docu-mental: mapping the american states of mind

Hello again!

I just sent you a juicy podcast with Greg Olear and told you that you were getting a second podcast, a little extra gravy to splash on your plate. And then I forgot to include that link!

So, here’s a whole new plate of podcasting, a stellar one at that.

Here’s what I said about it previously:

In this issue, you get two for one. Novelists are not the only ones taking on corporate media. Astrologers are, too. Over at docu-mental’s sister publication, Ensouled, Elisabeth Grace and I give you episode 5 of Off the Charts! A Stellar Newscast. In it, because we are two corporate media renegades who saw the scum from the inside and said, “See Ya!”, we examine the energetic patterns underlying CBS’s recent hiring of former White House Chief of Staff under POTUS45, Mick Mulvaney, and we challenge the network’s clandestine claims that doing so was how they would get access to politicians.

But most importantly, we explain how recent planetary patterns offer you, the regular earthling, an opportunity right now, one that won’t come along again for another 188 years, to help effect positive change in this world, in your community.

It’s a redemptive moment where it’s possible to seed the future you want to create, possibly one where dumb s**t we put up with now will be seen as the inhumanity that it actually is, one where far more progressive, evolved actions are the norm.

But that is up to you. You have agency. The New World is coming whether or not you ever lift a finger, but if you do, odds are in your favor you can help mediate it into existence. So, maybe you have a responsibility, too. If you turn your back on it, then the solutions-oriented lot among us likely will have no tolerance for your complaining.

Sorry about my goof!

Peace,

Whitney

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vol. 4 issue 9

Greetings,

When I started this publication, it was partially informed by a burgeoning movement called “solutions journalism.” I’d first heard about it in 2016 after being invited to a National Press Foundation seminar. The featured speakers included a couple of journos who’d been using their reporting to frame issues so that it was clear how attempts to address things like recidivism weren’t working and why, and most importantly, what could be done instead.

A tipping point had been reached. The tension reporters so often feel when they are privy to real problems but bound by a professional “code” not to show partiality towards a solution had been overcome by the sense that it was pointless to continue feeling helpless after filing yet another story about corruption and societal ills while knowing that just telling people it was happening was not enough.

It was time for action. Not political action. Citizen’s action, which is not to be confused with Citizens United, a bogus name that has nothing to do with citizenship and everything to do with dark money laundering by many of the same people who directly profit from our government’s breakdown.

Let me put this another way: solutions journalism arose from the realization that because our government has largely failed us, and corporations, where the bulk of power in this country now resides, on the whole don’t give a damn, solving problems falls to the rest of us.

And no matter what you might think of journalists, they, we, are people too. We do care, and we often have far more connections and resources than the general public, the very public most affected by the failure surrounding us all. So, let’s put them to use in the most effective way called for by these times in which we live.

And yet, sometimes, journalists are still sucked into the vortex of inanity demanded by corrupt media structures that are designed for profit, not progress, structures which rely upon clever language to perpetually confuse the electorate into thinking progress is not possible without profit, which is not true. Therefore, some journalists might be good at what they do, but what they do is not valued enough to be of any use to their employer, and we the people do not benefit.

That is where people like Greg Olear, an LA Times best-selling novelist and creative writing professor by training, are finding that stepping into the chasm between caring and reporting pays dividends for us all. It’s the caring about the news, not the consumption of it, that ties profit with progress.

Even if journalists’ skills are affective when not misapplied, it is clear we still need fresh horses to ride the ridge above the world that is crumbling, in order to see the future that is dawning on the horizon, to reassure the rest of us that it is there at all.

Which is to say that while Olear is not a trained journalist, he is a professional. Olear is the publisher of the three-times weekly newsletter PREVAIL, where he uses his skills for tying plot, setting, character, and motive together to connect the dots between many pages of excellent reporting done from the trenches and siloes where reporters have no idea that what they’ve laid hands on is the flank or tail or head of the very same fascist monster currently gobbling up democracies the world over.

Even if Olear has never sat in on a media briefing per se, he knows things, including how to think critically. And that is important at this inflection point in history, when the demand for problem-solving mercenaries is higher than the need for bona traditional bona fides. Innovation is the antidote to authoritarianism.

It’s the same ethos that inspires many Americans who are fed up with the smug incompetence of incumbency, as well as the arrogance of the elite, and so are entering politics or finding other ways to apply their smarts so that they can create solutions organic to the problems they face in their communities.

Smells like democracy, I know. It was pervasive once.

And it will be again, because increasingly, problem solvers who believe in the power of freedom are not waiting for permission to address what’s messed up, or forgiveness for having gone and done it.

I’m not talking about the confederacy of dunces that descended upon Washington during the last administration, claiming to bring a “git ‘er done” ethos to bear, but who were instead just depraved morons with an agenda to burn it all down. I am talking about effective, reliable people who might not have strings of letters after their names, but who do know their ass from their elbow.

Olear’s primary focus is the mendacity of nearly every single person ever to travel in the 45th president’s orbit, as evidenced not by an emotional distaste for Donald J. Trump and his coterie, but the indisputable facts of many aspects of all the players’ lives plugged into a larger context. The pictures never turn out anything but grim. And let me repeat, it’s not bias. It’s all facts. These things Olear writes about happened.

Greg’s gift to political debate is his commitment to putting the pieces of so much great reporting together so that a full picture of the monster emerges. It is one citizen’s response to the problem of fractured journalism. Once we can all see the bigger picture, then we can ask the bigger, the better, the most relevant questions.

To do this, Olear often turns over his pages to others’ who have insider information, like retired stripper Nia Molinari. A stripper with a prep school pedigree would ordinarily be the kind of person you’d expect to be a source for a journalist, but in the pages of PREVAIL, because she is a fine writer herself, she authors pieces that describe for us the times Tucker Carlson or Rudy Giuliani turned up tied to the sordid — and illegal — activities of brothel owners, and ahem, gentlemen’s clubs.

She doesn’t know why. She just describes in exquisite detail what she saw and then asks the questions that all begin with Why…? When you put those scenes together with what is happening on Capitol Hill, or in the Supreme Court, or in Moscow, you don’t need to read a political spy thriller. Fiction can’t come close to the s**t going down all around us.

Has Olear’s problem solving actually resulted in solutions? Yes, and no, as we discuss in this podcast episode dedicated less to the actual shenanigans of the shitty, and more to the process and ethos of being a citizen fighting fascism. One obvious sign of success is Olear’s book, Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/Russia, hailed by Salon as “required reading for all Americans”.

Olear and I both believe that the more of us who commit our professionalism and maturity, not our most moronic selves, to doing what we can to stitch together the fraying threads that might otherwise hold the free world together, the sooner we will PREVAIL over the criminal enterprise largely running this country.

In this episode, we discuss why and how we believe that will come about. It won’t be because the New York Times gets it right. More likely, they will miss the story entirely. The triumph we envision will come because those of us who still know how to zig when expected to zag will do so, and we will use everything in our power to keep moving forward toward that future where fascism is defanged.

Double header

In this issue, you get two for one. Novelists are not the only ones taking on corporate media. Astrologers are, too. Over at docu-mental’s sister publication, Ensouled, Elisabeth Grace and I give you episode 5 of Off the Charts! A Stellar Newscast. In it, because we are two corporate media renegades who saw the scum from the inside and said “See Ya!”, we examine the energetic patterns underlying CBS’s recent hiring of former White House Chief of Staff under POTUS45, Mick Mulvaney, and we challenge the network’s clandestine claims that doing so was how they would get access to politicians.

Here’s the link to that.

Well, that’s all I got. I hope you have a beautiful Easter, Passover, or Sunday Gone Fishin’, whatever it is.

Peace,

Whitney

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vol. 3 issue 37

Greetings,

If you are white, and could speak frankly to anyone about race, what would you say?

Would you explain why reparations aren’t fair, stating that you didn’t own slaves, so your tax money shouldn’t go to pay for sins of the past?

Maybe you’d talk about how you’re not a racist, so you should not have to attend diversity, equity, and inclusivity training.

Maybe you’d say that you work hard, you played the game, you got where you are because you did what you’re supposed to do, and it’s not right to be vilified for it.

Maybe you would say other things if the landscape were framed differently.

Maybe you’d see things afresh from your own perspective, not just from that of the black community, if you understood how racism is made up in order to keep you in line.

What does the system as it is cost you? How is your life flatter, more stilted as a result of being distracted into defending yourself against being a racist when what is really happening is something else, something far more pervasive, even if less visible?

That’s why I think this conversation between author and diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI) consultant, Dax-Devlon Ross, and myself is important, and perhaps even imperative.

Because: it’s about you.

This podcast starts out with me introducing Dax just like I would any other guest. Then it immediately goes off script into unplanned places after I unthinkingly use the word “ghetto”.

We don’t talk about his book at all, we talk about what it’s like to be a black man and a white woman, and the expectations upon us respectively. We talk about how we see the way what we’re taught gets in the way of seeing not just each other, but ourselves.

I have written critically before about DEI training because I think it’s just more of the same old, same old bull puckey of being told what to think and how to act. I have had enough of that, thank you.

But this conversation is DEI at its highest.

Neither of us schools the other. Each of us teaches the other.

Each of us listens. We laugh. We have fun. We challenge. We ask questions.

We don’t have answers.

This is the conversation you wish you could have. The kind of talk if you overheard it in a restaurant, you’d eat slowly so you could eavesdrop on the whole thing.

I had meant to release this next month, but it’s so good. Too good to wait.

So, while you’re driving with your kids, or making dinner in your kitchen, or walking the dog…take the time to listen to this. I promise, you will feel encouraged, not berated. You will appreciate the fresh air of honesty, the flow of talk without anger and reproach.

If you’re black, you’ll hear things you already know are true being discussed in a hopeful way. If you’re white, you will be relieved to not hear yourself being blamed, but instead being clued into how you have power to change what hurts you.

But be warned: once you listen to and process this conversation, you will no longer be able to stomach the excuses and distraction fed to you daily by the lazy media that perpetuates myths and lies about race in this country.

Peace,

Whitney

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vol. 3 issue 27

Greetings,

At long last, the promised interview with Alice “Ace” Sparkly Kat, author of Post-colonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor.

It’s an important piece in our examination of the sentiment that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of Capitalism, the end of the hierarchy we have invested in, yet which cannibalizes us all in the end.

I tried to keep the conversation focused on the book’s innovative way of viewing the deleterious impacts of hierarchy, being mindful of not alienating my non-astrology audience.

However, for context, just know that as far as astrology goes, Ace deconstructs what the various planets in our Ptolemaic solar system (the 7 heavenly bodies we can see with our naked eye) have been assigned to represent pre- and post-Roman Empire.

She asks us to consider whether the assignments are actually helpful to us as we develop relationships with the greater forces in our lives, with ourselves, and with one another. If these assigned meanings are not helpful, why not, and what other interpretations make sense to us instead?

This interview is an excellent follow-on to the podcast I did with author Brian Muraresku about his book, The Immortality Key, a New York Times bestseller linking psychedelics to Jesus, but also to the way the Roman Empire quashed access to the Eleusinian mystery ceremonies where psychedelics were featured, and where women priestesses guided initiates to the world beyond, the one that once we are reassured exists, imparts meaning to our lives lived here.

From my perspective, it was at that moment in history that whatever evil there is in the universe that seeks to stamp out the glimmers of human liberation and continual reunion with the Source, found its foot soldiers in the Roman Empire.

They trashed the Republic, stamped out Antiquity’s emerging democracy, orchestrated the hostile take-over of the Eleusinian mysteries, and established hegemony through the Empire’s subsidiary, the Roman Catholic Church, which sold to us the Eucharist as a sanitized version of the mystery that was more like a bait and switch: “Come for the communion, be separated from your true self by the holy hierarchy!”

Yes, the Roman Empire engineered sewers, sanitation, roads and running water, but did so on the backs of slaves and others, all of whom they forbade to partake in the woodland Eleusinian mystery ceremonies that the Eucharist is based in. Thus, the Roman imperialists achieved subjugation by separating the people from themselves, orienting them instead toward the Roman leadership, or as Ace says, “towards capital,” and away from their internal governor, the one that naturally regulates one’s longing for commune with the Greater Source.

In other words, an orientation towards capital/the capitol is unnatural. But we’ve been conditioned to think it is the only state of existence to which we can aspire, if not through the church, then certainly through our system of Capitalism packaged as the only way to ensure democracy.

Is there any wonder, then, why we feel so much anxiety and depression here in the US? We know instinctively we are not living in our natural state, but we don’t know how or why. It’s been so long, across so many generations, that we’ve been conditioned to accept that we can only access higher truths — and liberation — if someone packages these things and distributes them to us first.

And all the while, we’re told we’re free, simply because we are Americans, or that as Christians, we will be “saved” because we are obedient. Obedience is not freedom.

These are the kinds of questions and considerations that make Ace’s book not just culturally relevant, but important. As I say in this interview, to one degree or another, as long as we do not consider the origins of our stories, then we are all living a lie, even if we are not liars.

Race and astrology as forms of ‘magical thinking’

Even if you never give a glancing thought to the stars, it is possible to consider what Ace posits, namely, that just as astrology is a language of symbols and myth-making, so too is race a product of fantabulous mythologizing — a form of “magical thinking” says Ace — using agreed upon symbols to construct stories that ultimately turn into policies, which then become oppressions, because the symbology supports only those empowered by what the symbols are said to represent.

Or, as Ace writes in her book, “Both astrology and race are social constructs and are rooted in the circulations of culture.” Ace’s work suggests that those who insist upon seeing racism as merely an “interpersonal phenomenon, rather than composite matrices of domination that limit access and freedom,” are in essence abnegating their own powers of imagination, instead submitting themselves to the will of “the powers that be” rather than take ownership of their lives.

Which is why I love this book as an American cultural critic first, an astrologer second.

It challenged me to re-consider how we use and relate to symbols as ubiquitous as the Sun, for example, which we equate symbolically with power. The Sun is the source that allows everything to exist. It is also used to justify total surveillance, power over, and extermination of what is “dark”, as in dark-skinned. While I might never have explicitly attributed these meanings to the Sun, I have never thought to challenge how they are implied when we accept them without questioning their etymology.

For example, as Ace points out, royalty throughout history has always equated the Sun with gold. They have also tended to hoard that gold, burying it in the ground. Thus, royalty and gold, as well as the power of the city-state where the gold was buried, have been implied by the Sun.

Following a global gold mining boom in the late 19th century, the mineral was circulated briefly as a currency up until the first half of the 20th before being taken out of circulation and once again buried in the ground in vaults, primarily beneath London and New York, where it remains.

Once again, the implication is that gold is therefore artificially scarce, and so artificially exclusive, all while still being associated with the Sun. The result is that the Sun is considered both life-sustaining, but also exclusive. This helps justify at whatever conscious level it might be to some, why some humans “deserve” access to resources, and some do not. It is also therefore, justification at whatever conscious level, for why some humans “deserve” to live and some do not. Ergo, racism, and in the extreme, genocide.

Original Sin: hierarchy v. white supremacy

One question which came up in our conversation was the notion of Original Sin in the context of which came first, hierarchy or white supremacy.

The logic I follow, derived from the years spent mapping our national conscience through this publication and podcast series, suggests that hierarchy came first as a default mode, and all manner of subjugation hence flows from it, including white supremacy, and thus racism. Is this the correct framework? I don’t know.

Either way, I state unequivocally that for us to believe racism is merely a “personal” perspective and not an institutionally enforced one is to believe a pernicious lie. Racism is real because our policies continue to acquiesce to it. They do so, because our foundational beliefs, represented by the symbols our hierarchy has collectively agreed represent “reality”, command them to.

Regardless of whether white supremacy supersedes hierarchy or if it is the other way around, our reasons for its existence must be interrogated. Indeed, philosopher and professor George Yancy writes that racism is our ontological reality.

That is why patching “fixes” like Affirmative Action, for example, onto our policies without first asking ourselves the underlying rationale for the policies that hold the system in place, is ultimately useless.

Racism’s damage to the collective is real. Tinkering incessantly with our broken system without addressing the precepts it was founded upon is a waste of time when we have no time to waste.

Lies sanctified by society without question, such as that the Sun equates with some of us being worth the time and energy, and others not, also wastes human resources.

To not question our systems of faith-in-action is literally a matter of life or death.

The infinite resource of mind

Regarding the heavenly spheres anew caused me to do some thinking out loud in the interview, and I appreciate Ace’s patience as I considered familiar things as though for the first time, verbalizing both my epiphanies and my misgivings.

This interview with Alice Sparkly Kat once again stresses for readers of docu-mental the notion we’ve been exploring, that we stand to lose far too much power the more we allow others -- the news media, the church, the digital giants, any cult that seeks to brand us -- to aggregate our attention and distract us from knowing and using the power of our own minds and imagination.

How much gatekeeping to the Beyond do we actually need?

The question returns us to how the Roman Catholic Church used the language and the ceremonies of the people Roman emperors wanted to subjugate. It took the same words about liberation and hope for the life beyond, and used them to keep people enslaved.

Reorienting away from capital, from Capitalism, does not mean poverty or whatever dismal and demonic scenario the hierarchical top spooks us with. It simply means we become the gatekeepers to our imagination, the only infinitely renewable resource on earth, and the gateway to what lies beyond this life. It means we re-orient to ourselves.

If there is a lesson here, it is that perhaps it is easier to imagine the end of Capitalism than it is the end of the world. That in fact, to not do so is to ensure the end of the world. That we’ve not imagined such a future for ourselves collectively is a fait accompli of the hierarchy who stands to lose access to our hearts, minds, and lives if we do imagine a future that is not mediated.

That is why toppling the hierarchy begins and ends with our imagination, and why we must guard it as though it is as precious as the Sun.

The liberation of a post-truth world

What these past five years in the US have shown us is that we live in a post-truth world. At first, I saw this as terrifying. But now, I find it liberating.

We can untether ourselves from truths that are lies, but not the consequences of our actions taken as a result of adhering to the lies as truths.

That we have or have not done something will always be the fact of any matter. Saying something didn’t happen when it did is not changing our mythology, it’s lying.

But we can change our shared truths, our national myths, and thus help shape our actions and their consequences, by understanding that cultural precepts like race, like astrological symbols, like political parties, like gender (yes, gender — one’s capacity for sexual reproduction is biological, gender is not), are nothing more than agreed upon stories. That our cultural truths might be “fabricated” or “made up” does not negate their power nor its meaning, since they are attempts to describe what is ineffable – the eternal Real of existence.

Instead, the more we consciously participate in infusing our symbols with meaning, the more meaningful they will be, and to more people.

We are making it all up, but whatever we choose to create, it will matter.

And that is the truth.

Peace,

Whitney

The podcast for this is linked at the top.

The video is here.

Time stamps/chapters of podcast are below.

About that comment on Jung’s racism and sexism in this podcast…

One thing which came up in my conversation with Ace was her take that Carl Jung, considered the father of Depth Psychology and the world’s most “famous astrologer”, was racist and sexist. Many would agree with her, while others might suggest he was simply a product of his cultural moment.

Either way, he certainly made statements about the planets and the unconscious that were categorically binary, and made questionable comments about the nature of the unconscious, even though as Ace’s own investigations show, such statements were not always justified.

I think it is worth having a more thorough discussion about this, since both Jung and Sigmund Freud respectively were, along with William James, progenitors of American psychology and psychiatry. Since this is about mapping the american states of mind, I am looking into who can come on the podcast to address the larger context and considerations of Ace’s statement. More to come…

Timestamps for Alice Sparkly Kat and Post-colonial Astrology:

0:00 Intro and discussion about the name Alice Sparkly Kat

5:00 Myth-making depends on who controls the language that frames access to the archetypes

8:18 Race is not real, it is not biological; begins with religion.

12:30 The “traditional” mythology of the Sun

16:45 Why do we consider astrology as “western”?

21:00 The exciting phenomenon of deconstructing astrology while also using it to build community

31:00 Is astrology spiritual or habitual?

39:00 Mental health definitions “are made thought a middle class (male) white lens”

48:00 Colonizing the moon for “real”

52:00 Astrology’s appeal to fascists and neo-liberals

59:00 Resisting the colonization of our minds

1:06:00 The liberation of living a life not “received” but examined

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vol. 3 issue 25

Greetings,

This podcast episode with Acyuta-bhava Das, an ayahuasca vision quester and now a spiritually focused astrologer and bhakti yoga practitioner, is the third and final in our series exploring the intersection of mental health, psychedelics, and democracy.

The tone and feel of this conversation is cozy and inviting, largely because of the energy of my guest. When I re-listened to it before posting it, I was yet again captivated by Acytua’s positive wonder at the world, inflected with a deep wisdom gained not just from being in more than 100 ayahuasca ceremonies, but also from having a mind and body trained on what truly matters in life. Best of all, as Acyuta and I discuss, this peace of mind and state of hope and expectation is available to all of us.

Born Adam Elenbaas in ex-urban St. Paul, Minesota, Acyuta grew up a Methodist preacher’s kid in a family haunted by demons, as he describes in his book Fishers of Men: The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest. An addiction to opioids and other drugs along with a spiraling depression eventually culminated in a dabble with psychedelics. Whereas he thought he would have fun taking the novel drugs, instead Acyuta (then still known as Adam) had a “magic mushroom” induced spiritual crisis that led him to want to know more about what was beyond what we perceive only with our eyes.

It was then that he sought help from ayahuasca shamans in the Amazon, where use of the bitter purgative brew is contextualized through ceremony and spiritual practice.

The psychedelic ceremonies helped Acyuta end his addictions and depression, and inspired him to become a bhakti yogi, a spiritually focused astrologer and teacher, and a noted expert on responsible psychedelic use.

I have been so blessed to bring you all three of these conversations about psychedelics, as each has been nuanced, rich, funny, and also mind blowing. The “mind blown” quality not just because they are about psychoactive drugs, but because this entire series has opened new lines of questioning that even I didn’t anticipate. It has shaken apart the ossified structures of old beliefs and pressed for us to think how we might build new, more flexible, authentic ones.

Even though my online journal’s full name is “docu-mental: mapping the american states of mind”, I really hadn’t understood how intricately linked our mind is to democracy.

What brought that home hard for me was the conversation with author Brian Muraresku about how the Greeks of the Antiquities could have brought us science as well as democracy, while also serving up all the strange tales of Gods romping with humans, sexually and otherwise. It seems it was their use of psychoactive substances that took them from the “logical” to places where wisdom was gleaned from the gods in fantastical ways, simultaneously metaphorical yet real, and in that way the most “real” of all. In other words, the Greeks were the ones to access and translate for us the archetypes of earthly existence, an essential understanding for humans if we are to evolve.

This is why being in possession of our minds is essential. If we keep outsourcing our innerspaces to the attention merchants who aggregate our minds, then profit from them by dimming our capacity for imagination and authenticity and instead making us slaves to the various cults of branding, we will never achieve democracy. We will never be free.

So, then. What can psychedelics teach us about how to be and stay free? That is, even if personally, we never choose to use these drugs? (And, as I mention in all three interviews, I have not ever used psychedelics and so do not speak from direct experience.)

That is the focus of my discussion with Acyuta. The funny thing is, we never really talk long about the psychedelics themselves, but instead, about the greater lessons learned from allowing there to be more than one paradigm of reality.

The questions raised in this interview still have me thinking about how to frame reality in a post-truth world where liars and visionaries can be hard to tell apart.

My conversation with Acyuta truly is the most enlightened and enlightening discussion about the nature and necessity of hierarchy I personally as yet have been fortunate to have – and one which I am doubly fortunate to be able to share with you in this podcast.

I so highly recommend you listen. It’s an opportunity to spend time with a person who is real in ways that are beyond “real”. The discussion will inspire you to think differently about what matters in your life, and whether you are emphasizing those things or letting them slip away.

But it will also give you hope that creating a meaningful life is always, always within your power.

The time stamps/audio chapters for this conversation are listed below.

Here are the other posts and podcasts relevant to this conversation:

Why you should care who controls psychedelics - docu-mental (substack.com)

Howard University exemplifies cancel culture, but not without our help - docu-mental (substack.com)

Jesus, psychedelics, and democracy: how to clear the 'soul rot' between heaven and earth - docu-mental (substack.com)

Folks, I need to take a break. It’s the reason I am publishing this today and not tomorrow, on a Friday, which is the general rule. I don’t want to have this on my agenda to think about after today.

I have a lot of activity going on behind the scenes, much of it quite exciting, all of it directed toward a bigger vision that you have helped make possible by being loyal enthusiasts of this newsletter. Thank you so much for this.

So, I will be away for the next month. Instead of posting new entries, I will post “best of” material, which will allow my brain a little down time, while also giving us all an opportunity to reflect on the journey we’ve mapped through our minds so far.

When I return, I will share what’s happening that ties this newsletter to other ventures, and will bring you yet another fun paradigm altering conversation, this one with Alice Sparkly Kat, a scintillatingly good writer and thinker about a world that goes beyond hierarchical, binary strictures, and the author of a new book just published by North Atlantic Books, Post Colonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor.

I can hardly wait!

Happy Memorial Day to you all. Please enjoy some sunshine and fresh air. It will make you feel that much more alive and tuned in to what is true.

Peace,

Whitney

Time stamps for audio chapters:

0:00 Introduction

1:41 What does name Acyuta-bhava mean?

3:50 Story of what led him from being a preacher’s kid who’d become an opioid addict, to a psychedelic vision-quester who inspired his sister and preacher father to also use psychedelics

9:45 Description of what using psychedelics feels like, and how it changes one’s perception of self and of world

11:23 The adventure of mind v. escaping pain

14:18 The group experience of the same visions during psychedelic ceremonies emphasizes importance of ceremonial context v. recreational or therapeutic without care for soul

21:50 Not respecting context will lead to “colonization” of psychedelics, and will have dire consequences

25:00 True “shamanism” v. New Age b**t

32:10 Illuminating discussion about how and why science being “neutral” is still a proactive stance. “Every paradigm, including science, creates things, has a point of view, and so has ramifications.”

35:55 Nature shows us the way to play with our myths, stories, and ceremonies to make them relevant to each new era

37:30 The implications of this for policymaking

41:00 What questions are necessary to ask if we are to go around Big Pharma to control our own access to resources of transcendence?

45:00 Earth in peril because science can’t cure greed.

47:00 Description of hierarchy in action: being ayahuasca ceremony listening to things being killed and eaten in rain forest. Understanding of hierarchy as a necessity, and as something to learn to engage with, not conquer. Discussion of what happens when trying to overtake hierarchy.

52:00 The importance of “spiritual technologies” such as yoga, to move us beyond thinking in only one paradigm.

54:00 Progress without spiritual evolution leads to cynicism.

57:00 Current disruptions to our paradigm such as new UFO info, other events, demonstrate need for new tools, but how learn without indoctrination?

1:04:00 The essential nature of kindness to evolution and to working with the gods. It invites them in, among many other things discussed.

