Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to but why Real Talk on Messy Minds and Messier Systems, the podcast where two psychologists overanalyze everything so you don't have to. We're here to unpack the weird, the worrying, and the wildly unjust with just enough existential dread to keep it interesting. I'm Dr. Kristen.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: And I'm Dr. Laura. Let's dive into the mess.
[00:00:35] Speaker A: Let's do it.
So today we are on our last episode of our politics series.
Laura and I were just talking about how tired we are.
[00:00:46] Speaker B: Oh, my goodness.
[00:00:48] Speaker A: Yeah, we're so apologize if we struggle. I feel like this is a running theme for the last.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: I was just thinking that, like, it's going to be another, like, hysteric episode where we're like, oh, my God.
Yeah, hopefully we don't talk as much about death, but we'll see what happens.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: You never know. The last final episode of the series ended on a very existential note.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Yeah, we'll see. Maybe that's just like always. Like the third episode of the series, it just becomes quite existential because, you know, because.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: Why not?
[00:01:19] Speaker B: Why not, why not?
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Why not? It is the inevitable end of everything, so we may as well end everything.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Exactly.
Exactly.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Okay, so I know we had such a cool experience last time talking to Keegan.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: I just thought that was so interesting. And after the episode, guys, we talked about him coming on quite a lot because we realized afterwards we didn't even talk about Lord of the Rings or all these other fun things that we all have in common. So he's going to come on and chat about a bunch of other stuff, like more political psych stuff. Stuff. We're gonna do some Lord of the Rings stuff. We're gonna do some, like, formal episodes and then maybe some of the unnamed chats. Can't be a coffee chat, obviously, because Laura can't stand coffee. We're still coming, like, figuring out the name. It's gonna come on and do some more casual chats.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, we'll get there. Yeah.
I'm trying to think of, like, a good name. We're gonna have to. Yeah, we're gonna have to think into that.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: Coffee or not? Coffee or not Chance. No, it doesn't really have a ring to it, does it?
[00:02:26] Speaker A: No.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Tea Chat.
Tea.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: No, no, I hate tea. Well, sometimes I just like green tea.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Herbal tea.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: I have to put honey in my green tea.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: Maybe it's warm drinks. Oh, no. Hot drinks. Chat.
[00:02:44] Speaker A: That doesn't really have a ring to it, but let us know what you guys think.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:55] Speaker A: If anyone out there is good at this kind of stuff. Let us know if you have any idea.
[00:03:00] Speaker B: Let us know.
Oh, but talking about having Keegan on, I.
I really enjoyed when I would like, share my very narrow perspective and him just being like, but wait, look at this other side, you know, And I'd be like, oh, but what if it's because they're like struggling or, you know, whatever, and he's. I can't remember exactly what you would say, but it just gives like the complete, like, flip side of it. Like, actually, I don't know, they don't care or they're doing whatever.
Like, I love being told the other side that I just sometimes don't see or don't want to see. You know what I mean?
[00:03:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, like, well, definitely one of the things we probably learned throughout all of our, especially with guests, but like, also you and I's pod, like just us two, is that you love to see the best in people. I like to see the best of people, but I don't.
But you always approach things with, I think, like the best in mind. It is very hobbit minded of you to do.
Yeah.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: But I also think it's kind of like naive, do you know what I mean?
And I don't know, sometimes I'm like, do I do that as almost like defense mechanism, in a sense, do you know what I mean?
It feels maybe more comfortable to see the best, do you know what I mean? In people?
So I don't know, maybe there's a few things, different things going on, but yeah, I think it's good. But I guess, like we always say, like, you want the nuance, don't you? Like, you want your biases to be challenged and you want to see the other side.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Yeah. And I'm sure I've got defense mechanisms of why I see the other side so much easier as well. Like, that's just the way my brain works. So I like being challenged as well. It's just the unfortunate thing is usually my worst fears are proven to be translated over the last decade when people are like, you're being alarmist, you're being dramatic. Literally everything I've said will probably happen if we continue down this road has happened. I can't think of a single thing that hasn't, which is very annoying. It's not good for my anxiety.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: No, no.
[00:05:22] Speaker A: We're already getting existential. This is too early in the episode. Oh, no, stop, stop.
So this is our final episode of the politics series, guys. And I hope you've enjoyed It, I mean I've clearly enjoyed it because I love politics. Very political person. It was fun to talk about it with Laura on here. Like a. Like a. More of like an organized like deliberate conversation about it because we'd more talk about it casually a lot of the time.
So is there anything that has like popped out to you, Laura, that has been like interesting or weird or.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: I think. Oh, I think just from like a, I guess a personal perspective. I think it's, you know, been useful just to see, you know, those different layers that can we spoke about. Like where different people sort of sit in terms of I suppose their like political engagedness or like the stuckness that we spoke about.
And I think for me kind of just reflecting on my like shifts or progression kind of throughout that.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: I think.
[00:06:39] Speaker B: That for me has been useful. But I think today is going to be really nice to sort of top it all off in a way and to think about more in terms of like, I guess action in a sense. Like what can people do? What can we do to change or to be less stuck or to be more engaged and like, yeah, what does that look like? So I'm excited to sort of dig into some of that stuff.
[00:07:05] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good point because like a lot of the episodes have been, you know, what's happening and why is it happening. But as is the whole point of what we're trying to say without a, like what do we do? It's pointless. It's just kind of like a constant back and forth. So it is important to figure out what we're doing.
And so we've covered that kind of like psychological landscape we're living in. So that denial, avoidance, fear, disgusting, entrenched kind of vibe. But then like, what does it actually mean to push back in a way that actually works, you know, and not be just spinning your wheels for no reason.
