anon and conspirituality in the spring of 2020, is that finally, something seems to be important, because for the longest time, I would say for decades, the driving a driving principle of New Age, culture has been de-politicization. Don't involve yourself in worldly affairs, the Democrats and the Republicans are the two, two sides of the same illusion. You know, nothing really happens anyway. And, you know, the world is all joined in one and, you know, and my trip to Costa Rica really drove that home for me, right. So the last thing that I'd say is that ideologically these three these three principles intersect with yoga in New Age, spirituality, as I've explained, but they also address epistemic social and existential needs. So the social psychologists of conspiracy theory, theorists, or, you know, social psychologists who study conspiracy theories pretty much agree that what the theory does, regardless of what it is, is it gives a group of people this in group feeling that they know something that others People don't, that helps them with their social connections, you know, creates bonds, whether they're healthy or not, is another story. And it also addresses their existential needs, if people are very scared, as you know, they might well be about the pandemic or about, you know, late stage capitalism or about climate change or about medical malpractice, then those needs are spoken to. Okay. So that's ideology let's move to politics. And here, we just have to say that, you know, the, the US is the primary exporter of I mean, popular culture in general. But so it makes sense that it would also be the primary exporter of can spirituality and Q anon. And that means that it will carry with it the the impacts of profound institutional neglect, combined with a kind of demoralizing neoliberal propaganda, that, on one hand, tells citizens that they should be happy all the time, and on the other hand, tells them that they have to make themselves happy, and nobody's going to help them that they're actually on their own. And I think this is, I don't think we can understand New Age yoga, wellness, and many new spirituality movements without understanding this kind of absence of social contract, that they grow up in and accelerate, especially in the internet age. Secondly, I would say that the marketing of alternative health practices has to sell whether they're good or bad, whether people enjoy them or not, or derive benefit or not. All health marketing has to sell distrust of public health, it has to say, implicitly, or explicitly, that the people in the lab coats the people doing the pressors, during the COVID. You know, scare that Tony Fauci that the people of the CIA, CDC, that Theresa Tam, that Bonnie Henry, that these people are un-trustworthy, that they don't know the full picture. And specifically, they don't know you, they don't know you personally. They are bureaucrats. And to the extent that a country's bureaucracy basically neglects and abuses, its citizens, those sentiments are going to be more acute. And so again, I'll just say, America.