1:10:00 Narcissism and kindness are antithetical.

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vol. 3 issue 24

Greetings,

He demurs when I say it, but this podcast is my interview with our era’s equivalent to Galileo, Brian Muraresku. Whereas Galileo challenged church doctrine that the Earth is the center of Cosmos — and so was put under house arrest until his death — Muraresku similarly has challenged church doctrine by connecting the dots across many specialties to convincingly argue that the Christian church is predicated on the Dionysian mystery cults for which hallucinogens were essential. (Of note: he had the Vatican’s help in doing so.)

The time stamps for this podcast are listed below if you want to get started listening right away. Otherwise, read on for more about this book and its author.

Muraresku spent nearly 15 years in search of this personal Holy Grail, a quest he scintillatingly recounts in his New York Times bestselling book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name (St. Martin’s Press).

The relatively young classicist and practicing lawyer has illustrated that the mystery of Christ’s transubstantiation, known to Catholics and others around the globe as the holy Eucharist, is aligned with Greek Eleusinian and Dionysian mysteries where the “wine” of Holy Communion wasn’t an alcoholic beverage, but an herbal, psychoactive brew, known in Greek as pharmako.

Muraresku cites plenty of sources from the Antiquities indicating that drinking the special brew led to initiates experiencing a sort of rapture where they communed directly with the All beyond what is mortal, and found they no longer feared death. Further, through his impeccable research, Muraresku illustrates not only is there a through line of psychoactive substance use running from these ceremonial mystery rites, through the early secret cult of Jesus, to today’s psychedelic trials, such as the ones discussed in the previous episode of docu-mental, but that what has kept that line humming is the experience of divine communion.

But wait.

Muraresku has also rigorously connected the dots between scientific and other evidence to rightly interpret the Gospel of John to suggest the Church as it is today wasn’t exactly what Jesus had in mind. Instead, it was the plant “kingdom” and its administration by women — particularly mature women — of its mediating properties that were the rightful ones to bridge heaven and earth.

While Muraresku does not say this, I suggest in our interview that if what his scholarship points to is true, and I think it is, that makes the founding of the Church predicated on a lie.

That is to say, the Roman Catholic Church deliberately misinterpreted the Eucharist, paving the way for the linear hierarchies that have lead to today’s existential angst globally.

While I found the whole book exciting, I was particularly taken by Muraresku’s citation of an obscure Roman Eleusinian mysteries initiate, Praetextatus. It was he who successfully, if only temporarily, defended the mysteries from the Christian emperor Valentinian, who wished to end them in 364 (AD). Praetextatus claimed that the Eleusinian mysteries “[held] the whole human race together” and that life without them would be “unlivable”.

In the end, however, the Roman authorities eventually did do away with the mysteries, at least as they were administered in homes by women, typically the “grandmothers” of the group who had the correct herbal knowledge. Instead, the emperors et alia outlawed the priestesses, did away with the hallucinogens, and made it illegal to worship at home. Then they developed a male-only rite of the Eucharist which was wine without the psychoactive substances, and made it available only in the church.

In essence, the hierarchy domesticated the mysteries.

I suspect that through these mysterious rites, grounded in the worship of Demeter, goddess of grains and the harvest, the seeker Praetextatus had a vision that prophesied precisely where we are today. That is to say, by having domesticated the mystery, we have also domesticated the Goddess/Mother Nature, an act that has led to the increasing unlivable conditions on Earth, where the rate of extinction has wiped out nearly 60% of all global wildlife in the past half century, and climate catastrophes regularly now decimate the biosphere.

As docu-mental has covered in these past three years, this original act of domestication has now played out over the centuries not just as monolithic religious authority, but also as late-stage Capitalism, Socialism, Communism. It doesn’t matter what name it takes, it’s just one big story of how a pervasive authoritarian blob has seen to the perpetual enslavement of humans everywhere, whether literally or figuratively, oppressed by the top line who has all of the power, but ultimately takes care of itself, rather than show it feels a responsibility to any of the rest of us.

We feel it as anxiety and depression, a swelling of existential depression. The Earth feels it as death.

The Jesuit-educated Muraresku still avers his Catholic upbringing and admits that a globe full of faithful Christians is testament to there being something of God in the church. At the very least, it suggests that not everyone needs to use psychedelics in order to seek God.

And while I left organized religion years ago, and never fully felt committed to it when I was a part of it, I see beauty within it. I believe in the goodness of Pope Francis, and that if any modern era pope were ever to “get it”, it would be him. I also believe in the sincerity of many other ecumenical leaders. I certainly believe in the sincerity of those who find comfort within the church.

And yet, the hierarchy must go. It’s not real. It’s not what God, Goddess, All That Is, nor apparently even Jesus intended. And it’s killing us and our planet.

How it came to be that any human ever got a notion that it was okay to ever own another human being is a question for another day, but that itself seems in these pandemic times the real virus, the cancer of the mind. As I ask my guest in this interview: What is the point of having power over everything if the natural conclusion of doing so is the destruction of everything? Please don’t be so facile as to say that it will be at that moment rapture happens. I’m no biblical scholar, but neither am I simple. And neither is the answer to this question.

What is the solution, then? How do we engage with one another so that we can dismantle the deadly structures and create better ones that do not enslave us to them? So that we can allow the planet to evolve as Mother Nature intended, not obsessively bend her to our will?

We start by asking the question of what our actual heritage is as Americans. Is it Greek or is it Christian? And if as a democracy it’s Greek, why do we not insist on citizens having a classical education? Why are Latin and Greek barely taught in this country, and why do we know virtually nothing of the Antiquities which provide the moral foundation of our Constitution?

And I also think we might put ourselves in the shoes of those living during ancient times when slavery also existed, but so did the mysteries. Where might their civilization have evolved had hierarchy not usurped the fledgling spirit of true democracy? As has been pointed out by a previous docu-mental guest, American University associate librarian, director of research services, and Hellenic High Priestess, Gwendolyn Reece, PhD, equal justice — not enslavement — for all was essential for democracy to work.

It’s a perilous time, frankly. It’s a time when one of the most celebrated Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Howard University in Washington, DC, has just announced it is dissolving its Classics Department, as Muraresku reminds us in this discussion.

This is troubling not just because the black community has been at the forefront of leading this nation from its Greek and Christian roots, as evidenced by the writings of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who turned to Socrates as inspiration for his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, but also because, as Harvard professor Cornell West wrote recently, “Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture.”

Talk about “cancel culture”.

Without the classics to inform our soul, we might as well do away entirely with privacy, too. We won’t need our hearts, minds, and desires. We will be entirely at the mercy of the hierarchy.

My final thought on this is to share something Muraresku’s book elucidated clearly for me in my constant quest for what could bridge our current divide between soul and science.

By posing the question, as he does, as to why a society as highly sophisticated as the Greeks, who not only would discover and develop the foundations of today’s science, but who also were engaged in developing a democracy that, given a chance, might eventually have led to women and slaves being given the same rights as men, would also engage in the so-called silliness of gods and humans comingling.

The answer was in the mysteries. Put plainly, the Greeks had a very sophisticated form of spirituality that had the potential to work hand-in-hand with a democratic government to effectively balance heaven and earth. The silliness was the sublime.

I take that to mean that democracy would only work if the feminine principle was kept in balance with the masculine one — neither is more important than the other, just different.

Practically speaking, that means if we don’t respect nature and see her through the eyes of sustainability, democracy is moot. It’s impossible. The cycles of nature and the women who represented those cycles were the fulcrum of understanding we are part of a larger story, that we do not actually die when we die, that it was not the male-dominated church or any other hierarchical, linear construct that would ever make that truly possible.

As Muraresku himself suggests (p. 73 of the hardback version of his book), the bridge to the Great Beyond and back is only possible when the wild is in balance with technology. There is no one or the other. There is no hierarchy if we want to survive. There is only both at the same time, in balance. As Praetextatus warned us, the mystery is the only way.

Science. Mystery. Soul. Not science trumps soul. Not soul trumps science. There is only the integrated whole where all parts matter, regardless of their intrinsic nature. Hierarchy kills. Domination is deadly. Dominion, peace, and kindness, however, are not only possible, they are the only way to support life on earth indefinitely.

E pluribus unum.

This is why at a time when psychedelic research is poised to make possible the scaling of their use for the masses, particularly for those who report existential depression, I hope enough of us will pause to ask better questions. Who should be in charge of these drugs? For what reasons? What does their power to deliver transcendence imply not just for individuals, but for the societies where individuals find themselves existentially troubled? Is it prudent to offer the power over these drugs to the very systems that perpetrate the existential depression?

I suggest it is only classically, critically educated minds that can skillfully ask such questions about where we’ve been and why, and whether where we are headed is in fact aligned with democracy.

To not rigorously challenge the status quo’s version of history —whether it is that of the Church, the corporation, or a political party’s line — will mean that with the re-emergence of psychedelics, we are ready to let the hierarchy insert itself between us and God all over again.

We might as well kiss democracy goodbye, and hope future generations will be lucky enough to have their own Galileo and aren’t so stupid as to let the moment pass.

Peace,

Whitney

The time stamps of this podcast:

0:00 Introduction

2:00 The “best kept secret in history”

4:10 The Road to Eleusis, by Carl Ruck, Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, published in 1978: the first public statement about paleo Christian psychedelic use

7:30 The three pillars to the work: the Eucharist as a continuation of the pharmako and Dionysian mysteries; the Pagan continuity theory; and the idea that through the mysteries “We can die before we die so that when we die we do not die”

13:00 What does “blood of Christ” actually mean; the implied and literal cannibalism

15:00 The Gospel of John’s symbolic language for equating the Eucharist with the Hellenic Dionysian ceremonial mysteries; John 6:60

17:30 Dying before death (the immortality key), while also achieving communion with other worshipers, with God, and with the Earth

22:00 Today’s psychedelic drug trial participants overwhelmingly report that just one psychedelic experience is the most meaningful, spiritual one in their entire lives; what they report seems to mirror what occurred during the Dionysian mysteries.

24:00 The Roman Catholic Church usurps, and domesticates the mysteries “inserting” itself between the people and the pathway to know God

25:00 Psychedelics are a way to “die before death” so that death no longer becomes a fear because there is an understanding that when we die, we continue on in a different, non-material form

32:00 Why would the Greeks, the founders of democracy, of philosophy, of science, also have the soap opera-like tales of the Gods and not see any issues with integrating all three? Because they had access to the mysteries through the use of the pharmako, which we now call wine, but which was far more that just a wine as we know it today. It was more like the psychedelics of today.

34:00 The current crisis in our democracy is relevant when framed according to what the Greeks were able to achieve by being mature, spiritual adults who could work with the complexity of science, soul, and mystery.

34:30 The Gospel of John was an invitation to be both an initiate into the mysteries of Jesus/Dionysus, as well as a democratic participant in a society that was still developing democracy while also struggling with the question of slavery and inequality for women.

37:00 Praetextatus’ prophecy, which might have been a vision from the pharmako, now coming true: killing the mysteries, kills the planet.

39:00 The importance of not alienating humans from nature, the importance of kindness and group consciousness were demonstrated by the Dionysian mysteries. All of these things are essential to democracy, and are synonymous with health.

44:00 What would happen if we micro-dosed everyone on Capitol Hill? Would it grow our leaders up?

45:00 The importance of ritual as container for other-worldly experiences

48:00 Jesus sought to preserve, not domesticate, these mysteries, and was essentially the first heretic by urging his followers to worship in their own homes.

49:00 What is the true American heritage? Greek or Christian?

51:00 Greeks had democracy, science, and a very advanced sense of spirituality that accepted there is an afterlife. Classical education for our citizenry now would make this possible for our democracy now.

57:00 Fears of turning pharmaceutical companies into the next mediators of our capacity to touch the face of the divine.

59:00 The coming First Amendment challenges spawned by psychedelics.

1:01:00 The dangers of handing over power to the very systems that have for centuries been the ones to keep us “domesticated”.

1:04:00 Giving away the power to define what and how we experience the “immortality key” seals our fate as slaves to the System. Conversations like this one are what can alter that fate.

1:05:00 The importance of teaching how to be citizens through the classics.

Additional Resources:

Exterminate All the Brutes (hbo.com)

Howard University’s removal of classics is a spiritual catastrophe - The Washington Post

How Settlers Convinced Themselves They Were the First Owners of America ‹ Literary Hub (lithub.com)

The use of ritual to help clear the "spiritual pollution" of our democracy and start again - docu-mental (substack.com)

Why you should care who controls psychedelics - docu-mental (substack.com)

Healing 'mind cancer' - docu-mental (substack.com)

What stopped the FDA from taking tougher action sooner in the opioid crisis, and why it will happen again - docu-mental (substack.com)

Erratum: I mention in this episode that next week’s guest Acytua-bhava Das experienced about two dozen ayahuasca ceremonies. It was, in fact, over 100.

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vol. 3 issue 22

Greetings,

Earlier this year, I recorded a provocative interview with Scott Aaronson, MD, clinical research director at Baltimore’s Sheppard Pratt Institute, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious psychiatric research facilities, and soon to be a site for psilocybin research thanks to a hefty investment by Compass Pathways, a UK-based mental health company, that is funding the construction of a Centre of Excellence at Sheppard Pratt’s Towson, Maryland campus.

Dr. Aaronson will leverage his institute’s resources to help its new corporate partner “model the ‘clinic of the future’, showcasing the best thinking in science, therapy, technology, and design,” according to a Compass statement.

Meanwhile, in London, research is already underway to assess the utility of Compass’s proprietary psychedelic therapy, COMP360, which combines psilocybin with psychological support from specially trained therapists. More on that in a moment.

This is just one of a few such investigations, including ones being conducted at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and at New York University’s Langone School of Medicine.

If Compass and other such biotech companies are seriously committed to evolving how mental health is delivered in this country – and globally, too – a serious reckoning must first occur. That is, we need to find ways to commit to evidence-based research without diminishing or worse – disregarding – the question of the human soul and spirit in our medicine first, and in our health policies second.

The administration of psychedelics to help people with depression might finally be the way we blow up the old, broken, hierarchical, “science is for rich people, the rest of you can just suffer”, approach not just to mental health care, but all care, as touched upon in this interview. The pandemic, with its questions of how to equitably distribute the vaccines has helped train our focus on this dilemma. The time could be now for psychedelics to help us deconstruct this punitive byproduct of materialistic hierarchy, and solve it once and for all.

The most obvious question surrounding this, then, is whether a therapeutic molecule found in nature should even be part of a proprietary scheme. I do not get into that here since plenty of others, including the stentorian podcaster and investor, Tim Ferris, have been advancing that question. Ferris and Compass investor Christian Angermayer had a high-profile tweet-off about this question earlier this year. The discussion spilled over onto LinkedIn, and also to VICE where reporter Shayla Love conducts an admirable investigation into, among many ways, how patent law could imperil access to these drugs.

In sum, these exchanges explore in depth the question of who should own access to and control distribution of these drugs. If you care about leveling the field of mental health treatment and delivery, this discussion is essential to understand, and I urge you to read the links I provide above.

That’s not to say I won’t explore the question, but I will come at it from an historical perspective, later in this series when I speak with Brian Muraresku, lawyer, classicist, and author of The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. My conversation with Acyuta-bhava Das, author of Fishers of Men: The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest, also touches upon the historical separation of this medicinal plant power from the people at large by the powerful few.

My chief questions for Dr. Aaronson were those typically missing from our mental health policymaking, but which an increasing number of psychedelic studies make clear will need to be addressed. It appears Dr. Aaronson might be leading the way, as in this interview he gamely explored with me:

If psychedelic study participants consistently report that not only do the drugs relieve depression, but also impart a peace of mind rooted in the sense that there is a life beyond this one, then what are the implications for our capacity to relieve any kind of human suffering?

Is it even possible to have federal policies around drugs that induce spiritual experiences? How do we create scales to measure existential depression?

Who should be the ones to lead such adventures into the mysterious nature of the Unknown, and what kind of consent is necessary?

How do these studies force us to re-think the social constructs that traditionally have shaped our clinical descriptions of mental health? Do the answers to these questions point to our needing more psychobiological studies rather than less?

In other words, the more we learn about our soul, do we also need to learn more about our material selves?

That question about who should own the rights to psychedelics? As I hope my conversation with Muraresku will make clear, it’s an age-old one. It goes all the way back to the fifth century before Christianity, and perhaps even before that. And it begs even more questions, aside from who profits, such as what might be the other reasons the powers-that-be might want to control access to the Great Beyond.

Since Dr. Aaronson and I recorded this interview, COMP360 investigators published promising findings of a phase 2 study of the drug’s efficacy in a head-to-head trial against escitalopram, a selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitor, typically prescribed for major depressive disorder.

The study indicated the two treatments are likely comparable, with psilocybin possibly having more and better secondary outcomes, notably, those to do with long-lasting emotional breakthroughs, typically inflected with the mystical, which tended to occur in the study group at more than twice the rate of controls given escitalopram.

As per usual, the investigators are calling for larger and longer trials, which is what Dr. Aaronson will be doing, as he details in this podcast.

Accompanying the study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, is an editorial titled, “Back to the Future: The Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Drugs”, by Columbia University psychiatrist Jeffrey A. Lieberman, MD.

It is this attention to what our status quo has left behind — and the nation’s War on Drugs has most certainly meant we’ve largely left the healing power of many drugs like psychedelics and marijuana behind — but which might be of use to us as we move forward that I have been investigating with docu-mental. This is why I was intrigued to read Dr. Lieberman’s assertion that:

“Although this trial is an evidentiary milestone in the development of psychedelic drugs, it also reveals major knowledge gaps … a fundamental question is whether the putative therapeutic effects of psychedelics would require a patient to have a mystical experience or would occur in its absence through the pharmacologic effects on the serotonergic system or remodeling of neural circuitry. To answer this question, compounds are being engineered that have the pharmacologic properties of psychedelics but that do not cause mind-altering effects.”

Hopefully, my discussion with author Muraresku will help us determine whether the so-called “knowledge gaps” regarding psychedelics and mystical experiences are actually gaps, or are secrets that the hierarchy across the ages have known but deliberately have withheld.

Which is why the second part of what Dr. Lieberman writes is crucial. The question of who has “ownership” of psychedelics is extremely important, in fact, the fundamental question, the one which precedes Dr. Lieberman’s own “fundamental” question as to whether science can separate the mystical experiences from the therapeutic properties inherent to these substances.

While it is true that not everyone who engages with the psychotropic nature of these drugs reports life-changing mystical experiences, more do have them than don’t, including plenty of athiests and others uninterested in religion, as much of the data from the Johns Hopkins and NYU studies have shown.

For that reason, if psychedelics hold even just the possibility to relieve intractable human suffering, including the existential kind that Dr. Aaronson and I discuss in this interview, it would be unconscionable not to let them disrupt our current mental health policies designed to prevent parity of access compared to medical care, and certainly according to socio-economic status, as I say in this podcast.

But there is more, much more, riding on this.

How we handle the “God” question psychedelics poses will determine not just whether we shift the paradigm for mental health treatment, but also will tell us all much of what we need to know about the efficacy of the American experiment in freedom and democracy.

Even if science manages to cleave God from biology, the fact that these drugs have already demonstrated in clinical settings that it is possible to forever change one’s perception of reality so that the person can become more loving, compassionate, and at peace should be motivation enough to find ways to make them available.

This alone should make us hesitate about the desire to turn psychedelics into biological agents only.

The opioid crisis has proven that our money-driven approach to pharmaceuticals, especially those directed at our pain and limitations, leads to calamity. Similarly, I fear that the more money, politics, and hierarchies of the status quo remain in place when discussing the future of psychedelics, the more likely these drugs’ potential powers for healing will be left in the hands of those who might — or might not — decide to challenge the status quo, depending upon how they feel about the power and wealth they would stand to lose if they do.

Meaning that it’s possible all the promise of psychedelics will result in nothing more than a slap across democracy’s beautiful face.

Here’s the link to the video:

Here is a listing of the audio chapters:

0:00 Introduction

3:00 How Nixon’s War on Drugs included lies and government manipulations

11:00 How will depression treatment paradigm be challenged by psilocybin?

17:00 Is it possible to create federal policies around spiritual experiences?

23:00 Depression as a lever for deeper spiritual meaning

25:00 First integrative model for pharmaco & psychotherapy

28:00 How to balance biological v. phenomenological approach to depression: what new measurement scales will we need; how do we measure changes in self-worth, etc.?

33:00 Expanding end points and criteria to be more inclusive sooner for people in deep suffering, including from other mental health diagnoses

36:00 Existential depression could be good target for psychedelics

40:00 Working against scientism, expanding biology’s role, avoiding nihilism

46:00 Are community psychiatrists prepared for the changes psychedelics will bring, or will we need to bring in clergy to help with spiritual experiences? How can it be made accessible to all?

55:00 What bigger policy questions will positive clinical results cause us to face?

1:00:00 The impact fear of reprisal has on squelching scientific inquiry

Other docu-mental interviews about the intersection of psychiatry, policy, and culture:

The neuroscience of our national divide: how our brains help or hinder democracy's evolution - docu-mental (substack.com)

Does psychiatry reduce or increase our suffering, and are we powerless to change how it is practiced? - docu-mental (substack.com)

When psychiatry is life-saving: in defense of diagnoses - docu-mental (substack.com)

Harm from psychiatric diagnosis? A second look - docu-mental (substack.com)

It's not him, it's us: narcissism in POTUS45 is beside the point - docu-mental (substack.com)

Next week:

An interview with author, researcher, and lawyer who founded the organization Doctors for Cannabis Regulation, Brian Muraresku. His recent book, The Immortality Key traces the momentum of the status quo’s obliteration over the centuries, of the use of psychedelics in Christianity, specifically the Eucharist.

We’ll explore how the ancients penetrated to the mind of God using “A profound knowledge of visionary plants, herbs and fungi passed from one generation to the next,” until the powers-that-be put an end to whatever eroded their authority.

Thanks for reading, listening to, and supporting docu-mental.

Peace,

Whitney

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vol. 3 issue 20

Greetings,

On this episode, I talk with botanist and medical astrologer, Lee Lehman, PhD.

A medical astrologer can’t diagnose, can’t prescribe, and most likely does not have a medical degree, although more modern-day physicians have studied this ancient pillar of traditional Western medicine than you might expect. So, why bother to learn, much less use, this antiquated approach to helping patients?

These are the kinds of questions I put to Dr. Lehman. In that way, this interview is an adjunct to the conversation I had with award-winning author and Guggenheim scholar, Dr. Victoria Sweet, about her successful experiences with what she termed “slow medicine”. Inspired by the Medieval German abbess, Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179 AD; I give the wrong dates in this interview with Dr. Lehman — sorry), and until the hospital where she worked was overrun by consultants, Dr. Sweet practiced a kind of medicine that took its time, viewed people as plants in need of elemental balance, and allowed her patients to heal on their body’s own terms, not the 30 days typically mandated by federal regulations and insurance companies.

(The notion that a person could heal within 30 days traces its roots back to one full moon cycle and the timing of “critical days” when an ailment would either take a turn for the worst or better. In traditional 17th Century Western medicine, the kind Dr. Lehman practices — there are others, such as Jyotish-Ayurvedic, India’s own tradition — tracking the phases of the moon is key to prognosis.)

Time and space are what lie at the heart of medical astrology. It does not purport to treat anything, only frame it within a temporal context. Although using a humoral, elemental perspective can aid a medical astrologer in determining the cause of illness, as Dr. Lehman explains, actual diagnosis and treatment are considered discrete areas of specialization, which is why this field is an adjunct to medical training, not a replacement.

Physicians of old received integrated training, unlike today where considering the human body as a compound mixture of earth, water, fire, and air is today considered medical vulgate, it worked and was an obvious solution to align one’s medical condition with the planets, which also were — and are — considered elemental in their respective natures.

Applying these techniques requires a cyclical, not a linear perspective, in that astrology places every person at their unique crossroads of possibility and promise, infused with purpose. Such a framework is beyond the scope of actuarial science that collects and collapses what is rare and precious, even if paradoxically common, into probability and risk, devoid of any consideration of what the point to it all might be.

Still, as Dr. Lehman points out, plenty of insurance executives might like to know how medical astrology, with its ability to zero in on what is the matter, might save them a few bucks.

To that end, Dr. Lehman and I also discuss how, before medicine turned into healthcare, physicians relied upon their commerce with the stars to determine if they thought cure possible, and would only take on patients they were confident they could help, and accepted payment only after the cure was indeed proven and the patient restored to health.

As of March, I completed Dr. Lehman’s online medical astrology practitioner’s certification program through a school in the UK. I was drawn to the field first from an historical perspective, but then seeing that it was effective in helping clear up medical mysteries by looking at them elementally (sometimes keeping things simple makes what is inherently complex easier to comprehend) and recommending optimal times for surgery, realized its utility for people who get stuck in the doom loop of our modern healthcare system. I began to consider how, for less money and aggravation, it might be possible for people to get some valid information to help themselves and their physician get the heart of the matter faster, not waste time or money on unnecessary tests, and also cut out the middle man of insurance companies for non-acute situations.

In short, I saw it as a compassionate, personalized form of medical empowerment with limited so-called “barriers to access”.

At first, I approached this field with skepticism. What could humoral medicine, with its primitive and often wrong conclusions offer (eg, blood is not manufactured in the liver, as Galenic medicine taught, but is cleansed there, we now know)? Our modern understanding of anatomy, chemistry, germ theory, genetics, hormones, molecular biology, neurology, and every other -ology exponentially outstrips the knowledge of the 17th Century physicians who combined astrological understanding with Galen’s concepts of humoral medicine, drawn from Hippocrates’ own, with a little Aristotelian physics thrown in.

But the scientific method accurately applied – asking questions, testing theories, and having the humility to be wrong and start over – actually helped me see there is efficacy in this way medicine was practiced for centuries before modern technology and other influences dimmed our view of it.

This approach to connecting imbalances to where a person’s animation is sourced, and how it sings in time with the celestial bodies is indelibly humble. Without requiring an allegiance to a particular god, medical astrology acknowledges the presence of the ineffable. It is the well-delineated system that endures, and has proven itself flexible enough to accommodate any of modern medical advances to date.

The efficacy is its poetry. The poetry is its efficacy.

This was certainly not the direction I figured my career as a former healthcare insider would take, but in fact my background as both a hospice volunteer and clinical medicine and healthcare policy reporter paired well with understanding the holistic nature of this system. And, I know from personal experience that this system works. It gave me answers I sought after thousands of dollars and countless hours of aggravation winding my way through the “System” failed me. Once I got the answers I needed, I got better.

And so, I now wonder: Is there a way we can re-introduce this humble approach to health, one predicated on the belief that we are all connected to every living thing, to our modern gee-whiz but life-saving medicine?

