Psyop Defense

Introduction

“If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.” — Opening quotation

KMOHello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I am your host, KMO, and this is episode number 583, “Psyop Defense,” with guest Zac Rhodenizer, prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Monday, October 10, 2022.

In this episode, I’m going to be speaking with therapist Zac Rhodenizer. He is in the midst of writing a book about defending oneself against the dark arts of psychological manipulation. The book has not yet been published. He is still taking feedback on it. So listen to this, and if you have any feedback, you can get in touch with Zac. I’ll have a link to his Twitter in the show notes for this episode, which you can find at c-realm.com.

Now, I used to thank sponsors in the show. I don’t anymore, because most of the support for the C-Realm comes from the subscribers to the C-Realm Vault podcast. But since the last time I put out one of these free episodes, I have received two rather generous donations: one from Ryan F. and the other from Mike G. So thanks to Ryan and Mike.

All right, on with the show. Here’s my conversation with Zac Rhodenizer.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.”

Writing a book about psychological defense

KMOYou are listening to the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and I’m joined by Zac Rhodenizer. Zac, good to see you.

Zac RhodenizerThanks for having me.

KMOYou are in the process of writing a book, and you have a Substack where it seems like the book is taking shape one chapter at a time.

ZacYeah. I’ve written the manuscript, but as anyone else who’s ever written anything knows, once you have a manuscript, that doesn’t necessarily mean you have a book. Looking at my options for publishing, I thought I would use the Substack route and release a little bit at a time, and see if I could almost crowdsource the editing process and get feedback from the masses. Hopefully, then I can fine-tune it into a product that I feel is ready to be published.

KMOThe title is Psychological Defense, and typically it’s publishers who decide on the final titles. But do you have a longer title in mind?

ZacI’ve been thinking of maybe Psychological Self-Defense, because in the subtitle it’ll be something along the lines of combating psyops, propaganda, and idea pathogens. But we’ll see what comes of it when it’s done.

KMOVery good. I saw a tweet—I think it was a link to a longer piece—where you listed, I think, 15 books that were influential to you in the creation of this project?

ZacYeah, and it wasn’t the exhaustive list. I’m pretty new to social media, specifically Twitter, and how to best get your message out. I thought, “I don’t think I’m going to send out 40 resources that I’ve been reading.” So I thought I’d stick with the 10 to 15 most powerful sources.

It all boils down, for me, to this: I consider myself a fairly intelligent person, but I constantly get things wrong. My media diet was not informing me enough. I was getting so many things wrong that I just needed to do better research, I thought. As I started doing that, I thought, “Well, I need to help other people do this too,” because I’m actually a psychologist, and I help people—or I try to, anyway.

So many of the people I’m working with these days are coming in with this existential depression, this pessimism where they think the world is so evil there’s no point even living in it. That’s the other part of this book: I want to try to help them see that, yes, things are difficult and there’s a lot of trouble, but there are narratives out there that can help you battle against the narratives that are trying to get us to just quit.

I do believe there are narratives by very powerful people who want us to just give up, and that that’s in their interest. As I started to look into what helps us find the truth, I also was looking into what helps us find—not necessarily the truth—but the narratives, the stories that can help us thrive instead of just being consumers in this quasi-totalitarian setting that we’re living in.

KMOExcellent. I have to tell you, not only am I very familiar with the extreme pessimism you’re talking about, it’s something I participated in for a long time. You talk about how you think you’re smart, but you get things wrong all the time. Well, smart people are really good at defending their worldviews against arguments and evidence to the contrary.

Being smart is absolutely no defense against being manipulated or taken in by either a psyop—a deliberate propagation of a harmful narrative—or one that’s just sort of emergent. Ideas seem to take on a life of their own. They have an agenda of their own, which is the same. This is Richard Dawkins’ territory: the agenda of the idea or the meme is to propagate itself into the future. To do that, they prey upon our evolutionarily evolved psychological buttons, predilections, and vulnerabilities.

People have been participating in creating mental viruses and memetic pathogens for centuries. But in the 20th century, particularly in the intelligence communities, humans got really deliberate and systematic about it. The first part of your book references psyops, and that’s what I’m talking about here. Let me turn it over to you and have you talk about psyops.