Unknown: 52:56

Thirdly,

Matthew Remski: 52:59

you know, for a population that needs to protect itself against the ambivalence of the state, it really makes sense that the self care rituals of wellness and yoga, become aligned with conservative values that are libertarian, or that concentrate on personal autonomy all the way up to and including the sovereign citizen movement. Okay, now, who's the yoga teacher? I'm a little bit ambivalent about this photograph, but I just found it today because like, my god, I think it's Breathe, breathe easy Barbie. The yoga teacher is the de facto priest of the neoliberal state. Because what they have to do is they have to make the instability of the gig economy look beautiful. Their job is to go with the flow. Their job is to, you know, anoint, a kind of virtuous consumerism, you know, that is holistic and organic. And it all happens in a kind of like, individualistic framework where, you know, you are building your own dream, you are, you know, building your own side hustle, there's really no discussion within neoliberal politics of class consciousness or solidarity. And that is, you know, extremely true in the hyper individualistic and competitive marketplace of yoga and wellness. But there's no stability in this economy. You know, there's a lot of people that have been running around teaching yoga classes, you know, on on piecework or on per head payment basis for a long time and they're utterly exhausted and They also have to endlessly self promote. And that leads us to the last slide here, which is the technology aspect. You know, COVID-19 erupting in 2004 would have looked a lot different. But it didn't. And so it's almost like, while, you know, we had, we had a lot of infrastructure, trying to look at how to keep people safe, and, you know, sort of piecemeal ways. We also had social media, basically throwing kerosene onto every vector of distrust that was was out there. And the strange thing that started to happen, that we noticed really early on was that everybody in lockdown from the spring of last year, who was a gig worker, and who was already relying on social media for their primary visibility in this market, was suddenly in an even more compressed, competitive and flattened screen based landscape in which they had to make money. So how were, you know, sort of typical yoga teachers with followings of, you know, 1500 or 2500 people on Instagram, how were they going to continue to capture market share, when everybody was online, trying to get donations for their aunt for their for their, you know, live streamed yoga classes on Facebook? How is that going to happen? Well, we believe that what what a lot of people started to do, and this is not something anybody would admit to, but it's just sort of evident from the fact is that you could become more visible as a wellness influencer, if you adopted more contrarian content in a highly competitive marketplace. So I think what a lot of people discovered and when I was doing that work on the the the walrus Q Anon article, I found this to be like hundreds of examples of this, that the more inflammatory or emotionally engaging or manipulative the content, the more it will amplify the visibility and the charisma of the of the influencer. I think one of the saddest things about the pandemic landscape is that it put influencers into this position in which they could get positive ludic loop feedback from basically coming really close to shitposting. Q Annon content, whether they believed it or not. And this is just sort of mind blowing. There was there was there was probably a half dozen people that I reached out to, for the Walrus article where I said, so you know, you said this thing back in June, on your Instagram feed. And I'm just wondering, like, where did you hear that, that, you know, that that sex trafficking was the real pandemic? Sex trafficking of children was the real pandemic? And that's what nobody was talking about? Where did you get this stat that there was, you know, 800,000 people went, children went missing every year, which is just not true in the States. So I would reach out as a journalist asking these questions like, Where did you hear this? And do you still believe it? And if the person answered it all, they would say, you know, I don't want to associate myself with Q Anon. I was just passing along what I thought was valuable information that I had heard. And, you know, please don't put my name in your story. And I just it was really clear that people got audience captured. And they saw their engagement saw there was one woman who is still at it actually, she hasn't, she hasn't backed away. But the first time I kind of became aware of this was through the coverage of the A Anon anonymous podcast, the episode called the wellness to Q Anon pipeline, I think, and they covered three wellness influencers. And one of them her name was crystal teeny, and she's like a yoga teacher and model from from New Jersey, who had a line of yoga mats to sell And something happened to her where she watched a you know, kind of like a a famous Q Anon recruiting video. And she started posting Q Anon content, she started posting conspirituality content. And within a couple of months, her IG following went from two and a half 1000 to over 100,000. Like, there's money that comes with that, too. There are affiliate deals that come with that. It's actually it's a poison chalice. And I think what happened for a lot of people is that they didn't actually know what they were doing. And they became vectors for misinformation. Okay, so, let me move on to a couple of a couple of things from the cult literature that I think might be useful. Okay, um I think I mentioned at the top that cult literature, the bulk of it is pre digital. And that is really problematic. Because, you know, top sort of cult theorists and writers in the world are being pinged incessantly by top level journalists, you know, about Q Anon about conspirituality. And they're really being pressed to give answers for phenomena that don't actually fit the models that we have. I'll give you I'll give you one thing. It's it's an, it's undoubted that there are many aspects of Q Anon participation that feel cult like just to take this as an example. And yet, we don't have a model for cultic organization that does not feature the centrality of a leader. Or the capacity for that leader to congregate followers in brick and mortar spaces. That second point is a little bit less important. But what happens when the leader is actually invisible? What happens when the not only anonymous, but may not exist at all? So before Cullen Hoback, HBO film comes out, and it becomes a little bit more clear that Ron Watkins is probably acting as Q. Before that all happens. People who are looking at Q anon through the lens of cult analysis, can't really answer this question, right? Like, what do you do with a social organization like this that has all of the behavior that has all of the informational control, that is self sealing, that has a transcendent ideology that believes that everything is coming to a particular crescendo point and specific things are going to happen and relies on prophecy and all of this stuff? What do you do with a group like that, that does not have a leader because at the top of every model for cultic organization, typically is the notion of the charismatic leader from, you know, Jim Jones to Keith Raneri, to whoever you'd like to name. And so I mean, my take on that is that the the leaderless group, first of all, is connected operationally two, you know, forms of white supremacist movements in the United States that go back over the last 40 years like that's, that's a tactic to sort of diffuse responsibility and to make sure that nobody, nobody goes down at the center. But the function of the charismatic leader in the traditional cult, or traditional as defined from the 1980s or so is to embody the sort of absolute reality principle of what everybody is supposed to do and believe and value. And when that isn't there, and and when that charismatic function isn't radiating out. What takes up the space and my answer for that, which is still speculative is that the brilliance of Q Anon, is that it made every participant into a charismatic, it actually diffused charismatic responsibility to the individual digital soldiers who were all supposed to visualize themselves as heroes on the, you know, cyberspace battlefield in of good and evil. But that's not a very satisfactory answer. All all of which is to say that I think there are some aspects of cult literature that are useful, and some aspects that are just that are outdated. Also, I would say that there are economic and class and also mental health issues, that cult literature will not address that I think are crucial in understanding the success of something like Q Anon and I'm, I'm not making Q Anon and conspirituality interchangeable. So, let me just clarify that I believe in my formulation, conspirituality is kind of the landscape out of which Q Anon can arise, okay? If you can imagine, conspirituality as as Minecraft, and then Q Anon is, you know, some structure, some castle that could be built within it out of its elements. That looks very ominous. That's kind of how I visualize it. Okay, so, there is a couple there are a couple of ideas, however, that I think are useful. And let me just go back to screen share, to show you what I mean. Okay all right. So, I'll give a basic definition of of, of the, "cult" but then I'm going to talk about something called disorganized attachment, which I think is is the most useful framework. Okay, so this is 19. I didn't put the year here. Yeah. Oh, no, I did. It's 1986. This is Louie West and Michael Langoni. And they say that a cult is a group or movement exhibiting great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea or thing, and employing unethical, manipulative or coercive techniques of persuasion and control. Okay, isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heightened suggestibility, and subservience, powerful group pressure's information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgment, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of leaving it. And all of this is designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community. So if we just look at that list, which is I think, classic here. And I'll just highlight it. Yeah, um, what we see with people who join the online groups of, you know, Kelly Brogan and Sayer Ji or people who are completely immersed in the materials of Christiane Northrup, or I mean, I had a number of pictures up here we've got you know, Mickey Willis, Yolande Norris-Clark, Stephanie Scipio, here in Toronto, Zach Busch, Kelly Brogan Guru Jagat. This guy down here can't see him very well Madhavad Settee, Bernard Gunther, Christiane Northrup, it's just kind of a grab bag of of people that you'll be able to learn about through our various episodes, but also I write a lot about them on medium. You know, when people get involved, none of them run brick and mortar buildings, none of them run residential cults, right? There's no There's no waco compound in conspirituality that we're aware of. However, the immersive nature of the online content can definitely isolate a person from their friends and family. It can definitely debilitate them in terms of the time management part of their lives where they're spending, you know ungodly amounts of time consuming the content of the particular influencer special methods to heightened suggestibility and subservience. You know, if the, the religiosity of the particular influencers content has them chanting or you know, saying mantras or advising people particular types of meditation, then these are all sort of techniques of suggestibility, powerful group pressures, information management is a huge one. And of course, it's kind of a chicken and egg thing, because the groups that we study, so very easily are able to isolate themselves within echo chambers and filter bubbles. Suspension of individuality or critical judgment, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of leaving it. I mean, that's embedded in the in the sort of induction promise of here's this terrible thing that's happening out there the pandemic. And here's the spiritual spiritual solution that I offer, very difficult for the vulnerable person to leave that once they have been drawn in. So that's a useful basic definition that I wanted to have you on board. But I think the more important dynamic that comes from the literature that I want to flag comes from a researcher named Dr. Alexandra Stein. She has an amazing book called Terror, love and brainwashing, attachment in cults and totalitarian systems. And that's from 2017, there's been a new edition. And I'm just going to read this paragraph. And then I'll break it down a little bit. So the paragraph is describing a scenario within family psychology. And so there are developmental overtones to it. As I read it, you can replace child with follower and caregiver with leader. And it pretty much scans because that's what she does in her book. So this is a description. Now, anybody who has a good background in psychology will know what disorganized attachment is and how it fits in with with attachment theory. So I'm not going to go into that. But, and I think that even if you don't have that on board, the sensations of disorganized attachment are palpable through this description. So we're describing she's describing a pattern of relationship between child and caregiver. That's called disorganized and disorganized also implies volatile, unpredictable, but also highly charged and, and very bonded. And she says that this occurs when a child has been in a situation of fright without solution. So fright without solution. I think this is culturally familiar with us, it's globally familiar to us at this point. Fright without solution is is a good sort of band name for the beginning of the pandemic. The caregiver is at once the safe haven and also the source of threat or alarm. So when the child feels threatened by the caregiver, he or she is caught in an impossible situation, both comfort and threat are represented by the same person, the caregiver, can I just go back to the dichotomy in Ward and veloce. Between the the paranoid sociality of conspiracy theories, and the pronoid sociality of New Age promises, that same kind of split between something very ominous and something very promising is being described here, or I'm implying that it's being described here within a within a psychological or relational context. The child experiences when these two things are at war, the unresolvable paradox of seeking to simultaneously flee from and approach the caregiver. This happens at the biological level, it's not thought out, or conscious. It's an evolved behavior to fear. The child attempts to run to and flee from the caregiver at one and the same time, but because they need to be near to the caregiver to survive. They will override attempts to avoid the fear arousing caregiver, usually