Perhaps. Certainly, at a time when the world is in utter crisis of climate-change collapse, and our status-quo driven hierarchies are failing, hastened ironically by the conspiratuality fanatics who seek to claw their way to the top of such poisonous structures, it seems to me we have no time to waste in looking for utility in places the status quo previously has told us to ignore.

This is also why before I brought Dr. Lehman to your attention, I featured the conversation with the Lakota Music Project, to show that such a holistic perspective on the world has great power to heal, not just Indians, but whites and others – all of us.

I took the approach of interviewing Dr. Lehman as though I am myself naive to the subject, although I am not, in order to put myself in the place of most of my audience. I am sure some of you will dismiss this interview as frivolous, or worse. Others will listen and completely miss the point. Others will be bemused. Plenty of you will be intrigued. But it will get you to think, to consider your health and your reliance upon the world at large for its stability. If nothing else, maybe ponder where you, in your light body, stand at the crossroads of time and space, and how it aligns with other bodies.

Here’s the video version:

For a complete list of the audio “chapters” of our discussion, complete with time stamps, see the end of this post.

Thanks so much for reading and for your material support. The strength of docu-mental gives me such joy. It is testament to my not being alone in my questions. I am not alone in my refusal to be discouraged in search of freedom that is truly free, not transactional, not laden with freakshow b**t.

Upcoming in the next two months are such great guests, I can hardly wait for you to hear our conversations. In addition to my line-up in May to discuss the implications of psychedelic use, I’ve also added new authors and thinkers who will challenge you to reconsider the symbology you’ve been relying upon to tell your personal and collective stories…don’t be scared! Be excited! You can choose your own adventure…and be a solid citizen at the same time.

Peace,

Whitney

For more information about Lee Lehman, PhD, and the study of medical astrology: STA School of Traditional Astrology.

Don’t forget to visit our sister publication, Ensouled: the journal of applied and cultural astronomy. The next issue of this monthly online publication comes out May 3. It will address the odd threads quickly knitting together between the Catholic Church, the Department of Defense, and one of GAIA media’s most popular presenter as the world awaits further information about the implications of aliens among us. Thank you to the many docu-mental subscribers who have also added their names to the list of Ensouled supporters.

Here’s the audio chapter list for this podcast:

0:00 Introduction3:44 What is a medical astrologer?6:30 What is humoral medicine and why might it still be relevant?7:30 Evolution of deism to empiricism in Greek medicine9:40 The material meets the metaphorical in humoral medicine; blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm (sanguine, choleric, melancholy, and phlegmatic)11:17 How astrology helps anticipate humoral imbalance13:42 Case study – stopping snoring15:20 Coordinating the planets to the body through the elements18:07 The role of divinity20:23 Why did blood-letting ‘stop working’?23:34 How politics helped drive astrology from medicine24:41 The original patient-centered care in Roman times. ‘No cure, no payment.’31:54 Is there a compelling reason to return to this 17th Century form of medical counsel?32:33 Is there value in today’s medicine for astrology’s capacity to evaluate the quality of time?36:41 The personalized v. the averaged (astrological v. actuarial) perspective on treatment44:30 Who are medical astrologers’ typical clientele? What results count as ‘successful’, what ethical concerns are there?49:15 Could medical astrology help the healthcare system save money?52:30 Might there ever be a place in policymaking for this kind of medical insight?

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vol. 3 issue 15

Greetings,

Continuing with our look at what we might have lost of ourselves and our traditions through the necessary, but unnecessarily brutal, national acculturation process over the centuries, I offer this tender and provocative conversation with Delta David Gier and Emmanuel “Bull” Black Bear, two members of the Lakota Music Project.

Based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the project began in 2009 when Maestro Gier, artistic director of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, sought ways to serve the community at large. The result was a partnership with various members of the Sioux Nation, primarily those living on the Rosebud Reservation. Bull is a member of the Ogalala Sioux and is the leader of the Creekside Singers, a drumming and singing group from “the rez” that also now forms approximately half of the LMP’s total musicians.

Until the pandemic made performing impossible, at least for now, the LMP performed widely across the state, bringing their blended form of Western and indigenous music to audiences of all races, and in so doing, helping to effect inter-racial harmony throughout the region where racism against American Indians and indigenous skepticism of white “gringos” are prevalent.

I first was introduced to the LMP in 2019 when they performed here in Washington. I wrote about my experience attending this concert, and how it reminded me of time spent in Indian Country (and native Hawai’i as well), where time is a state of mind, not a linear construct to help us achieve progression from point A to point B.

How would it be possible, I wondered, to combine the music of a culture that responds to its environment, with the music of a culture that is predicated on controlling its environment? In fact, as both the maestro and Bull describe in this interview, it was not easy, but the difficulty was where they found their success. By putting aside egos and accepting that the point was less perfection than it was to build relationships, the LMP has created cultural bridges between the worlds of red and white, and still another bridge to a place where race is irrelevant: the place music takes us when language is limited.

It is in this place that the two leaders of their respective musical ensembles realized they shared the same goal. By assuming the mantle of what Gier calls “professional listeners”, together, he and Bull built trust in one another, their communities, and a way forward to peace an understanding that would not be possible without including the traditions of the past.

And that is why I think the LMP has much to teach us now, in this moment when our institutions have largely failed us all, rending our nation in tatters, leaving us to wonder how we ever will advance with a clear idea of how all the disparate parts of our multi-racial selves fit together.

My specific area of interest this year is in our traditional medicine, but it is deeper than that, as you likely have noted. My interest includes not just the ways we have traditionally treated illness in this country, but how the choices we have made around medicine and healing have never been in a vacuum, even when we have forgotten this fact.

We are never isolated, even when our commitment to what is shiny, fast, and novel might give us that impression. Instead, we either function within our environment, or become dysfunctional when we lose touch with our place within that environment.

I do not profess to have more than a neophyte’s appreciation for the sounds of native drumming and singing, and I am deeply reverent of my own Western musical traditions. Each moves me when I listen, but with different effects on how it engages my senses. Both ultimately will deliver me to a transcendent place, but the former is organic while the latter is measured.

As humans, we need both. It is our nature to make sense of things, to order and name them. But when we do so at the expense of remembering that ultimately, we are all connected to that which we parse, that nothing exists beyond the circular continuum of being, even if we are ingenious enough to lay it out on a timeline so we can experience it incrementally, then we come to believe the lie that we are separate. Our current legacy of healthcare demonstrates the expense and inefficiency of this approach.

The truth is, we are all connected, and we live within a world holistically. The need for reform is the evidence-based proof of how we have left too much of our elemental power behind in our focus on advancement. Jung might say it is time for us to look back now, and to retrieve the shadow of our former selves if we are to continue that advancement.

Dr. Victoria Sweet told us about how Slow Medicine is the way to exist and heal within the circle of life outside of the moments when the need for direct, acute response has passed. Physicians and healthcare systems that have access to both of these rhythms, I believe are the ones that are best equipped to treat and heal communities to their fullest, most complex potential.

It is this lesson in harmony and humility I was confident the LMP could offer us in our examination of what a compassionate and effective healthcare system of the future might look like. In my vision, it is a system of care that remembers we are all part of the environment, where each of us needs the right amount of rain, sunshine, fresh air, and nutritious food, a place where when we are denied that balance, we suffer and fail to thrive. My vision also recalls that while our modern health technologies are also essential – and inevitable, given that being human is to create and innovate – conquering and dominating the environment where we seek to effect healing is not.

We need both, but the importance of one – the ego, if you will – cannot precede the necessity and importance of the other.

Below are the video chapters in this short podcast/video.

Don’t forget, later this month (exact date TBA) — Ensouled: the online journal of applied and cultural astronomy. It’s an anthropological approach to humanity’s relationship to the heavens over the eons.

Also to come later this Spring…

I have begun conducting interviews with prominent members of the vanguard of psychedelic medical research. First up will be a truly provocative interview with Scott Aaronson, MD, clinical research director at Sheppard Pratt in Towson, Md., one of the nation’s oldest psychiatric facilities, and now home to the Center of Excellence for psychedelic medical research for treatment-resistant depression, sponsored by the mental health company, Compass.

There is a lot of debate in the venture capital community currently, as to whether there should be proprietary gains from therapeutic molecules found in nature, and I will address that in time, but my conversation with Dr. Aaronson centered on the implications of taking people on trips, so to speak, when the guides in charge might not be sure of how to navigate the mind-blown-wide-open terrain.

Thanks for reading and listening.

Peace,

Whitney

The Lakota Music Project Podcast and Video Chapter Markers:

0:00 Introduction

5:00 Partnership decision made to create better, more just world for Bull’s son

8:30 Difficulty to come in on just the right note

11:15 Music as a process of feeling, not counting

14:08 How two worlds come together

18:00 First you trust, then the music just happens

20:33 The marriage of two traditions improves the lives of those from each

28:21 Belief and faith in the process of each other brings integrity to all

30:55 The role of a “professional listener”

32:50 Music is what our souls hear and helps us thrive and heal

35:00 The death knell of music’s power is when it is commodified

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vol. 3 issue 7

Greetings,

Given that January 2021 still felt a hella bunch like 2020, I am considering this month to be the start of our actual 2021, and with it, a year-long look at what healthcare, and the general policy contexts it is set within, might be like if we were to deconstruct the way we currently frame it.

My first impulse is to remind everyone that healthcare is a construct of economics, not the actual care of the sick, which is the practice of medicine. Things like “patient care”, the so-called triple aim of “the best patient experience, with the best possible outcome, for the lowest possible cost”, or patient “throughput”, the operational term used to describe how long a patient remains the responsibility of a discrete health system – these have absolutely nothing to do with actual healing. Nothing.

But these are the kinds of things everyone gets their knickers in a twist over whenever healthcare reform gets discussed. Whatever gets debated is about the mechanics of delivering “interventions” and improving the healthcare consumer experience. If the concept of healing is considered, it is always within the framework of the system that in our country largely represents an assembly line, as though the Ford Motor Company designed it. And in fact, much of our healthcare does derive from such industrial methods such as Total Quality Management or Six Sigma, two statistics-based operational theories that are now mainstream management methods in most American health systems.

Data matters, and data can tell us a lot about things we need to know in order to do somethings well, especially when we’re talking about economics. But people do not live in the data. They live in their environments. They live in their stories. They live within the “matters” of their own lives.

Here in the West, medicine used to be practiced within this kind of framework, where a person who wasn’t thriving was first viewed within the context of the larger picture. An investigation into what might be the environmental shifts that have caused the person to not thrive as before would have been the starting point for determining a pathway back to health. Was there a change in their diet? The quality of their food? Were they somehow out of work and so unable to afford their living expenses? Was there something preventing them from having safe shelter? Were they sad or upset about something like the loss of a loved one?

Such assessments would require time and attention. It would require a familiarity with the community where the person lived, and a general knowledge of how they conducted their lives. Today, doctors are often directed to think about these things, but only as part of an ever-growing check list of things they are tasked with being responsible for, not because it’s good medicine, but because it is part of their hospital system employers’ drive to cut costs, which, always seem to be going up these days since people without safety nets are rather costly to care for.

Affordable housing, safe neighborhoods, healthy and affordable food, to name a few of what many of us used to take for granted are now termed “social determinants of health”, when what they actually are used to be what hold people together in health and balance.

Snarky comment: Who woulda thunk that fraying what was once a whole fabric, and pulling out each thread to be privatized, bought, and sold, would make the tapestry far too expensive and unwieldy when we need to weave it back together again?

Now, you choose a “primary care provider”, a term physicians loathe, since it reduces them to widget status, washing away the status once conferred by the honorific granted by their years of training. You find this “provider” on what might be a sorely outdated list, and you hope that if that person still is on that list for real, he or she has space enough to include you in the practice’s panel AND that they will still take your insurance. Will you have a rapport with this person? Will they understand your unique situation? If you’re lucky, perhaps yes.

But what if you don’t? Well, maybe it won’t matter because you only have up to 15 minutes to talk with them anyway.

How did we get here? The answer is, as so many clinical research papers will tell you about whatever is at hand, “multifactorial”. But overall, I peg it on our cultural shift over the past several decades where we have gone from viewing all things in our world as being all of a piece, and instead have sought to reduce each part of the whole into units of measurement, and then monetize them.

In other words, medicine became just a commodity when we separated the function of medicine from its form of delivery: medicine is beside the point. That’s not just me saying that, it’s the government.

It was the Federal Trade Commission’s 1975 attack on the medical profession, claiming it was overall engaged in a “restraint of trade”, and suing the American Medical Association to allow its members to advertise, something the AMA’s code of ethics forbade, for fear that it would demean the profession.

The FTC won its suit, and soon we found ourselves awash in advertising for all sorts of medical services, and eventually pharmaceuticals and “lifestyle” healthcare products. What is the point of advertising if not to create a marketplace for goods to hawk? In other words, medicine the art and profession, was now a commodity in a marketplace called Healthcare. And in a consumer-based society such as ours, markets are meant to grow, which has indeed happened: healthcare is a fifth of our entire national domestic product.

The FTC’s action helped assure a cultural shift where medicine has become transactional, where once upon a time it was personal and even spiritual, or at least soulful, in its administration which up until the middle of last century often took place in charity care settings run by religious orders (what we now euphemistically call “faith-based organizations”). Any power physicians once had is now subverted to the system. In short, we have tried to re-attach medicine to a system that was built to serve itself, meaning medicine is an after-thought.

Okay, so you get it. Now what?

First, we see what’s been lost. Then we re-imagine healthcare where medicine is practiced in a larger context. The correct context, not the phony one of commodities and GDPs.

And for that, we have to go way back in time to a little monastery in Germany and consider the methods of a mystical abbess, physician, and genius of healing, named Hildegard von Bingen. Actually, we don’t need to do all that time travel; Victoria Sweet, MD, has done that for us, and has skillfully shown how when medicine is practiced in a manner that sees a patient in the context of his or her entire environment, the outcomes are staggeringly good.

Dr. Sweet is the author of two eminently readable memoirs of practicing the art of such medicine: God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine, and Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing. They might be memoirs, but I see them as important public health documents, and it is from that perspective that I interview her in this episode of docu-mental: mapping the american states of mind.

In the first half hour, Dr. Sweet and I discuss what motivated the Department of Justice and a private Beltway consulting firm to essentially dismantle the nation’s last remaining alms house, Laguna Honda Hospital in Marin County, California. Dr. Sweet is a spicy and funny raconteur, one of the most entertaining guests I have had the pleasure to interview.

The second half hour is spent defining “slow medicine” and comparing our private system to nationalized ones elsewhere. Spoiler alert, Capitalism wins out in Dr. Sweet’s world…that is, so long as certain guidelines are in place.

Which brings our conversation around to the final 20 minutes or so where we discuss the sinister – and I choose that word deliberately – nature of dark money in healthcare, and finally, we hear the humorous and moving story of Terry, the patient saved by slow medicine under Dr. Sweet’s care.

My second impulse with this issue and episode of docu-mental is to tell you that I see our cultural views of medicine shifting, faster than some might realize. That’s why I think it’s important to take this year-long view of what we’ve lost of healing while in our reductionist cultural frame of mind.

Before you know it, we’re going to find ourselves needing our medicine of old, because it will be what informs the incredible potentials inherent to the medicine of now, the medicine of CRISPR and stem cells, and all gee whiz kinds of expensive but mind-blowingly amazing medicine that has already outstripped Healthcare, the System, and its monolithic widget-minded approach to care that has tried to own medicine but has in fact failed.

And why has Healthcare, the System failed to control those costs? Because when we are honest about it, we see that Healthcare, the System, is morally bankrupt, and no amount of cost savings-focused reform can change that truth.

That doesn’t make those of us who have worked within the healthcare system ourselves morally flawed, but it does mean that when we see how we’ve been co-opted by a corrupt and failing monolith, it’s tantamount to immorality to let our policymakers rail on about irrelevant factors like cutting healthcare costs when what really needs attention is the cultural belief system in which all our other systems, including “healthcare”, operate.

Are we shaping our culture to fit our policies, or are we letting our policies shape our culture? That is the key question for evaluating the effectiveness of our policymakers.

Welcome to docu-mental: mapping the american states of mind 2021. This year, we’re examining what we believe and why about medicine and healthcare in the hopes that we will hit upon resolutions for how to create practical policies informed by both.

Peace,

Whitney

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vol. 3 issue 6

Greetings,

Smoking is awful for one’s health.

Generally speaking, that’s not a controversial statement. I could go down the rabbit hole about how smoking chemical-laden cigarettes on a regular, perhaps addictive, basis is what is actually bad for you, not the occasional inhalation of medicinal smoke into one’s lungs…but that is far from the point of this fascinating conversation with physician, historian, and author, Victoria Sweet, MD.

The actual take-away from my talk with this pioneer of medicine, is that when physicians are free to apply their best clinical judgment to the unique situations their patients present them with, then astounding feats of healing are not only possible, they are probable.

The problem is that in the United States, physicians are not empowered to use their best clinical judgement. They have been trained through decades “monetizing” medicine into HEALTHCARE to hew within very tightly packed lanes of behavior, set not by physicians but by health insurers, ever-expanding healthcare systems, and far too many bureaucrats.

Also troubling is that increasingly, these narrow lanes of what physicians and other medical personnel — our nation’s healers — can actually do in order to ensure our better selves emerge when our minds and bodies are hurting, is gravely compromised by dark money streams, usually welling up from the pockets of private equity.

The result: healthcare costs continue to rise. Quality of care continues to drop. Outcomes stink. And hello, we’ve not even brought up the “c” word, that being Covid.

And yet, our legislators and policymakers continue running their calls for reform through the same kinds of narrow banks (pun intentional) that flow murky and dark. They talk about healthcare, but healthcare is a system created by people who seek to profit. Maybe that’s okay, but maybe it’s shortsighted. And if it’s shortsighted, perhaps it is that way for a reason: control of the profits by a few, and those few do not tend to be medically trained.

After writing about healthcare and medicine for more than 30 years, I can say with utter conviction that physicians and nurses are nearly always earnest in their attempts to function not only at the top of their licenses, but also from the bottom of their hearts when it comes to the lives entrusted to them.

But healthcare is not the same thing as medicine. Patient care is not the same thing as caring for patients. We’ve forgotten that because it is the institutions that profit that set the rules for how medical people are trained.

There are ways around this, but first we need to be clear on what the rules are and why. That’s the nub of my conversation with Dr. Sweet. It begins with a story about Terry, a homeless woman in her 30s who suffers an infection that leaves her temporarily paralyzed from the neck down. Terry wants a puff. Dr. Sweet needs to perform her clinical exam.

A small crisis arises. And so, I ask…

Should a physician help a patient light a cigarette?

I don’t think that’s any of our business to decide. That is, unless one of us is the patient, and the other of us is that person’s treating physician.

This issue of docu-mental contains just a taste of the juicy conversation I had with Dr. Sweet. The full audio and video of it will be available this weekend for patron subscribers only. I hope you will consider becoming one.

In the meantime, you might also want to revisit this previous issue of docu-mental to help you mull over the differences between healthcare and medicine. It’s an Occam’s Razor approach to re-considering the healthcare system in the US.

Here’s a snippet:

Because government and for-profit healthcare companies are the ones to whom we have outsourced the decision-making. It is deceptive to say there is freedom and democracy when the choices we start with aren’t really choices at all.

Let me lob this thought into your weekend holiday plans: maybe we need smaller everything. Maybe Texas and California and Key West and South Carolina and South Jersey should all secede. Or – maybe states’ rights should be greatly restored and the federal government should be left to worry about defense and education only.

Maybe we need smaller forms of government, smaller communities that we build from the ground up, in forms that make the most sense to our concerns and local needs. Then the ones who are closest to the outcomes will be the ones who have the most say in shaping how they will be achieved.

Now that I have your attention, at least consider that progressives and liberals are absolutely correct that good healthcare is a fundamental right, and that government should ensure access to it. They are also correct to say that despite many private health insurance and other related companies’ community-based efforts to improve healthcare outcomes, these are always profit-driven, no matter how much marketing is done to make it seem otherwise.

Meanwhile, conservatives and others sympathetic to them are correct that too much interference from big government makes caring for our communities difficult to do, including making it too expensive.

But don’t be fooled by any sleight of hand that government should be minimized and private industry maximized: too big corporations are no different than too big government – that is, they are both too big to care, not too big to fail. I am not the first to say it.

Looking forward to having you along for this year’s look at re-defining what the rules of healthcare ought to be.

Peace,

Whitney

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vol. 2 issue 57

Greetings,

There is no other.

Except that there is.

I know that last time I said it isn’t about “him” or about “them” but only about us, but there is a caveat.

To say we humans are all one is really only a half-truth, as we learn in this episode of docu-mental: healing the american states of mind.

My guest, James Griffith, MD, chair of the George Washington University School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, lays this out clearly by explaining the neuroscience behind our current national divide.

While we Homo sapiens might be one species, we all have two operating systems in our brains, one wired for empathy, the other for group think. The more evolved brain is progressive, in that it reaches toward “the other” with compassion, in order to connect. The regressed brain, the one which is primal and focused on security and defense, is the one that categorizes “the other” as a threat that must be fought and repelled for the preservation of the tribe.

Ironically, whatever our tribe – say other americans, for example (and remember, I use little “a” to keep us all in check) – it grows wider and stronger when we operate from the more evolved empathetic brain. Peace is more prevalent when we practice this kind of vulnerability, too.

This isn’t to say threats don’t exist in the world, but maybe the extent to which they are there depends on our state of mind, whether it be more fearful or curious, and whether we are choosing to operate within our evolutionary right as humans to see “the other” with compassion and respect.

In this episode, Dr. Griffith and I explore how these concepts have manifested in our country, and examine how our two brain circuitries have been used to either manipulate or motivate us.

We begin our discussion with a look at how the covid crisis has caused a steep incline not in mental illness but in distress, and why it is important to recognize the difference.

But, there is more: There are several implicit warnings against feeling smug, thinking we are more evolved than the other guy.

So, about this idea that “there is no other.” I’ve been thinking a lot about it. “There Is No Other” is even the name of a recent eclectic album by american vocalist and instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens and Italian jazz musician Francesco Turrisi. Theirs is a celebrated musical statement that “Us v. Them” thinking clouds our historical truths.

It’s a provocative album. I like it, and I wholly respect these two impeccable artists for retracing history, in their case, across Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, in search of what our hierarchies have required us all to leave behind.

However, these kinds of political overtones in our art and commentary such as my own can also cloud our truths if we lose perspective. Namely, that it is a scientific fact that there is indeed an “other” that our brains are genetically wired to perceive unless we override that perception by choosing to see the “other” from an evolved perspective.

As I’ve written before, democracy demands complexity, and complexity demands that we seek to weave the colors of all genetic threads into the fabric of our nation. But to leap over the fact that such inclusivity means first taking responsibility for our individual choice to rely on one operating system or another is not democratic. It’s certainly not evolved.

It’s why I am still annoyed to think of there being something called “equality, diversity, and inclusion” (EDI) training. It worries me because it runs the risk of us resorting to check lists for how to avoid seeing others as “the other” which is to say, it gives us a plan for group think!

Or, to put it personally, the way I initially reacted to it EDI when it was explained to me:

Please, do not tell me who I should and should not be nice to. I will make that decision, but I will do so because I am evolved enough to choose to view the world with empathy, to seek ways to consciously cross the gap between me and “the other”.

I am also fully aware that I can be a right b***h who does not want to allow others into my group. I take responsibility for her, too, and I know what to do with her, how to talk to her, and how to make her behave without judging her because she is just as real and biologically sound as the nicer me.

So, keep your snoot in your own business.

Do you see what I am getting at?

The real power of our nation, the real gift our democracy gives is the potential to live in a free society where each of us chooses to be an evolved human being without punishing the lesser parts of ourselves. And! And without all the hierarchical horse hockey where one faction of us thinks it has the right to tell the rest of us what is right and wrong.

That is not democracy.

Whether it’s all the preachy, obnoxious, and stuck-up white men in Mitch McConnell’s cabal who presume to have dibs on what I should do with my body, or any militant other-thinking activists who want to expunge our institutions of such narrowminded men, that is not democracy.

It’s small-minded. And it is potentially irrevocably dangerous to democracy’s survival.

Writing, producing, and publishing docu-mental is an experiment in publicly thinking out loud, in front of an exponentially growing crowd of people I do not know, whose individually engaged brain’s operating system while reading me may well telegraph to them that I am a threat, not an ally. I tell you, it’s scary.

But there is also the fact that, more often than not, I have no idea what I am going to say until I sit down and write it, and increasingly, I am bewildered by where my thoughts take me. Often, it’s to the fringes.

I find that what I am delineating is how we americans are becoming the architects of our own destruction, and the destruction of what otherwise has the potential to be the most gorgeous and perfectly imperfect system of human governance ever to have existed on the planet. That’s because it is the only one that I’ve ever heard of anyway, that can balance what is real with what is imagined.

Too many of us so stupidly line up in separate camps behind either God or Science and hurl rocks at one another, even if the rocks are just words. Meanwhile, the voices from the middle ground where democracy actually lives are lost in the melee.

It’s those people in the middle we must rely upon if we’re not going to kill democracy. These are the people who, regardless of whether they articulate it this way, know that neither God nor Science alone propels us forward. I worry not enough of us cares to hear them, that we are letting the narratives of those who want to manipulate us for their own aims be the narratives that perpetuate our national self-loathing and anger at “otherness”.

This is why I am relieved somewhat when I meet, work with, and hear about people such as Dr. Griffith, who aren’t interested in being right, but are interested in helping those caught in the crossfire to be heard, and just as importantly perhaps, to facilitate listening opportunities for those on the extremes, if they will allow it.

I first had the pleasure of working with “Griff” early in 2016 when I hatched the idea for a series of instructional videos for the coming onslaught of mental health concerns I detected so-called “primary care providers” (doctors hate that term; it’s an offensive and diminishing bit of jargon slapped on them by insurance companies) who typically didn’t have much training in addressing mental illnesses, would be facing thanks to changes in federal healthcare policy and an that other thing I keep railing on about – the rise in our national levels of anxiety and depression.

I was startled and impressed by Griff’s take on how patients could be reassured that in addition to anti-depressants, there were other valid paths to finding balance and connection with a brighter self, including those of a spiritual nature, where a person might lean hard on a community of faith and its shared sense that life has meaning, even when the reductionist, materially obsessed system we operate in here in America routinely serves up realities that are devoid of meaning.

Getting into the clinical implications of this is not my intention here, but of course evaluating patients to be sure they are not in danger and do not require other forms of intervention is good medicine. That’s not just a disclaimer, it’s my whole-hearted belief based on personal experience and years of observation as a reporter and journal editor in the field.

The larger point I am making is that it was clear to me that Griff, and his colleagues who also participated in the video project, viewed their patients with a compassion born of a global perspective on the nature and reality of spiritual pain, the kind that is born of believing one has no reason to hope and to dream.