From military operations to cultural narratives

ZacThis is a term that, as I was going about my daily curious life, I didn’t quite understand. A lot of the beginning of my book is me coming in and finding out what a psyop even is. I don’t want to give the impression that I am the expert on psychological operations. I’m just someone who is very curious about it, and I wrote down some of my ideas as far as what I came up with so far.

Psychological operations, or psyops, are targeted attempts to control and influence what your opponent is thinking and what your opponent will do. Sun Tzu said the most effective warrior is the one who can win without unsheathing his sword or drawing any bloodshed. Ever since war was a thing, that’s been part of the plan: to come up with psychological strategies that will get your opponent to give up, turn on their allies, be misdirected, or something to that extent.

As I learned what psyops were, it started to ring true as to what’s happening in media today, online, and with so much misinformation. I don’t stay in the military sphere too long in this book—only enough to describe what it is and a few examples of how it’s happened, to draw the parallel and demonstrate, “Hey, look, everyone: this is what’s happening to us now.” Corporations do this. Political parties do this. Social movements do this. It’s not just a military phenomenon anymore.

KMOLet me have you flesh that out with a few examples that started off in the intelligence arena and then moved to the corporate arena.

ZacSure. There were examples in World War II: the Nazi Germans tried to send letters, pamphlets, and things to get the French to turn on their British allies. As we know from history, the French and the British did not have a very long time being allies, so they tried to play on those natural divisions.

They would send out propaganda and targeted psyops to try to get the French to realize that the English were being sent to more favorable fronts and getting more provisions, to try to sow discord between the French and the British. Ultimately, that campaign was not that successful.

In return, the British would also send letters in German to make it look like it was an actual German correspondence that was found. It would be of, say, Austrian generals, making it look like they’re living the high life while the German commoner is starving to death—to try to make them believe that their superiors were hoarding all the resources while they starved.

Those are just little examples, but “divert hatred” is often a term used in psyop literature. If you can divert the hatred away from yourself and get your opponent to live in a universe where they think their ally hates them, or maybe their opponent isn’t so bad, that would be a case of a psyop.

Later on in history—and I’m forgetting his name, and I don’t want to waste the time looking for him—there was the highest-ranking Russian dissident, the Soviet dissident, I believe in the ’70s or maybe the ’80s. He said that anytime you see peace efforts and peace movements—and I consider myself a pacifist in a lot of senses, so I’m not against a peace movement—but when you see a peace movement, you’d best be sure that the opponent is going to do everything they can to raise the prominence of this peace movement.

For example, in the Vietnam War, this Russian dissident said that the Soviet psyop was to foment the antiwar sentiments in Vietnam. From there, you start to see shifts from just military operations to more cultural ones. Maybe the Soviets were behind it, or maybe they just fomented it, but ultimately the popular culture starts to generate narratives that benefit a certain side in a conflict.

My argument is that in our day-to-day—and obviously there are some clear caveats to this—for the most part, we live in a very peaceful society in the Western world. But the war keeps going on. The war is more a war of ideas, a war of culture. To this day, you can see messages and narratives woven by media to benefit one side of this cultural divide, similar to World War II or Vietnam.

We don’t have to get into the cultural examples just yet, but you go down a rabbit hole, essentially, because anytime there has been war, there have been psychological operations involved. That’s one of the things I learned. It’s not just a technique. It is the war. The whole point is to try to get your opponent to give up.

To bring it back to mental health, that’s what motivated me to start reading this, because I feel like there are people trying to get me to give up.

Doomerism and the fear of collapse

KMOWhen do you feel that most? When do you feel that most acutely?

ZacYou can get this from the right and the left politically, but there’s a lot of messaging that says we live in a time that’s completely—not just evil, but almost like there’s no point. There’s no point to moving forward. We are in a crisis of meaning.

You have very prominent and powerful movements that basically say we’re screwed, we are evil, the Western world is just oppressors. There’s nothing worth moving forward and being creative or having kids for. Climate change is so bad that we’re all going to be underwater in 10 years anyway—stuff like that. In my world, that is obviously not true. Not that I’m denying climate science. I’m just saying we’re going to be fine in the short term, at least. But the message is: we’re doomed. And I just refuse to believe it.