the child stays close to the frightening parent, while internally both their withdrawal and approach systems are simultaneously activated and in conflict, that simultaneous activation of, of fear and need creates a heightened emotional state that can actually also feel euphoric. Now, let me just give a prime example of how this worked out early on in the pandemic. This is the face of a very handsome face and radiant face of Mickey Willis, who was the producer and director of a film you might have heard of called Plandemic. Plandemic was probably the most successful medical conspiracy theory propaganda piece ever produced, or released. It was released on May 5 of 2020. It featured an extended interview with Judy Mikovitz who said many of the same things that Tom Cowan did, including the fact that you know, will masks will actually give you viruses because you're going to recirculate? She also said that, you know, you could, she implied that you could cure COVID By rolling around in sand on the beach or something like that. Anyway, he releases pandemic on May 5. There's like, spooky music involved. There's a you know, everything is shot in this kind of like very noir, disorienting, very ominous aesthetic. And then the day after, this guy, photographs himself, radiant with golden light in his home in wherever he is in New Mexico, or Arizona, crying into Facebook, about how he loves everybody, and how we're all going to pull together and how it's going to, you know, everything is going to be okay if we just rely on each other. So on May 5, he releases a film that scares the shit out of 10s of millions of boomers. And on the next day, he goes on Facebook, and he talks about how he's willing to die for everybody. If they all, you know, he plays he gives this Messiah speech basically, in very soothing tones that are very spiritually charged. This, whether he, you know, knows what he's doing or not, is like a classic cultic technique of provoking a disorganized attachments state in the viewer on May 5, I'm going to terrorize you. And on May 6, I'm going to tell you that staying close to me, or being involved with a community of people who are likewise scared is going to be your pathway to salvation. That creates what Alexandria Stein describes, in this circumstance as a trauma bond not that different from what arises in, you know, domestic abuse situations or situations of long term family violence. So breaking down this dynamic. The caregiver presents a false safe haven apart from other attachments, but their care is unpredictable mingled with neglect or abuse. See, when you turn on any of Mickey Willis's content, you don't know whether he's going to tell you that you're being poisoned, or that you're turning into God, you just don't know. Like it could be one or the other. And the more that those two things oscillate, the more hooked you'll probably be right for a bunch of neurological reasons. At more extreme levels of unpredictability, the attachment of the member becomes disorganized, highly aroused, fearful, conflicted between withdrawing and approaching, but defaulting towards proximity. The group if there's a group involved, and then of course, all there's all of this sort of parasocial bonding around events like this on social media, they will nurture this disorganization and interpret the stress responses as signs of devotion and advancement. If you are suffering while watching Plandemic, then you're doing the work if you are suffering, but then also bonding with other people who are suffering you are doing the work of transformation together. Doesn't matter that you're on Facebook all day you are involved with spiritual transformation, and it's really hard work. It's the dark night of the soul. Don't you know? The thing about this conflicting pattern between being terrified and being loved bombed is that it's extremely stressful. In my own cultic experience, there was a regular daily ritual at the place one of the places that I was at called endeavour Academy where the you know that the, the teacher, the teacher had this kind of like, flipped back and forth between you are you're dying of your own ignorance and you are already Christ incarnate and the thing about being in the presence of that group dynamic was that it was unbearably stressful for me physically and psychologically, it made me very ill. And I was told over and over again by the group that those feelings of illness or dread, were actually signs that I was learning something that I was like, ascending or I was I was, I was becoming better in some way I I was going through a necessary process, I was going through the eye of the needle or something like that. And the thing about Alexandra Stein describes in her book is that the thing about the stress of this is that neurologically at a certain point, the the fawning response, which is the point at which you reach this maximal stress, and you cannot sort of resist or process anymore, can actually feel like pleasure. There's a moment of surrender to the social tension involved, that can feel as though you have had a quote, unquote, breakthrough into some profound realization about your life or about the nature of reality, or about the truth of the Cabal, or about, you know, how Theresa tam is actually trying to kill you. So, I would say that the empathy that I have for people who get wrapped up in these highly charged very emotional dynamics in which on one hand, they are paranoid, of the, you know, the New World Order. And on the other hand, they really feel strongly that wonderful things are happening, and in fact, must happen. Because it's darkest before the dawn. I understand that stress, and I empathize with it. It's very captivating. And I think it really locks people into dynamics that are hard to leave. Okay, I'm going to try to finish up in five minutes so that we have a good amount of time for questions. I think I've said a lot. I think I've said a lot about how a harmful can spirituality can be, you know, I haven't gone into details about just how much it moves the needle on, you know, vaccine hesitancy and things like that. I know that when we get into its deepest expressions, or its most rigid expressions like Q Anon, that when you go to the subreddit called Q anon casualties, you'll see that there's like 150,000 users that are signed up and they're telling each other stories about having lost their their family members to to q anon. You know, there's a lot of this material that destroys families and relationships. I have been, I haven't actually participated in any court cases like this. But I've I've spoken with a number of people who have like, interviewed me to see whether or not I could be a friend of the court or provide an amicus brief in you know, divorce proceedings or some kind of testimonial because one person in a marriage has become devoted to conspirituality or Q anon and won't vaccinate the children and the other partner is immunocompromised themselves, or their parents are and it just, it's just, it's like a it's there's there's incredible pain that comes from this material. And so, in the midst of sort of being aware of that pain, I think it's very easy to have a reaction of disgust to those who would use spirituality, or would cloak let's say, anti masking or anti Vax sentiment in religiosity. But I want to end by suggesting that unless we recognize what conspiritualists get right. In general, not in specific, that we won't really be well equipped to build the kind of society in which in which an explosion like this is is less likely to occur. So so let me just share a few ideas on that. Okay, so conspiritualists are great storytellers. And in contrast, you know, Teresa Tam has to explain processes, tasks, benchmarks phases, so does Tony Fauci very different tasks. The stories that conspiritualists tell try to grasp what Timothy Morton the the philosopher calls the hyper object, the totality of the world. And what we have in the communications of public health and critical thinking is okay, well, let's look at this little thing. And make sure that that's operating well. Let's look at this problem and make sure that we we increase efficiency and clarity there. But the stories that conspiritualists tell our grand stories, like Marvel movie grand stories, right. And at root, many of the stories are reasonable, because they're stories about predatory capitalism, their stories about medical or organized intergenerational abuse. Is it really implausible that there is a pedophile ring at the center of the Democratic Party? When we know that there is a pedophile ring that is organized around the figure of Jeffrey Epstein? No, it's not implausible. So what are people right about? What stories are they right about? And how do they tell stories in compelling ways that allow them to be felt, first of all, but then also answered and brought towards some kind of denouement? One thing that I point out is that often however, the stories that conspiritualists tell our story appropriated One prime example being that when Save the Children emerges in the summer of 2020. Many influencers that used it would draw sort of a correlation between efforts to save the children from the, you know, deep state cabal with efforts to, you know, reckon with the fact of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada, for example. Those are not the same story. And in fact, it's a way tragically for the MMI WG story to be, I think, co opted. Now, I would also say that conspiritualists understand the principle of heroism. Part of this is because they operate through charismatic leadership, and they endow their followers with a kind of autonomous self importance. You become the hero of your own health, you become the master of your own well being. And yeah, and that can even work in a leaderless movement like Q anon through the deputize ation of its users. And, you know, we have to look at the question of when a movement like Q anon makes its digital soldiers into individualized heroes, and they, they might feel a sense of autonomy or agency for the first time in years. Where are they not feeling that? Are they not feeling that in local politics? Are they not feeling that in the democratic process? Are they not feeling that in their working lives? Conspiritualists also appeal to very real grievances and uncertainties? They know about economic inequality. They don't really have a social answer to it, they have kind of a demoralized answer, which is to promote, you know, sovereign citizenship and autonomy. But they also know from decades of, you know, globalist management, failure to act on climate change. They know from the me to movement, that contemporary institutions offer very few pathways to accountability. And so, this again, pushes them towards Well, I'm going to take responsibility for myself, I'm going to protect my own health I'm going to I'm going to pursue my privatized spirituality and religion towards my personal transformation. I would say also that conspiritualists do a really good job. Maybe they're deploying cultic dynamics to or techniques to do it, but they soothe anxiety about fraying social networks. They are well aware of how much technology has reorganized our social relations, they know how chaotic that feels. And so they are constantly appealing to populism, community, heteronormativity, and the nuclear family and to naturalistic fallacies about, you know, how if we all got closer to the earth and did more gardening, we would feel more connected with each other. They're not wrong about that they're wrong about the heteronormativity maybe, but like, they're not wrong about fraying social networks. But, you know, they're not reaching towards, you know, structural analyses of fraying social networks, they're not, you know, and so and so, you're gonna see a lot of overlap a predictable overlap between anti Vax sentiment, and, you know, the moral panic over critical race theory in the United States. Both are instances one is biological, and one is social in which the person feels that the state is injecting their body with some kind of chemical or shame about, you know, a history and so those things flow together. Okay. Finally, I don't know if this is the scariest or the or the or, or the most poetic way to end. But conspiritualists don't manage endless crises? They offer salvation, but that salvation is often offered by cosplaying the role of channeling the wisdom of the natural world. And here we have the incredibly handsome face of the Marlboro Man of conspiratorial ality Zach Busch, Dr. Zack Bush, who is an anti Vax activist who is obsessed with the microbiome and sells diatomaceous earth that is, has, I don't know, bacteria in it or something like that, so that you have good poopy. And here's a quote from one of his sermons. He's an amazing speaker. He's totally mesmerizing. And this is in the midst of an anti Vax kind of presentation. Go create with nature today. Don't buy something today. Alright, so an anti capitalist, maybe, you know, don't buy something today, except my supplements, go create something today, plant a seed, stack a stack of rocks on the river and see the river move those play with nature today, I encourage you to look up Zack Bush, because I'm not doing his voice justice. He's like, it's like listening to, I don't know, to Charlton Heston or something like that, like he speaks so beautifully. Go outside and revisit your beauty. You don't even know yourself yet. Society has not let you see it. You don't know what lies within you. Because society has made sure you don't know your own power, and so on and so forth. Find yourself love yourself. And through that we will find our beauty and we will find the reverence for humanity as much as nature. Alright, so we have charismatic sermonizing. At the level of Martin Luther King, Jr, Cornel West, like you name your favorite order, there will be somebody conspirituality who's doing it that well or better. And the humanizing part of pointing to that is, is to say it's very understandable why people are hungry for that kind of mysticism, that kind of poetry. It speaks very powerfully to disenchantment and to alienation. And for somebody who is a doctor, to speak that way, is even more powerful. And it returns I think, people to the nostalgia of, you know, the 19th century and before when you know doctors medicine and poetry and philosophy were not independent disciplines. And so, I guess I'll I'll end by saying that if we are concerned by the misinformation that comes in the sheep's clothing of spirituality, that we have to take the sheep's clothing seriously, because it's feeding an emotional need. And it doesn't, it's not going to work to debunk somebodies anti Vax science, it's not going to work to say, you know, you're really an idiot for thinking that 5g towers are giving you migraines. None of that is going to work. What's going to work is to reckon with the I think the hollowness and the alienation and the lack of social support that allows this kind of very attractive, but also very dangerous answer to take root.