Dr. Griffith is one of several in his department at GWU, including Dr. Allen Dyer, who has also been a docu-mental guest, who are actively seeking to soothe that pain and to facilitate peace in the world one relationship at a time. For example, as we hear in this episode, in addition to working with dispossessed americans living in Appalachia, Dr. Griffith works with Palestinians and Orthodox Jews in the West Bank to help foster personal understanding and compassion, by appealing to the evolved parts of those participants’ brains, the ones that seeks to empathize with not defend against one another.

We also hear in this episode about how and why this approach succeeds, and why it will likely not be either the sloganeering so-called progressives nor the MAGAs among us, but the ones rooted firmly in what is beyond the here and now, as well as in what is right before them at this moment, who are likely to lead us away from the brink.

Plenty of historians have shed light on how democracy has been defined and applied over time, but my take on it, for whatever that is worth, is that democracy is an evolutionary system of government, one that requires a soulful application of science, and one that is entirely in the hands of we humans acting moderately in the middle, perhaps aided by our better angels, but not building a forcefield around us and attributing our fortunes good, bad, or otherwise, to some supernatural force, as our current and specious national motto “In God We Trust” implies.

If anything, two key takeaways from this episode is that democracy is the bridge between soul and science, and that operating from the middle is not the same as mediocrity. The alchemy of greatness is what our original national motto, E pluribus unum — From many, one — really is.

As such, democracy is the facilitator of a potentially glorious and harmonious relationship between who we imagine ourselves capable of becoming, and what we apply our rigorous intelligence to mapping as repeatable and thus currently true. It is the link between fact and what is not fiction so much as the ineffable that cannot be proven, but which adds so much richness and purpose to our lives and so is still very much valid.

In that light, I humbly offer this episode on how to heal our national divide, the scientifically based caveat to my exhortation that our politics is always about “us”, my response to well-intentioned artists and activists who are right to remind us that we are all human.

Even so, while the explanation of the neuroscience of our current national strife is interesting, in the end, it’s just fancy proof of something those happily ensconced in the middle have known in their hearts all along, perhaps unaware that science had also mapped it out in their brains:

Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.

Whatever that means to you is between you and yours, but if we each heed that Golden Rule, I reckon it means there’ll be a lot less hollerin’ and fuss in our land, even if it takes generations to get it right. But neither immediate gratification nor perfection is the goal, freedom to imagine what perfect means to each of us as individuals is.

Peace,

Whitney

For more about the books Dr. Griffith references in the interview:

Religion that Heals, Religion That Harms, Dr. Griffith’s own 2011 award-winning book on the subject of spirituality and mental wellness.

From the blurb:

“Dr. Griffith is a prominent author and has published research articles and books on psychiatry and spirituality. Most recently, Dr. Griffith published a book titled, Religion that Heals, Religion That Harms, that helps clinicians to intervene effectively in situations where religious faith is used harmfully. His book provides vivid examples of how religious beliefs and practices may propel suicide, violence, self-neglect, or undue suffering in the face of medical or emotional challenges and offers empathetic and respectful ways to interview patients who disdain contact with mental health professionals.”

Arlie Hochshild’s 2016 National Book Award finalist selection, Strangers in their Own Land

“The anger and hurt of the author’s interviewees are intelligible to all. In today’s political climate, this may be invaluable.” —The Economist

Time stamps for this interview:

00:00 Introduction

01:30 Difference between mental illness and mental distress

4:15 The evolutionary psychological perspective on our political provocations and how our brains are susceptible to being hijacked into group think.

5:50 The difference between empathy and categorical brain circuitry.

7:40 How one overrides the other.

9:00 “Politicians might not know how it works, but they do know the power of creating uncertainty and threat in a population,” and how this leads to conspiracies and justifications for clinging to group think driving political division that can be exploited for profit and power.

14:00 The “front-back” shift effect in our brains that halts metabolic function of our executive function when successfully manipulated through fear-mongering.

16:00 Warning to Progressives not to cloak selves in “science” that is just sloganeering.

20:50 Discussion of the best tools for overcoming the national divide, including activating the “person-to-person” network in our brains.

21:30 Why it won’t be MAGA people who facilitate peace in our land.

26:00 Discussion of lawyer and activist, Bryan Stevenson and the difference between forgiveness and awareness of the “emotional other”.

29:00 How this has been modeled in the fight around abortion.

30:00 Discussion of who actually will be the ones to lead the nation toward peace.

33:30 Why those living in Coal Country and Appalachia distrust the rest of the country but cling to the companies that have forsaken them.

38:00 The role of social media in denigrating our national tools for peaceful conflict resolution.

43:30 How does one treat the loss of a dream?

I hope you had a lot to eat for Thanksgiving. I did, and I felt very grateful to have so much on my plate.

Also, I raised a glass in thanks to you, for being a subscriber. What started as a meager list of academics and policy wonks in my circle here in DC has now rippled out exponentially across the entire nation, and at least three countries, much to my surprise and of course, delight. So many of you want to map and heal the mind of our beloved country. Thank you, thank you!

Starting next month, I will be reviewing highlights of the year and previewing what’s to come in 2021. There will be still more insights and fun for patron subscribers, including book clubs, and extra insights in my Window Over Washington posts. For everyone on the list, I have already lined up some fantastic guests, including two New York Times Bestselling authors on what kind of awesomeness healthcare could be if We the People were to dream it, and then move past the politicians and profiteers to make it so…

If you would like to share this kind of thinking out loud with others whom you think would be inspired to do the same, please share!

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vol. 2 issue 54

Note: docu-mental’s coverage of The Blacksmith is a joint venture with DC Metro Theater Arts. You can read a slightly different version of this feature and review/preview of Opera Lafayette’s production of The Blacksmith, here. The video interview above and the commentary in this feature is exclusive to docu-mental.

Greetings,

Take any decent road trip through the American West and you’re bound to pass half-a-dozen old opera houses in varying states of disrepair, or repair — if there happens to be a local renaissance underway. That’s because contrary to what you might expect, opera houses were essential for offering respite to the dusty rustiness of life on the frontier, being as they were the venue for itinerant entertainers, politicians, preachers, lecturers, and other speakers with news from back East.

Put another way: outside of the saloon, especially if a settlement lacked a strong enough contingent of righteous folks to see to there being a church erected, the opera house was the Old West’s quintessential all-comers meeting place.

And so it is with Mancos, Colorado, where a downtown rebirth is underway, the centerpiece of it being the opera house built in 1910, when the frontier was still rough. It’s a movement co-led by ranchers and artists, many of them retirees from the rat race, or newcomers fleeing fire-ravaged coastal areas. The collaboration is worth noting since, even if so far, there haven’t been any shoot outs, there has been plenty of hollerin’ over what constitutes correct land use and water rights, pitting oldtimers against the newbies.

Still, the shared vision is that the opera house will become a thriving performing arts and community center, a small business incubator, and all-around place where differences can be put aside and friends and enemies alike can come together, learn from one another, and focus on the future, while not forgetting their past, whether or not is a shared past.

Standing ovation from the socially-distanced audience for a performance of Opera Lafayette’s The Blacksmith, at Reddert Ranch in Mancos, Colo. Photo: Paul Boyer.

Enter into this fray, the Washington-based Opera Lafayette, which earlier this year was set to premiere its Old Westernized version of The Blacksmith (Le Maréchal ferrant), an 18th-century French comic opera composed in the mid-1700s by François-André Danican Philidor with libretto by François-André Quétant. OL stage director and musical arranger Nick Olcott along with OL founding artistic director and violinist, Ryan Brown, set their adaptation of the work in an 1890s American frontier town.

The premiere was intended as the restored opera house’s gala fundraiser opening night back in May, but then ol’ covid came riding into town and busted up the whole shindig. Of course, the show must go on, and so it did, even if a little later than planned.

This past October, with audience members seated on hay bales placed 6 feet apart, the show premiered on the Reddert Ranch just outside Mancos, the working cattle farm that has been in Brown’s family for generations, and where he has spent nearly every summer of his life.

Turns out, Reddert Ranch is also home to an historic blacksmith shop that served as the perfect backdrop for two well-attended, late afternoon performances, both of which were held on behalf of the Mancos Cattlemen’s Association and the Mancos Creative District. Each performance ended just as the sun was setting over the La Plata Mountains, not far from Mesa Verde National Park.

Full cast (L-R) Sarah Shafer as Jeannie, Arnold Livingston Geis as Cody, Dominique Cote as Marcel the Blacksmith, Joshua Conyers as Eustis, Pascale Beaudin as Claudine, Frank Kelley as Slim MacBride. Reddert Ranch outside Mancos, Colorado October 2020. Photo Credit: Paul Boyer.

The Blacksmith is typical 18th-century comedic opera fare: father arranges marriage for his daughter, daughter wants to make her own choice in love, daughter wants man who also happens to be her aunt’s object of affection, a fight breaks out, daughter accidentally “kills” their mutual paramour, chaos and comedy ensue, the dead comes alive, everyone sings about how they will now all live and love happily ever after.

It’s silly, but it’s human. And of course, no one lives happily ever after, they just live their lives, and everybody knows it, too. That’s why comic opera works, and why, once this particular show was re-worked to reflect the local memes and meanings, folks went nuts for it.

But there’s more to it than a good time was had by all. It was performed on the land, and above all else in the West, it is the land that matters.

Opera Lafayette founder and artistic director, Ryan Brown with musician and horsewoman, Lynne Lewis. Photo: Whitney Fishburn.

That’s what makes this interview with Maestro Brown and his friend and fellow rancher and musician, Lynne Lewis (who also plays guitar in the adaptation), so special to me. It’s a talk about music but it’s really about the place that we romanticize as the heart and soul of what America “is”: the Old West. And it’s a place that is finite, and people know that, too. Ain’t no one making any more of it, no matter how many of us want a piece of it.

It’s that scramble for limited resources that turns one group against another in our nation, forcing us to ask who deserves those resources more.

And yet, there is another way, we just don’t want as a nation to admit it: a return to how most indigenous peoples see the land. That is, that we belong to it. It does not belong to us. It is what hosts us, feeds us, provides for us.

This interview, the sixth video in the series docu-mental: healing the american states of mind, takes us back to the first and second videos where we considered how to move forward as a soulful nation, we need to own our sins, which include how we have treated the indigenous of this land, and enslaved black Africans.

It also connects with our third video, where we discussed how the performing arts can help us to create the necessary rituals for us to come together as a nation, but also as micro-communities, where it is easier to find common ground and values that bind, even if they do so in overlapping circles, where we might share a love for our local land, but not share a love of the same political point of view.

In that spirit, in this conversation, through the lens of a Westernized version of a French comic opera, with thoughts from two musicians, yes, but also two ranchers, we get to the heart of what’s been bugging all those other ranchers and newcomers to Mancos: who is entitled to the land and all it has to offer.

It’s important for the integrity of Brown and Olcott’s actual artistic intentions, to state that a discussion about land use wasn’t the point of their adaptation. That was more along the lines of how to succeed at the challenge of whether the use of cowboy vernacular and American folk tunes to “break the fourth wall” that separates the audience from the stage was possible.

Yet, what they have achieved offers the opportunity for anyone who cares to take it, the chance to consider what’s really at stake.

Some in this nation love what land like that in southwestern Colorado, and so many other places, can do for them, and so don’t really love the land itself, but the idea that it can confer power that others then can’t have, hoo-howdy! That’s sexy.

But, if you have been as lucky as I have been to spend a fair amount of time out West, riding, singing, hiking, or just visiting with folks who live on land, it’s impossible not to notice that these people really love the land. They also respect it. They have to! It’s beautiful, but it’s also dangerous. And even if they wouldn’t say it outright, they understand what it means to belong to the land and not the other way around. Howdy boy! That’s sacred.

It might not be in our respective lifetimes that it happens, but I envision there will be a day where, in part because we are moving to an increasingly virtual world, it will become natural to live according to the belief system still inherent to the indigenous nations of this continent, the one that doesn’t have us dominating the land, but living in dominion with it, and we will create economic systems and policies accordingly.

One reason I believe this is because, without the land we die. Enough of us are starting to understand at a basic level that simple, obvious, critical fact. It might take a while before those who want power over instead of partnership with the land die out, lose their grip, or otherwise get out of our way, but I believe it will happen.

And we can live at peace with our national soul again.

Although Brown demurred in an interview to affirm or deny whether his opera had outright helped heal the divide in his mountain town, he did acknowledge the feedback from The Blacksmith attendees was overwhelmingly positive, and described other opera projects he is hatching to more directly address what he called “hot button issues” on the minds of his fellow Mancosians.

“Everyone was all smiles and happy about what they were there for,” says Lewis. “Yeah, there’s a unity there. Not that it’s permanent, but it’s the kind of thing we need.”

Which is why once again, my faith in the power of the performing arts is redoubled.

Anytime opera demonstrates its power to tell stories that show how rifts can be mended, even if it’s with humor and silliness, we have the opportunity to remember what is possible once we put aside our differences: peace and prosperity.

When you listen to this interview, keep an ear open for the cattle lowing in the background…they’re there!

Tickets and other information for Opera Lafayette’s online production of Philidor’s The Blacksmith (Le Marchant ferrant) are available here. A live, one-time event on this Sunday, November 15, 2020, 2:00 p.m. (EST), includes a pre-show discussion with Maestro Ryan Brown, a virtual screening of the show, and a post-performance conversation with the artists.

On-demand access to the show runs from Nov. 16 through Nov. 29, 2020.

Here are the timestamps for this interview:00:00 Introduction

11:30 By internationalizing opera, we've removed it from its power to speak to local audiences

12: 38 Opera's role in reminding communities what they have in common in times of culture clash

13:00 How opera can help bridge the old time ranching and newcomer crowds in Mancos and elsewhere

15:00 What happens in the communal experience of attending an opera

19:00 How opera gives us a lighthearted way to vet our culture wars and fights over shared resources

20:51 Ryan tells a story of how a Native American Indian shows a middle way to seeing past the problems created by our current cultural views on land ownership

23:30 How our system gets in the way of our mutual values and love of the land and what can we do about it?

30:00 The enduring power of money in the arts and how that impacts the future

32:33 How has our romancing the West helped to ruin it?

39:00 How micro-communities and their forms of entertainment helps foster decency among neighbors and lengthens and deepens the experience.

43:00 What we have lost to the past we can re-discover and merge with current technology to strengthen our communities

If you enjoy docu-mental, please take a moment to consider others whom you think might also like to learn more about the different ways we americans are finding peace and mental stability in these less than stable times and forward to them this or others of your favorite issues of docu-mental.

In the past year, we’ve covered a range of topics to do directly with mental health, as well as our spiritual and soul needs as a nation. Please take a ramble through the archives for podcasts, videos, and essays such as:Etsy for your mind: the world’s first marketplace for mental health tools

Brain science is showing us what ‘normal’ is. Can it also help us evolve?

The use of art as ritual to help clear our country’s spiritual pollution

Democracy doesn’t evolve us, but it requires evolution

Ending ‘spiritual bypassing’ to build a better nation

Thoughts on complexity, god, messiahs, and the ‘Magnificent Work’

9/11, Coal Country, and what it means to be great

There’s still more to come before the year is out, but looking ahead to 2021, you can expect improved production values and more in-depth interviews, including with avant-garde musicians and composers who are deliberately making a statement about the mental, spiritual, and soul status as americans, as well as from cutting edge researchers and others investigating ways for us to find peace and balance. I’ll be bringing news from the frontiers of science, history, and other fields to you, and also sharing the ways you can access it without intervention from third parties whose primary goal is profit.

And if you’d like to become a patron subscriber, or give a gift subscription, here’s where to find the details:

You’ll get more content — shorter, but also more personal, quirky, and often lighthearted — like this outtake from the interview above that includes Lynne Lewis, rendering her version of The Blacksmith, along with Maestro Brown sharing his thoughts about the challenges and rewards of repurposing opera using American vernacular.

I also like to talk a lot about birds, so if you’re a bird jock, you will enjoy my spring migration updates for Washington, and other thoughts about nature, which for me, is how to heal ourselves. Nature never judges itself. It just is…and that’s some powerful juju to experience first hand, especially since we’re so filled with meanness these days.

Thanks for your time and attention.

Peace,

Whitney

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vol. 2 issue 52

Greetings,

It’s rare that docu-mental publishes on Sunday, but that is the way things turned out in this week of ghosts, goblins, and now with this issue, astrologers. Today for many is known as El Dia de los Muertes — The Day of the Dead, also All Souls Day (although apparently, some calendars claim it is tomorrow). And of course, Tuesday, November 3rd, is our election.

What do all these events at this time have in common? It is not the spookiness, the goons, nor the horror, but the liminal. It is a time of the in-between, when what comes next is either a continuation of what was, or a chance to pass through a portal to what has never been.

And so, I thought it was time to offer something completely new and perhaps unexpected to my audience.

But first, a story.

Cum hoc ergo propter hoc

“Just because two things occur simultaneously does not mean there is a cause and effect,” the head of the National Cancer Institute once boomed at me from across his desk. “Cum hoc ergo propter hoc. It’s Latin for, ‘With this, therefore because of this,’ but it isn’t, and I don’t see why the authors of this paper want to say that it is, so this interview is not worth the time.”

The doctor glared at my video crewman.

Thinking quickly, I dropped the offending study I’d been sent to discuss with Dr. Rosenberg, and changed the topic to the latest research coming out of the NCI – research where cause and effect had been established, and which would go on to be covered widely – and so managed to get some footage of the doc, even if it wasn’t what I’d been assigned to cover.

Aside from the incident being a reminder that an alarming amount of crap science gets published and routinely makes it past those of us who should know better, even if I’d already understood that just because two things are true doesn’t mean they are causative – a core tenet of scientific research -- being reprimanded by one of the nation’s top scientists helped ensure the maxim is always top of mind any time I examine data.

Yet, I have found that over-emphasizing the need to prove causation also runs the risk of missing the bigger picture. Things we might perceive as true, and so accept as part of the fabric of our lives might never reveal to us their true “cause” despite the most painstaking evaluation. For example, I cannot prove a causative correlation between the rise of our reductionist materialism and our national epidemics of anxiety, depression, and suicide, but my observations that their trajectories correlate is are certainly worth study.

We can know how things work, without ever fully understanding why they do.

Put another way, we might not ever know why two things might be true, even if we can show that they happen simultaneously. In philosophy and religion, such analyses form the basis for questions of fate and fortune. Economics, history, and sociology also rely on noting how patterns and cycles might co-occur consistently, affording a fair degree of confidence in forecasting future trends, and thus alerting us to our choices in how we might respond.

In this interview with mundane astrologer Elisabeth Grace, whose newsletter tracks and correlates planetary movements with world events, I explore this notion of correlation vs. causation. Just as I believe there is a correlation between economic cycles and our mental health even if I cannot prove causation, Elisabeth knows how to correlate how the orbits of Saturn and Pluto to predict say, the rise of authoritarianism globally, and especially here in the US, even if she does not know why this is so. These kinds of correlative observations of world events and astronomical events form the core of the field of mundane astrology, and yes, it is an actual scholarly field, even at the university level in some countries such as the UK.

By the time I discovered Elisabeth’s work, I was already familiar with the work of Richard Tarnas, author of Cosmos and Psyche, the seminal work on mundane astrology. The tome tracks the orbits of the planets through history, drawing attention to distinct patterns of planetary transits occurring at the same time as historical events such as the rise and fall of authoritarian regimes, world wars, pestilence and plagues, and good stuff too like the Renaissance of the early 1500s and other re-births of the arts and humanities.

It’s part of his larger operating theory that these events are evolutionary, and are part of a larger plan that we do not know, but which involves the evolution of the Cosmos itself through its Psyche. Why this might be so, that is a mystery, but it calls him to wonder and suggest that our current insistence upon the reductionism of cause and effect means we are missing the larger point of our collective experience.

Why does Psyche want this experience? We do not know.

Tarnas is a student and colleague of Czech psychiatrist, Stanislav Grof, a pioneer of transpersonal psychology, especially the use of psychadelics such as LSD to lower conscious barriers in order to conduct as much as possible, an unfettered exploration of the human psyche. Tarnas and Grof, formerly of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, now are both associated with the Department of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where they have written and lectured extensively about what they call the “enchanted world”, the cornerstone of their ultimate conclusion that the human mind is of the same “stuff” as the mind of the universe; that it is ultimately all one consciousness. Put another way, our human consciousness is a cosmic phenomenon, and does not arise from biological processes, but that biology arises from it.

As an aside… Tarnas’s research into the history of Western thought, world events, and planetary movements came after establishing that there were some in those early psychedelic studies who would have really “bad trips”, and others who would have positive ones. Also, sometimes the ones who had good trips would suddenly have bad ones. Why? After noting the correspondences between planetary movements and the study participants’ charts, Tarnas et al concluded it was because, essentially, sometimes the stars truly did not align in support of a person altering their mind/consciousness at that time.

To my way of thinking, the enchanted world theory is not the same thing as the Intelligent Design movement which seems to me to have become an Evangelical Christian flavored system of reductionism, claiming to have the universe all sorted out. However true to a scientific method geophysicist Stephen C. Meyer, creator of the Intelligent Design theory, himself might be, proponents of his pro-Intelligent Being Universe Creator theories seem to me to want to use his work to justify their belief in a masculine god and their entitled claim to the hierarchical status quo.

The levels of guilt, shame, and fear necessary to keep that “truth” locked in place is not only absurd, they are as nihilistic as reductionism, in that they demand stasis, which is of course antithetical to growth and change. It cuts across all areas of our lives: in religion it manifests as a fear of being alienated as a sinner at best, eternal damnation at worst. In science, it’s the fear of being wrong.

Whether sinner or errant scientist, there are very real punitive consequences, whether it be ostracization or zero grant money. Yet, none of these consequences seem to be handed down from heaven or up from the petri dish. The punishments are always distributed by other humans.

While Tarnas et al do not assign gender to the greater consciousness they say exists, they do insist it is there, and that human consciousness exists within it, that all is interrelated. If I am going to reject randomness, which I do, then with Tarnas’s findings as the larger context, it is far more possible to believe that each of our individual lives has meaning, and that even if we do not know what that meaning is, the search for it is in itself as important as any proof of causation to life because the journey brings us that much closer to the Source.

In that way, we can choose to imbue our lives with the fruits of what we learn, and know that it mattered that we valued the opportunity to direct our teensy speck of consciousness toward something of our own choosing, something of our own design, using both observational data and that of cause and effect to help us course correct.

Although the Harvard educated Tarnas is also the author of The Passion of the Western Mind (2000), a classic text in collegiate history programs nationally, upon the publication of Cosmos and Psyche (2006), he, like Meyer routinely has been, was dismissed and excoriated by the intelligentsia. In the Wall Street Journal, the reviewer seethes as though personally offended by Tarnas’s temerity to suggest an enchanted world view:

“Mr. Tarnas's examples steadily build into a game of free association that will try the patience of any reader burdened with sanity.”

He ends with this zinger: “Among the unexpected lessons to be drawn from Cosmos and Psyche is that the tyranny of science may actually be preferable to the tyranny of superstition. In any case, count your lucky stars it's not assigned reading.”

Okay, Mr. Smarty Pants. You can be the smartest guy in the room. Every room. All the rooms.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of four years of our national Avatar of Id rampaging across the land, infecting some, depressing many more, and exposing the actual insanity of much of the rest, here’s me on the eve of our election, in my apparently deluded and idiotic state, reading Tarnas, along with works by the late Joseph Campbell and James Hillman, and others, and finding myself inspired to think of how we as a nation might move beyond our reductionist thinking at all levels of policymaking, especially in healthcare and medicine, without abandoning logic and reason.

Their ideas inform my closely held belief that policymaking which supports an explicitly purposeful view of life could offer important public health benefits and help staunch our rising tides of unrest, which the coronavirus has only exacerbated. After all, what is the point to life if there is no point to life?

With this in mind, it’s worth noting that while there is a trend among some Democratic leaders and pundits alike to say that this election is about reclaiming the “soul of our nation” – something I have been saying independent of these talking heads, because I really mean it – they also insist on Science, especially since science is what does convenient things like, say, effectively and predictably control pandemics.

Since the pursuit of causation is essential to stopping pandemics, I support the Democratic ticket. But as far as their claims to be the soul retrievers this country needs, I am skeptical. If these folks are going to say the word “soul” as though it is something desirable, that means it has value. Either the two –science and soul – work in tandem or they are incongruent, and if they are incongruent, then how can the Party logically claim to be invested in both?

The only way out of this dilemma I can see is to balance the causative with the correlative, and really mean it. In that way, the burden of reductionism is reduced, the pursuit of soul can be real, and both science and mystery can once again balance and support our sanity. If we allow ourselves that as a possibility, then hierarchical thinking will have to collapse.

What would policymaking have to look like then, if not one based strictly on cause and effect, deserving and undeserving?

For some, sadly, the answer will be found in conspiracy. But the magical thinking necessary to link non-causative, non-correlative events in order to make something “true” that isn’t, will only result in confusion, suspicion, and worse, dangerous delusions. The QAnon conspiracy is proof of this: it offers not one single demonstrable and replicable example of if A then B, nor is there any body of observational data that can even closely be said to correlate, and yet its adherents make wild claims and take just as weird actions to defend them. Same goes for the so-called deep state.

I don’t really know how re-imagining governance without hierarchy would work, frankly. When I was in college in the mid-80s, I was mightily confused by the then Zeitgeist of deconstructionism, where nothing seemed to fit back together once relativism, also popular among my professors, was injected into the equation. I still don’t see fully how to resolve that riddle.

But if not linear, and not relative, then what?

As we search for the answer, some of us will be wrong. That is the true way of science: experiment, evaluate, correct, repeat. Hierarchy prevents this; it robs us of the humility to ponder being wrong, stifles our curiosity, and inhibits asking new questions.

Yet, some, thankfully, persist.

In his brilliant and utile book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli writes:

We are an integral part of the world that we perceive; we are not external observers. We are situated within in it…We are made up of the same atoms and the same light signals as are exchanged between pine trees in the mountains and stars in the galaxies. As our knowledge has grown, we have learned that our being is only a part of the universe, and a small part at that…

We believed that we were on a planet at the center of the universe, and we are not. We thought that we existed as unique beings, a race apart from the family of animals and plants, and discovered that we are descendants of the same parents as every living thing around us…Mirrored by others, and by other things, we learn who we are (emphasis mine).

Our popular thinking, and thus our policymaking needs to catch up to science. But science also needs to be rescued from hierarchy and returned to the boundless world of curiosity where I like to think soul lives larger and more fully than our puny selves do.

So, back to the astrology. Mirrored by others, and by other things, we learn who we are.