KMOWell, good. I encourage you to reject that notion. In the comments here, Oswald Spengler says, “Is doomerism a psyop?”

I mentioned that I have participated in propagating some of these messages of doom. For many years in this podcast, I was very devoted to interviewing people on the topic of Peak Oil. This is a narrative about how industrial society is completely dependent on oil, and that as soon as demand exceeds supply, there’s going to be this cascading failure of critical systems which will just take us back to the Dark Ages overnight.

The world is more complicated than that. Yeah, we are dependent on oil. This is a fossil-fuel-driven industrial civilization. But it’s not going to fail like a Jenga tower falling. It’s a much more complex, robust system, with a lot of different moving parts and a lot of ways to adapt. Collapse can happen over the course of a couple of centuries, and people who are not really interested in the topic won’t even know about it. They’ll just be living their lives. That will be the context in which their lives play out.

A few years ago, I came to see that the people who were seeking out reinforcement for their commitment that industrial civilization will soon collapse—and there is no point trying to be successful within it, or to achieve the traditional life goals agreed upon by the larger society, because this is all going away—I came to see the psychological dimensions of that. I basically made a public pronouncement that I’m done with it. Not only do I not engage with it, but I’m certainly not going to provide a platform for it or participate in articulating that message.

And the audience withered on the vine. Let me tell you, the audience that is still with me is the hardcore KMO supporters, because the people who were just here for the doom have gone elsewhere. There’s always somebody preaching it, and there’s always an audience that’s hungry for it. That’s maybe a bit too much on me. Let’s get back to what you’re talking about.

ZacI think part of being mentally healthy is fearing the right thing. There are some doomer outcomes, scenarios, that are more likely. I’m nervous about what’s going on with Russia and Ukraine right now, and Putin’s posturing, even mentioning that he’d be willing to go nuclear if X, Y, and Z happened. I’m hoping he’s bluffing, but I don’t know. That scares me, and I want to make sure I’m prepared for that. I think it’s healthy to be prepared for some worst-case scenarios.

We saw with COVID how some of us weren’t as prepared to hunker down for a while as others were. There’s a healthy fear there. But if it keeps us from living our lives—I think there’s a healthy fear of a pathogen like COVID, but there are a lot of people who, to this day, are so afraid of it that they’re not living anymore. I think COVID is sticking around, so I don’t know what they’re going to do if they’re still waiting for COVID to be entirely eradicated before they step outside.

It’s a balancing, a calibrating of what we are afraid of: how much of it is healthy concern, and how much is keeping us from living.

KMOWe may have a slight difference of opinion here. To me, healthy fear is a very small set, confined to the things that will keep you alive for the next 30 seconds, where if you were to take on a more blasé attitude, you would be killed. It’s that fight-or-flight: “Oh my God, I’m about to die,” and suddenly your system is flooded with adrenaline, and you do something that keeps you alive. That’s a healthy fear.

Beyond that, fear is crippling. It is never a good thing to cultivate, particularly on a long-term basis, particularly as an element of one’s worldview.

ZacI would agree with you on that. Going back to the Putin example, it’s not going to do us that much good to stoke a bunch of fear. If anything, that’s what he would want. He wants us to be so afraid that we just give him what he wants. I’m just thinking that I’m afraid enough that I’m going to stock up my shelves a little bit, my food storage, and have a plan in case things get really bad. From there, I’ll go, “Okay, I’m now prepared as much as I can be. Now I can’t worry about it as much.”

KMOYou’re not as prepared as you can be, but you’ve reached the level of diminishing returns. Once you’ve got your pantry stocked, your potassium iodide tablets on hand, the plastic and duct tape ready to seal up the windows, and you’ve talked to some neighbors or friends and have local, coordinated preparedness in place—if you push on past that, you’re definitely into the territory of diminishing returns.

The more energy you give to it, the more you’re taking away from the things in your life that you absolutely have to maintain if you are going to have a successful life going forward in a non-collapse or a non-nuclear-apocalypse scenario.

ZacAbsolutely. I think that’s a good way to put it: that law of diminishing returns. There’s only so much we can do. As you point out, hypothetically there are more things we could do, but there’s not as much point to that.

One of the things I’ve learned is that when you’re trying to calibrate your appropriate level of fear, you look at who benefits from your fear, and how much they benefit.

