Tag Archives: Joe Rogan

The Trump fear factor: What we are doing about it

A life in the Spirit, Psychological growth, The Mission, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Rogan in younger days

Are you old enough to remember the first Fear Factor TV show?  According to your friend, Wikipedia, it was “an American stunt/dare game show that first aired on NBC from 2001 to 2006 and was initially hosted by comedian and UFC commentator Joe Rogan.”

After a summer of endless advertising, it was successful enough to be granted a full season right after the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by airplanes on 9/11 and the United States started an unending War on Terror.

I think most of the population is still figuring our what to do with their personal war on terror. The media’s advice  was generally delivered via products like Fear Factor which proved a regular, beefed-up person, could basically do anything if they put their mind to it and had some way to film the deed.  Psychotherapists had increasing wisdom to offer, as well. They had been concentrating on trauma since the Vietnam War, and now began institutionalizing screening practices for it, summarized by Harris and Fallot in their seminal article. As a result, the Marvel superhero films, like The Avengers, began to showcase more complex and vulnerable heroes. They grappled with the trauma of relentless attacks by monstrous beings and faced the strain of dishing out violence while trying to have  principles.

Fear Factor is still going. It has become a successful franchise for selling packages of artificially-controlled trauma back to the people living in an age of overwhelm, and has spawned versions all over the world.  MTV aired a version with Ludacris as host in 2017-18 which included a Jersey Shore episode with Snooki and Pauly D. With the dawn of Trump 2.0 the time is ripe for an American reboot and it is planned for a fall premier later this year. People Magazine (still exists) quotes the advertising tag line: “Dropped into an unforgiving, remote location, a group of strangers will live together under one roof, and face mind-blowing stunts, harrowing challenges and a twisted game of social strategy where trust is fleeting — and fear is a weapon.” Some people might say that sounds like a recent school board public meeting.

The fear factor is background

I think we often gloss it over and talk about something other than our fear, even though we are afraid all the time. Don’t get me wrong, much of human development is a reaction to our fears, so saying we live in an “age of fear” could be a bit grandiose. After all, the ancient collection of the Bible is said to have 365 instances where we are told “do not be afraid” – since we are all afraid most of the time. If God is not with us and we are not with God, what will become of us?

It is easy to see our fearful reactions to the Trump turmoil. He’s the newest fear factor which has become the background of our days and his perverse nonsense will be a dark cloud on our summer picnics. I and over 80,000 others protested it all in Philly last Saturday. We don’t like living in an era where our fears are heightened, our reactivity is on a hair-trigger, and both rationality and compassion are constantly strained.

I can’t imagine your personal experience. But if it is anything like mine, you have also witnessed many people facing the newest fear factor. You could, no doubt,  add your own reactions to those I’ve noticed in others:

  • Schools and other institutions are still rushing to rewrite DEI language before they lose funds.
  • People are not buying real estate because of uncertainty.
  • People are finding new drugs to take for their anxiety.
  • High school and college grads can’t imagine what professions will be left after A.I. fully takes root.
  • Old people wonder how stable their nest egg is now that crypto is infecting their portfolios and a crypto family is in power.
  • People who would like to pastor the church but find other things to do because of the poisoned atmosphere for leading.
  • People are actively going through the process to claim birthright citizenship in other countries in case they need to escape the fascist U.S.

Recently, IMY2, a newer group from Nashville, ably covered Buffalo Springfield’s famous indictment of the fear factor from 1967: “For What It’s Worth.” It is the perfect soundtrack for scenes of Senator Padilla being wrestled to the ground. I shouted “Hey, hey. Ho Ho. Kristi Noem has got to go” during No Kings Day. I hope she’s out before she “liberates” Philly.

June 14 was a hugely positive reaction

The media continues to highlight burning Waymos and assassinations, somewhat justifiably. But they also turned up to cover the over 2100 protests last Saturday — estimates of the number of protesters are still being formulated: so far, 5 million people is low, 11 million is high. So many people have been personally touched by the senseless, somewhat random governance of the goon squad let loose by our psychopathic president they got into the street.

Here are well known examples of the fear factor their signs referenced:

  • Scientists and researchers now fear speaking out publicly because their funding will be cut. Their livelihoods are threatened and they are intimidated.
  • Journalists, foreign and domestic, are harassed and funding is cut to free speech institutions that took years to develop.
  • Trump’s first 100 days upended the global order led by Americans which painstakingly developed cooperation and created mechanisms to solve differences.