As described in excellent detail, complete with a PowerPoint presentation (a first here on docu-mental!) Elisabeth’s is a system with its own language developed in scientific pursuit of cause/effect knowledge that we began to discard when materialism took the reins, circa 1700 with Newtonian Physics. To the extent that there is any explicable cause/effect, it is that which is borrowed primarily from Aristotelean physics, although the study of the heavens predates Aristotle, stretching back approximately 5,000 years to Mesopotamian times. Astrology describes the how within the why, but leaves the why an open question. This forms the basic tension between fate and fortune, destiny and free will.

To my understanding, mundane astrology is not a personal system whereby the planets take an interest in either helping or condemning humans, so much as they are just connected energetically to life on earth because the material elements are the same: mineral, fire, water, gas.

Because it is a system of physics intended to logically demonstrate the interrelatedness of all matter, including that which comprises the planets and stars, and how regardless of the remoteness of things, all are in the process of becoming and decaying, but not in a vacuum, it does have logic.

Although science has moved past the old ways, maybe valuable knowledge was left behind. Plenty of ways of being and thinking that were at one time discarded in favor of materialism but now find themselves in the ascendant include what has become the multi-billion dollar hand crafts movement (think Etsy) as opposed to disposable goods, as well as the slow food movement which includes the resurgence of farm-to-table, sustainable agriculture in favor over industrialized farming.

Among the more telling shifts is as Rovelli intimates, the growing willingness among biologists and others who once mocked “anthropomorphism” to now admit that animals do indeed have intelligence, emotions, and systems of communication designed to express their need for love and connection.

These ways of detecting and delineating life were not ever proven wrong, just incompatible with one particular perspective, that of the extremely reductionist, strictly cause and effect one.

Again, Rovelli:

The world is complex, and we capture it with different languages, each appropriate to the process that we are describing. Every complex process can be addressed and understood in different languages and at different levels. These diverse languages intersect, intertwine, and reciprocally enhance one another, like the processes themselves. The study of our psychology becomes more sophisticated through our understanding of the biochemistry of the brain. The study of theoretical physics is nourished by the passions and emotions that animate our lives.

Think of science then as German, and astrology as French. Neither is wrong, both explain the world around us. Each exists in parallel, yet knowledge of one enhances the utility of the other. Or, as Elisabeth says, “Astrology is a language with its own jargon to explain human consciousness through space and time.”

Like Rovelli, I believe the human race on earth will eventually become extinct; should we remain dedicated to our materialism, this will occur sooner than it might otherwise have done, exhaustive of the earth’s resources as materialism is. But to suggest that because our race is part of merely a chapter of existence on a middling planet in a small solar system in a boundless universe, it should mean we might as well abandon any attempts to derive personal meaning from the experience distresses me, the way I suspect it distresses many of you.

My personal sense is that since we do not know what becomes of our consciousness when we leave this plane, we should attempt to imbue this opportunity to be separate from the All with as much meaning as possible, lest we find it turns out to make for a richer Cosmos.

Rovelli:

Nature is our home, and in nature we are at home. This strange, multicolored, and astonishing world that we explore – where space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere – is not something that estranges us from our true selves, for this is only what our natural curiosity reveals to us about the place of our dwelling, about the stuff of which we ourselves are made. We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy, we are being nothing other than what we can’t help but be: a part of our world.

By that logic, when we die, we don’t leave, we just shift forms.

Who knows what we then become and whether the knowledge we will have obtained will inform that new thing? Could what we do while we’re conscious precipitate how matter and consciousness takes shape when we’re “gone” (dead or extinct)?

If so, then the Why of Psyche’s How will have occurred through the existence of each one of us. Those of us who choose to ask why we are here, and then seek to answer that question in a meaningful way, perhaps we are the ones in whom there might be a faint glimmer of understanding of the larger Why as it unfolds. The sheer power of this possibility blows my mind.

I hope you enjoy Elisabeth’s illuminating explanation of how mundane astrology works. Below are all the time stamps to highlights of our discussion, including what we might expect from this election, and its aftermath, as well as resources for further information. This is available as both a podcast and a video, but the video has a nifty PowerPoint and lots of charts with explanations for how they work.

Thank you for reading. I am grateful to you for your support of this newsletter. Please be safe this week and throughout the rest of this epochal year. If you enjoy how I approach mapping our minds through these shifting times, and think others might like it as well, please forward this email to them or consider giving them a gift subscription.

Peace to every one of us,

Whitney

0:00 Introduction

6:00 Why might mundane astrology have utility?

8:30 No one knows why this works

17:31 The futility of "sun sign astrology"

19:20 Astrology is a language with its own jargon to explain human consciousness through space and time 21:50 Difference between Eastern, Western schools, and the misapprehension of Processions of the Equinox 25:45 The horoscope of Queen Elizabeth II as example 30:00 When we know what a person needs, we can predict how they will act 32:50 What is the "horoscope" of the US? 38:00 What does it say about the psyche of the nation and what might need to happen next? 43:00 The American Dream built into our psyche and our “tough guy” image45:00 What might be the fate of the American Dream? 51:30 An explanation of mundane astrology in action 53:00 How planetary cycles of the 1960s impact us now; did they predict 2016 and 2020? 1:00:00 Was 2020 "necessary" and what now? 1:00:09 The NYT agenda to discredit astrologers, even when astrology predict they will discredit them1:12:00 What can we expect in the US 2020 presidential election and beyond? 1:22:00 Do things look good for Kamala Harris? 1:25:00 How do things look for the next Congress? 1:27:00 What might happen to patriarchy and The Powers That Be? 1:34:00 Will the US stay in the same form? Will it break apart? What will the next 30 years bring?

Visit here for more information about Elisabeth Grace, or to subscribe to her newsletter.

For more about the Precession of the Equinoxes on earth, here’s a good explanation

Photo: Égalité devant la mort (Equality Before Death), 1848, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Musée d'Orsay

Errata: This post was updated on 11/1/20 to reflect a change from the word “correlative” to “causative”.

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vol. 2 issue 51

Greetings,

If you’ve been reading docu-mental for a while, you are aware that I don’t see the mondo bizarro criminal behavior of the current occupant of the White House as the cause of our national woes, but as the ultimate manifestation of our damaged collective psyche, the one we have forced for the past half century to carry the burdens of a patriarchal and thus hierarchical system predicated on an ethos of “to the winner goes the spoils”, and everything else as well.

And really, that is why I think cries of “defund the police” are useless. It is “old world”, not “new world”. The old world is angry and us v. them, and protestors and reformers who want to see changes in law enforcement but who do so in the same martial tones they oppose will get nowhere.

The new world is much more collaborative, forced as we have been to learn new ways to work together by the covid-19 crisis and by so many global catastrophes, including climate change-induced migration and dwindling resources.

But the new and old words do have some important things in common, the first being a shared history that must be healed, the one of systematic extermination and resources stolen from this continent’s indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of other human beings, namely black Africans.

The second is a need for some kind of enforceable structure and order. How else to build without a reliable scaffold?

In our current paradigm, LAW AND ORDER is yelled at us by red-faced and bullying federal and executive figureheads, which would be laughable except that the man in the White House is inciting violence in our streets, fomenting hatred between whites and others, and putting our law enforcement in the crosshairs of what many, myself included, fear will be a terrifying and violent election day and beyond.

That’s not funny in the least.

Yet, to me, it seems a last gasp at trying to stay in control when the skywriting just doesn’t seem to vaporize and vanish, the unmistakable message being “Time’s Up!” on hierarchy and iron-fistedness.

As a mother, despite the actual verdict, what I will always view as the cold blooded murder of Trayvon Martin still haunts me in particular, as I know that my son or any mother’s son would have had no reason to suspect that a handful of Skittles dribbled into his mouth as he innocently walked home from the convenience store one night, would be his last thanks to the derangement of a self-styled law and order gun nut; yet watching the lynching of George Floyd changed me forever.

It proved the tipping point for me to embrace publicly my growing personal ethos that I have been documenting here since I began in 2018 by trademarking and copyrighting my materials under docu-mental. My plan had been to document and explore solutions for the national increase in mental health crises, never suspecting that it would turn out I would be chronicling the end of extreme Capitalism.

And yet, as a practical minded, erstwhile Capitol Hill policy reporter who has written primarily about clinical medicine and healthcare economics for much of her career, I believe wholeheartedly it’s time to talk about things that aren’t quantifiable, and to insist that they not be relegated to the side lines as frilly and silly.

It’s not that I ever denounced it, but I was always too cowed to stand tall and say so, even though in my private life, I admitted it was true: this world needs more love, more softness, more feminine energy. Not more women per se, more Goddess.

And it needs the women in power to say so and demonstrate this, too.

There is nothing left but death when something reaches an extreme. Where else is there to go? Our system of Capitalism is at that point. It can take law and order with it as our system decays, leaving us vulnerable in an existential way. Alternatively, we can revive and reshape that masculine ideal buried under the propaganda we’ve heard in this nation for so long that “might makes right” and parlay that into what will work in the coming paradigm of peaceful collaboration: we can let our strong men and women in uniform be the ones who are vulnerable in an empowering way. We can humanize them.

And make no mistake, the new paradigm is coming; in fact, it’s here. How on earth will it be possible to crush and dominate in the old ways when this new virtual world’s power hierarchy is based on having access to others’ privacy and data, not their land and other resources? That is the new warfront, and it does not take shooting people or having the right skin tone to triumph; anyone can hide behind a digital screen, and anyone can steal your numerical soul and turn you into a digital slave. Yet, because the Information Age is free flowing, the hierarchy is easier to infiltrate.

Yet the need for familiar structures remains as we navigate the new ways of being. To me, that is an obvious call for our communities to focus on how to empower their respective law enforcement organizations to be flexible, breathable, ready to change as necessary.

In this video in the on-going series dedicated to healing the american states of mind, I speak with three people who know well how masculinity in the extreme has the ironic effect of eroding one’s masculinity, and perhaps even killing the person who bears the weight of it, maiming the souls and spirits of those left behind.

My guests are:

Chief John Morrissey of the Kenosha, Wisconsin Police Department (Ret). After 33 years as an officer, 28 of them in Kenosha, Chief Morrissey retired from the force in 2016, but is still intimately involved in what happens on the streets of Kenosha as city administrator, a job he took just before his hometown erupted in violence after three Black Lives Matter protestors were shot by 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, killing two. While leading the police force, Chief Morrissey lost two officers to suicide in less than 6 months. Mr. Morrissey has been actively involved in suicide prevention since 2010. In 2017, he became leader of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention Public Safety Taskforce. He also serves as a member of the Workplace Suicide Prevention and Postvention Committee, and is a member of the IACP National Consortium on Preventing Law Enforcement Suicide.

John Marx, CPP, was a law officer for 23 years, 19 of them as a hostage negotiator with the Westminster, Colorado Police Department. Marx is now the executive director of The Law Enforcement Survival Institute and founder of CopsAlive.com. He is the author of several books and training manuals that take a wholistic approach to law enforcement training and wellness. When a fellow police officer and good friend of his committed suicide at 38, Marx decided to dedicate his life to helping law enforcement officers serve and protect by learning to first protect their emotional needs and those of their colleagues.

Sally Spencer-Thomas, PsyD, lead editor of the mental health for men series of books, Guts, Grit, & the Grind: A Mental Mechanics Manual, and the creator along with the Colorado Department of Health and others, of Mantherapy, a very funny series of videos challenging what it means to be manly and to hide emotions behind a moustache. Sally began her career studying the effect of trauma on first responders, and has been actively engaged in suicide prevention since her brother took his own life in 2004. She is now the president of United Suicide Survivors International.

The take-away from our conversation is that calls to defund the police or even to abolish it, as Colin Kaepernick is now doing through what I believe is his impressive and well-reasoned co-venture with the publishing platform Medium, LEVEL: Abolition for the People, are actually aimed at the same goal as many visionary law officers want to achieve: and end to lethal law enforcement encounters for black men, a reduction in violence overall, and a healthier citizenry through the direct involvement of the community in their local police force.

As stated in earlier docu-mental posts, law enforcement has had to take on far more societal ills than they are equipped to handle, and guess what? They burn out. They snap. They underperform. They stop being manly men, even if they’re women.

My guests address this problem and explain why defunding the police will make this worse, not better.

But I don’t let it stay there. Providing better training, less tasks, and more opportunities to be emotionally vulnerable might make better cops, but if it doesn’t change the fact that young black men are two and a half more times likely to be shot than a white man the same age,

then it is a white vanity project.

I also pointed out the FBI’s findings that there has been an infiltration of white supremacists in law enforcement over the years, something my guests claim they were not aware of, but did not downplay.

Credit goes to all three of my guests for their candor about the different ways blacks and whites view the police, and I give them credit for hanging in there when I suggested the Jungian concept of there needing to be more feminine character, not women, in the force. I think all my readers, many of whom are involved in policymaking and politics, as well as all of us thinking deeply and carefully about this moment in our nation’s history will be intrigued by this dialogue.

Thank you for continuing to support docu-mental, whether materially, or by being a faithful reader and sharing it with others whom you think will be stimulated to think differently by my thinking out loud.

Below is the annotated list of places in the audio where you can hear highlights of the conversation, and also a list of links to the resources and data citations made in the discussion.

Peace,

Whitney

Annotation:

3:00 John Marx and John Morrissey on the mental health challenges of policework

12:00 Mental health burn out on the job 14:30 Statistics on lethality of police encounters with blacks

18:20 The need to balance hardness with softness in law enforcement

27:30 The causes of mental health crises on the rise

29:30 How this reinforces built-in bias, and impacts crime, police response to minorities, and black communities' fears of law enforcement

34:00 Is law enforcement a cover for white supremacy?

41:00 There is less enforcement now that police are less proactive and more reactive now

42: 30 Is the system not changeable from within?

45:00 The harmful impact of the media on law enforcement-community relations 46:00 What Trump and Biden could do but aren't -- Chief Morrissey

52:00 Would more resources for law enforcement mean less deaths for black men?

55:00 Communities no longer in touch with reality in expectations for law enforcement

57:20 Community policing is ideal and here's what it requires

Additional Resources:

JAMA: Prevalence of Mental Illness and Mental Health Care Use Among Police Officers

LEVEL: Abolition for the People from Colin Kaepernick

Washington Post: Trump, Biden and masculinity in the age of coronavirus

Law Enforcement Survival Institute

Cops Alive Magazine

International Association for Suicide Prevention

Pew Research Center: From police to parole, black and white Americans differ widely in their views of criminal justice system

ACLU: The war on marijuana in black and white

Just Security: White Supremacist Infiltration of US Police Forces: Fact-Checking National Security Advisor O’Brien

National Academies of Science: Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex

Journalist’s Resource: Black men 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police

21st Century Cures Act and addressing mental illness in law enforcement

Neighborhood Defender Service: A community-based, wholistic approach to public defense and law enforcement

NYT: Opera Grapples with Race

docu-mental: McMindfulness

docu-mental: Batman is not coming

Police b roll footage by Kelly Lacy at Pexels.

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vol. 2 issue 46

Greetings,

This issue, podcast, and video features what is more a word concert than an interview. It’s a conversation between myself and the poet, author, policy analyst, Fulbright scholar, and celebrated Washington, DC resident, E. Ethelbert Miller.

Among Ethel’s most recent works is an essay entitled, If You Don’t Know Me by Now.

It explores how in our riven nation we might find the strength to love. It begins:

We uproot the past looking for historical clarity. Unfortunately, the future often wears a mask. We are no longer protesting like this is the Sixties. The motion of history has taken us somewhere else. “Where are we?” is as difficult to utter as “Once upon a time.”

It is from this “neither one nor the other” place that Miller and I begin an examination of democracy in this moment in time. The result is a string of riffs that hang together as a novel way of seeing America with our ears, a synesthetic approach to policymaking and to working with the future that Miller describes in practical ways. And if that sounds bonkers, consider how censorship from authorities and corporate news media alike are already forcing us to find reliable ways of learning and knowing so we can act in our own best interests.

Our conversation starts with a look at what literary activism is, before ranging over how poetry provides an effective way of looking at policy and policymaking, to considering how the existence of Trump – a man who fused with his technology (Twitter) – is a message from the future, to the ways in which language is no longer apt enough to contain our experiences of now and what is to come. A discussion about the relevance – or lack thereof – of works by George Orwell, James Baldwin, August Wilson, Toni Morrison, and Ta-Nahisi Coates is probably one unlike you’ve ever heard, as is the indictment of the news media and the impulse we have for storytelling. All of it within the context of whether it is possible to heal ourselves and our nation enough to carry on as a democracy.

Miller has a facility for forthrightly articulating where he stands on an issue, while also being able to objectively weigh and value all other sides as well, making the act of analysis an exercise in applied wisdom, not cunning rhetoric. That is why this discussion about the current state of our nation is balanced, funny, and provocative: there is no bashing, no lamenting, and no pandering.

In the end, we conclude there is no conclusion to be had. We stand amid the fog not of war so much as the fog of now. It calls to mind Rilke’s poem, Moving Forward which ends with the poet progressing not from terra firma, but from a place where he is “standing on fishes”.

What worked to help us navigate democracy before is not so much broken as simply the wrong set of tools, and now we need to trust in ourselves to develop new ones. Whatever the process, the key is to step up, and to take responsibility for ourselves alone and together, and above all, to have faith that peace and progress will come.

There is so much texture and depth to what is said here – plus loads of humor – that even though I conducted the interview and had been the one to choose the topic, when I re-listened to it as I edited it, more than once I realized that the truth of what Miller was saying had sailed right past me the first time around.

That is why, despite wanting to edit it down, in the end, I did not. It felt like I was pulling the seams out of an in-the-pocket jazz performance where every chord progression must have the one before and after it if the line is to make sense. Perhaps you will listen to only portions, perhaps to the whole thing, and perhaps only once. I believe you will still be richly rewarded; better to hear four bars of trumpeter Miles Davis’ So What than never hear it at all. But it’s the entire 10 minutes of the work that helped us hear American music in a whole new way, or at least it did for me.

That is what I hope this issue helps achieve for you: a new way of considering yourself in between worlds, standing firmly on fishes, considering a new way to love America.

Thanks for reading. Highlights and time stamps are below.

Peace to us all.

Whitney

Some highlights of the interview:

13:00 The importance of “future thinking” and how seeing through the eyes of what is to come explains the inevitability of a President Trump.

(This discussion had me wondering whether Trump as a master of Twitter and galvanizing talk is moving us away from the written word, or if he is a marker for how we are all moving away from the literal qualities of reality. Given that Trump has shown us the power of talking/listening over reading/writing, will we come to trust the oral/aural tradition more than the written stories that now encompass “fake news”? Is the written language becoming irrelevant? How will this impact policy?

22:00 Graffiti and Hip Hop already presaged the breakdown, condensation, and repurposing of the symbols of language, and language itself. “If you’re laughing at the president’s misspellings, you don’t get how this works.”

32:00 Trump the phenomenon vs. Trump the leader? The trap is to miss his true cultural significance, to lose it in between laughing at his stupidity or raging at this authoritarianism.

38:00 What is the difference between being “well” and being “healed” and who is responsible for making it so? Us? The government?

47:00 When storytelling becomes synonymous with lying.

54:00 Learning to “see” with new ears.

58:00 Who is truly capable of living in a democracy and perpetuating it?

1:00:15 “The election doesn’t matter” because too much is broken and can’t be fixed. It makes healing less important than taking responsibility. “Healing isn’t possible without forgiveness. Forgiveness isn’t possible without saying I am sorry and taking responsibility.” How well we understand this will determine if democracy lives or dies or changes form.

1:24:00 Democracy and economic systems aren’t the same thing. “It makes no sense to have a president who embraces Russia but condemns Socialism.”

1:27:00 Better understanding of our founding documents will help us know when the “news” media is not telling the whole truth, as they are all guilty of doing with their preferred versions of storytelling.

1:31:00 Back to poetry and literary activism: will we be the children of Whitman and Dickinson who tried to write from the future where they imagined there to be hope and peace, even if they couldn’t know for sure living as they were during the Civil War. How can we do the same?

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vol. 2 issue 44

‘We’ve let the tangible inform the spiritual, when it should be the other way around.’

~Timothy Nelson, artistic director, IN Series Opera

Apologies for the late release of this issue. Migraine + tech issues + deadline = no muy bueno. I regret and am irritated by these events, but that’s life. Have a great weekend!WMF

Greetings,

South Dakota Symphony Orchestra conductor, Delta David Gier, once remarked to me that one reason why orchestral music outfits in the US constantly found themselves struggling to remain solvent was because they tended to view themselves as one of a range of entertainment options rather than keepers of our unique national cultural flame.

A follow on to this is that in order to compete with big screen movies, stadium sports, and musical theater, among other live activities, American orchestras pre-covid tended to resort to gimmickry such as thematic programming and an appeal to their patrons’ sense of fun (think “Beethoven and blue jeans, for example).

Boil that down and the residue that remains essentially says, “You give us your money, we’ll give you a distraction.”

But, what if the performing arts were not just one of a range of many distractions, but a consistent vessel of our sacred national heritage as well our means of experiencing individual and communal spiritual transcendence? That is, after all, how the Greeks who invented theater, intended it: as a place where members of society across all strata could come together as one, where through witnessing comedy, tragedy, and satire, they could be educated, emote, and have their world reflected back to them in order to observe how it functioned. This empowered them as both actors in their communities and audience members of the performance to consider how they might possibly engage differently in the world at large and in their own homes.

‘Art (opera) goes where policy never can.’

~Timothy Nelson

Art that lacks an awareness of spirit, of justice, is vulgar, to paraphrase my guest in this interview, IN Series Opera company artistic director Timothy Nelson. With his decision to scrap the remainder of last season and all of what was planned for this season thanks to the covid-related shutdowns, Nelson has liberated opera and theater from its brittle pre-covid confines and found freedom in the chaos.

Today is Day Two of the IN Series Opera all-digital festival marking not just the company’s 2020-21 season, but its first entirely digital one, with double the amount of previously scheduled content, all created and performed for the small screen you are either holding in your hand or viewing on your desk. You can access this free content here at the INVISION: Logan Operahouse without Walls. Once there, you can purchase varying levels of membership in the company, but there will always be some kind of content freely available.

I first met Nelson in my function as chief classical music critic for DC Metro Theater Arts. We have since become friends, in part, I think because we share the same ethos that making art is a calling to engage with the soul and spirit, not an imperative to make money. That is why for this third installment of docu-mental: healing the american states of mind, I turned to Nelson to glean his thoughts on how in a post-covid world, the performing arts can be refashioned, leveraged as healing tools, not merely as branding mechanisms.

In fact, per the original video in this series, where I spoke with pagan high priestess Gwendolyn Reece, PhD about her assertion that this nation needs the kind of catharsis offered by Greek tragedy, I have suggested to Nelson he consider staging a modern telling of the Oresteia, the 5th Century BC trilogy that “taught” Athenians how the Gods envisioned humans might turn revenge into justice, vendettas into litigation, and cleanse the wrongful sacrifice of murdered beings in a quest for power. In a modern American telling, the wrongful sacrifice would be the indigenous peoples of the continent whose homeland we warred over and now “own”, and enslaved Africans whose descendants still suffer incivility and injustice.

The notion of “right” sacrifice is just one of several aspects of how art can be used to heal, discussed in this conversation. I suggest that one way to create a meaningful sacrifice is to be willing to test our personal truths. If they hold up, keep them. If not, then it’s time to find a new truth, or a more conscious way of living according to the truth we’ve tested and found still holds. Nelson counters with what to do about an impulse to use sacrifice for darker aims in society, alluding to historical “suicides by proxy” (15:50 in the audio). He also suggests that “ritual, not plot, is the point of art” (28:00).

‘We all have an understanding of God beyond ourselves.’

~Timothy Nelson

A keen insight of Nelson’s, also discussed, is that before covid, performing arts companies asked us to be guests in “their house”, indicating an unequal footing for audience members who were told what time to arrive, where to sit, and when to leave. Now, with on demand digitally-based performances, we the audience are the ones in control. What’s more, rather than be one of many sitting in the dark witnessing the performance, we now can “attend” a performance while sitting in bed. How does this change the dynamic of how we interact with art? How do performers change the way they train and deliver their craft now that their métier has shifted? (46:00)

If you, like me, are missing your regular concert-going, Nelson’s thoughts on the future of the performing arts, I believe, will redirect your attention from simply feeling the loss to considering how the arts can still offer you transcendence, if not at a deeper level than before, than at least as deep, and probably different.

A note: In this interview, Nelson and I reference a number of operatic works and I neglected to give all the details about the composers and their titles. However, below are all the links to all the performances discussed.

Relevant Links:My review of IN Series Opera’s production of Bizet’s Carmen

My review of IN Series Opera’s production of Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ

My review of Washington National Opera’s production of Puccini’s Tosca

Former Washington Post classical music critic Anne Midgette’s feature on “small opera”

Timothy Nelson’s CV and more about his work

The IN Series Opera website

Thanks for watching, reading, and listening.

Whitney

photo: Publicity still from the IN Series Opera company’s new Logan Operahouse without Walls, which opened Sept. 17, 2020. Season tickets are available now

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vol. 2 issue 41

Greetings,

This past Tuesday marked the 401st anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the ship called The White Lion at Point Comfort, now Ft. Monroe, off the Virginia coast.

Today is the 57th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream Speech, part of the peaceful March on Washington. It’s also the 65th anniversary of the disappearance in Mississippi of black teenager Emmett Till, found dead three days later, having been not just murdered, but gruesomely tortured and disfigured by two vigilante white men who believed the lies of a white woman who’d said the 14-year-old had made advances on her. She eventually admitted she’d lied. The woman paid no price but perhaps with her own conscience. The murderers went free.

Also 156 years ago today, the Union was debating what to do with the swelling ranks of black men and women who were fleeing to the protection of Union forces to become contraband of war, in hopes it would lead to their freedom.

Ultimately, on January 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation which did not free slaves so much as encourage them to flee the clutches of their “owners” and seek protection from the Union Army that desperately needed ranks to continue fighting the rebellious South.

It wasn’t until December 1865, after the Civil War had ended, and the 13th Amendment was ratified, that slaves were actually, legally freed in the US.

The adoption of that amendment began with the actions of three enslaved Africans who did not want to be sent away from their families by their “masters” to build fortifications against Union troops. Instead, they escaped to Ft. Monroe near Hampton, Virginia, and asked protection from Union Major General Benjamin Butler, who cannily sensed an opportunity to punish the South, but which ultimately rewarded all enslaved Africans.

The names of the three men who sparked that fire: James Townsend, Shepard Mallory, and Frank Baker.

Why are blacks ‘invisible’ in America?

When my son was younger, he worked a series of manual labor and service jobs. Many of his coworkers were young black men from less affluent communities. My son observed how he was treated by managers and customers compared to the treatment they received.

“Mom, I don’t think whites actually see black people,” he said to me one day. “If they did, they would notice how hard they work, and how much nicer and more attentive they have to be to others so they don’t get their ass kicked. But then they get treated like they’re not even there.”