Who benefits—and whose account are we hearing?

KMOCui bono? Always the question to ask.

ZacAnyone telling me I should be afraid, I’ll listen to them. But quite often they’re trying to sell something themselves, or something along those lines. You have to bring up your guard as much as possible. I’m sure there’s an element of usefulness in whatever it is they’re saying. You want your defenses strong enough that the information can come in, but you can block the pathogen within that information. That’s the tricky part.

KMOThe best propaganda and the best deception are going to be composed of 95 percent true statements.

ZacRight. I think they call it [unclear: “great” or “gray”] propaganda. Or there’s the Steve Bannon approach, almost the opposite: “I’m going to throw so much noise at you that it’s going to be hard to figure out where the real message is.” I think Bannon’s quote was, “You just inundate them with shit.” I think that’s how they put it.

KMOHave you actually listened to much of Steve Bannon’s War Room radio?

ZacI haven’t, no.

KMOYou might be surprised at the quality of the content. It is considerably higher than the left-leaning blue tribe in the U.S. and Canada would have you believe.

ZacI appreciate that, and that’s the other thing I try to focus on in my book. A lot of the information I was consuming was secondhand. Growing up, I loved late-night talk shows. I would watch Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Saturday Night Live, and stuff like that. When I was in my twenties, I remember a study that said people who got their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were actually more informed on the news than people who watched the news.

KMOIn the aughts, I think that was probably the case, yes. Now it’s not.

ZacNot now, no. They would always reference Fox News and how terrible and biased they were, and that was my only exposure to Fox News. I don’t watch any television news anymore because I don’t have TV. I’m sure Fox News is full of mistakes, and there’s some credit to that. But my opinion of Fox News was entirely in relation to how it was filtered to me through Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart.

They only showed me the egregious examples of their bias. I can imagine there was a lot of stuff on Fox News that had value. To your point about Steve Bannon, I actually can’t say I’ve watched or listened to much of him. Being Canadian, I don’t know if it really mattered to me as much.

We see it in the media with Donald Trump all the time too. He says and does enough that you could legitimately criticize, but often the criticisms of Donald Trump never show his exact quote. They never show him saying the exact thing. It’s always someone else’s interpretation of what he said.

KMOOr it’s a carefully edited montage of his most provocative sayings.

ZacRight, which he’s got enough of. This is obviously not news to maybe you and a lot of your listeners, but that was one thing I had to remind myself: if I heard something, I needed to go to the source.

That kid, Nicholas Sandmann—remember that one a few years ago, where he was on a high school band trip in D.C., and there was a Native American man drumming in his face? This kid looked very smug, and it looked like a group of kids harassing this Native American man. But when you look at the direct source, the video, it was the man who came up to the kid and started drumming in his face aggressively. The kid was, I think, pretty scared.

KMOI think that kid—I don’t know his name—marshaled considerable and commendable self-restraint. That smug look on his face was him keeping himself impassive, not saying anything, not reacting, not provoking. I remember that clearly because there were people on Twitter literally calling for the blood of those kids. They wanted them physically, savagely assaulted for their temerity—for basically not being the Native American guy with the drum in that encounter.

Psychologist Paul Bloom wrote a book called Against Empathy. He talks about how, when it comes to inciting violence, a lot of people think it’s these hate-filled messages that get people all riled up. But often someone who can weaponize our own empathy is the most effective way to incite violence.

ZacRight. The antisemitic material that gets the most play and reach is not “All Jews are bad” or “They’re inferior.” It’s not that. It’s “They’re oppressors.” They use examples of the Rothschilds and the Sacklers, or whatever, and talk about this conspiracy of Jews taking over the world. That’s the antisemitic material that gets the most play. It’s when you turn someone into the bad guy.

Wrestling, kayfabe, and the public narrative

ZacA lot of the material I use for my book has to do with professional wrestling, because there’s such a parallel. You create this heel that’s just so awful. You’re telling the fans, “This is the person you’re supposed to boo.” You do it by having the heel attack someone who’s defenseless.

KMOI love it. That’s a wrestling term, by the way: the heel.

ZacYeah. Eric Weinstein has a whole theory about how the world is now kayfabe, and there’s a section in my book about that.