So it's not just like, oh, we can manifest a better world through happiness, but like what is actually psychologically and socially realistic and sustainable. So that's what we're going to cover today.
I'm glad you liked our little model from the first episode.
[00:07:58] Speaker B: I loved, loved the model, love any model.
[00:08:01] Speaker A: I have brought you another model for today for our. And it's very related to the socio ecological. Yeah, very related to socioecological model that we loved so much.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: Do we do an episode about that?
[00:08:15] Speaker A: I think it might have been, yeah. Like one of our earlier episodes I think was the socio ecological model. Yes, I think it was like episode like one of the first six episodes or something.
[00:08:27] Speaker B: I think so too.
[00:08:29] Speaker A: Check it out, guys. Love the socio ecological model. I mean, that sounds very sciency. It explains how we function at individual so like within our psychology and things like that. Interpersonal, which is between people organizational and then like broader culturally. And it links how interrelated all these different things are. It's a super interesting way of looking at the world.
Yay, Bronfenbrenner. Just us being nerds on a Friday.
So just to recap for you guys now, if you haven't listened to the first two episodes, you really need to to understand kind of the concept of what we're talking about. I know we're like eight minutes into the episode and telling you this now, but you've gotten this far and haven't listened to the other two. Please do. It's totally worth it.
But just rather than catching you up thoroughly, I'm just gonna let you know. The key points to recap are authoritarian kind of invasiveness is more emotion is emotional. Right. It's not rational in any way.
Denial and ambivalence are defense strategies. So they're not keeping you like neutral in your spot in society. They're actually defense strategies that you are using actively, even if you're not aware of it.
Disgust and dehumanization aren't just things that you're feeling or things that you do. They are actual tools of policy.
So like protect the children thing and framing certain groups as like contaminating, like the attacks against trans people, autistic people, things like that.
One thing, another thing to keep in mind is what we talked about with Keegan last episode was the myth of the rational voter, as he says, is comforting bullshit.
And I absolutely love that framing of it.
And then lastly, something to keep in mind from the last couple episodes is that if you have control over the narrative, you have power. And the far right does and always has really a great job of understanding and weaponizing this and their investment in media, ecosystems, online pipelines, messaging, and it's all about constructing what feels thinkable, what feels real, and not just what is true. Whereas we on the left tend to try and focus a lot on what's true for obvious reasons.
So I guess the point of this episode is if people aren't necessarily moved by fact, and if denial and disgust are doing just really the majority of the heavy lifting for a lot of these people, then raising awareness of what's happening is not enough.
And so we're going to talk about today what actually moves people in the right direction and what Doesn't.
[00:11:18] Speaker B: I was thinking, you know, how did we phrase it last. Last time when we spoke about empathy? Like there was an empathy thing, like struggling to give empathy. What was the phrasing? Can you remember?
[00:11:33] Speaker A: Can you give me more context?
[00:11:34] Speaker B: So we were talking about how it can be hard to have empathy for people who have such, I guess, opposing opinions and beliefs and so on.
And we were kind of talking about, I guess, boundaries in a sense as to, you know, when can we give empathy and when actually we are like, no, we can't. We phrased in a certain way. It was empathy without excusal.
That was what it was.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that's going to be a through line to this is like, you can be an empathetic person, but you can't excuse harms and dehumanization and things like that. And that's a really tough balance because no matter what, that puts the labor, the emotional and the cognitive labor, sometimes physical labor on the person, on the, you know, quote unquote good side. And it just makes people so much more tired. So I think a through line of this is going to be empathy without excusal.
[00:12:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Cool. Love it.
[00:12:44] Speaker A: So first we want to run through the psychology of why people do or don't change. There are so many factors and we can't necessarily cover all of them in this episode, but it is important to have a relatively good understanding. Identity has a much larger impact on the human psychology, a human brain, than actual reality does. I mean, we covered this in our first episode ever. The sense of identity versus like your actual sense of self. They are different things.
[00:13:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Like our. It's our sort of lens on the world, if you like, our lens on.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: Ourself within the world. I would say.
[00:13:25] Speaker B: I always find that such like as almost like a.
I guess, kind of scary, like in a way when you think about it, because we could just. We. We will be seeing ourselves completely differently to how other people see us. And I find that really uncomfortable, you know, especially I think, for us if, you know, if we are like this, this. We spoke a lot about performative identity, didn't we? So we're like. We're putting on like a performance and trying to like curate how people view us, but.
But actually they're just gonna see it through their own lens anyway. Yeah.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: No matter what. No matter what you control.
Yeah. And that's why, I mean, if you go back to our episode, we could hear more about it. But that's why it's so important to rely more on your sense of self than your identity.
Because I feel like identity is much more of a social construct, whereas your sense of self is more like internal and reflective and reflexive.
And along those lines, I feel like political identity has become some kind of like self esteem crutch for a lot of people. Like they're using it to fulfill whether it's a sense of self esteem or rightness or something like that. Because it's doing a lot of emotional work for people that either they can't do for themselves or they're not willing to do for themselves. They don't have the capacity for it gives a sense of virtue without requiring any ethical behavior.
[00:14:58] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: It's allowing them to engage in unethical behavior without examining that.
And it still gives them a sense of belonging without intimacy, which I think is really interesting and important from like, especially how men are becoming more and more and more conservative and women are becoming more progressive. Patriarchy requires men to not like be intimate with other men in a friendship way or anything like that. Go for it.
[00:15:20] Speaker B: Yeah. It like, just makes me think about religion. Right. It's like, I don't know, the way people, I suppose, engage in political groups and religious groups, I guess, can almost be quite similar in a sense. Yet the political side of it is often seen as. Oh, I don't know, this is probably my own biases coming out here. But politically, I think we'd probably often see it as maybe more factual, if you know what I mean. Like more right and wrong perhaps, maybe as time's gone on. But actually, what is the difference? Do you know what I mean?