My son went further. “Considering the b**t they put up with every day, you’d think there would be more black violence against whites.”

There is a profound truth packed into my then 17-year-old’s impression of how America works. Namely that white America has gone about its business without much consequence for our inability to “see” our fellow citizens with darker skin.

It was in 1952 that black author and social observer Ralph Ellison published his novel, Invisible Man, a fictional account of the very real phenomenon of how a black man making his way through white America post-WWII and before the Civil Rights movement, was largely ignored and disrespected. It won the National Book Award the following year. Yet it was in the last decade that my son, who had not read the book by the way, shared his observation with me, signaling not much has changed for the better.

Black Americans today, with protests in the streets and professional athletes taking a knee or refusing to play altogether, certainly have our attention, even amidst a sizeable portion of the nation being on fire, another being under water, still another huge portion clearing the rubble from powerful windstorms, and all of us under siege thanks to the political war raging, the economy collapsing (Wall Street gains are not the economy), and a plague inundating our hospitals and upending our lives.

But attention is not what black Americans are looking for, according to my guests in this interview. Aside from an end to unjustified murders and harassment of black men by some white authorities, what is actually at issue is empathy. Black Americans want to trust white Americans are with them, that we won’t abandon them in their pain, and especially that we will not make their pain worse than it has to be.

What is their pain? It is the pain of being ignored en masse, of not being remembered in the calculations for who gets access to resources in this country, and of being made to suffer unnecessarily as a result. In particular, it is the pain of being promised something in return for loyalty and sacrifice, only to have the terms change, the promises broken.

That is what is explored in this interview with three officers from the Contraband Historical Society, a Hampton, Virginia-based nonprofit educational group focused on the contributions to American freedom made by the contraband slaves in the US Civil War. My guests are Pamela Holley, a contraband slave descendant and research advisor to the Society; Phillip Adderley, president of the Contraband Historical Society and a board member of the Citizens for Fort Monroe National Park (CFMNP). His efforts helped lead to the proclamation by President Barak Obama that May 24th is now “Contraband Day’. And also, Dr. William Wiggins, a former history professor and assistant dean at Columbia University, who is the Society’s historian. The Society was founded more than 20 years ago by another contraband descendant, the late Gerri Hollins.

Who were the Contrabands?

As detailed in this video, the original contrabands were three slaves who fled for their lives to Ft. Monroe near Hampton, Virginia at the start of the Civil War. When their “owner” demanded their return, the Union general in charge countered that if the men were someone’s “property”, then they could be confiscated, making them contrabands of war.

This became known as the Contraband Decision, and it paved the way for what ultimately became 200,000 enslaved Africans leaving their bondage and joining the Union’s fight against the South, attending to the needs of the white soldiers, as well as fighting alongside of them in hopes of being made truly free.

Why should we care?

The contraband slaves’ story is important because it contains the key to how the Civil War went from being a fight over economics and keeping the nation intact to being centrally about emancipation and freedom. These Africans’ bravery and loyalty forced the Union to consider the unvarnished question, “What do we do with all the black people?”

The path to civil rights for blacks in this country eventually might have happened some other way, since, as Dr. King said four days before he was murdered: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” an optimistic view of humanity if ever there was one.

However, it is this view that black Americans largely have held from the beginning of their time on this continent, beginning more than four centuries ago.

Who best exemplifies the American ideal of ‘freedom’?

It was because black men who, despite having been enslaved by some white men, chose to put their trust in still other white men, and believed that through their service they and others like them would be recognized as humans. That they would be free. That other men would treat them justly, would allow them to live in a just universe.

As a result, I can only conclude that the freedom I have considered my birthright as an American woman began resonating not with the Constitution, which was directed at white men even if its spirit was expansive enough to eventually include me, but with the trust and actions of these black human beings who understood the nation’s spirit, perhaps better than any other white man living or dead who’d ever tread foot upon this land.

That is why we need to care about this story. It is not just black people’s history, it’s all of ours as Americans. To bang on about freedom without acknowledging and respecting that it was black men who made sure we focused on its promise, is to fundamentally misapprehend what Land of the Free, Home of the Brave actually means.

‘What would Jesus do’?

When we speak of reparations for the ancestors of the enslaved in this country, many in the white community become angry and defensive. Some of us claim there are not enough resources to retroactively “cover” the price admittedly paid by blacks. Others of us are upset to be placed on the hook for past actions none of us in the present day had any say about. Others claim that since they aren’t racist, they should not be made responsible for racist actions.

These sentiments are collected loosely within the argument that if America were a racist country, we would not have elected a black president, and perhaps might soon elect a black vice president. The argument also contends that there are plenty of prominent black Americans such as Gen. Colin Powell, Sen. Corey Booker, former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, or former National Security Advisor Susan Rice (no relation), so it’s impossible to claim racism is a barrier to equality in America.

Although a plausible defense, it’s a naïve one, one that ultimately deflects taking responsibility for the nation’s original sins of genocide of the indigenous Americans and enslavement of Africans, two sins of our fathers that are so irrefutable, no one dare seriously say otherwise, not even MAGAs.

To that end, and especially for the self-proclaimed evangelical Christians who make up just under a third of our total population, I offer an insight that undercuts this position of “not my problem”: If Jesus died for all our sins, and then commanded that to gain entry into heaven, we be like him, then it’s time for us all to clear the spiritual miasma of our nation’s sins by taking responsibility for them, even if we think we had nothing to do with them. That’s my answer to WWJD (“What would Jesus do?”).

Many Evangelicals do think this way, thankfully. Well, some of them. There are those who are going off like rockets because of the also indisputable fact that the Black Lives Matter movement is overt in its opposition to all pillars of our white-built hierarchical structures, and states clearly its alarming intentions such as to disrupt the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”.

And yet, are we so critical-thinking impaired that we can’t see the personal and societal benefits of treating black Americans with empathy, regardless of what a political movement — including those enmeshed with the religious ones — also says about it? Just because the BLM organization, Evangelical churches, Republicans or Democrats, or (fill in the blank), has anything at all to say about the intrinsic value of a human life, we somehow need some organization to spin it for us?

How about we forget everything that any of these groups say and just get back to the basics of what all successful societies across time have said in one form or another: do unto others as you’d have them do to you.

That’s not synonymous with letting others think for you. Spiritually mature, thinking adults can whole-heartedly support and embrace that life matters across any and all demographics without having to wait for some group to clarify that moral imperative.

In my case, not being an avowed evangelical anything, I confess that because I had black friends, my initial reaction to my son’s insight was that it didn’t apply to me. But after I thought more about it, I realized that because my friends and I were all roughly equal in our social standing, it just made the existence of racism harder for me to see.

Once sensitized to it, however, I began noticing how I often did ignore black people outside my usual sphere, or how I tended to prefer interacting with whites over blacks in my everyday life. If I had a choice on a train to sit with a white person or a black one, the white person usually “won out”. If I had a choice to be served by a black person instead of a white one…and so on. It wasn’t because I hated anyone, or because I consciously thought of myself as “above” black people, it was because I was acting according to what was familiar to me.

As for our having elected or “allowed” black people to prominence in this nation, why should we think that pointing to these aberrations is proof that the norm they flaunt doesn’t exist?

My black friends might seem to enjoy the same fruits of their labors as other Americans such as myself who have seized whatever opportunities we could. But the fact remains they are more in danger of losing what is theirs than I am simply because they are black. Life is hard for everyone at one time or another, that is true, but white Americans are less likely to be killed or harassed by those in power than are blacks. That is a fact, and saying racism doesn’t exist because “look at all those successful black people” doesn’t change that fact.

Neither does it change the fact that statistically, when we talk of social ills in this country, they predominately center on black communities where material poverty and blight might not be evident, but where education, housing, job access, and nutritional foods are poor. This is also a fact, and it is to do with how our hierarchical, not democratic, system so often explored here in the pages of docu-mental, naturally makes it so.

Who leads us along the ‘arc toward justice’?

In this week of important anniversaries in American history, there is an irony afoot. This week has also been that of the Republican National Convention, replete with so much red, white and blue theatrics so as to become a patriotic burlesque, all aimed at a distinct demographic of Americans who, like so many black Americans, feel certain their needs have not been met.

This group, the MAGAs, have invested their hope in the future in a white man whom they call “the people’s president”, a moniker that was thumped over our heads more than once during the convention festivities, and one that was cheered by these Americans who love their leader because he has flaunted the so-called kingmakers of both our political parties, appealing to their sense that they too have been left behind by someone and now need someone to look out for them, a phenomenon with which I don’t quibble, but unlike the MAGAs, lay fault not at the amorphous “Radical Left” but at the feet of the white men in Congress and on Wall Street who have by various means, stolen MAGAs’ dreams, a phenomenon also explored often in these pages of docu-mental.

In any case, these are the Americans who believe that their chosen leader will not bow to The System, or so it would appear anyway as he tweets and tweets without subjecting his thoughts or unilateral policymaking to a formal vetting process. Take a knee? Never. There is far too much humility in that.

And this is what is so striking: whether it be through protesting in the streets or taking a knee on the field, or even refusing to take to the field, black Americans are choosing through their lawful, humble actions to refuse to play the game of being seen as inferior.

Is there looting and rioting and burning and resisting arrest right now in the black community? Yes. Is it warranted? No, but I understand the rage and opportunism behind it, and I note that it is not being condoned nor committed by the leaders of the black community. Therefore, are whites in danger of being attacked and brutally murdered by black mobs? Nope. Are blacks at a heightened risk of such attacks? Sigh. What do you think?

Black America is putting its faith in our democracy, in our common goodness and decency. They continue to trust that in time, as the moral universe continues its arc, we will do the right thing.

Meanwhile, white MAGAs who feel aggrieved by being seen as less-than by the powers that be have responded by celebrating as their leaders knowingly and repeatedly break the law.

Putting aside all known and debated other violations of the law by this POTUS, every single night of the RNC Convention was knowingly performed in full violation of the Hatch Act which bans political leaders from campaigning on federal property, among other statutes. When asked about it, the acting White House chief of staff said in a stunning moment of candor in a year full of such moments from the pack of law breakers in this administration, “No one cares.”

So, there he was, P45 and his entourage, all week unlawfully using the people’s house indeed, as well as the White House Rose Garden, and even the resources of our State Department to campaign for a return to America’s past, the one that no one, not even MAGAs, will deny is a past predicated on breaking the Mosaic commandments of not coveting, stealing, and killing. A sinful, painful past.

And as we have seen and documented here, that past is in fact The System, the very one that has begun to erode the privileges of every American except those at the very tippy top, and the ones in power whom we allow to flout the law. Which is to say, it is a system that if we continue to support will eventually crush not just black Americans, but all of us.

What is the road to reparations?

Seen this way, to not take responsibility for our nation’s original sins is as costly or more so than if we refuse to atone for the inherent evil within all our institutions, or to refuse to offer reparations for the resulting harms.

But let’s be sure we even know what we mean by that.

My way of making reparations was to change my behavior. It wasn’t hard. I committed to looking black Americans in the eye when I encounter them and to say hello so there is no mistaking that I see them, that I recognize them.

I don’t wave signs, I don’t yell at the police, and I don’t look specifically to support black causes, although each of these actions do have their time and place. I didn’t even have to admit I was wrong, nor feel as though I were taking on the burden for all of white America, even though I do accept that my awareness of the burden is the same as being responsible for it. In any case, all I had to change was my way of seeing.

It is a reparation that costs nothing, but means everything. For this small investment in other Americans, I have been repaid with smiles and warmth. People respond positively to being seen as people. Imagine: if this were the norm, blacks would not be placed in the demeaning position of having to insist, yet again, that they matter.

The road to reparations does not start with calculations but with empathy, with admitting we have a shared history and then bothering to learn from it. The idea of freedom that we cling to in this nation isn’t the one that we wave our flag around the world professing; it’s the one that black Americans have fought to secure right here under our noses and always to everyone’s benefit, definitely mine as a white woman.

Maybe there will be a time for writing checks, but until we listen and hear with our hearts, writing checks will only serve as an attempt to buy off black America in exchange for our continuing not to pay the real debt: remorse and sorrow for our nation’s foundation being set firmly upon abject inhumanity, for our forefathers having broken God’s laws, and for our white privilege arising from those sins, regardless of our either professed or true ignorance of this fact.

This interview is an opportunity for us to consider how freedom for all Americans was secured by the actions of enslaved Africans before, and how it is reinforced by African Americans now. It’s an opportunity to listen without being defensive, and to learn to see the love of freedom for all reflected in the faces of every American.

Links of interest:

Sacred Ground: The Episcopal Church’s response to racism

The National Park Service’s Ft. Monroe and Point Comfort history pages

Thank you to the patron subscribers who helped make this video series possible. With your support, I purchased video editing software, and some other tools to help continue improving the production values of all the docu-mental media. It remains a work in progress, but I am committed to your commitment in me, and grateful to you for it. If you are a regular subscriber who’d like to become a patron subscriber, here’s a link to how you can do so:

Next month, video number 3 is a conversation with IN Series Opera company director, Timothy Nelson, who will discuss what role the arts have in helping society create and perform meaningful rituals that bring us together through catharsis, common stories, and a shared vision of a peaceful future.

Thank you for exploring these topics with me.

Whitney

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vol. 2 issue 36

Ritual is the way to connect to the sacred in all relationships; they help us live out our meaning on a daily basis.

-Gwendolyn Reece, PhD, High Priestess of the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel

Greetings,

Baptism of fire. Dark night of the soul. Wrestling with the angels.

There was a time when the advent of a spiritual crisis, one that challenged our sense of what matters in life, was viewed as an honorable experience that marked the intersection between our human struggle and the divine. Crises once were widely seen as opportunities to move forward in our understanding of ourselves in relationship to our soul and spirit, to others in our lives, and to the world at large and all things seen and unseen, within it.

Not a religious person, nor one to speak in terms of God, I do believe that as I have aged, I have witnessed a national calamity where the more materialistic and reductionist we have become, the more our spiritual crises have become a cause for shame. Frequently, they are even cause for diagnosis.

Yet, there will never be enough pills or mental health personnel to meet the demand for help through the acute existential crises so many of us are experiencing right now while the coronavirus, our pathetic response to it, and the teetering economy, have all laid bare just how shallow our sense of national purpose is, and has been for some time.

We are all living in communities fractured by the angry identity-driven rhetoric from across the political spectrum, by the fall-out of misappropriated resources, graft, corruption, and too few solutions for problems that therefore seem insurmountable.

Too many of us do not feel empowered, and so we feel hopeless. Feeling hopeless is a well-established signal of suicidality at the extreme, or more likely, depression.

This publication was founded as a way to discover why anxiety and depression, particularly the existential kind, are so rampant in this nation. Through two volumes and nearly 100 essays, I have docu-mented policies and political stances, showing how the crises are due to how we have focused too hard for too long on the material, but not on what matters. We’re not even sure any more what that means: we know something is wrong, something is “the matter”, but what?

And why does not knowing seem to hurt so much?

How do we restore hope? How do we prevent losing it? I believe these questions are inextricably tied to our sense of mattering as a nation, our communal raison d’etre.

By nature, spiritual crises are disorienting. But I believe they are especially chaotic in our society now. That is because such crises mark times of weakness, and after years of having to grind it out, especially after the financial leveling we took in 2008, in order to survive, weakness of any kind has become a liability. Our national fear of being vulnerable started becoming pathological, I would suggest, after 9-11 when we were attacked on our own soil, scaring us to bits and riling us up in search of those we could punish. These are not the only events that have brought us to this point, but as we have docu-mented over the past two years, they factor largely in why we have a presidential obsession with winning.

A pathological fear of weakness is our national sickness, not just his.

But ironically, all this winning, and especially this fear of being “soft”, has left us that much more at risk: we don’t know what to do when we are broken, and so when something like the coronavirus hits us in the face, we are easily smashed to bits.

Rituals, just like rites of passage, used to be what our ancestors used to contain the chaos of having one’s world view shattered. Rituals offered us tools to move through, to reconnoiter, and to heal.

I believe it’s time we consider how ritual might help us as a nation weather what has befallen us and what is yet to befall us. These crises may come through no fault of our own, and at other times, very much by our own choices, however ignorant or calculated they may have been. The point is not to blame, but to heal and become wise.

A national soul retrieval is certainly not where I intended this online journal/journey to take us when I initially began it in early 2019, fresh off my career as a health policy and economics reporter, but here we are.

If you’d like to read the more policy wonkish stuff, and also listen to the very policy-oriented podcasts, please do go through the approximately 100 essays and podcasts in the archives, because they give a good foundational understanding of how we here have mapped and docu-mented the connections between bad policymaking and lack of soul and spirit.

Now, let’s focus on what was lost to our fixation on the material and on winning. What healing tools, soulful questions, character traits, and positive vulnerabilities have we left behind, forgotten, or stashed away where no one would dare suspect we keep them? Let’s retrieve those things. What is still useful? What, after careful examination, can we discard? What do we need to develop that we don’t already have? Added together, how might these tools help us frame what truly matters, ground it, and move forward to develop it?

My first guest in this series intended to heal the american (little “a”) state of mind before we return to mapping it, is Gwendolyn Reece, PhD. She is a high priestess with the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel, a pagan organization in the mid-Atlantic region. Dr. Reece, who is also an associate librarian at American University, is based in Washington, DC.

Among the many important tactics for this soul retrieval mission that Dr. Reece and I discuss, these are the highlights:

The concept of a national miasma, or “spiritual pollution” and how art as ritual helps clear it through collective catharsis.

How ritual was used to clear the miasma in the first Western democracy, Athens.

That ritual and policymaking must be applied in concert if there is to be effective cultural change.

How democracy, once cleansed, must maintain justice for all by putting all before the law.

The importance of separating church and state, and how the ethereal works together with science to improve society.

Why staying local to solve problems is more effective than too-large enttities, and how what happens locally filters up.

The critical nature of asking the right questions that will direct us toward our national purpose, the relationships that will support that, how to build community around these relationships, and how to solve the paradox of many visions with only one nation.

Practical examples of what starting with ritual and then leading to policy changes might look like, such as with food and water supplies, or labor force structures, might look like.

The dangers of “lofty talk” about being spiritual, but in actuality not demonstrating care and kindness for one’s neighbor.

The importance of starting “where you are” to affect change.

The notion of politics as applied ethics and how discussions about value are the an antidote to identity politics.

How can Pagans, Scientists, and Evangelicals work together?

What examples of systematically living in an ensouled society do we already have, including Rudolf Steiner’s Waldorf Schools?

And more.

If you’d like to learn more about the classical Greek tradition of ritual healing through theater, this concise video by Dr. Reece discusses how this is achieved by Aeschylus in The Oresteia.

Here is a New York Times feature on the use of the Oresteia in particular, and Greek tragedy in general, to help heal war-torn cities such as Mosul, Iraq.

For more about the Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy, his comprehensive system for building and sustain an “ensouled” society, visit here.

To learn more about the sacred rite of initiation across many cultures, and how it might be applicable to a new America, visit Dr. Reece’s video here.

For more about the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel, visit here.

For more on Dr. Reece’s own work dedicated to Athena and Apollo, visit here.

And, to learn more about how the Wiccan tradition builds community, there is a conference scheduled in 2021. Learn more here.

A dystopian short story I wrote years ago and published in 2018 in the fiction anthology Grace and Gravity, speaks to the idea of a collective catharsis. Here’s an interview I gave about the piece I wrote, and information on how you can obtain a copy of the anthology where it appears.

The transcript of this conversation will be available soon for patron subscribers. These videos are not “quick hits”. They are neither rushed, yet neither do they meander. They take the time necessary for subscribers to learn new ways of thinking, new questions to ask, and new processes to consider adopting. My intention is to create an entire library of such videos that soon will live behind a paywall. Not a formal curriculum per se, but a collection of topics that together add up to a comprehensive line of inquiry on how to rebuild a better democracy. For now, this is freely available to the public. As you probably noted, I have also included the audio only, in case you prefer to continue just listening to podcasts.

Thank you so much for your time and interest.

Peace.

Whitney

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vol. 2 issue 30

Greetings,

I love this podcast episode with Marie Leznicki. She’s the creator of Mindstead.org, the world’s first marketplace of personal growth tools, including for a variety of mental health challenges such as anxiety and depression. Imagine it being like Etsy, only for personal growth and mental fitness, a sort of 24/7 mental health fair.

What’s exciting to me about this is how it offers virtually everyone access to the wide range of mental health tools and modalities that otherwise would remain out of reach either because of insurance restrictions, budget, or simply unfamiliarity with the number of techniques that exist.

The tools are all vetted, and either evidence-based or validated, created by a range of credentialed therapists, life coaches, best-selling authors and Ted Talkers, all dedicated to helping individuals free themselves of the emotional and mental blockages that keep them from fully living a purposeful, intentional life.

Marie explains in this podcast how she saw a need for the “middle range” of people who aren’t in acute mental health crisis or who don’t have gobs of cash to pay for elite mental fitness services, but who nonetheless want to find professional support for their personal growth goals, whether it be to quell their anxiety or live life more purposefully.

Similarly, therapists and others who have developed tools but who only have so many hours in the day to work with their patients and clients can now have a wider reach, and can also improve their methodologies using feedback from Mindstead’s customer review process.

Whereas self help books don’t offer support, apps are costly and might not suit a person’s style and personality, Mindstead offers a range of options such as cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, meditation, breath work, and many other techniques you might not be aware exist, but which might be exactly what fits your goals. Often, this leads to working one-on-one with therapists per your own budget and other considerations, or to “cross-training” the mind with a combination of techniques.

What I love about Mindstead is that above and beyond its egalitarian yet individualized approach to centralizing the supply and demand for tools of mental balance, it offers a way to avoid being, as Marie calls it, “mind hacked”, and thus helps us expand our individual freedom. This aligns with the raison d’etre of docu-mental, which is dedicated to mapping and documenting the connections between democracy and our personal empowerment, our freedom, and ultimately how these lead to peace.

Our minds are the last frontier, even beyond space. Our minds and our imaginations are infinite, unlike all the other resources on this planet. That’s why “they” — whomever they are, whether it be purveyors of goods, religions, or politics — are coming for our minds. If we don’t protect them, grow them, guard them, and exercise them, then someone else will, and we will lose control over the one thing we have that connects us to our future, grounds us in the now, and delineates our uniqueness.

Marie abandoned her original plans to pursue a PhD in anthropology, instead applying her years of training in it to creating better branding. “It was ‘anthropology for evil’,” Marie jokes. Her head for business and marketing led Marie to work with Bridge International Academies, where she strategized the founding and development of more than 900 schools primarily in Africa, where access to any kind of formal education was lacking. Over the decade she worked in Africa, Marie saw how when academics were paired with social and emotional skills, children developed more resilience as well as academic success, yet often these skills were not modeled in their homes. This got Marie thinking about how to offer adults access to tools for personal growth, for those interested in taking the path of radical self-care.

Eventually, this led her to create Mindstead.

The name “Mindstead” is inspired by the Homestead Act that was passed around the time of the US Civil War. The ethos was if you could sow your own land, you could own your land. Marie’s idea is that if we can sow our minds, we can own our minds. Then not only can we live our lives with intension and purpose, we can be more useful to our communities.

“It’s the best of America. You can pursue your own happiness,” Marie says in the podcast.

Our conversation also explores how when people are not given this freedom, but instead embody what others tell them is true about who they are, instead of who they know themselves to be, entire populations can develop tendencies for certain diseases. In our conversation, I muse how genomic data already gathered by researchers could be interpreted to show how systemic racism and anti-Semitism results in black and Eastern European Jewish communities having higher rates of irritable bowel diseases, just as one example of how systemic beliefs impact our health and wellness.

In this conversation, we also consider the future of mental health treatments and what will be the fate of influences we currently do not or cannot measure because we can’t “see” them.

In the end, this podcast got me thinking about how an individual who is happier, healthier, more rooted in a personal truth based on one’s own beliefs and values, is an individual who will be more connected to others, and will create a strong societal fabric. In other words, there is strength in diversity, where each of us can choose our life’s tone and nuance. The more choice, the more innovation and creativity. This leads to progress, and ultimately, to peace.

Whitney

Photo compliments of Marie Leznicki, pictured here.

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vol. 2 issue 18

Photo: Tara Thiagarajan, PhD, courtesy of Sapien Labs.

Greetings,

Key to docu-mental is the discovery of how mental illness diagnoses have the power to promote or restrict democracy and freedom. To assess this, it’s essential to be clear on just what mental “illness” is, how it is defined, who is determining that definition, and for what purpose.

docu-mental already stirred up a ruckus with the previous two podcasts dedicated to these questions, in which we explored the extremes between mental illness diagnoses as arbitrary constructs that favor profit, to them being essential for the health of those who truly suffer from potentially severe disease.

This episode of the docu-mental podcast is especially rich and provocative, and returns to the questions of who gets to decide what normal is and on what bases, and offers a novel perspective thanks to cutting edge brain science.

My guest is Stanford neuroscientist Tara Thiagarajan, PhD, founder of Sapien Labs and creator of the Mental Health Quotient. Dr. Thiagarajan has been applying her background in neural network physiology to build a global database that matches brain activity with cognitive and emotional states in order to provide hard science that shows what the range of good and normal mental health actually is so we can once and for all answer the question of what does it mean to have good mental health, even across a range of highly diverse populations.

“If we don’t understand the whole spectrum of how people behave, we don’t really know where to draw the line between what is normal and abnormal,” Dr. Thiagarajan says in this interview. “How do we define mental well-being? Until now, there have been no tools that account for the full spectrum of human responses to life’s experiences.”

In describing her work, Dr. Thiagarajan addresses three key shortcomings of our current mental health diagnostic tools: mental illnesses themselves are ambiguously defined, mostly according to symptom clusters instead of actual underlying diseases; screening tools are highly inconsistent; and they are negatively biased, meaning they don’t look for how symptoms might also be positively adaptive.

“A lot of assessments don’t consider the consequences of the symptoms. Something could be flagged as problematic, like sadness, but perhaps that is a marker of empathy that makes a person better at work,” Dr. Thiagarajan explains.

To address these shortcoming, Dr. Thiagarajan and her colleagues have created the Mental Health Quotient, an online survey tool that anyone can take at any time. Data from all the survey participants is collected anonymously and analyzed to track population mental health status worldwide. It’s forming the basis for a global repository of data on “normal” and “abnormal” mental health states.

Having taken the survey myself, I can say it is easy to use and provides a snapshot of one’s state of mind in the moment. Rather than make a diagnosis based on that, it goes deeper, helping uncover how we cope with how our life is unfolding. In short, rather than view our various states of mind as pathological, it sees them in context of whether they are functioning as obstacles or tools for how we live our lives. For example, the score I got when I tool the survey indicated I am highly functioning, but if I chose to get better sleep, I would perhaps score higher on certain domains. This is empowering and leaves the choice up to me.