KMOGo ahead and define that.

ZacKayfabe is a carny term. Essentially, everyone in the business knows wrestling is fake, but that’s the swear word in the wrestling world: you don’t call it fake. Kayfabe is the universe in which everyone kind of believes. They know it’s fake, but in order to keep it going, they have to play into the fantasy. Even fans know it’s fake, but it’s fun because you can suspend your disbelief for a moment and get lost in the performance.

Eric Weinstein talks about how, ever since the 1970s, actual economic growth has been stagnating in the Western world. We love the idea of economic growth. It’s our religion, essentially. The elites had to create a universe where it looked like there was growth, even though there’s not. His argument is that the elites, in order to demonstrate growth—in order for them to have growth—are not growing the pie. They have to take some of the portion of the rest of the pie that other people have. That’s why you’re seeing income inequality and so forth.

But they are in charge of the messaging, so they get to decide what’s an acceptable message, and what Eric Weinstein calls the troglodytes or the deplorables. If you have a deplorable belief, you are relegated to the corners of society. You can see it so plainly: which opinions are presented in media as if you would have to be an idiot to believe them, even though they’re true.

The psyop ends up being—Weinstein calls them the rent-seeking elite—the rent-seeking elite get, I think he calls them the dupes, the intelligent dupes, the media types who spread these ideas, and they control the narrative. Anyone who deviates on COVID, on the environment, or whatever it is, gets packaged and displayed as a buffoon.

That’s where you start to see what he calls the kayfabe—kayfabrication, pardon me—where it looks more like pro wrestling. When you’re watching Stone Cold Steve Austin versus The Rock, in kayfabe world you’re going, “Oh yeah, Stone Cold,” and “Boo, The Rock,” or vice versa. But both of them are laughing to the bank, because as long as they can get you booing for someone and cheering for someone else, they’re rich.

The media, the elites, want us booing for someone and cheering for someone else, as long as we’re not paying attention to what’s actually the case: that they are hoarding the resources and controlling the narrative to make anyone else who disagrees with them a troglodyte.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast with your host, KMO.”

Defense against the dark arts

KMOYou’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast, and I’m speaking with Zac Rhodenizer, who is a therapist, did you say?

ZacPsychotherapist in Alberta, Canada.

KMOWe’re talking about psychological defense. In the comments, we’ve got several comments from Oswald Spengler. One compares psychological defense to the notion of defense against the dark arts from J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series. That is an amusing comparison to me. Is it apt at all?

ZacI think so. I’m not as familiar with Harry Potter. That’s on the list of books to read my kids. I’m familiar, but I’m waiting for my kids to be a little older so I can read it to them. I haven’t read it myself, so I’ve kind of waited.

KMOThey are marvelous books.

ZacI’ve heard.

KMOI have read them and enjoyed them.

ZacI kind of understand the premise, so as a metaphor, I think that’s exactly the case. What is a psyop, and what is just a prosocial narrative that’s beneficial, is really up to whoever’s in power. That’s the other thing I found in my research. You see terms like propaganda and news, or cult and religion. The only difference is who’s in power and who gets to define the term.

I think it’s important to learn the dark arts of psyops, not so you can use them against people, but so you can recognize them and have defenses against them.

KMOEarly on in the conversation, I mentioned that not all harmful mental constructs are deliberately created by somebody. A lot arise spontaneously. They’re wild-grown. Sort of like weaponizing a virus that already exists, a smart propagandist is going to find the wild-grown, naturally propagating mind viruses and adapt them, rather than try to create one from scratch.

But either way—whether it is an opportunistic construct that has arisen spontaneously, or something that has money behind it—one thing I’ve realized one should look out for is if you start using pejoratives to describe people who hold a different belief system. If that’s a regular part of your vocabulary, you have definitely turned over your mental workings to the propagation of a harmful mind virus, be it constructed or naturally evolved.

When identities become insults

ZacI agree. There’s a section I wrote about profanity, and how what we see as profane has a lot to do with what we consider acceptable or not in our society. A lot of it is used to keep certain people down, keep certain narratives down.

I touch on some pretty controversial topics. If you think of the most offensive word in the English language right now, it’s the N-word. It’s a word even the most profane comedian is afraid to say. I won’t get into the history, but if you look at the linguistic history of that word, it became a pejorative that people who had ill intentions started to use, and that’s why it is profane now.