[00:16:06] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, it depends on like how you're looking at politics. We know we're not rational. It's the same, it serves the same. A similar organizing principle as religion did historically. Do you know what I mean? Like when we were talking about in our Monsters episodes back during like the time of like the witches and the werewolves, that was the first time that politics and religion started to become besties in their, in their ways of controlling people because they actually are quite, quite similar in their mechanisms.
And it gives people these binary or whatever roles that they need to fit into to get that sense of belonging without actually engaging in their humanity at all.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: It's just like nice clean boxes, like right and wrong, like, yeah, bringing that comfort, bringing certainty in an uncertain world. Like. Yeah.
[00:16:51] Speaker A: Which is just like, it's the most human thing to search for. But certainty isn't very human. It's like we are messy.
We're all messy bitches at Heart.
It almost, it almost reminds me of like every time I'm at like a football slash soccer game. Because I would say gender roles in the UK have always been a little more like, it's worse back in the US now than it was when I left the US like 12 years ago or whatever it is. But being at these like football games, it's the only time I ever see men like hugging each other, like when their team scores and like, like initiating physical contact. And it's so I'm just like constantly observing the crowd space because it's behaviors you would see normally with like a group of friendship like that. It's like women or something like that. But it's the, they're all like hugging each other, got their arms around their shoulders and smiling, even kissing each other on the cheeks and even that like we know that in the uk football is religion. So it's all the same kind of like, it's a sense of belonging and without having to be too like, okay, we separate it there, like you said, minimizes that complexity while also protecting them from their personal shame by providing like a prepackaged enemy. Which is also, like you said, what religion does, it's what football does. Oh yeah, yeah, I love that comparison.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: I like the phrase prepackaged enemy.
[00:18:15] Speaker A: It's like, here you go, I have somebody that you should hate.
I know why, because their existence is inconvenient for me. But I'm going to convince you that their existence is inconvenient or harmful to you. And it's just handed to people. They've not done any work to figure out why that's the case.
[00:18:35] Speaker B: That's so interesting, isn't it? I know people as well.
We love to complain, don't we? I guess as humans, it's like anything to almost redirect whatever anger, frustration or whatever we have onto again, someone else to blame.
Yeah, prepackaged enemy.
[00:18:56] Speaker A: And that's what feeds the algorithm. It's all rage bait. You know, it's frustrating when your identity is so authoritarian. It narrows your worldview and your scope for engaging with normal human kind of things. And it's so grievance based and it's so morality obsessed. And it's just like people are clinging it to preserve themselves, but it's not preserving them, their sense of self through any form of reality, it's through some mass sense of delusion.
And so I just feel like if somebody's political identity is doing the emotional labor, because that's what it is. It's like a lot of and some cognitive labor. But I would say it's mostly emotional labor. Upholding their kind of unworked on self together, challenging that to them feels like a personal existential threat. And so that's why they like double down. Even when their worldview is, you can prove that it's harming them, but they're still going to double down to defend it. And this is also a point that I wanted to make is like a lot of these people who double down like this are also safe in the world they live on, live in because of progressives and liberals who have, you know, fought for workers rights, have fought for certain, certain rights. And so they are safe enough to have these shitty ass beliefs because of the people they hate. Their prepackaged enemy.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: And I guess, and they already, I guess gain through the system. So there's almost more defensiveness there in a sense for things not changing.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: Definitely. And I feel like that, that kind of links to this predictable pattern as well. When things do change, they love shame and fr.
At least like the, the engine of authoritarianism or super far right movements, they like to trigger shame or replacement ideas. So like you're losing status in society because all of a sudden black people are allowed to work. Like you're being replaced, you're not being respected. And we're seeing this rhetoric in the UK as well.
And the second step to this is providing that emotional off ramp. So it's not your fault though. It's because of them, it's because of the immigrants, it's because of the trans people.
Then they convert the shame into rage because that feels better than a feeling of inadequacy or just like needing to do a bit better. Because recognizing you have privilege in whatever sphere means recognizing that other people have had to work maybe sometimes twice as harder to be where you are and sometimes that makes you feel inadequate and all these like normal human feelings, but being mad about it is easier to deal with.
Um, and then like pointing that rage at a specific target. Immigrants, autistic people, trans people, women. And so that is the pipeline of authoritarianism. It's, it's not misinformation or bad logic. It's literally a shame and rage addicted political identity.
And it requires continuous external punishment of other people to feel internally stable. Because if you stop that like continuous external cycle of I don't know what I'm doing with my hands right now, it's like a weird cycle dance guys.
If you, if you stop that cycle of punishing other people, then how are you going to feel Internally, right?
[00:22:12] Speaker B: Yeah. You got to punish yourself. It's just, it's, it's scary, isn't it, how, like, you say, these seeds can be planted that are just, like you say, lies or being used as, like, scapegoats. And all it really takes is, like, one person in a way to believe that, not think about it critically, and then just to keep spreading that misinformation. Do you know what I mean? Like, it just like the misinformation breeds misinformation, you know, it's like, yeah, it's like a virus.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: It literally is like a virus.
[00:22:48] Speaker B: And I think that's why, you know, like, a lot of people, I guess we saw, say after, like Trump was elected. Do you say elected? Yes. Yes.
Good. Okay.
[00:23:03] Speaker A: What was the other option?
[00:23:05] Speaker B: I don't know.
I have no idea.
[00:23:07] Speaker A: Brought into power.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: Who knows?
Like, I guess that's where you see, like, the hope, I suppose, like, hope almost like diminishing. Or like this again, the stuckness, right?