Wes Regan: 1:35:22

Thank you very much, Matthew, that was even more detailed in depth and thoughtful than I was expecting and listening to your podcast, and reading some of your other work, I was expecting it to be thoughtful in depth. On behalf of the Vancouver lodge of education and research, I want to turn it over to Casey Collins, who's one of our principal officers, senior Warden, I believe Jr. Ward, she's I can't remember, we haven't met in so long. In any event, we've asked Casey to respond with some thoughts and comments on behalf of the lodge before we open it up to have some general discussion and some questions from the rest of the audience. So I will Oh, and Troy, do you have a question? Or did you want to just be added to the queue?

Troy Spreeuw: 1:36:07

Now I just want to be added to the queue. I don't want to use my bully pulpit. I'll let you guys go at it for a little

Wes Regan: 1:36:13

after Casey, we have a question from Craig DiRocco. That was mentioned in the chat. So if anyone else has questions, please feel free to type them in the chat. Or you can raise your hand. But I want to turn it over quickly to Casey, for some response.

Matthew Remski: 1:36:26

Also, I want to say yeah, I also just want to say that I do not have a hard stop in 15 minutes, so I can stay to.

Wes Regan: 1:36:32

Thanks, Matthew, we appreciate that. Yep. Casey, take it away.

Unknown: 1:36:37

Thanks, Wes. I'm Matthew, first of all, thank you so much for taking time to be with us today. I'm a fan of your podcast. I find myself listening and smiling because oftentimes, what you articulate so well on the podcast, kind of validates what I find in my research on Japanese new religious movements. And oftentimes I find it it's difficult for me to articulate some of the things I've observed or experienced, but then to hear them in a different kind of familia in, you know, North American spirituality and things like this. It's It's gratifying to say the least, and it's a pleasure to meet you. So I have just a couple of questions. My first one is actually it's about Buddhism is kind of specific. And I'm interested in what you were calling like the the curdling of those three axioms, kind of at the core of kind of the milieu of conspiritual thinking and I'm just it strikes me as kind of this uncritical or unnuanced mixture of Hindu and Buddhist concepts that are often conflated and because Hinduism might be like Sankhya philosophy might suggest that the world is an illusion, yeah, but Buddhism Buddhism disagreed with that, that notion, and that actually, you know, that the world is real, but being attached to it or having a particular attitude or approach to it is what can make you suffer is one of the things that Hindus and Buddhists have disagreed about so much, you know, the height of the length of emptiness, these things have gotten conflated, and then get imported into the yoga world and New Age ideas, perhaps through kind of like Orientalist enthusiasts and and kind of just, I don't know, so I'm wondering if you could talk about this conflation of these ideas?

Matthew Remski: 1:38:45

Yeah, I mean, I think for for most consumers of, you know, globalized Buddhism and yoga, the significant and yet, seemingly, well, significant, but difficult to understand philosophical differences between the various schools, are probably going to be less important for the curdling of those axioms from, you know, here are some, two or three ideas that produce equanimity or should produce a sense of feeling of rest within the world into I now I'm on edge, and now something is happening. You know, I think that the philosophical position of, you know, is the world illusory, or does it exist, but in a way that we don't, we understand, we misunderstand it. And then there are various Buddhist schools in there. I think those arguments are lost to most consumers. And what they're left with is, is, you know, nothing is as it seems, which is is a lot more vague. And and but I think that I think that the the, the point about the curdling is that I don't think consumers have global Buddhism or Hinduism, neither of those economies have emphasized the ethical foundations of those cultures. And so, the adopters of global, the converts of global Buddhism and Hinduism, from the 1970s onwards, have trended towards de-politicization. And so the the salient or that the soothing aspect of nothing is, as it seems, allows for a kind of real world bypassing for both groups, regardless of how they understand the philosophy. And then, but I think I think that, that, I guess I'll just repeat what I said in the, in the presentation, is that, at a certain point, there's a boredom that sets in that, that switches this nothing is as it appears, as in well, meaning I shouldn't, I don't need to take anything that seriously. I don't need to pay attention, life will unfold as it unfolds or things are in their place, and God is in His heaven or whatever. That that that feeling becomes disenchanting itself because, obviously, life is continuing, obviously, things are still changing, you know, you can't shut out the news forever. It's not like you start meditating and somehow the Industrial Revolution doesn't, you know, spew carbon into the atmosphere. So people are doing a practice that is d politicize them and then they're feeling the impact of their political reality rise around them. And the statement nothing is it, as it appears, can flip from this kind of relaxation into the status quo into Oh, I should learn more and I should do more and maybe my mystical insight that I've gained through meditation will allow me to see how to be an activist now. So I don't really know if that answers your question, but But I too am frustrated by the fact that that the this kind of globalized products of glow of Buddhism and Hinduism are really kind of vague and and, and Orientalised.

Unknown: 1:42:35

Thank you. Um, I have one other question. And it relates to the humanizing of conspiratuality you mentioned kind of the you know, the need to understand why people are are hungry for this type of thinking. And I was just listening recently to your episode about Elena Brower and doTERRA oil, you know, multi level marketing. Yeah. And you mentioned there the with kind of like an editorial comment that, you know, you pause to say, one of your informants had mentioned that joining a multi level marketing scheme can seem to outsiders very kind of odd and irrational or whatever, but that this informant wanted to stress that there are real benefits positive, you know, initial experiences of belonging that can be affirming in the same way that, you know, kind of discovering this, this kind of, I don't know, affirmation through I'm just wondering if you could mention also some of the positive benefits. Oh, yeah. Well might experience within a group when they when they join?