In my world, in psychology—and I don’t even know how acceptable this word is now—we use the word “retard” for a purpose. But because it was used to denigrate people, it has now become an unacceptable word.

So much of the psyops—and I agree with your point that it’s not necessarily originally plotted. Often it’s a natural occurrence. It’s a wave people can now use for their purposes. A lot of the psyops in our culture wars is turning a term—when people start to define themselves as something, the political or cultural enemy wants to turn that something into a swear word.

The term “woke” is a good example. Woke, 10 years ago, meant people who, whether you agree with it or not, were awakened to social injustices, or saw it where other people didn’t. Now if you call someone woke, it’s because they’re being silly, and it’s a pejorative.

KMOThat’s a polite way to put it.

ZacRight. A lot of folks, maybe two or three years ago, wanted to figure out what the opposite of woke was, so you see the term “based.” I think it was maybe James Lindsay and some of those guys who came up with the term. That makes sense: based in reality. But now it’s the same thing. The enemies of the based used propaganda, essentially, in the culture wars to make “based” correlative with being bigoted or something like that.

It’s to the point where nobody, or very few people, want to claim any type of title for themselves anymore, which I think is a really bad thing. Whatever you claim yourself to be, someone is going to find a reason to denigrate it or use it as a pejorative. That’s lowball. That’s dirty boxing.

KMOI’ll tell you another pejorative word which really shouldn’t be. It doesn’t rise to the level of the N-word—a word I actually used to have the temerity to say on this podcast, and now it’s too hot, so I will say the dreaded replacement phrase, “the N-word.”

But a word I hear and see thrown around as an insult, and nobody wants to be associated with it, is “normie.” A normie is somebody who doesn’t share your very specialized belief system. They’re just using the off-the-shelf, normal belief system of people going about their lives. And that’s an insult now. Who wants to be a normie? I don’t want to be a normie.

ZacIt’s like “sheeple.” Another theme that came up for me as I did my research is this natural tension we all have between our desire to be part of a community—we want to be part of the collective; we’re social animals—but we also want to be unique and free. There’s always this internal battle: “I want to fit in, but I also need to be myself.”

These days, especially with young people, they want to be subversive in some way. It’s rock and roll, it’s whatever. But we don’t have a monoculture anymore against which young people can rebel. There are pros and cons to that. When there’s not a monoculture to rebel against, they find every way possible to portray themselves as subversive.

Being normal, whatever that’s supposed to mean, is now just: “I can’t associate myself with the norm or the status quo. That would be awful.” You see a lot of young people who are middle-class, white, cisgendered, and straight, but they don’t like that. It’s so based on identity these days. They have to identify with something else.

Quite often, what you see is young people who on paper are entirely privileged, because identity is so important these days, but they’ll find their mental health to be the marker, the evidence, that they’re not a normie. “That is the last thing I’d ever want to be.”

It’s interesting to see how, without a monoculture to rebel against, there are now a thousand different ways to skin the cat, so to speak. Young people especially want so badly to be unique and find their own little corner of subversives that it’s hard for them to figure out how to balance the collective versus the individual needs. And that gets taken advantage of.

KMONot just for young people.

ZacNot just young people, yeah.

KMOHopefully, the older one is, the more experience one has to draw upon to recognize—for self-examination and course correction. But it’s not automatic. It doesn’t just necessarily come with age.

Belonging without surrendering judgment

ZacNo, it doesn’t. But hopefully, as you said, there’s some wisdom in time. I’m of the frame of mind now that if somebody wants to identify—or if it’s really important to them that the Earth is flat—I should always be free to disagree, but I’m starting to care less about other people’s weird ideas.

If you can find community in your flat-Earth group, all the power to you, because I’m much more concerned about mental health and encouraging people to find community. I think that’s way more important. As long as your flat-Earth group doesn’t rob you blind or get you to do something completely immoral, I’m fine with you just being you.

KMOBetter flat Earth than Scientology.

ZacIt’s funny—that was the other example I was going to come up with, on cults and religions and in-groups. The more I read about it, the harder it was to really define what a cult was. I think Robert Anton Wilson said that a religion is a cult that is big and powerful enough that you have to leave it alone.