Because I think people recognize how hard it is to get rid of and like, eradicate all of this misinformation. Like, it is literally impossible to eradicate all of the misinformation, right? And I think that can breed then the stuckness and then again the cycle. The cycle continues. It can start as something small, but then actually, like I say, that misinformation spreads. The people who are trying to challenge it, the people who are trying to be critical against it, can then feel like, well, what's the point? I can't.
It's like, say, a virus that's spreading faster than we can deal with it.
[00:24:11] Speaker A: And I have to write this down because I've got two points to that.
Firstly, that is the point, and that's something I'll get into towards the end as well. The point of these authoritarian systems is to either have people so invested in them that they can't leave, or to make people feel so powerless against it that they just become numb. Obviously, there will always be people fighting back, but if you can have the majority of the people either invested in it or numb, then that's the whole point. That's how they keep their power and keep.
Keep getting more and more and more power. Right?
And speaking of, like, misinformation and things like that, controlling the narrative is such an important aspect of the right wing and authoritarian movements. Have you seen the whole Grokopedia thing?
[00:25:06] Speaker B: I have no idea what that is.
[00:25:08] Speaker A: Do you know what GROK is?
[00:25:10] Speaker B: No, I do not.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: It's just the way you're saying it like, what the fuck are you talking about?
[00:25:15] Speaker B: Should I know, Should I know what this is?
[00:25:17] Speaker A: So essentially, you know Wikipedia.
[00:25:20] Speaker B: I know what Wikipedia is. Yes.
[00:25:21] Speaker A: Okay, well, I just had to check.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: In a hole under the ground yet.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: Yes, I like that you said yes.
Only above ground. Only in above ground hole.
So Grok is Elon's AI chatbot that is on Twitter, so you can use it. And Grok has gone.
Yeah. Or X as we. As he likes to try and name.
[00:25:47] Speaker B: Meant to be kind of like, like, like, is that like a person? Like it's his name, it's called.
[00:25:53] Speaker A: I haven't delved into that. He's a weird ass person.
He tries to name every company he acquires X.
So I don't even know where he tried that with like PayPal back in the day. Like all sorts. Like yeah, he's a weird dude, to put it lightly. Does a lot of fact checking of Trump and of Elon, but every time it does that he goes back in or has somebody else do it because I highly doubt he's doing it himself. And rewire its programming so that it is on his side. And one of the times it did that it like started calling itself like, like mini Hitler or something like that. Like I forget which it got started calling itself that.
Yeah, and I forget the exact terminology, but it went on this like anti Semitic, like Nazi esque rant. And so he keeps like trying to fight back against it. And so obviously they're going to be able to make it so that I can control the narrative now.
[00:26:50] Speaker B: So his own chat bot was working against him and then he like he, he missed then misinformed his chat bot to try and like you say, control the narrative.
Yeah, yeah, great.
[00:27:05] Speaker A: And he keeps doing that and it keeps getting more and more on his side. But then we. Yeah, there's a lot of back and forth with it.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: Isn't it funny that even they're even having to try and convince like AI chatbots that yeah, like, yeah, what they're doing is right.
[00:27:18] Speaker A: But the people, people on the, on the right are like, God, it's just because like knowledge is so left wing. Like well, what does that tell you?
Oh my goodness. But the reason I bring it up is because he is starting something called Grokopedia. And so this.
[00:27:35] Speaker B: How do we spell Grok?
[00:27:37] Speaker A: Gr. I was like GR O. Okay. I don't know why that was. Why G, R O, K.
And so Grokopedia is going to be basically this AI fueled misinformation website where people who are Looking for essentially confirmation bias or whatever go on here. And so they are literally working to build the reality outside of facts.
[00:28:02] Speaker B: That's terrifying.
[00:28:03] Speaker A: I did a post on it because I don't think people understand how terrifying that is because like I said, narrative is everything in these environments. It's insanely dangerous. That's literally the pipeline is going to be.
Because I feel like a lot of this pipeline was long term, but since everyone started becoming chronically online during COVID it's gotten faster and faster and now this is going to accelerate it. So like the pipeline of like triggering shame and rage, providing that emotional off ramp and then pointing that at a target and then just cycling it and cycling it and cycling it.
[00:28:39] Speaker B: Yeah. You're literally changing people's realities again, like, like, say through the information that you're then giving them, that's building the narratives, that's then the narrative resource or like discourse that's within their reality.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: Well then what's crazy is like their reality that they've constructed in their brain. Because I mean, Laura and I operate from very similar philosophical, Philosophical.
Philosophical assumptions of like, reality is co. Constructed. Right. There's no one single reality that we all see, so it's, it's constructed by our own experiences, thoughts, biases, et cetera, et cetera. So people have been constructing this reality in their heads, but what's really happening to them on the outside is probably hurting them, it's probably harming them. They're probably worse off economically. Women are having less rights.
Like anyone who is a minority that supports Trump is definitely having their life being made measurably worse. But even the people that like, he claims to really love, they're not any better off. And these people still won't change because.
Well, firstly, a lot of it's that constructed reality, but also it's privilege. The cost of changing their politics is higher than the cost of living with the consequences. Can you imagine getting somebody as a client who wants to change? But for the last 10 years they've been entrenched in this far right crap. Right.
And then they've just realized the consequences of what they've believed, whether a lot of people have lost their families and friendships.
So changing their politics is changing their whole identity, Effy, you know?
[00:30:26] Speaker B: Yeah, the whole world. Really. Well, the whole reality. Yeah. And it's like, it. I think it just really shows, like how, you know, we love to think that we are in control as like individuals and make our own choices, but we are so manipulated and almost like puppeted by again, the Society we live in, the narratives that we're exposed to, the information that we consume. That is all, like you say, creating or constructing our reality.