To date, the Mental Health Quotient study has tracked with epidemiological data, indicating that even though the data is self-reported, it is clinically valid, which public health policymakers should find reassuring. Another public health gold brick: the data also indicate who in the population truly do need mental health intervention but aren’t receiving it, and who among us are seeking mental health services even when they aren’t really necessary. Such data can help us readjust our expectations of what “normal” is utilization of our mental health system is more appropriate for the actual needs of the population.

I am especially excited by the implications of Dr. Thiagarajan’s work because, as she discusses in this podcast, without a way to account for the diversity of emotional and cognitive responses to life across an entire population, it’s easy to form policies that are only beneficial to some, and which potentially can be used to empower a few at others’ expense.

It’s been my contention that this is why mental health outcomes in the US, particularly our rates of anxiety and depression are so high and continue to climb higher: neither our public health nor our economic policies reflect the mental and emotional experiences of the entire population. I predict this will start to come into clearer focus, however, now that the pandemic has crashed our economy and caused serious distress across the nation.

Dr. Thiagarajan has thoughts on this, too. She and her colleagues have already conducted a study that shows unemployment has a more deleterious effect on clinical mental health than physical health challenges. Using the Mental Health Quotient data collected globally (it is available in a number of languages), Dr. Thiagarajan and her colleagues are creating an evolving global map of mental wellness in real time.

What excites me perhaps most of all about Dr. Thiagarajan’s work is that it begs the question as to whether it is possible for nations to create public policies predicated on the current mental health capacities of an entire population, regardless of how diverse, that help evolve that nation with harm to none. In a sense, the truest application of the Hippocratic Oath for all.

Wow. What a fantastic thought.

I hope you will listen and consider all the many possibilities Dr. Thiagarajan’s work suggest. And, I hope you will log on to the Mental Health Quotient and take the survey. In addition to learning more about yourself and how you adapt to life’s challenges, you will add to the database that is clarify what “normal” mental health is.

Links of interest:

www.sapienlabs.org/MHQ/

Does psychiatry reduce or increase our suffering, and are we powerless to change how it is practiced?

When psychiatry is life-saving: In defense of diagnoses

The potential risks of hydroxychloroquine v. social distancing and its impact on mental healthIf you enjoy reading and listening to docu-mental, why not share it?

Thanks!

Whitney

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Special issue: Deconstructing the News

What’s the risk-benefit ratio of using of an unproven drug to help prevent deaths from COVID-19?

A dispassionate interview between a world renown expert on hydroxychloroquine and a healthcare and clinical medicine reporter, not one whose beat is White House politics.

Photo of Remington Nevin, MD, MPH, DrPH, courtesy of Dr. Nevin.

Greetings,

As a former full-time healthcare and clinical medicine reporter, I have been annoyed at the frequency by which this public health emergency starring the novel coronavirus has been reported through a political lens and not much else.

Of course, we all want to know what the economic fallout will be. We all want to know when we can visit with our kids and grandkids or other family members again. We all want to know when we can go out for a cup of coffee!

But, really, what we need first is an understanding of the actual risks, benefits, costs, and procedures for evaluating what public health measures to take before we take them. I am finding such information hard to come by, and especially where concerns the use of high-risk treatments such as hydroxychloroquine.

Here is that information in this special podcast and transcript.

To cut through the politics, and to get a clear idea of what the actual risk-benefit ratio is, here is a special edition podcast with Dr. Remington Nevin. As the executive director of The Quinism Foundation, Dr. Nevin is the world’s leading authority on the harms of quinolines, the class of drugs to which hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine belong. Dr. Nevin is also a leading consultant on their use to governments and militaries internationally, and an in-demand expert witness for plaintiffs harmed by their use.

Background:The president speaks frequently about using hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine in our nation’s strategy for preventing and treating COVID19, the potentially lethal illness resulting from the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Some suggest it is because he stands to gain from promoting the drug. Others suggest it is because he stands to gain from the economy firing up again (wouldn’t we all?).

Still others say let’s try it!

While urging the FDA to issue an emergency use authorization of the drugs, the president has asked the nation, “What have you got to lose?”

Well, as it turns out, a lot. And yet, if you’re at high risk for contracting COVID19 – and little by little we are starting to form datasets that indicated who is most at risk beyond just the older among us – or you already have it and need acute intervention, then the risk-benefit analysis is probably going to tilt toward living, even if it means doing so in an impaired fashion.

For those who choose to take these drugs, the potential harms are grim, and will likely progress into being a life-long medical condition most recently delineated as “quinism”, a neuropsychiatric illness that closely mimics PTSD and traumatic brain injury, in some cases, severely so.

In this discussion, Dr. Nevin breaks down how these drugs work and what harms they potentially cause, gives us a brief history of their use, and explains how they came to be central to the debate over how to stop the pandemic.

He then explains the potential upside of including their use in a federally coordinated pandemic response, using the Strategic National Stockpile to prevent hoarding and to ensure equal access to these drugs, as well as indemnity for clinicians and health systems that choose to use these drugs.

Dr. Nevin also poses some compelling questions about whether promoting wide use of these drugs is actually more reasonable than promoting social distancing, and discusses what evidence there is for both. He also suggests that both sides of the political aisle are putting politics before data and analyzes what the potential long-term outcomes of doing so will likely be.

As a special bonus for all docu-mental readers and podcast listeners, I am also offering free use of the transcript, created by automatic software and currently unedited (but that will be updated soon), of my conversation with Dr. Nevin. I am doing so because I think this is perhaps the most objective interview about the situation currently available to the general public. If I am wrong, please send me links to whatever else is out there.

To read the transcript, visit this page on my website.

The transcript will be updated within the next 24 hours in order to provide an edited version that corrects the inevitable misspellings from the automatic transcribing service. My haste in getting this up there is that any moment, the daily White House coronavirus briefing will begin, and I want there to be an objective companion about the situation to accompany the reporting.Thanks for your support. Be sure to check back for the updates, and feel free to share this widely.

Whitney

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vol. 2 issue 11

Greetings,

The first psychiatry papers I ever edited and published were ones I was handed the very day I was named managing editor of a continuing medical education-focused journal in psychiatry.

The collection was by a group of outré researchers headed by a Yale-trained psychiatrist fascinated by the Chinese “Book of Changes”. More commonly known now by its actual name, the I Ching, this 9th Century divination tool is largely considered a sacred text in China, while most Western scientists, given its random nature, view it with suspicion. This particular psychiatrist, however, insisted the papers were important in that they established how at least some forms of divination could be validated and used as a therapeutic tool.

There was considerable discussion behind the scenes as to whether it should even go to print. In part because the papers offered some data on whether the I Ching’s seemingly random patterns had any statistical value that might be seen as instructive, the papers at last won the editor-in-chief’s imprimatur, and that was that.

Still, it was seen by some on the editorial board as an episode never again to be mentioned nor repeated, lest the journal be seen as a joke.

For me, however, a clinical reporter and writer experienced in covering mental health issues, but not an academic who’d spent years learning, defending, and practicing from a canon of medical literature and clinical experience, the scramble over what to do with the papers showed me how much psychiatry has changed since its conception in the late 19th Century, and how fraught with opinions the field can sometimes be.

It is more than safe to say that most practicing psychiatrists – especially those in academia – would not aver that divination is good medicine. Some would even call it malpractice. On the other hand, many psychoanalysts and psychologists who practice in the tradition of Carl Jung, are quite comfortable working with symbolic systems such as the I Ching or the Tarot.

For Jungians, fairytales, myths, and spiritual symbols are indicative of archetypical energies that animate us all, but when ignored and left unacknowledged, help create neurosis.

So then, what is good medicine in psychiatry, or even psychology, for that matter?

To answer that, I suggest something George Washington University School of Medicine psychiatry and behavioral sciences department chair, James Griffith, MD, told me once: good medicine is whatever brings a person into balance.

But what is that? It sounds rather personal, doesn’t it? Yes! That is the point. Good medicine is what brings you into balance with whatever your life is about. There is, therefore, an implicit existential quality to our mental well-being, regardless of how we seek to treat it. In America, I see it as being inextricably linked to the promise in our Bill of Rights to pursue our unique view of happiness.

[For an excellent podcast on how to define, achieve, and maintain resilience – and balance – and the role of hope and purpose in one’s life, I recommend this conversation between Dr. Griffith and my friend and colleague, Lorenzo Norris, MD, GWU SOM’s Asst. Dean for Students and an assistant professor of psychiatry.]

There is plenty of clinical literature in support of a variety of mental health treatments, and novel therapies and insights are in development all the time. Until only a few decades ago, for example, being gay was considered a clinical psychiatric condition. It no longer is, but questions surrounding how best to define and treat mental health concerns in the transsexual community currently challenge the field.

Because of the existential and personal nature inherent in our states of mind, treating mental illness in populations poses a unique challenge. How do we factor in the ineffable while creating evidence-based standards? My guest in this episode, former National Institute of Mental Health intramural research director, David Pickar, MD, says that while some mental illnesses such as anxiety are moving targets, with schizophrenia, the answer is to approach it medically, like any other illness: through observing the onset, course, and clinical characteristics.

The point I have been trying to make, first with this podcast with clinical research psychologist Paula Caplan, PhD, who decries diagnosis as the root of harm in our mental health system, and this episode where my guest, Dr. Pickar emphatically defends the importance of diagnosis, is that how we define and treat mental health is immensely controversial – and just as important.

Depending upon whether or not you are involved to any degree with the mental health system, you might react strongly to this series of podcasts. My guests certainly put me through my paces both in these podcasts and behind the scenes. And I have had one upset exchange with a well-known mental health practitioner who took exception with my previous stance that clinically diagnosing the president as a narcissist is counterproductive at worst, and meaningless at best.

But if my raison d’etre with docu-mental is to explore the American states of mind and connect them with how we express and shape our freedoms, then I can’t see how to do that without unpacking the ways in which our mental health is defined, and by whom.

These kinds of conversations held between mental health experts (and I am not an expert, but an observer and analyst of what I observe) don’t usually erupt into the public forum. Yet, at a time when we have had very serious public discussion about whether the president can be diagnosed as mentally unfit and thus yanked by the powers of 25th Amendment, now more than ever we also need public discourse on what constitutes a sound mind.

Our future in the US, already uncertain in an election year when anger is high, is all the more inchoate and scary thanks to our confused response to a deadly pandemic. We need to ask who stands to gain when a person is defined a certain way, and who stands to lose. These are not easy questions, but they go to the heart of our democracy; they are what gird our freedoms, particularly as power structures are quickly shape-shifting and are often maintained, as I point out in this episode, by leaders who haven’t got the faintest notion of the many nuances involved in defining and treating mental health.

So, here is the second in a series of three podcasts that set some common boundaries for how we view the parameters of mental health. In this episode, Dr. Pickar makes plain the reasons why and how medical diagnosis works in mental illness and why it is important. Among many things in favor of a medical approach to mental illness, he argues that there is not enough attention paid to leveraging diagnoses, particularly in schizophrenia.

By not using the vast amount of clinical knowledge already been derived from diagnosis, Dr. Pickar says we allow patients to suffer needlessly. He also takes exception with National Institutes of Health director, Francis Collins, MD, for overlooking viable pathways of drug discovery for schizophrenia in favor genomic research. I did seek comment from the NIH and Dr. Collins about this, but so far, I have not had a response. Last fall, however, I did interview Dr. Collins about some of his shifting research priorities, some of which are not genomic studies. You can listen to that interview here.

This is an entertaining discussion, and Dr. Pickar is passionate in his defense of psychiatry as a powerful and effective medical specialty. If you’ve never had reason to interact with the mental health system, I think you will still find this an interesting discussion because it features a voice we don’t often hear through the din of policy and pharmaceutical industry profits – the voice of the frontline. And while there aren’t any patients speaking in this episodic conversation I’ve set in motion, their needs emerge in the arguments of all my guests.

The third and final in this particular podcast series dedicated to understanding what mental illness “is” will be out next week. It’s a discussion with Tara Thiagarajan, PhD, a Stanford neuroscientist and founder of Sapien Labs. Dr. Thiagarajan and her team have created a novel, fleixble model that relies on the patient or citizen to help clinicians determine not only the correct nomenclature of mental illness, but its application in accurate, useful diagnosis.

Some notes on this podcast:

When Dr. Pickar refers to “me too” drugs, he is referring to drugs that are iterative, not to the #MeToo movement. Also, this was supposed to have been an in-person interview, but because of the need to “social distance” for the sake of the coronavirus, this was conducted over the internet, and the quality suffers for it. I hope this will not deter you from listening.

Dr. Pickar is founder and president of Gabriel Sciences. For more about Dr. Pickar, visit his website.

To access the previous episode in this series, visit here.

Thanks for listening and reading. I wish you good health!

Whitney

Photo by Shutterstock

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vol. 2 issue 7

Greetings,

It was 2017. I was in a posh conference room at a five star hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona. An elder statesman of the psychiatric community who’d recently stepped down from his post as leader of one of the nation’s oldest and most venerated mental health hospitals and research facilities, was giving an honorary address. The room was filled with esteemed psychiatrists. I was there to report.

Among the man’s many startling claims was that psychiatry was broken, and was likely to get worse before it got better, especially if the field continued to view patients as pathways to profits instead of persons in need of succor. I had never heard anyone in the profession take such a public stand before. One psychiatrist in attendance, not unsympathetic to what the speaker was saying, nonetheless referred to it in conversation with me later as a “fever dream”.

Most intriguing of all was the speaker’s assertion that by 2067:

“Most physicians will be employees of one out of four major health care nonprofit corporations that are vertically or horizontally integrated systems of care…managed care will be perceived as a regrettable experiment of the late 20th century ending in the first part of the 21st century. With the enactment of a universal single payer system of care, the high-cost intrusive middle management of carve-out behavioral health care companies will become moot… [Further,] significant advances [in science]…will make the prior 200 years of psychiatric care seem crude, quaint, and absurd.”

More than a decade before this, the psychiatrist and noted humanitarian, as president of the American Psychiatric Association, had chastised his colleagues for allowing a dissolution of their professional values, and thus a loss of credibility in the eyes of the public. In particular, he’d called out the need to reverse the influence of the pharmaceutical industry the field, and declared war on his fellow psychiatrists’ reluctance to fight for the rights of their patients across many fronts. He also called out the lax standards of scientific inquiry in the field.

As the speaker re-iterated in an interview with me later, he was deeply disappointed in his colleagues for not sharing his alarm over the drop in psychiatry’s professionalism. What struck me then and stays with me now is the sense that the speaker was genuinely broken hearted over what he had seen his beloved profession become.

I thought about his sorrow as I was editing this podcast episode of docu-mental. It occurred to me that whether or not he realized it, what he was describing was the erosion of freedom in psychiatry.

Freedom’s erosion looks like this:

It is the insurance industry with their need to deliver shareholder profits, not psychiatrists with their clinical judgement, that has ultimate say over the treatment algorithms, the time spent with patients, and the length of time for treatment. With help from the pharmaceutical industry, insurance got and keeps that power to determine treatment through policies held in place by legislators. Why do they put such restrictions in place? Because too often, as I have also seen firsthand, the legislators don’t really understand what they are agreeing to, and take at face value what the lobbyists tell them makes sense.

The lobbyists justify their position with scientific data derived from studies designed in favor of their interests. When there is protest against their findings, they claim that science is science, and their results are scientific.

Yes, science is indeed science, but there are many ways to occlude the whole of the scientific findings. One is that when outcomes aren’t favorable, too often they are kept quiet, never to be seen by the public, despite calls to publish them in a public database.

The result is drugs that are marketable, in part because their efficacy can be proven in some cases (if not all), which results in treatment that is quicker and often cheaper than less metric-laden methods, which helps insurance tighten the noose even more on the necks of psychiatrists who know that other methods also work, even if they take far more time but are ultimately more enduring if the end point is a reduction in anxiety and depression, a will to live and connect.

Why aren’t those other methods studied? Some will say they are too difficult to measure. But that is a half truth. Measurement, while important, is too often tied to money, and the power of so-called “interventions” and “treatments” like listening, connecting, and empathy are immeasurable, and so offer no profit margin. In healthcare now, money matters more, no matter how often we hear the protests that is not true.

I’ve heard those protests from (mostly) men with their academic and industry affiliated credientials, standing at those podiums in those posh five star hotels in glamorous locations, paid for in part by sponsorships from drug companies. The story coming from the men and women standing at the podiums in the less luxurious conference rooms where meetings of community psychiatrists — the ones you and I might ask to help us if we can gain access to them — is that there is a lack of resources being made available for people in crisis, and they, the mental health professionals trying to help them, are starting to feel pain themselves because they feel helpless to do so.

That is a loss of freedom.

All that money, they argue, such as the National Institutes of Mental Health’s 4.5 billion spent to study things like whether schizophrenia has a specific genetic code — something we will not know for years, if we ever know — could be put to better use now, in this moment, to help ease the pain and suffering of so many patients with schizophrenia made worse by the lack of basic safety net provisions for them once in place in this country, such as housing, food, basic healthcare.

This causes moral injury to the psychiatrists who are forced to act not in the best interests of their patients, but of The System.

What actually is The System? I don’t have a fancy definition for it. I just see it and have experienced it as the collected mass of agency and power we give over as individuals when we don’t ask good enough questions about how our assent to something that enriches some now will rob us later. That mass becomes too solid for us to push against as individuals. To break it down will take the force of enough of us waking up to our lost power and pushing against that mass all at once until it disintegrates, at least enough to break through, reclaim the good, and rebuild.

There was a time before psychiatry was so subsumed by the blob that is The System. It was the time before the discovery and industrial manufacture of psychotropic drugs, a time when there was less at stake financially for clinical psychiatric researchers. That was the time the speaker that day in that fancy conference room came of age in the field. He was describing not a distant utopia, but his non-fevered dream of the potential the field once had to help people not just heal their pain but grow and become more humane.

Like any field of study or industry, at a certain point, when the system becomes The System where “everybody does it”, whatever “it” is, then resistance becomes, if not futile, then nearly so. In medicine, this places psychiatrists and other clinicians in a situation where it is hard to uphold their oath to do no harm. This erodes freedom.

This intersection of the American notion of freedom and how mental healthcare is delivered is of keen interest to me. I see a national cognitive dissonance when we are told by our leaders that America is a free country, when held at the mercy of monopolistic entities such as insurance, pharmaceutical companies, and also policymakers, we clearly are not.

I believe there is a way to reverse this conundrum. It begins with waking up to what has happened, to how we’ve outsourced ourselves to The System. That’s when we can ask better questions, find better pathways.

In this episode of docu-mental, I speak with Paula J. Caplan, PhD, a clinical and research psychologist at Harvard University’s Hutchin’s Center, and the author of several books including They Say You're Crazy: How the World's Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who's Normal. Dr. Caplan is also the recipient of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry’s 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award, among numerous other accolades. As a research psychologist, Dr. Caplan also was a committee member involved in creating the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), before she resigned in protest (the DSM is now in its 5th edition).

Dr. Caplan takes a bold stance against psychiatry. She believes that the field causes more harm than good, and that the harm begins with diagnosis. I find some of Dr. Caplan’s claims problematic, and I do not believe psychiatry as a field is inherently harmful, as you will hear me explain in this episode. And despite my misgivings about the pharmaceutical industry overall, I also have seen where drug interventions are positive, life saving even, which is why, unlike Dr. Caplan, while I do not believe drugs should be in the ascendant, I do think they are important treatment options.

Still, Dr. Caplan is utterly correct to say that the problems which do exist in psychiatry will not be adequately addressed from the inside, as the speaker that day hoped, but by lay people such as you and me. Change will begin when we educate ourselves and ask better questions about just how much power we give up once we enter the mental health system at any point, not just through the door of psychiatry.

During this podcast, we do not name any specific individuals, as I am not interested in blaming or fighting. I am interested in finding avenues for change. I also chose not to name the speaker, although his remarks, name, and affiliations are listed below, if you want to read what he said for yourself. Just as he urged psychiatrists from the inside to stop playing the game, I suggest you can, too. See your part in the madness. Ask questions. Reclaim your freedom.

Dr. Caplan shared many resources where you can begin to do just that. They also are listed below.

Next month’s episode of docu-mental will feature an interview with a former head of research at the NIMH, a psychiatrist now in private practice specializing in treating persons with psychosis and schizophrenia. Whatever didn’t get addressed in this episode, I intend to address in the next.

Thanks for listening and reading.

Whitney

Here are links referred to in this post:

The Future of Psychiatry by Steven Sharfstein, MD

Incoming APA president Steven Sharfstein urges reform

The Good Pharma Scorecard

Here are the links referenced in the podcast. I do not endorse any of them, but offer them as a follow-up to what Dr. Caplan shared:

Website of Paula J. Caplan, PhD

The Icarus Project

The International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry

National Association for Rights Protections and Advocacy

Ending Harm from Psychiatric DiagnosisMad in America

Illustration: John Hain

Updated March 6, 2020 to reflect that we did not name any specific members of the field intentionally during the podcast.

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vol. 2 issue 2

Greetings,

It seems we’ve moved on from “finding our tribe”, as was the thing to do in the 2010s, and are now onto identifying our “family of origin”. There are even so-called “family of origin” therapists. I haven’t ever spoken to one, so I don’t know what that’s all about, but it seems iterative to me. Really? We’re only now starting to consider that the pain of our progenitors is our inheritance?Well, okay then. Here’s my own entrance into that pursuit of inquiry.

The character actor Harry Dean Stanton will be best known to you depending upon your generation, as the singing convict in Cool Hand Luke (not Paul Newman, the other one), Travis in Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas, or Roman the arch patriarch of a polygamous Mormon family on the HBO show Big Love, or the star of Lucky. I know him as the family member who shows up in nearly every dang movie I am casually watching, unsuspecting that at any moment he’s about to appear.

In fact, Harry Dean was in hundreds of movies, but with the exception of Travis, never had a lead role. He co-starred with a young Emilio Estevez in Repo Man, but that was it. He died in September of 2017 at the age of 91.

Of the four boys born to Ersel Moberly Stanton McKnight of West Irvine, Kentucky, only one remains: my father, Harry Dean’s youngest sibling and half-brother, making Harry Dean my uncle.

My guest in today’s podcast is Joe Atkins, Harry Dean’s biographer and a professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. His book Harry Dean Stanton: Hollywood's Zen Rebel is due out later this year from the University of Kentucky Press.

I adored Mama Ersel, my grandmother. But I was not in the majority. So much of Atkin’s book explores the tortured relationship Harry Dean had with his mother. Talking with him both in this podcast and off record, I learned more about how that relationship also informed the one Mama Ersel had with my own father, and thus, how her demons and his, were handed down to me.

It’s a strange thing to sit in a movie theater, as I did for Harry Dean’s final work, the semi-autobiographical Lucky, and to see your own family photos featured in a scene where the main character reveals how these people let him down.

But it did reinforce my observation that pain and suffering in one family member, particularly when unresolved, will take similar forms across successive family generations until someone afflicted by it all looks backward and says, “No. This ends with me.”

In my family, as Atkins reveals, it seems that depression, addiction, abandonment, and rage are coded in my father’s family’s DNA. Personally, I have known the depression and the rage of being exposed to the rest of the family “gifts”. But, somehow, I also was blessed, and I do mean blessed, with an abundance of stubbornness that has translated into resilience and ultimately, into soundness of mind.

Was Harry Dean so blessed? He lived long and worked nearly until the day he died. Stubbornness: check. But how willing was he to look back and say “No thanks. You can keep that,”?

It seems to me that the abandonment he experienced along with the attendant rage and pain were too much for him to fully exorcise and examine, which is why he could go on in circles about god and philosophy, but never really get anywhere: It hurt too much. Maybe it made him a better actor, I don’t know. Was his pain his secret sauce?What’s funny is that all that preaching and philosophizing — that’s another family gift that ironically tied him to his kin, even though he otherwise kept his distance.I was close with the woman who haunted him, and much as I loved her, she haunts me, too. In fact, she and I, and her second husband, my grandfather, all shared the same birthday. What I’m getting at is that in families of origin, the legacies can be both hard and soft at the same time.

For me, Atkins’ investigative work – which I have yet to read, but have discussed in part with him – will shed light on some mysteries I have carried my whole life. Thank you for that, Joe. For movie buffs, I suspect when the book is released, he will have added a worthy volume to the canon of American filmography, spanning as his biography of Harry Dean does, so many decades and so many changes in Hollywood that a scrawny Kentucky kid with a lovely lilt to his voice managed to survive and reflect back to us all.

Next month we’ll focus on how culture and society shape how we define mental health.

Thanks for reading and listening.

Whitney

Photo of Mama Ersel Moberly Stanton with her sons, from left ot right, Archie, Harry Dean, and Ralph, circa 1929, from the private family photo collection of Whitney Fishburn. Handwritten by Mama Ersel in Feb. 1968.Audio in this podcast of Harry Dean Stanton singing Cancion Mixteca, Ry Cooder on guitar. Warner Bros.

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Vol. 1 issue 39

Greetings,

It’s podcast time again. These take time to produce, and I do them myself, so thanks for your support and patience while I work on getting them together. This one with London-based economist Grace Blakeley, author of, STOLEN: How to Save the World from Financialization, is one of my favorites to date.

In it, Blakeley begins with a reference to the late British cultural theorist Mark Fisher and his notion that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of Capitalism. She then gives a concise history of late 20th Century Capitalism beginning with the aftermath of WWII, all the way to now, touching on how a series of events helped tilt global markets in favor of the super-rich, resulting in the gutting of the middle class and today’s disproportionate distribution of resources world-wide.

It’s a well-written book, one you will zip through with Blakeley as an excellent guide. She is not preachy, but she is passionate about pointing out how Capitalism hasn’t worked for us the way we’ve been told it should.

In our interview, Blakely describes what “financialization” is, and breaks down how when off-shore money invested in various domestic economies, combines with the privatization of government functions, it leads to financiers, not elected officials, having the power to make decisions that impact everyday citizens’ lives.

These wealthy but faceless powerful often are those who never set foot in the US but still have immense impact on how we as communities are able to distribute and utilize our resources.

You might remember what that is like…it was called the Great Recession of 2008.

It is not fear of material poverty that Blakely argues is what fuels the rising tide of populism, but our having been rendered voiceless and powerless by people who have no reason to feel accountable to us.

Ultimately, Blakeley advocates a form of Socialism as the solution to financialization (in the UK, spelled with an “s” not a “z”), and she makes an even case for why. I challenge her on some of it, but I also see the wisdom of what she puts forth.

As far as economic policies are concerned, I am not advocating anything, at least not yet. I am more interested in examining our options and seeing what has and hasn’t worked as the economic components foundational to modern democracy to date. I believe the likelihood is we are on the precipice of creating something entirely new.