KMOWords to that effect.

ZacExactly. It’s basically the same thing. It’s a religion without power—without cultural power, anyway. It’s difficult because there is a part of us that wants to conform, at least to a small group. Is there a certain level of conformity that’s healthy, even if at its core you go, “I don’t know if I really buy into all of this”?

I’m part of a religious community where I’m not totally bought into everything, but they’re open-minded enough to allow me to be part of it, knowing I don’t buy into everything. That tells me I’ve got a good group going. They don’t need me to buy in 100 percent. I get to benefit from the strength of the pack, but I’m also allowed to think for myself and express myself, even when I go against the pack, to a certain extent.

I’m sure there are some things I could say where they’d say, “You know what? I don’t think you’re really a part of us anymore.” I’m sure there’s something I could do that would get me kicked out. But I think that’s a big part of the defense against bad ideas, pathogens, propaganda, and psyops: finding your comfortable balance between the collective and your individuality.

KMOYes. And a complete rejection of the collective, to the point where the only way you can even be comfortable with your place in relation to it is to say it’s doomed and about to crash and burn—you’ve got to be able to exist in society. You can be dysfunctional if you want to, for a time at least. But your baseline in a healthy life simply can’t be that society is irredeemably evil and “I’ll have no part of it,” because you do have a part of it.

Optimism, meaning, and a temporary life

ZacThat is the core question. I’ve spent years studying and the last year writing about it, and I don’t know if I’ve come to a clear conclusion yet. I have for myself, but it’s hard to help other people caught in that cycle of “There’s no point. It’s all pointless.” Near the end of my book, that’s where I’m still struggling.

I want so badly to just inject—it’s funny: my compassion makes me want to be a propagandist, but in a good way. Like, “You can trust me. You can trust my—”

KMOBut in a good way. It’s okay when I do it.

ZacRight! I want people to believe X, Y, and Z because I believe there are certain beliefs you’re better off believing. Maybe they’re true, maybe they’re not.

KMOFrom a scientific perspective, that’s not even controversial. People who take an optimistic worldview have better life outcomes. That’s just demonstrated. Pessimism is self-reinforcing, and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy on a personal level.

ZacBut then you start getting into red-pill, blue-pill stuff, because pessimists also tend to be more accurate as far as what’s—

KMOWe’re not talking about verisimilitude between your belief system and the real world. We’re talking about living a good life, operating in society, and being a productive member of it.

We’re all going to die, and this civilization will at some point come to an end. Our species will, in time, go extinct. These things will happen on some timeline. If you just devote yourself to that point of view—“This is all temporary; therefore it is useless, it is meaningless, there’s no point”—those last three don’t follow from “This is temporary.”

Life is temporary. Life is ephemeral. Life is transitory. But it doesn’t mean there’s no point. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make the most of it.

ZacA lot of the existentialist thinkers thought it’s meaningful because it’s temporary. A life that went on forever would be the meaningless life. Maybe I’ve got a thousand years of a good life in me, but I think eventually I’d get bored or something. The fact that the party ends actually makes it way more meaningful.

This goes back to psychological self-defense as well. Boundaries and limits help you define something and see what it actually is. You can’t be everything, and things don’t last forever. If that’s the way your mind is thinking, it’s very easy to lose the sense in anything. Boundaries and limits seem restrictive, but they actually help us see what is and what isn’t.

Can any “ism” become a psyop?

KMOOswald Spengler in the comments asks, “Could it be argued that any ism is a psyop?”

ZacWhile I was writing, I was really sensitive to whether it was coming off that, when I called something a psyop, that meant it was inherently evil, because that’s kind of what it sounds like. But I think there are a lot of isms that can point you in a certain direction, and that direction might be good.

What do they say? The difference between medicine and poison is dosage. I get a lot of benefit from all sorts of isms. But if I’m going to completely dedicate myself and lose myself in an ism, in too much collective ideology, I run the risk of getting manipulated and controlled.

I’m trying to get to a place where I don’t denigrate people just because they believe they are liberal or conservative, or whatever ism is theirs. I want to be able to see it and go, “I see the value in being a conservative. I also see the slippery slope of what it could do in the extremes.”