So it's like, it then almost becomes too much to think about when you're like, oh, okay, so I'm scrolling through, like, Instagram and I see something, and I can allow that information to become part of my beliefs and my reality or not. This is why we need to think so critically, you know, otherwise we make ourselves so vulnerable.
[00:31:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's why they've been attacking critical thinking in education, public education, for decades. But, like, this reality construction has been there for hundreds of years, from religion, like, back in that day through to, like, the 50s, trying to get women back in the home after they came out to work. Like, all of the advertising was about that, right? Advertisement went from like, women, you're great, get to work. It's like the image of the woman flexing her arm and, like, we can do it then. Oh, no, women belong in the home. Like, you know, vacuums for your wives. You can spank your wife if she doesn't, like, behave. Things like that. So it's. It's possible.
Firstly, it's something that's always been there. Right. People are trying to control our narratives, but it's possible to not get stuck in that. So I think people, we need to keep that in our brains. Right? We have to keep that level of hope because otherwise we're screwed. Right?
But some of these people would, literally, because they're so ingrained in hatred and rage, they would rather lose their rights or, like, maybe even believe that they're not losing their rights. They would lose. Rather lose their rights, lose their healthcare, lose their money, lose their safety. Safety. Then lose their sense of identity.
And because we always talk about meaning, don't we? Don't we? Being miserable? But having a sense of meaning can feel a lot safer than being, like, free but quite uncertain, especially if your brain is psychologically wired to be more conservative. And I'm not saying that's a natural thing. I'm saying it's socially. It'll be constructed throughout your life. So they're gonna make people feel more and more helpless with what they're doing to people's lives on a material level. But if they can give them a narrative for somebody else to blame or punch down when these people feel helpless, then it can just keep going. And that's how the Overton window just shifts and shifts and shifts.
And it's just these people. Some people just won't change when it hurts them because changing would require them to admit that they were complicit in this wide scale harm. And many, many people don't have the psychological flexibility, or I guess strength isn't the right word.
Resilience, maybe. To do that, it is hard, right?
So, yeah, that's why some people don't change when it hurts them. And we also have to recognize this is really important, guys. Some people won't change no matter what.
And it's something that a lot of us have to internalize. And it's sad and upsetting, but it's not because they don't understand, it's because they don't want to. Right.
And again, a lot of this relates back to privilege, but a lot of it relates back to personal psychology. And we're again, like, empathy without excusing is a running theme of this episode. So this is a group of people who, like, if they. If they see equality, they experience it as personal oppression. Right? You see all these guys in the. The reform protests in the UK because women have rights and migrants are coming in saying, oh, they're stealing our jobs. And like, the interview is like, oh, well, what jobs are they stealing? And the person goes like, well, I couldn't be a doctor if I wanted to, could I?
She was like, well, do you have a medical degree? And he's like, no.
Like, literally just the vision of other people having equality feels like oppression, even though it doesn't impact them at all.
[00:35:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:35:04] Speaker A: These are people that experience other people's rights as threats to their own sense of identity or whatever, and boundaries as some kind of persecution. I mean, you see that with, like, the MeToo movement. So women saying, like, you literally cannot touch me without my consent. Like, do not touch.
It was so normal. Jack and I started watching a show that was 20 years old last night. Always a sunny in Philadelphia. We've never seen it before.
[00:35:29] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah.
[00:35:30] Speaker A: And it's like, it's actually, I think, supposed to be quite a progressive show, but some of the stuff on there, I'm like, oh, my God. Because even just 20 years ago, just like waitresses, people just like touching them as they walk by and things and stuff like, that still happens, but, like, when we started to put boundaries on it, men are like, but I'm entitled to that. So that boundary is actually persecuting me. It's taking away something I have a right to.
These people experience diversity as some kind of contamination, which we talked about with Keegan last time, and accountability as some form of cruelty towards them. Like why? Why are you being mad at me? That's so cruel.
And so they refuse to compromise. They want dominance.
So they're not confused. They're not necessarily uninformed or brainwashed. They just like how they feel in the system.
And this matters a lot, like, strategically for how we move forward. Because if we're wasting a lot of energy on trying to convince these people, you know, the people that are very psychologically and emotionally committed to this hierarchy, committed to cruelty, committed to purity, politics, black and white thinking, or completely draining the resources we need to organize people that we can actually move.
And I think that's something we need to focus on a little bit.
[00:36:48] Speaker B: So using resources on people who are more willing to change or behaviorally, like, have that kind of readiness to change.
[00:36:59] Speaker A: If we think about our model, I'm sure there are some, and I've heard stories of some very entrenched MAGA people that have left that movement. But really where we should be focusing most is on the people that are ambivalent. The people with the cognitive dissonance, the people that are shocked in heavy quotes but not doing anything. Those are the people, especially since there's so few of us on the activated level that we should maybe focus on.
But I think we should get into that more when we talk about the what to do. So I want to talk about what breaks that pipeline before we talk about the kind of, okay, what do we do now? Because what breaks that isn't so facts. It's not logic or even debates. We've seen actually the harm that these debates have had because they've normalized conversations of, like, should women have the right to vote? Like, no, that does not work. Right?
Yeah, you're so right.
[00:37:53] Speaker B: Like, how has that become a conversation that we even need to have?
Wow. Yeah.
[00:38:00] Speaker A: Well, that's part of that pipeline. It's the way to recapture a narrative.
Like, obviously, for the last 20 years, the narrative has been, like, women, like the MeToo movement, women should have the right to vote. We're quite, you know, we're progressing a bit. So they've needed to reinvigorate their own narrative to, like, kind of gain control over that. So this. The first step to doing that is manufacturing confusion. And that's where these, like, kind of more harmful debates come from. Like, is this really happening? Who knows? Should these people have rights? Who knows? Right?