Perhaps familiar political paradigms will be refashioned thanks to digital technology. I am not talking about artificial intelligence so much as just the power to communicate and so create communities that pop up and then easily reconfigure.

On the other hand, perhaps we are about to enter a phase in human history that looks like none humanity has ever seen, one we have yet to comprehend is even possible.

Whatever might be, Blakeley calls this a “moment of contingency”. The far Right is rising, the financial class is digging in, and the Left is growing louder as people who never before saw themselves as activists are starting to organize in support of protecting themselves and their communities.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is an Older vs. Younger Generation argument. This is about equity, not age.

Something I feel confident in saying is that regardless of who “wins” the messaging wars during this Age of Populism, they will do so against a backdrop of dramatic change that will happen swiftly and evidently.

Will you be ready? I think if you listen to the logic of arguments like Blakeley’s and consider how it might resonate with your own experience, even if you disagree with her, you will be able to more effectively help shape and respond to the coming change.

I hope you enjoy this provocative conversation and leave your comments for others to ponder, too.

Whitney

PS: Premium subscribers, be on the look-out for a bonus email with an outtake from this interview. In it, Blakeley and I discuss how climate change protests have become a means to a greater end, and why they now involve not just environmental activists, but ordinary people who previously might never have envisioned themselves as protestors.

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vol. 1 issue 32

Greetings,

Many in this nation take it for granted that mindfulness is helpful for managing stress, alleviating pain, and feeling more connected to one’s self. I would agree that in the right context, this is so.

And yet.

I have not seen any serious national consideration of the risk/benefit ratio of mindfulness’s call for us as individuals to “go inside” ourselves in search of the root cause of our stress.

What if the root cause isn’t inside, but is coming at us from the outside?

What if mindfulness as it is taught in the working world is exacerbating rising public health threats such as anxiety, depression, and suicide?

Perhaps you don’t actually think mindfulness has lived up to the promise of stress relief you’ve sought. Maybe you blame yourself for not “getting it”, so you doubled down, figuring you’d just keep practicing until you finally got it right…and maybe that is just a waste of your time, an effort doomed to fail, and take you down with it.

It’s time we consider that what we really need for people to feel less stressed out is better policies and more humane working conditions, not people feeling badly about themselves for their inability to manage their anxiety and hopelessness.

Stress isn’t a pathology to treat, but a lie we have conditioned ourselves to believe is our flawed way of coping with an unfair world. That is the argument of my guest on this episode of docu-mental, Ronald E. Purser, PhD, a professor of management at San Francisco State University and an ordained Zen dharma teacher. He’s written a book called, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality.

In this discussion, Dr. Purser takes us through a brief history of how “mindfulness” was derived from Buddhist traditions in Southeast Asia, and how as it traveled West, was uncoupled from its spiritual tether, eventually becoming a tool that keeps people focused on themselves and thus not on challenging the real “stressors” such as loss of autonomy, not enough food or income, and hostile work environments.

We discuss whether this was a conspiracy or an unplanned phenomenon, with Dr. Purser pointing to how mindfulness has become a tool of the corporate world, particularly after the economic collapse of 2008. Dr. Purser also explains its roots in the 1940s “neoliberal” response to Communism, made front and center by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, a time when corporate profits began to soar, labor rights began to wane, and the notion of being “stressed out” first entered our parlance as we sought to capitalize on ourselves in all ways possible.

Or, as I have written about and discuss in my Five States of Mind, how we have outsourced ourselves to profiteers.

I ask him if what we’ve done is seek self-imposed, corporate sanctioned mind control, whether it is truly harmful if people like it and derive benefit from it, if spirituality is essential to peaceful living, and if it doesn’t actually work, what should we do instead?

His answers might surprise you.

In this episode: Are we human beings or human capital?

I hope you will listen and forward to others this important conversation where Dr. Purser and I examine these questions, so key to think through in a time when our levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide are at all time highs.

I promise you this interview will give important clues into the roots of these serious public health threats.

docu-mental will be sporadic for the next two weeks as I head to the UK and to Iceland. My plan is to return with some interesting interviews for you. At the very least, I know I have on deck a London-based economist with a vision for what a post-Capitalist global economy might look like.

Be well. Happy Friday.

Whitney

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vol. 1 issue 29

Greetings,

Have you given up talking about how healthcare in the US might be delivered more efficiently and affordably? Do you figure it’s a lost cause at this point, and so just hope for the best while you grit your teeth to make your monthly premium?

If so, then listen up.

My guest on this episode of the docu-mental podcast is Olivia Webb. She’s a healthcare consultant at The Open Markets Institute, a think tank dedicated to reclaiming the debate over how best to apply antitrust laws in this country.

After four decades of antitrust law enforcement being in service to something called “consumer welfare” — essentially, practices that lead to goods and services being offered at the lowest price possible — I think it’s important to examine how this has cut into our rights as citizens. I even wonder aloud in this episode if the primacy of consumerism is antithetical to citizenship in a democracy, whether being told that the kind of “convenience” that is offered by conglomerates like CVS comes at the expense of informed choice.

Think about it: without the power to choose, we no longer have the power to exercise our freedoms. Without freedom, what is democracy?

And, when health insurers, of which there are fewer now than ever thanks to a series of mergers in the last decade, are the ones telling us which doctors we can and can’t see, and are the ones telling physicians which drugs they can and can’t prescribe, where is our freedom, much less, the “consumer welfare”?

We are all witness to the fact that our healthcare is not delivered at the lowest cost possible. But we don’t know why, and we don’t know what “the lowest cost possible” should look like because the system is so opaque.

It’s opaque because those who stand to gain from our ignorance — monopolists and other profiteers — want it that way. In America, while we’ve been told that we have the market power as consumers to choose what is best for us, instead the opposite has become true.

In the US, if we truly had consumer choice — and consumer welfare — we would be the ones directing how healthcare decisions are made. But, as my guest in this episode points out, we do not have the facts, we are not allowed to see actual costs, and worse, the lanugage of healthcare economics has become so obtuse, many of us are afraid of looking too stupid to talk about it.

I argue that by outsourcing our choices over how we will receive care and thus of how our bodies are utilized by this profit-driven system, we’ve become the suppliers and the products, not the consumers in a pernicious system that we are told is one thing but is really another.

This is a podcast that I hope will get you thinking so that you can demand current and future elected officials speak plainly about healthcare rather than pretend that what they say is true — that of course, we all want basic care for all in this country — is not actually subsumed by the greater truth: profit is more important.

We don’t have to accept we are powerless. And they don’t either.

If you have a reaction to this podcast, please leave it in the comments section, and feel free to tweet, or otherwise share it. Best of all, suggest to your other thinking friends and family members that they subscribe to docu-mental. It’s free, unless you also want to be a premium member. Either way — the more thinking people, the better.

Whitney

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vol. 1 issue 12

POTUS 45 with Kelly Johnston, former Secretary of the Senate appointed by former Senate Majority Leader, Bob Dole.Photo: courtesy of Kelly Johnston

Greetings,

Air conditioning, Newt Gingrich’s naked ambition, and especially post-Watergate rules that created a power vacuum special interests rushed to fill. All that, plus the never-ending, high stakes fundraising that takes a third of our federal lawmakers’ time, are among the key ingredients in the special brew that has poisoned relationships in Congress.

That’s according to Kelly Johnston, former Secretary of the Senate under the Republican majority leader, Bob Dole. Johnston is my guest on this episode of Washington Remembers, presented by docu-mental.

Johnston should know. He just retired from more than 40 years of service on Capital Hill, where he has enjoyed a stellar reputation for civility, collaborating with members of both parties on a variety of initiatives across several administrations. Before working in government affairs for the processed food industry, Johnston, a conservative Republican and Oklahoma native, spent a quarter of a century working in various leadership capacities for members of either the legislative or executive branches.

One of these roles was as former Republican Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole’s secretary of the Senate. In all, Johnston’s perspective, which reaches back to the Jimmy Carter era, is helpful if we are to understand—and move beyond—Washington’s current level of incivility.

I first met Johnston years ago, around 2004-ish, through a local chamber of commerce in southern New Jersey. I ran a small healthcare-oriented communications shop and he had just began his role as head of government affairs for the Campbell Soup Company, a local employer in the region. Over the years, I have come to consider him a wise counselor who tells it like it is, but with mercy.

Johnston says incivility in Congress is nothing new, but it has manifested in different ways throughout our nation’s history. “Leaders from both parties have always struggled with how to make their parties get along,” he says, listing the ways: Civility retreats at amusement parks, family dinners, outside organizations that mediate behind the scenes, and other vehicles for niceness.

But Congress’s greatest civility tool of all, is time lawmakers spend getting to know one another informally, Johnston says. It’s something that can only happen when more voters realize that legislators really only do what they’re told. And right now, regular you-and-me voters do not direct Congress, powerful special interest groups do.

A couple of months ago, I posted a brief interview I had with Democratic House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (Md.), a member of both the Progressive and Black Congressional caucuses, about his friendship with Freedom Caucus and staunch POTUS 45 supporter, Mark Meadows (R., NC), much to the surprise of many.

Johnston explains why this kind of friendship was once the norm, and shares why there must be more alliances like the one between Cummings and Meadows if Congress is to become more effective and less nasty. Best of all, Johnston details how to make this happen.

Photo courtesy of Kelly Johnston

As for the division over POTUS45, Johnston says that’s symptomatic of something deeper. He brings it back once again to the special interest groups that turn Americans against one another and which have risen to power thanks to post-Watergate ethics legislation that created a vacuum that these non-elected entities were eager to fill.

“Only when we diminish special interest money and let the primary fundraising be done by parties will we have a chance of civility returning,” he says. “It bothers me that somebody can come in and write a million dollar check and destroy somebody’s campaign or get somebody elected.”

And it’s not just outside interest groups battling for dominance, according to Johnston. Internecine wars between groups like the Freedom Caucus and the rest of the Republican party, or the Progressive Caucus and the Democratic party are also turning things into an all-or-nothing match.

As for the president’s own notable rudeness, Johnston believes it is a symbol of the incivility that existed already and that no one has stepped in to act like an adult to overcome the president’s own “immaturity.”

Also in this interview: Johnston shares historical tales of murder and bludgeoning on Capitol Hill, we discuss the similarities between disruptors like former Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich and Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and we debate whether Johnston’s friend, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, is doing enough to tone it down on the Hill.

We end with Johnston looking ahead to 2020 and offering a few rays of hope that civility is possible, noting that some in Washington are quietly working behind the scenes to make everyone play nice, and that most lawmakers really do mean well.

It’s a great listen, and goes to the heart of what docu-mental is about: thinking for yourself, not according to doctrine.

I hope you enjoy this podcast as you head into your holiday week.

We’re going on vacation here at docu-mental, but we’ll still be publishing. No more podcasts until later this summer, however.

Stay out of trouble,

Whitney

PS: Sorry about the president’s eyes being closed. Can’t do anything about that.

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vol. 1 issue 10

Dr. Allen Dyer, Professor of Psychiatry and Vice Chair for Education at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and only living member of the original American Psychiatric Association’s ethics committee. Photo: Whitney Fishburn

Greetings,

Here’s a treat for you: a conversation with psychiatrist, Dr. Allen Dyer. He is the only living member of the American Psychiatric Association’s original ethics committee which in 1973 issued what is popularly called “the Goldwater Rule”.

I first met Dr. Dyer in 2017 while I was working on a story aimed at the diplomatic community, explaining what the Goldwater Rule is and why it was so controversial. In its most basic form, it is a principle that guards against psychiatrists diagnosing a person from afar, and then speaking publicly about that “diagnosis”.

This became an issue after Donald Trump was elected, since many in the pyschiatric community believed him to be a dangerous narcissist who would do irrevocable harm. During the APA’s annual meeting in 2017, members became very emotional and divided over whether or not to relax the “rule”.

The Goldwater principle is less of an open topic of discussion today, but Dr. Dyer says it is still a topic of much debate within the field. Its tenets also have been much discussed in the context of removing the president using the 25th Amendment vs. impeachment, or just waiting for the next election cycle.

I wanted to include Dr. Dyer in our Washington Remembers series because the presidential election cycle is upon us and questions about POTUS45’s mental health status are again percolating.

I also thought it important that we discuss the side of the debate which I believe got less popular coverage previously. Namely, I wanted to explore the side which had psychiatrists and others asking: What is the root cause of this kind of person being in power, and what does it say about who we are as a nation?

In our discussion, Dr. Dyer and I cover why and how the Goldwater principal came to be; whether psychiatrists actually are bound to adhere to it; what the definition of a narcisisst actually is; and most fascinating of all, the question of the actual problems we need to come together as a country and address from a mental health perspective and what we need to do to address them in a unified manner.

Do we have the tools we need to move forward in peace and security, regardless of what we individually think of the current president?

Listen and decide for yourself.

Please don’t forget to subscribe if this is being forwarded to you. And if you already are a subscriber, please consider becoming a member.

As always, I thank you for your attention and I love documentaling the news with you.

Be well this week end. Happy Friday!

Whitney

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vol. 1 issue 10

Donald Baker, former US Asst. Attorney General for Antitrust. Photo: Whitney Fishburn

Greetings,

Today Congress began an investigation into whether Big Data firms such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon are running afoul of US antitrust law.

Before determining if the companies are monopolies, legislators will need to determine whether current antitrust law is sufficient enough to manage how Big Data has changed the marketplace. It used to be that a “relevant market” was easily defined, usually by geography. That’s out the window with the global net.

But there are more personal issues at stake. Now that we know how much of ourselves — namely our personal data — has been used for very big profit by these colassal organizations, without our explicit understanding that is what was happening, it’s also crucial that our lawmakers have a fundamental understanding of what a two-sided market is and how when we participate we are not just customers, we supply a product. Our data, our privacy, our names…these are the products that data companies sell.

That should mean we have rights as suppliers as well as citizens.

And it’s our rights as citizens that have been under attack in a pernicious way. By focusing our attention on what is called “the consumer welfare standard”, which is meant to ensure we get our goods and services for the lowest possible price, we are lured into thinking that is always the end goal.

But as we now see with Big Data firms, who supply us “goods” — essentially access to the Internet generally and to the online market place specifically, we have traded our freedoms (privacy, data) for “free”.

How will we ever return this genie to the bottle now that people we will never know have probably seen and used our personal information without our permission? Even if we stop the behavior, we can’t undo what’s already been done.

Big Data also fuels the so-called “gig economy” which includes Uber and Lyft drivers. These ride-share companies also participate in two-sided markets where we riders and the for-hire drivers are both controlled by the data company. Without the drivers, who are suppliers to these companies, not employees, the companies could not profit. Currently, there are no rights protecting the drivers as suppliers.

What, if anything, will Congress do about these questions? I just hope that Congress obtains a clear understanding of what is at stake. That would be a good place to start.

For docu-mental subscribers who listen to this podcast, the second in our Washington Remembers series, you will certainly get a good idea of how antitrust law has gone from being just about big business to instead being a very personal area of the law.

In addition to there being investigations into antitrust on Capitol Hill right now, we’ve also just passed the 50th anniversary of the first merger guidelines ever written in this country. Former US Assistant Attorney General Donald Baker was at the table as they were drafted (after now Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was done composing them from scribbles taken on the golf course).

Baker and I met in his Pennsylvania Avenue office in Washington, DC to discuss why we need merger guidelines and how antitrust enforcement works in a broad sense. We also discuss how competition law can bend to politics, and what citizens should pay attention to now that the digital revolution has changed our marketplace.

We also discuss the key argument in antitrust circles today: whether the so-called consumer welfare standard is eroding our rights as citizens by making us consumers first, and persons with Constitutionally guaranteed rights second, an argument made more than 100 years ago by then Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

If you’re enjoying your free subscription to docu-mental, GREAT!! Please consider purchasing a membership, and definitely forward this on to others whom you think might like docu-mentaling the news.

Friday we’ll have more excellent food for thought, including some investigating into the correlation between the bond market, agriculture, weather, and lobbying, by request from two readers.

And next week, be on the look out for our next Washington Remembers podcast with Dr. Allen Dyer, a psychiatry and behavioral sciences professor, as well as the vice-chair of education at the George Washington University School of Medicine, and the sole surviving member of the ethics committee of the American Psychiatric Association responsible for the so-called “Goldwater Rule” that advises against diagnosing celebrities, including presidents, from afar. That one, like this one with Baker, is well worth your time.

Thank you as always for your continued readership and support.

Whitney

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Larry Barrett with Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Photo: Michael Evans, courtesy of Larry Barrett.

May 1, 2019

vol. 1 issue 5

Hello,

This issue introduces the monthly podcast, Washington Remembers. In this episode, former Time magazine White House correspondent, Larry Barrett, remembers what it was like to have access to the “other” populist Republican president.

Barrett compares current White House press policies to those of the current and previous administrations, including President Jimmy Carter’s, which Barrett claims was not much good at managing the media, while Reagan’s team was.

Barrett also offers insights into how the religious Right got its foothold in Washington, not under the Southern Baptist Carter, but the socially moderate Reagan, who had been pro-choice before winning the White House. Barrett describes how Reagan advisors crafted a plan to pair the religious Right with the gun lobby in a move that helped transform the Republican party into what it is today.

Barrett also compares Reagan, whom he says at times chose to ignore his advisors and act on his gut, to our current president who also claims to act “gusty”, going without the input of aids and cabinet members.

At the time of this recording, Susan Page’s new biography of the late former First Lady Barbara Bush, The Matriarch, was just being released. In it, Page touches upon the rumors surrounding the prickly relationship between Bush and Nancy Reagan. Barrett fills in some gaps, including the assertion that First Lady Bush thought the Reagans were beneath her and her husband’s social standing and maybe even not quite as intelligent.

For nearly 40 years, most of it with TIME magazine, Barrett covered national politics. He wrote about seven presidents, beginning with Lyndon Johson and ending with BIll Clinton. Having begun his career with the New York Herald Tribune, Barrett was best known for his role as TIME's senior White House correspondent during the Reagan administration.

Recorded in Barrett’s home in Chevy Chase, Md., it’s a fun discussion, loaded with anecdotes about the Reagans and other Washington luminaries of the 1970s and 80s. We begin with Barrett telling us how this photo came to be in service to his book about Reagan, Gambling with History: Reagan in the White House.

As docu-mental is intended to do, the interview also sheds light on policies and protocols of the past that we contend with today.

Future podcasts will explore how we came to have the mergers and acquisitions guidelines we have today, how immigration went from being a civil to a criminal matter, and several other policy beginnings that are ripe for debate.

Thanks for reading and listening. We’re adding on as we go, with our big launch coming this Fall. We hope you will subscribe and tell your friends to as well.

More about our mission and how docu-mental was founded to create herd immunity to anxiety and depression (TM) by examining policy and protocols in this country can be found here.

I hope you enjoy this podcast, hosted and produced by me, Whitney M. Fishburn.

Whitney

Former Time magazine senior White House and national political correspondent, Larry Barrett, at home in Chevy Chase, Md. photo: Whitney Fishburn

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vol. 1 issue 4

April 22, 2019

Hello,

First, while attending a concert at the Library of Congress, I ran into House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.). You might recall the docu-mental post musing about Chairman Cummings’s friendship with fellow committee member Mark Meadows (R-NC). I told him about what I had written and asked him about their friendship and how it might help the work he and Meadows are currently undertaking on the committee, including several investigations into potential illegalities engaged in either by POTUS 45 and/or his administration. Click on the link above to hear Chairman Cummings’s response.

Thanks for reading and helping this newsletter grow. The docu-mental newsletter is your only source for reliable commentary about the underlying mental framework driving american policy and culture. Your enthusiasm for it is so gratifying and catalyzes me to keep thinking of new ways to get you thinking.

If you like docu-mental, please forward it, and suggest that your friends and family subscribe. Later this year, we will be offering both free and paid content. Get in on the ground floor by subscribing here now.

Now, let’s docu-mental some news.Whitney

Are the Saudis drinking our milkshake?

Photo of the Palo Verde Valley, Calif., Dick Lyon, creativecommons.org

There’s been an uptick in national and even international coverage of a Saudi Arabian company, the publicly traded Almarai, owning water rights in the extraordinarily drought-stricken Palo Verde Valley in California. A recent article in the UK’s Guardian asks:

What business does a foreign company have drawing precious resources from a US desert to offset a lack of resources halfway around the globe?

If this question is ever to be addressed as a matter of policy, any lasting solution will need to be framed less as a question of proximity to a natural resource and more as one of whether access to it is a basic human right. The answer is not so straight forward.

We all need access to potable water to live. By worrying over who should “own” the rights to that water, we imply that “rights” are commodities. In this equation, we are forced to buy what we need to live. It’s not going to be there for us unless we can produce something of value in exchange for access to it. But “rights” have a superior meaning in this country, because we are Constitutionally guaranteed the right to pursue happiness. We’re less likely to be happy if we’re dead or sick, which is what happens when we don’t have access to potable water.

The Saudis need to buy the water to grow alfalfa to feed Saudi cows. Cows, in the desert. Almarai is one of the world’s largest dairy farming operations, and according to its Wiki page, the largest vertically integrated one. Let that sink in. Cows. Desert. Biggest dairy operation on planet. Almarai alone (it’s one of several such dairies in the desert) has upwards of 150,000 head of cattle alone. Air conditioned cows? Of course. Desert. 150 liters of water per cow to drink, per day. Desert. You get the idea.

Alfalfa is water-intensive. Saudi Arabia is a desert (you knew that). In 2016, the SA Kingdom outlawed alfalfa farming because it was depleting their water supplies. They bought up rights to our water instead. Water that flows through a drought-stricken desert valley. Water we allow to be used without limit because unlike the Saudis, we haven’t imposed restrictions on it, and given the political pull of the big agricultural insterests — including Almarai’s, which includes 16% of all water rights in the Palo Verde Irrigation District — restrictions are not coming any time soon, if ever.

The PVID is the modern day benficiary of a first-come, first-served prize of a claim to the river in California, purchased from the U.S. federal government by an 1800s San Francisco-based prospector named Thomas Blythe. Blythe paid for exclusive rights to the river for mining and farming, and now, because it was historically the first claim in the state on the river’s waters, whoever owns it still gets unlimited, first dibs on the water. That means members of the PVID pay about $75 more or less per acre for access to the water. As the Guardian points out, this arrangement does nothing to discourage profligate use of the water, since the rate is the same no matter how much is used.

The only thing farmers in the valley are required to pay is overhead for making the water available.

Oh, and by the way…the Colorado River is at a record low.

Let’s back up a moment to see why cows are living in the desert to begin with, and why the Saudis want our nation’s water supply to sustain them. In the late 1970s, Prince Sultan bin Mohammed bin Saud Al Kabeer sought to implement food self-sufficiency in his country. Begging the question as to whether Saudi desert dairy farming could ever truly be a self-sustainable form of agriculture, because importation of fresh dairy across long distances is tricky, the only way to achieve local dairy food autarky was to source and import water and feed from elsewhere. Even more ironic, the technology used originated in the California and Arizona deserts.

Almarai has its fans in the Palo Verde Valley. It’s a major employer in the area, offering benefits like healthcare plans and vacation, and it buys alfalfa from other farms, too. Here’s a quote from the Guardian article

“The Saudis, they’re here buying up at a good price,” [the assistant manager of the Palo Verde Irrigation District] explained. “They’re just the same as everyone else. They buy local. It’s a shot in the arm for the economy.”

But it’s doing all this “good” by profiting off a system that if unchecked, will destroy the valley by draining it dry. Who wins then? For a startling look at the intensive use of resources Saudis and other Middle Eastern countries rely upon for their mega dairy farms, here is an article CNN.com ran in 2013. Just this month, National Geographic reports that the Kingdom has slurped up so much of its own water supply to slake its dairy habit, that four-fifths of the underground freshwater supply there is G-O-N-E. Did I mention it’s a desert? And because it rarely rains in the desert, National Geographic reports:

One of the planet's greatest and oldest freshwater resources, in one of its hottest and most parched places, has been all but emptied in little more than a generation.

Almarai owns still more water rights in Arizona, and even more in Argentina, which also has its own water challenges. And although the Saudis deny it, they’ve been accused of some serious human rights violations in pursuit of water in places like Ethiopia.

And while no one has declared human rights violations are at play in California, not publicly anyway, the American Journal of Public Health reports that mental health concerns directly related to drought fears are real and on the rise.

Meanwhile, the Saudi Kingdom pushes news reports like this one celebrating the desalination technology it sells to drought-stricken California!

Permit me please to point out the obvious. This is insane. We sell access to our fresh water sources to foreigners who may or may not have our best interests at heart, from whom we then purchase technology to desalinate the oceans when what we might do is better manage the fresh water we just sold to the very people selling us technology that will make the oceans drinkable.

This is precisely the kind of cognitive dissonance inherent in our policy making that makes people anxious and depressed. It also leads to scarcity mentality, suspicion of others, and fears over whether there is enough to go around. There isn’t enough to go around, by the way. If there were, then the Saudis wouldn’t need to know how to desalinate the oceans.

There are some other considerations at play in the valley. One is that Almarai and PepsiCo together are the parent companies of the largest Egyptian-based dairy producer, Beyti, which is what allowed Almarai to become the integrated international behemoth it is. Another is that law suits are flying between PVID and the entity representing various cities that rely on the district for their municipal water supplies. At issue is whether the cities are collectively purchasing farms to lie fallow while diverting the water to the cities instead. And then there is the recent show down between the nearby Imperial Irrigation District and the Trump administration over whether a drought plan the president signed into law violates California environmental laws.

These factors are germane because they are manifestations of the deeper faultline in the argument: do we value the right to profit over the right to live?

The focus should be on how we define the word “right”.

Once the billionaire Saudi prince established food “sustainability”, however dubious, in his homeland, he went on to build his company into the world’s largest and most profitable dairies — with water Californians are now fighting over because Californians sold it to his company.

Why did he have the “right” to ask to buy that water, and why did Californians have a “right” to sell it? Does anyone have the right to profit exponentially while others are fighting to surivive now that access to the source of those profits is cut off or drasitcally limited? Would it be a violation of anyone’s rights if officals at the PVID only sold water rights to organizations that demonstrated committment to sustainable water management practices?

These are the real questions we need to address not just in California, but as a nation. How we answer them will determine whether we achieve effective policy making around access to resources, or whether we continue to make ourselves crazy.

From There Will Be Blood:

Stay tuned for our first podcast of Washington Remembers, coming in May. We will speak with Reagan biographer and former Time Magazine White House Bureau Chief, Laurence I. Barrett. He’ll talk about the behind-the-scene feuds between Barbara and Nancy, why a certain photo exists of Larry seated on a couch with Nancy’s stocking feet up by his knees (we will run that photo…), and what Reagan was really like when he was off camera, among other unexpected tidbits.

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docu-mental: mapping the american states of mind: Recent Episodes

Whitney M. Fishburn