I think a healthy person could jump fully into an ism but still have his wits about him to see how much would be too far, how much would be too much. No ism covers everything. It’s like, “Okay, I like this ism, but what are its blind spots? How can I make sure I am aware of those as well?”

KMOHere are a few isms I like: humanism, universalism. You could say liberalism. There are aspects of a liberal, particularly classical liberal, ideology that I find very—

ZacYeah, John Stuart Mill.

KMOUtilitarianism, speaking of John Stuart Mill. But libertarianism—I identify with that. Individual liberty, rights, and responsibilities. Is that a psyop? I don’t think so.

ZacIt could be. To your point, KMO, isms and waves of ideas occur, and you will get opportunists who can use it as a psyop. I don’t think the ism is itself a psyop, but it’s a vehicle for psyops.

I’d have to think for a second, but I’m certain there are people who have used libertarianism as a vehicle to mislead and lead people to negative outcomes. No ism’s perfect, and there’s a dark side. Just like we all have our own dark side, every ism has its own dark version. You can make the argument that there’s some level of collective or government intervention that’s required, and maybe strict libertarianism would be against it.

KMOYou don’t have to squint very hard to find the dark side of libertarianism.

ZacOnce again, it all boils down to balance, nuance, and calibration. If I find myself inclined to libertarianism, but I’m still aware of what it would look like if it goes too far, or a certain scenario where it’s not going to be the best ideology to guide me or everyone else—I think it was Nassim Taleb who said, “Globally, I’m libertarian, and nationally, I’m conservative, and at the state level, I’m liberal, and at the city level, I’m progressive, and at the family level, I’m a socialist.”

There might be certain scenarios where you see how this ideology fits here, great, but maybe not so much in this other scenario.

KMORight on. Well, Zac, we’ve been on for nearly an hour, so we’re going to have to draw it to a close. But I’ve enjoyed this conversation, and I would like to keep up with your book as it takes shape. If not before, certainly when it’s published in some form, come back and we’ll talk about it again.

ZacThank you so much for having me on.

Program identification: “On the C-Realm Podcast, a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

Closing: a change of scene

KMOThat was Zac Rhodenizer. As I said at the beginning, I’ll have a link to his Twitter account in the show notes for this episode, which you can find at c-realm.com. If you’re going to type c-realm.com, you might as well put a “kmo@” in front of it and send me a piece of email. Or you can leave comments for Zac on the entry for this episode on c-realm.com, or on Patreon. You can find me on Patreon: patreon.com/KMO.

I am putting this episode out, one, because I haven’t put out one of these free episodes in a long time, but two, there’s a big change coming in my life. Right now, I’m living in Berryville, Arkansas, in the house my grandfather built, and I’m about to take a Greyhound bus from Fayetteville, Arkansas, to Reno, Nevada.

I’m going to be doing seasonal work at the Northstar ski resort. It’s on the California side of Lake Tahoe. I’m going to be snowmaking. If you’re a skier, you might have a vague notion of what that is. Snowmaking is done at night when the skiers are not on the slopes. It’s kind of an unsung profession, but it pays okay. I’m told it is a fun job, although physically demanding. I’m going to do that for a season.

If you’re interested in following my progress, I would suggest checking in with me on either YouTube or Instagram. I’ll have links to both in the show notes for this episode on c-realm.com. Or if you just type “KMO YouTube” into Google, I’m sure you’ll find me.

If it seems like I don’t put out free podcasts very often, that’s a mistaken impression. I put out a lot of podcasts, but most are to be found over at padverb.com—that’s P-A-D-V-E-R-B. There are 20 episodes of the Padverb Podcast waiting for you, archived there. Do me a favor—and, if I may be so bold, do yourself a favor—and go to padverb.com, find the Padverb Podcast, and check it out. There are some good conversations there, and I know most of you are not listening to them. Seriously, if you like the C-Realm Podcast, you are quite likely to enjoy the Padverb Podcast as well.

All right, that’s all. I leave for Reno in just a couple of days. If you live in or near Reno, Nevada, I’m going to have some time to kill this weekend. Get in touch with me: kmo@c-realm.com. That’s the letter C, then a dash, then R-E-A-L-M: c-realm.com.

All right, I’m out. Wish me safe passage, and stay well.