[00:38:35] Speaker B: Like, we know.
We do know.
[00:38:38] Speaker A: We know we're not the crazy ones for knowing that we should have the right to vote.
God, the amount of. The amount of men I've had in the last three months or so on my page telling me that I shouldn't have the right to vote, that they need to repeal the 19th Amendment, which is women's right to vote, has been insanely alarming. So that's clearly where they're going next, right?
[00:39:00] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Again, it's like planting these, like, little seeds just to make it seem like it's an option, you know, like, it's totally.
[00:39:09] Speaker A: Yeah, well, so that's. That's literally the second step to, like, narrative conditioning.
[00:39:14] Speaker B: Right.
[00:39:14] Speaker A: So you normalize that grievance. Like, I'm being treated so unfairly as a man because women have these rights.
Like, you know, you normalize it and then you just kind of like, keep manufacturing it. I don't know if you saw my post yesterday, but I did a post about, like, how Fox News talk about women, women's voters and stuff like that. It's just like, they're just, like, making the world terrible. And, you know, they're. Yeah, it's just like, women.
[00:39:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:43] Speaker A: Oh, of course. You know, we're horrible.
[00:39:46] Speaker B: Give us that much power, actually.
[00:39:47] Speaker A: I know, I know, right? That we can't do that.
[00:39:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:51] Speaker A: They, like, manufacture disgust or really horrific views towards a group of people and then give people permission to fantasize about harming them. The amount of comments I've had that are horrific, whether relating to my autism or being a woman, it's like, you deserve to be r. Worded, assaulted. You deserve to be, you know, whatever. And people are literally openly doing this on public accounts. They've got pictures. They're like dads with their kids. They have been given permission to fantasize about harming people. And then you can turn this into policy, because at this point, people aren't shocked.
[00:40:27] Speaker B: Right.
[00:40:28] Speaker A: By any of it. Because if some of this becomes policy, then they're relieved because it confirms the worldview. They've just been conditioned by the narrative into.
[00:40:39] Speaker B: It is such a mess. Oh, my God, how terrifying.
[00:40:43] Speaker A: So frustrating.
So the question is, how do we break that? Right?
[00:40:47] Speaker B: Yes, please, please, quickly.
[00:40:50] Speaker A: Well, quickly. Well, unfortunately, it won't be quick and.
[00:40:54] Speaker B: It won't be EAs.
[00:40:57] Speaker A: Because people don't leave kind of these systems because they suddenly learn the truth. Obviously, it's because something kind of ruptures the narrative that they've been conditioned into. And unfortunately, it usually comes down to a level of selfishness, which is what Keegan talks about a lot. You know what I mean? It's like a personal consequence.
It's sometimes a betrayal by the. In group, but I don't think that's necessarily a thing. Thing that can totally be relied on right now. I don't know if you've seen the Trump Epstein stuff, but a lot of this group started with Save the Children. There's a group of people like assaulting children in the government. That's why we need Trump and to get rid of them. It's obvious through all the Epstein trials files that Trump is one of these people. And now the right has started to justify this behavior in their narratives. A betrayal by somebody in the in group might not be enough. If there's control over the narrative, we'll see. A lot of the time it's going to be a material loss that contradicts like, what was promised to them. And I think that's what happens a lot, like losing their home or losing family or losing a right. A lot of women who need an abortion that were. That were anti choice, all of a sudden they're like, well, now I can't get an abortion, but I'm different. There's a lot of this, but I'm different.
A psychology on the right.
[00:42:21] Speaker B: It's like the privilege that they once had has now been taken away or like directly impacted. And then, yeah, then there's. They can't turn a blind eye to it.
[00:42:33] Speaker A: It's right in front of them 100%. I mean, that's what the research says. It's like conservative mindsets is very much about their small closed group. Whereas, like, we tend to think about the humanity of everyone.
So, like, for example, one of the things that can change somebody is seeing somebody they actually love harmed by the system they. They supported. And a lot of these people that have changed is because they've had like a trans kid, LGBTQ plus kid, autistic kid, though I usually see the autistic parents going in the other direction. Like the RFK Jr. Vibe, like hearing autism.
But a lot of these people have had people they love impacted by this. And so it's like, oh, well, but now it's my group. So now I can see that it's a harm. And one other way that people leave or that breaks that pipeline is like what we've talked about before is like consequence in social belonging. So their community, their family doesn't endorse it.
They're ostracized.
And the hard thing is we can't manufacture this for people.
We have to wait for it to happen because it inevitably will.
The thing is, when it does happen, we have to figure out a way to have A clear and grounded narrative waiting for them when they come out, if they're willing to do the work without excuses.
But empathy without excuses again.
[00:44:03] Speaker B: Yeah. It's kind of scary, isn't it, how to almost.
To become unstuck, there needs to be, like, you say, like this, like, trauma or however you want to like term.
[00:44:20] Speaker A: Really is. It will be likely a trauma of some sort. And it's just. It's like, so frustrating because I'm like, we could have just prevented this from happening to you. We could have gotten you your health care that your kid needs for their chemotherapy. We could have prevented you losing your house. We could have prevented xyz.
So it's just. It's very frustrating.
So.
But kind of shying away from them. Let's focus this last bit of the episode on what we actually do. Right?
So a framework for agency. Another model.
[00:44:56] Speaker B: Yay.
[00:44:57] Speaker A: Our model is the framework for agency. And so I want to work from our individual agency through to the broader level of agency. So the levels are individual agency, like interpersonal and broader social.
