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Bigger Dreamer's avatar

I worked in the alternative health industry for a long time, and I definitely watched some people lose it during the pandemic. Sayer Ji comes to mind but not on your list - did some crazy live videos with his wife where he was just ranting seriously messed up messaging about how covid had come to help transform our DNA and that some people would die and that was part of our evolution as a species. Here is some hippy guy with a beard espousing some wierd cleansing of the population Nazi messaging - and people ate it up. One of the big tricks in this field is when you get kicked off social media or banned from Amazon Videos, you use it as proof that your message is starting to hit home and the machine is trying to crush you.

I read an article in Wired a long time ago that really made sense to me about the human brains inability to handle unfairness. This is the survival mechanism that lets people pick up and keep going after a tsunami kills everyone they love - your brain simply says 'do not process - too unfair'. It is this mechanism that has driven people to create gods and governments - the big trustworthy dieties on whom we can blame the deeply unfair, and also who are supposed to handle it for us.

I think that this ultimately though is to blame on the same thing you blame most things on - capitalism. Ultimately, there are tons of amazing alternative therapies. Let's pretend we had a culture that paid us all a reasonable living wage. Healers could then make their potions, and share them with those who needed them, and all would be beautiful. When your ability to live and feed your family is based on your ability to sell that potion, at some point almost everyone becomes a snake oil salesman - selling their solutions beyond the reach of where they are really needed, and making up applications that aren't the core of what the product really solves just to sell to broader markets.

Zach Bush is a clear one here - you can buy humic acid and volvic minterals on Amazon for $8 a gallon or something. Or from Zach Bush for $50 for a couple ounces in a bottle. In my opinion healthcare should, at its core, be about helping people. No matter how good your solution is - and pharmaceuticals play the same game - the second you are price gouging people for it you are just a capitalist pawn in my opinion, and no longer have any relationship to a healer of any type.

It is a hard one as I too spend a lot of my life in the deep realms of woo - I don't believe that there are actual hard scientific answers to some questions, and I certainly think dismissing it all and calling that science is also - not science. A good scientist, a real scientist would know that, until they can prove that my soul is not greater than my body, and that my energy won't continue in the web of consciousness after my death, that all we have is hypothesis - because they can't prove that consciousness is simply a chemical act either. The great scientists accept that much of live is a mystery - you may seek proofs, you may try to strengthen hypothesis, but believing that you know the answer when you have been unable to actually prove it is a distinctly unscientific perspective.

I actually think that the answers for us lie in pursuing the distinctly unbelievable and impossible with a healthy dose of scientific skepticism.

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Andy Cahill's avatar

I appreciate your willingness to take this book on, Daniel, given that some of their criticism hits close to home. I haven't read it yet, but I listen to their podcast regularly, and it sounds like the book mirrors the podcast's strengths and blindspots. Much of my work and worldview overlaps with esoteric traditions and practices. I find that the podcast, at it's best, serves as an 'inoculation' against the seductive but incoherent (and often covertly predatory) messages and practices in the field. At it's worst, the podcast comes across as reductive, patronizing, and self-serving. I'm all for calling out predatory 'influencers' and 'thought-leaders' (which they do quite effectively) but if you're someone who's been victimized by the field (e.g. seduced into a cult, given up life savings as an offering to G-d, purchased snake oil at high cost, gaslighting after abuse, etc) listening to conspirituality might only serve to shame you more without honoring the parts of you longing to escape the dominant cultural paradigm that also causes tremendous harm

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