Matthew Remski: 1:44:08

Well, I referenced the social psychology around the conspiracy community offering epistemic social and existential benefits or answering those needs. And I think that's, that's, that's the the primary useful framework to join. Christiane, Northrop's Great Awakening video series and to tune in every day is to gain the sense along with a whole bunch of others in common threads that you now know something that is privileged and will allow you some kind of moral or spiritual advantage as you move through your day. It will soften the jagged edge of perhaps You know, the deepest pain of the information crisis that we live through day by day, which is, you know, here's somebody who's telling you how reality is and and she's, she's doing it from her kitchen in Maine and it feels very cozy. And, you know, there are not none of these influencers are without their particular kind of attractive effect. You know, Christiane Northrup is kind of like the, the gracious aunt who's always pouring tea for you, you know, Kelly Brogan is this kind of, you know, glamorous, both maternal but also very independent and sort of unattached, or avoidany attached lioness who wants to, you know, empower followers. So there's a, there's a, there's an attraction to an effect that I think is very important as well, that people bond around parasocially, as they are getting the secret knowledge, as they are finding, you know, social relationships that are more receptive than the ones that they are finding at home or in their communities. And, yeah, if they are nurturing some kind of experience of past medical trauma, for example, to be told that there is a way to bypass you know, medical or public health infrastructure and take care of yourself, either by not believing that the virus is real, or by understanding that your sacred holy immune system can defeat it on its own, then that can be existentially valuable, because the amount of terror that some people have in relation, especially to the predatory American health system is really high. So yeah, there are all kinds of of wonderful, wonderful benefits that are about social identification. And, you know, you know, horizontal networking, what I would say is different between the online movements that we study we've studied over the last 18 months, and traditional cults is that they're online, and so they're more fragile. You know, one of the things that we saw happen on January 20, on telegram was the absolute carnage, of Q Anon adherence, tearing each other to shreds over whether or not they were going to remain faithful to the plan, whether they were going to stand by Q, as they were watching Joe Biden swear the oath of office on that Bible. And in real time, the ones who were saying I'm going to stay with the plan, we're having to say, Oh, he was just replaced by a CGI President Biden, and that's not a real Bible. And you know, Trump is off in the wings and so on. So but but the level of conflict and how immediately it overran the various coupon channels on telegram was really indicative of how fragile these bonds actually are. They offer so I think, I think that the the final point that I'd make is that groups like this offer incredible social benefit. But it's slightly deceptive because it's it's built on either the deceptions of pseudoscience, or a fiction like Q Anon, or it's built upon the the bonding effected by a charismatic leader who may not have their best interests in mind.

Wes Regan: 1:48:52

Thank you, Casey. We haven't really touched on it, Matthew, and I want to get to some of the other questions here but you you've sort of hinted at some of the things in the conspiratuality podcast, which you delve a bit deeper into, including disconfirmation. And the idea that we now have this situation where we have a leaderless cult, effectively, online, and yet, you see this sort of entrepreneurial, charismatic leadership that steps forward and is able to, you know, harness some of that cultic energy and stamp their, you know, presence on the on the cultic milieu online, which I think you and the podcast have done a service to research into this area. Because I think as, as you pointed out, you know, classical academic research into this has, we're still relying on a lot of truisms or things that we have learned from, you know, before the digital era, and we're at a real interesting sort of, we're in a liminal space, or perhaps we passed through that liminal space in the 90s and early 2000s that we are fully in into this new era of digital chaos in which the cultic dynamics are actually quite different in many ways. So I really appreciate your attention to that. And I want to direct people to your podcast where you delve into that more deeply. But I want to draw attention to a question by Craig here, who earlier asked the two groups that seem to be most in the crosshairs of conspiracy groups and fascist regimes, regimes, which he would consider more organized conspiracy groups. And if you have studied any of Nazi Germany, you'll appreciate that conspiracy theories are very important in how they mobilize their social solidarity around their ideas. But he's asking, you know, often in the crosshairs are Freemasons and people in the Jewish faith and he, he asks you, Why do you think that might be?

Matthew Remski: 1:50:50

Well, I can speak more to just my general knowledge of of the perennial nature of anti semitism and conspiracy theorizing going back into medieval Europe and the blood libel theme that is just sort of writ large and Q anon. You know, I don't think that the anti semitism of Q anon and conspirituality can be untangled from the proximity of these movements to ethno nationalism and white supremacy in the United States, either, because there's always on the fringe of the, you know, anti mask, anti lockdown, anti vaccination argument, there's always the fringe of, or there's always the context of the the Jews are not only controlling how money flows, and that's all unequal right now. But they're also controlling the cultural narrative of how, you know, the United States considers its racial history and moves towards racial equality. And so there's this sort of confluence of paranoia around financial actors and educational actors. And, and then, of course, the entertainment industry, that all gets sort of tagged as being Jewish. So that's the contours of anti semitism are just sort of like plain to see. I guess I don't know enough about historical or contemporary Freemasonry, to be able to comment much except to say that you know, as a sort of well formed and organized and ritualized social movement, that is dedicated to, you know, principles of, of, you know, humanism, rational philosophy, but also preserving, you know, some aspects of esoteric heritage. And also, I, am I am I mistaken in in an understanding that the Freemasons typically try to adopt positions of political neutrality

Wes Regan: 1:53:38

in the Anglo American tradition that's explicitly So, in the French what we call the grand orient tradition, which is the largest, you know, Masonic body by membership in France and, and birth lodges in colonies around the world. It's actually, in many cases explicitly political, and, and yet also explicitly secular. Right. So there's some nuance and some schisms within Freemasonry, but within North America, it you know, Freemasonry has traditionally gone to great lengths to try and remain explicitly apolitical. And D politicize its presence in communities, although, for many years,

Matthew Remski: 1:54:20

It sounds like it sounds like it's such a diverse movement. With with so many different types of of participants, that I'm wondering if, if the if the targeting of Freemasons over and I haven't seen a lot of it, I think its features in q anon discourse, actually, over the last 18 months or so. But I'm wondering if it's some sort of vague kind of branding issue where because the The because Freemasonry is difficult to define difficult to understand because there are membership requirements there seem to be, you know, degrees of participation and there's a there's a ritualization of the institution, it's very easy to stereotype it's very easy to other. I mean, I think just speaking as a as a civilian, the term Freemason for me conjures you know, the secret society that is planning to retain some sort of secretive knowledge. And I think that is just an easily transposable brand on too deep state or cabal or there's a transitive quality there that probably has nothing to do with anybody's sociological understanding of what Freemasonry is. Yeah, thanks for that.