So let's start with us individually, right? Because like you were saying, we really need to be quite critical. We really need to focus on what we're doing, what we're consuming. And so our goal is making ourselves as critical and agentic as possible in ourselves. And the goal is to interrupt any of our internal mechanisms that authoritarianism likes to exploit, because it depends on numbness, intolerance to shame, because we know how powerful shame is. Right. Brene Brown talks about it a lot. It relies on avoidance, desire for simplicity and easiness, moral panic, learned helplessness, catastrophic thinking, morality, like fantasies of purity or moral certainty. Like, these are all things as a checklist to put in our model that authoritarianism relies on. So the first thing we need to do personally is to recognize any emotional manipulation that's happening. And it's so easy to happen, Right. And we might not recognize it at the time.
And one of the reasons for that is because emotional manipulation is designed intentionally to feel like our own intuition.
Like, I just feel like this is bad. I know this is bad.
[00:46:25] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. So can sometimes our gut feeling actually be what the system is trying to kind of manipulate us with?
[00:46:39] Speaker A: 100% because they've changed the narrative. Like, your gut feeling is based. Your gut feeling is a feeling that you get that's based off of the information that you've processed.
Now, what is the information these people have processed, plus, like your emotional state, your biases and everything like that. And so, like, especially because Outrage and disgust are really innate human emotions that hijack our prefrontal cortex. They're the most efficient shortcuts to this way of thinking. So, like, you're probably not going to notice you're being manipulated. And that's the entire point. If it's kind of like hijacking this and this, no matter what, it doesn't matter what side of the aisle you're on. I mean, different sides have different, I guess, sensitivities to this. Right.
And, like, I guess, ability to reflect on it. But it's. No, we all have to be quite vigilant with it.
So one thing I would say is, like, if something sparks an instant moral panic, you need to think, do I know enough about this group to hold this belief? Like, if they're just, like, saying something about a group of people that's, like, automatic and stuff like that. It's like, who benefits from me feeling this? It's not me. It's not society. And so we gotta think about, like, what. Why is this story happening now?
And what problem is this outrage distracting me from? Right. I feel like that's a really important thing because they love to distract us with different outrage tools.
[00:48:10] Speaker B: Yeah, Misdirection.
[00:48:12] Speaker A: Oh, yes. Love a bit of misdirection.
The other thing we need to do is name our own personal defenses. And this takes a lot of work to figure out. So, like, some of us might rely on denial a lot. So, like, this can't be happening here. This isn't us.
Some people can rely on minimization, so it couldn't get that bad.
Right. Some people rely on avoidance. So I just can't get involved with the news right now.
[00:48:38] Speaker B: Yes, I've often felt like that.
Or like I say sometimes, mine is maybe more like seeing the good, you know, like always seeing the good.
That can be it. Yeah, that's a good point.
[00:48:52] Speaker A: Yeah. But it's also taking it with a grain of salt and nuance to it because it's not always bad to take a break. But it's like an actual avoidance strategy is different.
[00:49:05] Speaker B: Totally. Yes. Yeah. Like, am I avoiding the news because actually my body and my mind really need a break right now, or am I avoiding it because I'm not willing to feel, I guess, just like a bit uncomfortable, or. Do you know what I mean, 100%? Yeah. It's the understanding how much we can tolerate ourselves and maybe trying to expand that if we feel like it is quite narrow, you know?
[00:49:35] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. Definitely trying to expand that is super important.
Another thing that I Think we fall for a lot on the left that we need to look out for is this false sense of exceptionalism. So, like, I'm too smart to fall for propaganda. Like, there's this feeling that we can't because we're on the moral side of good. So, like, moralizing happens on all sides. Right. And it can feed into this false exceptionalism. So be very wary of that.
Also, this links, I think, to a lot of ambivalence, but this passive sense of hope. So someone will stop this from happening.
Somebody will save us.
[00:50:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
Almost like logically my mind is probably like, well, this isn't just going to keep going on, because that would be ridiculous, wouldn't it? So, yeah, I can kind of feel like that sometimes. Like, oh, let's give it like four years, it'll be fine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:50:33] Speaker A: And then, then I'm like, well, if we have three years and you know, he might just take over by then, who knows?
[00:50:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:50:40] Speaker A: But then that leads me to the next one is this thing that we have to be careful of. And this is, I think more my learned defense mechanism is like learned fatalism. So, like, everything is inevitable. It's going to freaking happen, like, blah, blah. So I. That can be an issue for me sometimes. Right.
And we need to be able to acknowledge that and figure out how to cope with it. We need to understand that, like our defense mechanisms, they're not necessarily flaws, they're survival tools that we were given in our brains through evolution and through our own socialization, but they do influence our broader reality and our political reality whether we want them to, whether we intend them to or not.
So we need to be mindful of them.
[00:51:25] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. Being able to kind of catch them and notice them when they're kind of there, when they're active. And again, like, we're. We're giving ourselves the option to like, choose.
Like, actually, do I want to go down this route? Do I want to. Yeah. Think of around, like, why this is all just going to be fatal and everything's going to be terrible, or do I actually want to see some good right now? You know, so again, it comes back to being able to choose. Like, being able to be like, flexible and not just getting stuck down our, like, you know, learned pathways of biases and so on.
[00:52:05] Speaker A: 100%. I mean, we do this a lot with clients. The first step is noticing something because then you're kind of putting one barrier in front of that tunnel, like you said, and that just interrupts your automatic defense mechanism there. The third one which is I think is really important for a lot of people. And it's where not societally, especially in the west, designed to have this as like a natural thing. But we need to build up our tolerance for being wrong because authoritarianism thrives on shame and we are taught a lot in society to be feel shameful if we were wrong about something, which is just not how the world works. Like so authoritarian thrives where like a mistake, it's a moral failure.
Updating information is humiliating. Accountability feels like an attack.
