Update. Blackmail. Human Potential.
You may have noticed I haven’t posted any writing for over a month. That’s because I’ve been working on a pretty long essay that I keep trashing and starting over again. I just couldn’t let go of it to work on something else. Finally it is done. I will post it this weekend.
In the future I plan to publish my more serious writing on my website, charleseisenstein.org (once I finish renovating it) and use Substack more like a newsletter, not a publishing platform. I’ll announce the essays and articles here, and I will comment on them too, and share about the process of writing them. So, on Substack I’ll be chatty, more like a social media feed. Also I’ll share and comment on podcasts and things also.
With that, I’ll share a few recent podcasts.
Unlearning, Dr. Espen podcast. Topics: Dystopia vs. Ascension, Finding Personal Guidance, The Process of Unlearning, The Paradox of Letting Go, Rebuilding the World with a New Narrative, The Journey of Separation and Return, The Role of Humor in Seriousness, Message to the World
The Human Potential Podcast. The title sounds so New Agey I’m embarrassed to quote it. Topics include: How consciousness is an expansion of awareness rather than a hierarchy of enlightenment; The unspoken power of words, silence, and intention in shaping reality; The direct link between personal transformation and planetary well-being.
Intentional Life Transformation podcast. Filmed in Costa Rica. I don’t remember what we spoke about, I just remember the vibe was good. I think this will be fortifying to listen to.
The most recent (and controversial) was the Darkhorse Podcast with Bret Weinstein. The title makes it seem like the main topic was RFK Jr., but we actually spent only a few minutes talking about him. The podcast touches on lots of other topics too, including the importance of amnesty and its relation to disclosure. I felt a little constrained by Bret’s allergy to any kind of “spiritual” vocabulary, but I think we had good rapport overall. Anyway, there is speculation afoot that Kennedy is being blackmailed into rabid support for Israel. I tried to make it clear that that is just speculation. I know the man pretty well. He is kind and warm. He is patient with children. He treats his security staff and drivers with the same respect he shows top advisors. While he may have committed some sexual indiscretions, I am certain that he is innocent of any Epstein-island level depravity.
Furthermore, that kind of reasoning collapses a complex problem into a false simplicity. If only it were as simple as “Bad things happen because bad people are doing them.” If only people adopted horrible views because they are horrible people or are being blackmailed. If we dispense with that explanation, the world becomes a lot harder to understand. But understand it we must, if we are to change it.
That is not to say that blackmail isn’t part of the way that the power structure maintains itself. I know it is. But it usually doesn’t work the way people think. I go into that in the podcast too—the three levels of blackmail. But please, don’t go invoking blackmail whenever a public figure voices a position you find repugnant. I get it. It seems inconceivable that someone could sincerely believe something like “The IDF is the most moral army in history.” They couldn’t actually believe that, it must be blackmail, right? Wrong. There are many ways that people arrive at outrageous beliefs. Bobby Kennedy probably thinks that my belief (that Gaza is the latest and most brutal chapter in a decades-long program of ethnic cleansing) is outrageous too. But he doesn’t think I’m being blackmailed by Hamas. So believe me when I tell you, something more subtle is happening here to bring a person to a belief so incongruent with his other beliefs. We have to recognize that if we are ever to change the story of this world.
By the same logic I’ve laid out here, we cannot understand Israel’s actions in Palestine by collapsing the explanation onto the personal evil of Israelis or Jews. There is no such thing as a nation full of bad people, or a religion full of bad people. If we are actually interested in ending the slaughter, we have to let go of such falsely simply explanations and get serious about understanding the conditions that generate dehumanization, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
All right, this kind of chatty format is what most of my future Substack posts will be like. Sometimes (tomorrow for example) I will post intricate treatments of a specific topic that I would call “essays” if that didn’t sound so pretentious. Well maybe I’ll call them that anyway, so as not to pretend to be unpretentious.
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