Troy Spreeuw: 1:55:55

Wes. Wes, and I may well, you're an excellent, yeah, please. Yeah. But but the My question has nothing to do with what you guys were just talking about. And I in, in many ways, the establishment of a small our Republican representative government. That is that that at least leans into secularism, if not, the overt deism that we practice in Freemasonry is, and I believe that even on the conspirituality side, they're right about this, we, Freemasonry established representative democracy, and the forces that work within Freemasonry established representative democracy in in England, and then in the States and in other places around the world, quietly, discreetly, because that's, that's our working ideal. And, and we don't even know, as a group, where that comes from internally. It might just be a result of the the type of deism that we still practice which you know, I believe harkens back to the the even the Gnostic heresy, maybe even earlier. But right. But we we see, the establishment, and I meant small establishment of these principles in the west and functioning for a couple of 100 years, seamlessly. And Freemasonry just gets it succeeded so successful, it's succeeded so vastly and so completely, that it's, it's, it's, it's almost no longer needed. It's like the argument about the ultimate victim of its own success. Yeah, yeah. The the true Bavarian Illuminati succeeded so wildly in establishing, you know, removing the power of the church from education and government. And, and replacing it with a, you know, a pluralist secularism and hear Freemasonry does the same thing everywhere else, and people take it such for granted and are set but my real question was about how much of of our problem now is about, everybody just takes the way things work for granted, which is not easy. consensus building and representative democracy is hard. Losers have to accept the loss. People could have. First of all, you cannot bring violence into politics, because basically, any version of violence on either side now is a form of fascism. And that there's no way that representative democracy is trying to build consensus can handle how radical people need to be to embrace violence in a political milieu now, so. But we've left the ground without idealistic competition at all to the point where nobody bothers to learn about the past of this stuff, or about constitutional, their constitutional rights in the States or the way representative democracies in Canada and the rest of the world work. So I mean, what I wanted to ask about is, you know, how, how do we get back to a time where people appreciate how hard it is to work with it a representative democracy, because all the benefit is all around us. And yet, we're just, we're just lighting it on fire. And the people who are willing to fight for fascistic ideas are willing to embrace violence, and everybody else is just like, well screw those guys.

Matthew Remski: 1:59:42

They're also willing, they're they're also willing, they're also more willing to to embrace representative democracy, in certain cases was just what we're seeing with the overwhelming of school board meetings and you know, and local politics, elections in the state so, so so they are they are playing that too. Yeah, it's a great, it's a great question. I mean, every, like, I find, I find I empathize with your question. And I find it nostalgic for a time in which, you know, there was a better base level of of civics education. Where, you know, everybody could just sort of like, remember what they learned in grade nine about how, how democracy worked and and things would, I don't know they would feel better about that and all get along on a Saturday afternoon. But I don't know I like I'm thinking about this might seem like a tangent, but I'm thinking about a very powerful book that we reviewed on the podcast called it came from something awful by a journalist named Dale Baron. And it's called how an old right troll the subtitle is how an old right troll army accidentally memes Donald Trump into office. And and and I guess what I want to say is that you obviously know the history of your Is it a guild, you would call it your, your your organization? Like really well? And that everybody, everybody who is using it for some kind of using the name Freemasonry, with with for some kind of social capital? I don't believe they would know anything of that history, nor would they care any more than they would care about what it means to traffic in anti semitic materials? Because one of the things that Barron's book lays bare is that in the internet culture of, of, you know, meme-ified politics, which is what conspirituality is also driven by? Thing, history is stuff, history is pictures, history is images. It's not like clear arguments or positions or narratives about how something came to be are of high cultural value. What is of high cultural value is the fact that the word Freemason can be used. I mean, if you imagine Donald Trump saying the word, just the sound of the word itself, would carry more weight and emotional impact than, you know, the most articulately written history could provide. And so it feels Yeah, I feel I feel melancholic about your question, actually. Because? Because it's it's, it's, it's a very, it's a great question, which is about, well, you know, how do we slow everything down so that people can understand what's actually running things? And yeah, I don't, I don't have an answer for that, at the

Wes Regan: 2:03:08

time that everything is speeding up.

Troy Spreeuw: 2:03:10

Yeah. Yeah, neither do and neither do those of us who take these things seriously, which is part of why you're here and why we're talking about this so much, and Wes has been talking about it. I've just before we move on to Brother Harbick's question, I'm just gonna read a comment that was in the chat much earlier. And this just sort of illustrates the problem we've got because we've got members of these rather radicalized conspiracy groups, in our membership in the lodges that are initiated in our members and maybe even influential in some areas. And here's the comment, I'm not going to say his name, but I know he's a brother. And he just he said right before he flounced "Sorry to leave brother, I wish you would have announced that you would be enforcing your beliefs by skewing any and every everything from the counter argument. Your talk has lost its effectiveness." Yeah,

Matthew Remski: 2:04:01

I saw Yeah, I saw that. I saw that. I don't know what

Troy Spreeuw: 2:04:04

did you see me call him out right below? Because he she said that and bolted, which is not very Masonic at all? Because, yeah, you can't make a statement without allowing a reply or a counter argument. And that's, I mean, and that's part of the problem is that is that they use these tactics and, and they would never stand for those tactics in their groups. But when they were in our group, they come over here and, and use their destructive rhetoric, they have no idea what they're talking about. They don't even know what they're involved in. You know, they just, they, they see it as a as another vehicle for this sort of promotion and improvement and it's very frustrating to those of us who who value what this organization represents. And and it's, it's so broad and so inclusive. We daren't even say what it is. And that's part of the problem, I really think and I appreciate your response, because it's very considered. And I could see the wheels turning over there. Because I know you haven't spent much time thinking about us or what we do. But I can see the wheels turning now, where you're, you're well about.

Matthew Remski: 2:05:16

I mean, I mean, I, I don't think I have to know much about your group to sort of assess the crisis of that, of that comment. I mean, this is a weird format. And if we were in person, you know, it, I'd be standing at the front of the room, or sitting at the head of the table or something like that. And the person would obviously be uncomfortable, I would probably have paused earlier in the talk, because this also looks like a comment from somebody who is just overwhelmed by something, and isn't taking the time to articulate it, but they're saying they are communicating that they're overwhelmed. And so I think if we were in person, I would probably be able to feel that discomfort, and I probably would have stopped and said, Okay, so is Is there anything that is objectionable, or anything that you want to push back on? Or, you know, if I, if I'm speaking from a political point of view that you disagree with? Do you want to identify that so that we can move on because we can agree to disagree about, you know, stuff without, without abandoning the thread of the the actual data altogether? You know, I probably would have done that. I think it's hard to tell, with a comment like this what the person what the person means. I don't know what an effective talk would have been. I don't know. Like whether, yeah, I just want to ask the person more questions. What's, what's really, really alienating about this format? Is that somebody can bounce like that. Right. And, and, and, and register their discomfort without really explaining it. And, yeah, that's rough. Yeah,

Wes Regan: 2:07:07

I think I might have been more therapeutic than anything. So we'll move on to John Harvey's question next. But we had the same thing happened last year, when we hosted Dr. Thomas Milan Konda, who wrote in 2019, a book called conspiracy of conspiracies. And he's a professor emeritus of political science at State University of New York. And we had actually a member who was a ardent believer in Q Anon, and believed that this was in the lead up to the election in the US, I believe it was, and he believed that the the Q eschaton was at hand and things got very awkward. And so you know, we here we have this, this interesting conundrum in Freemasonry, where we are in a very old organization that on one hand, believes in rationality and we're a bit of a child of the Enlightenment, for better or worse, there's good baggage and some problematic baggage that comes with that. But on the other hand, we are stewards of rejected knowledge or stigmatized knowledge or these other things that you've hinted at earlier. Which, which means that, you know, guys who can be attracted to Freemasonry, for what we think are healthy reasons to have an interest in esotericism or hermetic, you know, old interesting arcane things can also have an interest in why the earth might actually be flat, or, or that there's, it's a hollow Earth with a king at the center of it, literally, or whatever else they might believe. But I wanted to get to John Harbick's question here, John, please. We end this. It doesn't look like anyone else has questions. We really appreciate you staying a little bit late. Matthew is we had some some technical difficulties. It's been a really rich and interesting discussion here. And I guess, unless anyone else has a final question from the audience. You know, I'll hand it over to John here for the last question

Unknown: 2:08:55

\

Troy Spreeuw: 2:08:55

I've got one more question, Wes. You can come back to me to address address.