  • People are becoming more aware and Trumps approval numbers are slipping. A new president who leads a minority, not the country, is inherently destabilizing.

Governments are all about stability. At their best, they are about the common good. In functional democracies, they skillfully manage ongoing institutions that provide justice and services while they incorporate the changing needs  associated with societal development. They are much more complex than corporations and require people who devote great skill to maintaining them. When all that is absent, the fear factor immediately intensifies.

Seattle on June 14

Work on healthy responses to the fear factor

I personally loved how boring it can be when 80,000 people are out for a peaceful stroll together. The socialists, communists, and Free Palestine people were out last Saturday with their usual singlemindedness. But we just stepped away and joined the next 1000 people on their way to the Art Museum. We brought children, so one time we needed to start our own chant when all we heard was “Fuck Trump.” But most people were pretty happy. That’s one of the main ways to beat fear:

Be happy. Joy was in the air at the march, not just fear. Many of us were with loved ones. And we were with 1000’s of people who were with us. Being outside, being together, having a common purpose are all avenues to joy — I was praying, too. We need to hang on to joy.

Be creative. We were also making a protest together. And many of us made some very creative signs. Mine looked a bit like I might be in 4th grade — but I did put my marker to foam board which I had to go buy. I made the effort. It always feels good to make things. It is definitely joyless to destroy.

Talk about it.  Fear is dissipated when it is named. Sometimes trauma is hard to get to, of course, it gets locked in our most basic brain. But talking is probably better than anesthetizing it with the latest drug, for most of us. It was nice to have 80,000 people bringing up the subject.

Get righteously mad. Obviously, most Americans did not get to the protest. They might have honked their horn on the way to work or to attending to their aging mother’s medical needs. They may think Donald Trump will save them from gay marriage, Mexican rapists or other terrors. More likely they are opted out of everything because they are uncertain, alone and overwhelmed. Being angry and not sinning is good self-care. Last Saturday, shouting “Stephen Miller has got to go!” felt very good —  I got it out of the churn of the fear factor invading my peace. The churn died down for a bit. I intend to keep shouting.

Empathy: Love in the crossfire of political warfare

Doing Theology, Psychological growth, , , , , , ,

While I was ignoring podcasts, a rebellion against empathy was bubbling in them. Post-WW2, Eurocentric, therapeutic moralism was under attack! I was not completely ignorant of these rumblings, since Rush Limbaugh was like a non-resident member of my Central PA Church, and Trump has been getting away with various forms of grabbing for years. But I was still shocked when Elon Musk, who does not lie and dissemble as well as Donald Trump, parroted a line of reasoning that seems to be taking hold.

Elon on Joe Rogan

Musk spoke out on the Joe Rogan Experience. Young men who listen to Rogan, among others, are being taught they are fearful empathy-robots who will lose their country if they don’t grow a pair. I thought that must be an out-of-context exaggeration when I heard about it. But then I found a person who makes transcripts of Joe Rogan episodes (!). I had already reacted on hearsay when I wrote my congressman. Then I found out he actually taught it!

Since I work on connecting to people empathetically all day and hope they feel safe enough to explore who they are and who they want to be, I was understandably alarmed. So I wrote the 20 congresspeople on my list, as follows:

Elon Musk got on the anti-empathy bandwagon with Joe Rogan last week. In his own autistic way, he justified why he cares more for humanity (which he thinks Tesla and SpaceX will save) than for the people right next to him. This is consistent with his neurodivergence. He thinks his heartless capitalism will save us from overspending our love on nonsense – and he will decide what is nonsense.

He said, “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.” He slightly qualified that with “I believe in empathy, I think you should care about people. But you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole, and not commit civilizational suicide.” After repeating multiple falsehoods about immigrants, he claimed it was empathy that had allowed immigrants to become a threat to the United States. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit—they’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.” In truth, empathy is a “bug” that threatens his lust for power. He needs our resentments to outweigh our regard for other people, and ourselves.

Senator, please help us oppose him. Help us focus on our connectedness and our shared regard for the people being harmed by DOGE, Musk, and Trump. Please keep this administration’s victims front and center in your narrative. Uplift the stories of people whose lives are being lost, endangered or undone. Please help us build a narrative around our shared humanity, rather than grounding our politics in contempt. Form a more perfect union. “Love as I have loved you” is not the downfall of civilization.