Wes Regan: 2:08:57

So John, and then we'll have what is that? Okay. Matthew will be one. Yeah. Okay.

Troy Spreeuw: 2:09:01

Yep. Go. Go ahead, John. Okay, hopefully,

Unknown: 2:09:04

you can hear me. I can. Good right at a microphone failure. Anyway, very erudite, much appreciated. I'm reading something I wrote earlier. So some of its already been covered a wee bit, but the information that's been presented seems to be preaching to the choir, among the people who did sign up other than the departur ecxepted. But as Troy and West have noted, I mean, I've blocked people were, who are members of Freemasonry, who said, we'll do the research and I know that say, a flag, or also I see comments about the Nuremberg Code. So I'm, I consider that really specious reasoning, and it rankles me and other than finding a direct energy weapon to send to them, which I think Wes and Troy would get that joke. How can you reach those? Who do hold conspirituality beliefs within the craft? Or are they simply too far down the rabbit hole to be reached?

Matthew Remski: 2:10:13

Yeah. Okay. That's, that's a that's that's the, it's a great. I mean, there's another question, but this is a great one to, to move towards a conclusion with is that, you know, I don't know how often you meet, I don't know how, you know, I don't know how your meetings go and what kind of socialization that you do. But the extent to which it looks like this is an intergenerational organization where you can have intergenerational bonds, you can have people who act as, as mentors, people who feel like uncles to you and brothers to you, I know that you're using that appellation. You know, I think that you have an opportunity to put relationship above ideology or even worldview. In this particular circumstance, you know, if there's a commitment to, okay, we are studious, we value both, you know, enlightenment values, but we also want to preserve Hermes Trismagestus has, you know, we, there's a lot of things that we're interested in, and we love, and we really love sharing this stuff together. And we are dedicated to critical thought, and, you know, and and, and rationalism. Those are all very fine things. But I think the key ingredient to having a more sort of receptive and cohesive environment is that if you do feel that somebody has moved towards a kind of indoctrination, if they've moved out of reality, arguing about the facts isn't going to bring them back. Discussing, you know, how round the earth versus how flat the Earth isn't going to salve the wound that drove them out of the consensus based, you know, sort of community. Anything that you do to suggest that the the, the fellow is deluded, or they've been duped or they've been taken advantage of, or they're not, or they're not thinking straight, none of those things are going to work. What's what's what's going to work is the sense of social safety that the person feels, I think I described in some of the comments about cultic dynamics that and also in response to the questions at the beginning of the session. That the social relationships formed in groups like these are ultimately fragile because they're either based on pseudoscience or charismatic abuse. Any long standing social society with regular meetings and an infrastructure for sort of interpersonal care has an advantage over a huge advantage over Q Anon and that's the advantage of, you know, secure attachments. You know, here's somebody that I know I know something about his life. We are we see each other at meetings X number of times a month, or per year. And I I like the normalcy and the groundedness of knowing that this person cares about me. And so it's almost axiomatic in cult recovery circles, for the advice to be given to family members, for example, where somebody has been indoctrinated to do everything that you can to preserve the relationship. And because it's, it's the the memory of the secure attachment of the relationship that's eventually going to win out over the sort of false self of the indoctrination. There's also this idea that, you know, if a person gets sucked into Q Anon, they actually become a different person. And your job as their friend is to remember for on their behalf Have who they were before they got sucked in. And if you can reflect that back to them, that's going to be a stabilizing to the relationship. But, you know, the the person that you're talking about blocking John online, you might not have any social capital with. And so the advice that I'm giving about maintaining the relationship might not be appropriate. And in fact, it might not only not be appropriate, it might be counterproductive, to continue to discuss, especially in a social media forum. They're weird disinformation, you know, publicly that here's a weird weird thing about Facebook is that if you start arguing with somebody about the reality of Q Anon and a comment thread, the algorithm actually highlights that particular comment thread as being more interesting than other comment threads, the controversy and the conflict and the actual acrimony is a monetizable product by Facebook. And so the advice from the online disinformation activists is to is to block and to isolate people who produce disinformation. So we've got two conflicting sets of advice, cult recovery, people say maintain the relationship with a person at all costs. And I would say that is appropriate. In real life, if you actually have strong social connections with the person, then keep that going, because they're not getting that from the group they've been indoctrinated into. But then, if you encounter the material online, do not become a vector for its algorithmic spread by engaging with it, your you know, your, your, your best option there is to is to block because you don't have social capital to to lose anyway.

Unknown: 2:16:59

And I do want to maintain my same equilibrium. And there's no point in engaging in a social debate on topics this contentious online, so I see your point, it's just easier to block them, knowing now what I know, it's going to be difficult to engage personally with them. Because, you know, I can fake a smile with the best of them. But it you know, I'd rather be honest with myself and be a social hypocrite.

Matthew Remski: 2:17:33

Yeah, I mean, it's, there's, there's a, there's a line between being a social hypocrite and, and having the will, and also the emotional energy to to sit with somebody and say and say, yeah, that's, that's I, you know, to be able to say, to the Q Anon adherent. Wow, it sounds like you're really anxious about the state of the world. Can you tell me more about that, you know, but that, that takes a lot of energy. And not everybody is in a position to do that. And, you know, it can feel like a lot of emotional labor. And, yeah, we have to, we have to make tough choices about how much we invest.

Wes Regan: 2:18:19

Thank you, Matthew, it's gonna, there's gonna be a lot of awkward moments for us once we get back to in person meetings in Lodge, because there's been a lot of unfortunate things that have been said in digital formats. And we've really seen some people's true colors, oddly, in a way. You know, as to your point, Matthew, we build very strong trust bonds in lodge because we have these rites of initiation. Yeah. And we have these, you know, this ritualistic experience that we share. And it's unique. It's unique and peculiar to, to us in our society, so to speak. And that does create a really strong bond. But yet sometimes, we find you don't actually even know that person, you may have a strong bond in a I don't want to say superficial way, but in a way that comes just by virtue of being a part of a membership of something. But yet we've seen these comments from people within Freemasonry online, we're like, wow, I thought I knew that guy. And he's like, not who I thought he was, you know, he's expressing his truest self, perhaps, in in this format. So we're going to have an awkward time when we get back to face to face meetings and lodges. If we don't find a way to constructively try and get to a better point in.

Troy Spreeuw: 2:19:28

Shouldn't we be thankful that we've opened this Pandora's box so at least we could find these people as to exclude them from the people who don't care about facts, and now we can exclude them from the real conversation?

Wes Regan: 2:19:42

Perhaps I think it speaks to Matthew's answer about the tensions between recognizing who that person was before this happened or what you what you appreciate about them what you saw and that you found noble and liked and trying to get past the comments that have been brought up in a really hyper tentious moment. It also

Matthew Remski: 2:19:59

says something It's also probably like a good mirror on the how how, you know, ritualized bonding can, it can bring people closer together, and it can abstract relationships as well, you know, there's got to be some sort of relationship between between the, the, the ritual emotions that a community goes through, and just the casual shit that happens on the break room or whatever, right. And that's why, like, you know, I knowing nothing about your organization, I keep thinking about what I've heard about a totally different(Wes) Started by a Freemason. Okay. All right. Well, there you go. So what I'm what I understand about what I understand about AA, vastly problematic, there's some bad science involved with it. The you know, recidivism rate is is relapse rate is higher than they want to admit, I think. But sociologically, the bonds that are formed in these groups, I haven't heard of anything like it. And it's, it's a mixture of there's a formal, like, people sit in circle, and they do their thing. But then also, there's this, like, there's this dyad mentorship, where where, you know, the everybody has a sponsor, and so, like, there's a mixture of the formal and the informal of the group and the interpersonal, that that I think, is, is probably probably really interesting there. And I think if it was only the circle, then yeah, there would be a lot less of there would be a lot more of oh, I don't actually know you after all these years, because when push came to shove, something else happened.