I hadn’t explored the Rogan podcast yet, or I might have mentioned that Musk goes on in the conversation to lament if he walked the streets of San Francisco in his MAGA hat, he would get harassed and maybe beat up. I thought, “Oh, so you would like some empathy instead of being bullied!” He yearns for empathy as those empty of it usually do.

The anti-empathy movement

I missed the anti-empathy movement as it was percolating. But it was prevalent enough for Paul Bloom to write a book about it and get a review stored by the NIH. In the review, Trevor Thompson checks out the binary argument the author conducts, beginning with his title: Against Empathy. The Case for Rational Compassion. The book takes a strong line against empathy, arguing that it is not only not useful, but positively detrimental to human progress. Bloom says empathy leads to biased, shorted-sighted, and practically useless action. What Musk might call “civilizational suicide.”

Bloom is working with a reduced definition of a very large and varied human experience. We are all wired for empathy and express it on a broad spectrum. Even autistic people experience empathy on all sorts of levels and have all sorts of neurodivergent struggles with it, in just a different way than neurotypical people do. Yet Bloom says empathy is merely the “act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does.” — as if it were just Bill Clinton performing “I feel your pain.” He seems to think most people are just unconsidered reactions to their mirror neurons — irrationally sending useless children’s gifts to the scenes of mass shootings.

Simplistic and debatable, but gives a whole picture

Researchers also name “cognitive empathy,” which Musk could have called “rational compassion.” The label states the obvious: we don’t just feel empathy, we think about it, too. People can react with any of their faculties to the empathy they feel, and generally do. When we feel the pain of another, we may also understand their experience, or respond viscerally, automatically to it, or care about it. Or we may metabolize the pain spiritually and suffer it. We might ignore it or mock it. No one is a robot (yet).

There is a noisy, Christianity-claiming faction with a lust for power dominating the government. Members of it are mounting an argument that love – especially love for strangers – is a distraction, the Bible notwithstanding.

The bandwagon seems to be bulging with new adherents. Last year Allie Beth Stuckey, a Christian podcaster wrote a popular book called Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. Lately, Joe Rigney, a Minnesota pastor and theologian, published The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits (for which, he laments, he gets no empathy). He  redefines empathy as self-immolation: “If someone’s drowning, empathy wants to jump in with both feet and get swept away. Empathy jumps in. Whereas compassion says, I’m going to throw you a life preserver. I’m going to even step in with it and grab you with one arm, but I’m remaining tethered to the shore.”

Of course people do foolish things and get exploited. Their empathy might make them a sitting duck for people like Elon Musk if they stop mentalizing. But I think most of us know that humans created civilization with empathy. It is one of our most basic and best instincts. We can be trusted to work out the daily decisions we have to make about it and not get killed. It is not always that easy, since the U.S. government has relied on empathy to get Marines to kill and sacrifice themselves. Even if we don’t want to protect loved ones from “the enemy,” the soldiers want to take care of their comrades in the unit, who pulse together like a common set of neurons.

Jesus will not destroy civilization

When Elon Musk gets ahold of empathy, you know it is being used for something except empathy. He’s not pondering how to best help people or how to alleviate suffering. He’s hard at work finding ways to de-prioritize alleviating that suffering – all the while assuring us he is rooting out the waste in the budget, saving those hard-earned dollars previously thrown away on people who don’t deserve help or should help themselves or might be trans. He’s muting the voices of the dispossessed — it has always been a slave economy, after all. Musk notwithstanding, I find hope in the fact that few people, including the Pope – would accept that the interests of power should be prioritized and the least powerful forgotten.

Jesus does not forget the powerless. Here is a bit of what the Bible actually says about empathy:

  • “Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15).
  • “But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?” (1 John 3:17)
  • “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12).
  • “Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered” (Proverbs 21:13).
  • Jesus wept (Luke 19:41).

In building his robots and longing for Mars, has Musk forgotten what it is to be human? Has he forgotten that history shows how empathy knits societies together? Has he missed how empathy leads people to volunteer, which then boosts their mental health? Hasn’t he heard that kids who have low empathy are more likely to bully?

Have all these bullies missed learning what happens when we ignore pain and mute the cries of the suffering? Maybe. It happens.

Any post featuring Elon Musk gravitates toward Nazis. So let me end with this warning. Psychologist Gustave Gilbert, interviewed Nazi leaders during the Nuremberg trials and wrote a book about it. He said, after all his work examining the psyches of those who committed the most horrendous acts of World War II, he had come close to finding a definition of the nature of evil: “It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants,” he said, “a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

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