Wes Regan: 2:21:37

I think so. We have one, you've been very generous. Matthew, one final question, which is a very British Columbia question. Yeah, I really appreciate the comments, you make them about how the, the bonds of ritual, create an abstract sort of closeness or imagine. And, and that's, you know, I want to hold on to that for future discussions within the lodge. But I want to turn it over to Cumberland, where we have a living room party,

Unknown: 2:22:03

with with a watch party, we were actually we've been following conspirituality pretty much since the beginning. And I'm interested when I saw in your bio, that you're moving your work into, like, eco justice movements. I'm kind of interested for thoughts on the connections between conspirituality and eco justice, knowing that here on Vancouver Island, you know, we know lots of people who are quite involved in the Fairy Creek, blockades and protests, protecting old growth. Yeah. And I noticed a lot of overlap, like it's a lot of the same people who are like the virus doesn't exist, and humanity is on the cusp of a great transformation. Yeah. And they go to places like fairy Creek and have these transformational experiences, which I am reminded of, you know, things like Occupy, like there is intense grief process, intense bonding in the face of some perceived adversity. But anyway, I'm just kind of intrigued to connect some of those dots. Yeah, thank you so much.

Matthew Remski: 2:23:06

Yeah, you're welcome. And thank thank you for the thank you for the kind words. So I guess the first thing that comes to mind is that you know, I don't think it's, I don't think it's a surprise that radical ecological movements will carry with them or reach into historical sources. Elements of early 20th century fascism. I mean, it's like, if it's, and it's entirely possible, and it's entirely possible to be inspired as a young person, by the, you know, the ecological sensitivities of somebody like Rudolf Steiner to send your kids to Steiner School, to Waldorf school, to be organic gardening, both on your own property or or collectively, and to not realize that there is, there are etiologies of purity and self sufficiency and notions of kind of divine connections between between, you know, chosen groups of people and their divine sources. All of those things can flow together in ways that allow for other forms of Magical Thinking to be acceptable. And then also for a kind of anti authoritarian and anti State and anti corporate attitude, all very understandable attitudes to to be to be folded in. So, yeah, I think that if you spend your life if you've if you've, you've spent the last 40 years, or you're you're in a lineage of organic, crunchy gardener types who have been doing their thing since the 1970s. As in opposition to the globalized and scientized Green Revolution, let's say and it's been in your lifeblood, your community lifeblood to say, Okay, well, the agro business captains are ruining the planet, and they're denuding the soil. And the soil is the lifeblood of our existence. And the soil is what makes us who we are. There's a there's a what's Northrop Fry's phrase is fearful symmetry between those very, I think, pro social positive attitudes and similar attitudes that lead very effortlessly towards, you know, an anti immigrant attitude or, and a concern about the pollution of modern medicine or, you know, a kind of xenophobia or a hyper protectionist attitude towards one's land. So, I don't I don't think that's I don't think that's surprising. What I have been increasingly concerned about as I interact with and and involved with, and, you know, do some do some kind of organizing limited amount of organizing with some ecological groups is that it seems like as climate crisis accelerates, that eco activist groups are going to be just kind of like conveyor belts for cultic dynamics. And I think we can see this very clearly, in organizations like extinction rebellion, where with, you know, very good intentions, we have an older generation of activists, very charismatic activists, telling younger activists, what they must do, generally involving physical or legal or financial danger, and creating highly charged emotional, social contexts around those actions that feel theatrical, that feel ritualistic, you know, there's costumery, there's, there's, there's pageantry, I'm very concerned to actually about whether or not everybody who participates in the typical XR action is being fairly influenced or unduly influenced. And, you know, this comes down to how the leadership of XR, you know, utilizes data around the efficacy of social movements, and what percentage of people have to have to be involved and so on. So, yeah, I mean, I remember I just read, let me let me put it this way. One of the the last XR meeting that I went to, there was a, there was a, an action plan for downtown Toronto. And there, the meeting was probably 15 people in the room. And we started with an hour of group processing, which was interesting to me, but it was also like this kind of untrained psychotherapy, I understand that people need to get together and talk about their ecological grief. But this seemed like excessive and, and also sort of unboundried to me. When we got around to the actual planning part of the discussion, like, who is going to show up what, what, where, who is going to do press releases? You know, how is this event going to unfold? I raised my hand to ask basic logistical questions. And I was told by the person who led this pseudo group therapy session for close to an hour that this was not a meeting for questions, that if I wanted to ask questions about the, the, the goal or the outcome or you know, the reason for the particular action, that you know, I could phone this number, and you know, I would I would be able to get more information there and I was like, oh, okay, so everything except the sort of emotional investment in this group is invisible. Right? It's that's gonna be off the, like, the space in which I would actually be a human being who had questions about my bodily safety or about my commitment that was going to take place in another room. Right. In another. It was going to take place hidden actually, on the phone. I actually phoned several times the phone number, nobody got back to me. They might have been busy. Who knows, but but I felt like, Oh, I'm going to keep an eye on this. Because as more and more people get involved in crisis oriented ecological movements, I'm concerned about the social dynamics of coercion.

Unknown: 2:30:45

Thank you for that. Yeah, it's really insightful. Yeah. I'm reminded our good friend has sort of been avoiding or one of our big concerns with that is the, you know, tendency to put young female bodies

Matthew Remski: 2:31:01

Oh, God. Right. Right. To Yeah, to dress them up and to and to and to make and to give. Yeah, to make them into the the muses of destruction, right. Uh huh.

Wes Regan: 2:31:12

To feed them to the Eco justice Moloch.

Matthew Remski: 2:31:15

Yeah. Yeah.

Wes Regan: 2:31:17

I really appreciate that answer. A number of years ago, I, after my finished my undergrad at SFU. I took the professional programming community economic development in SFU. And Charles Eisenstein was one of the instructors. And I got an eye so I got an early glimpse at that sort of positioning of eco justice movements and and a sort of detachment from reality. And it's sort of back to your saying about, you know, nothing is as it seems everything is connected. You know, all those sort of things come, we're coming through in Charles's sessions with us, which involve long bouts of silence. Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. On long bouts of silence. Plus,

Matthew Remski: 2:31:57

yeah. Plus, plus intrusive eye contact, probably.

Wes Regan: 2:32:00

Yeah, I'd be sitting there silently, he would look at me. And I'd be like, what's going on?

Matthew Remski: 2:32:08

That's one thing. I think zoom has has obviate a little bit. So I think we can be grateful for that. All right. Well, thank you so much for thanks so much for the kind invite invitation. It's a pleasure. Happy to talk with with any of you at any time.

Wes Regan: 2:32:21

Thank you so much, Matthew, You take care. Thank you for all the work you're doing. I've posted a bunch of stuff to your own website and to the spirituality podcast, and you stay well out there in Toronto. We really appreciate your time.

Matthew Remski: 2:32:32

Thank you so much. Take care, everybody. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. You

Wes Regan: 2:32:38

take care. Stay safe. Great scene. Stephen. Robin. Joel, thanks so much for joining us and everyone else here today. Your living room party was an inspiration