And these are all such big tools where people like you and I see mistakes as like oh shit, I've learned from that. That sucks. Right. It's not always easy to deal with, but you can process it and move on. It's not a moral failure, it's just like it's a mistake. Right. Updating information is our entire life. We're constantly learning. Updating information and accountability is something we're taught a lot for our own practice, but it's not always easy. But I just think like that's part of growth. It's course correcting, it's important.
And so some things we can say to ourselves like I call them like a little low shame script. I just didn't know any better then.
I didn't see the problem then. Now I see it differently.
I can update myself without hating my past self. And I'm also not numb or frozen in who I used to be.
[00:53:54] Speaker B: Yes. And I think it's also really powerful sharing those things that have changed with other people. Yeah, like I used to be someone who like, used to be someone who just like would avoid the news or would just say I just don't watch it or whatever.
But I think sharing and being vulnerable about those things where we can so that other people kind of can recognize another way, you know, 100% modeling that.
[00:54:23] Speaker A: Behavior to other people is super important. I try to do that so much. And the last one I'll add, but I'll go through it really quickly, is curating your inputs intentionally. So the main things we can do are limit your exposure to like rage, bait and doom scrolling things that like destabilize you internally and increase your exposure to meaning making. So that's like analysis, report reporting, organizing, looking at affected communities and looking at being super reflective, which is obviously you guys are probably sick of hearing by now. Laura and I constantly talk about reflection, but what does the emotional imprint of each thing do? Does it leave you clearer or more informed? Or does it leave you feeling kind of numb or panicked?
So if Your information diet essentially makes you too numb or too frantic to do anything about it. It's what that system is trying to do. It's not information, it's. It's numbness, it's sedation. It's trying to make you feel like you don't have any agency whatsoever. And so the next layer of our model is relationship and community agency. So a lot of this is about personal and community agency, Right? So shifting these interpersonal norms that tend to hold up authoritarian dynamics. And a lot of this is like holding people accountable. And this layer of our model matters because people don't change in isolation very often, at least not positively.
Belonging is more powerful sometimes than argument.
Silence allows certain social norms to continue. Its silence is way more powerful than a lot of people realize. Like you said last episode, Laura, and as we're starting to see the epidemic of young boy violence towards young girls, extremism thrives in loneliness. So like what we've seen, like the TV show, adolescence.
So this isn't about fixing people. It's about like changing the, I guess, like the social arena that we're existing in.
I also want to emphasize this is something that people with a certain amount of privilege have the responsibility to do. I'm not. I don't think that people who have been living this their entire lives necessarily need to do this. I think that, say, like, if you're from a super marginalized group who has been dealing with this bullshit their entire lives, it's not on them to craft a social narrative or to call out shit when they might not feel safe to do so. So that's an important thing, is to reflect on personally as well. I think it's firstly important to clarify the layout you're working with. Right.
Are you dealing with entrenched extremists? Are you dealing with defensive but reachable people? So do they have high shame avoidance?
But they're movable if you're consistently relating with them. Are you dealing with somebody who's avoidant or ambivalent? These kinds of people are highly influenceable by norms. This is the largest group of people.
So they're going to go with the trend, they're going to go with the norm.
Are they already engaged? Are they quite progressive? They just need support not to burn out. So you need to be informed about who's reachable, who's not, what's the landscape? Right. And so you really want to strategically redirect your energy towards people with cognitive dissonance, support people who are already acting and interrupt the harm done by the entrenched without trying to convert them.
That is a psychologically informed strategy. It's not perfect, but that's a good way to approach it.
[00:58:03] Speaker B: I like it. And it sounds almost like safer in a sense that you're not trying to target, say the extremists, if you like, because that's scary. That's. Well, maybe not scary, but it's unpredictable or maybe it's actually very predictable. But I think it's more that you're gonna end up not being able to have a constructive conversation and probably putting yourself through more emotional toll and labor than anything.
So actually it's almost like while the things you're talking about kind of here, like yes, that still is like emotional labor in a sense, but it's like the payoff is gonna be, I guess, more likely, you know, 100%.
[00:58:56] Speaker A: And it takes less effort to have these conversations, maybe with the avoidant.
It probably takes less effort to interrupt harm done by an entrenched person than it does to try and convince them not to do something. Do you know what I mean? So it's just like being there for somebody and something related to like what you were saying earlier, Laura, like model stuff. Like you're showing people what to do, so you're modeling clarity and not how to be avoidant. So not every moment needs a full intervention. And this can be really hard for some people not to fully. I know we're all coming up to like Thanksgiving when people are going to want to like have full on conversations with their MAGA uncle about like the harms that have been done if anyone is still existing with their MAGA uncle at this point.
Sometimes tiny clarity cues can disrupt, disrupt this. Right. So just saying like that's not accurate.
That's just, that's discriminatory, that's racist or I'm not comfortable with that. Humans update their internal experiences based on social cues and the emotions they cause, not facts and silence. Like you've said last episode, Laura, is perceived agreement. It's so powerful to not be silent about something because authoritarianism needs people to believe the social eye that everyone is thinking the same way.
[01:00:22] Speaker B: Yep, yep, totally. Like you just saying one of those small cues then gets the other people in that conversation thinking about it as well. Even if you haven't changed the person's view who is speaking, whatever they're speaking, you know, 100%.
[01:00:40] Speaker A: So like one of the. A really powerful thing to do is just saying these small things and making that person look ridiculous or racist or biased or they just don't live in a reality to the people around them. And that's it. That's so powerful. And along those lines, it's practicing a narrative, interrupting or interruption, furthermore, calling out the bullshit. So destabilizing a propaganda script. We all know they run on scripts reintroducing doubt to the situation, disrupting the emotional payoff of the narrative they're engaging in. And reminding somebody that they have other options, other ways to interpret the information that they're given, which is something we do a lot in sessions with clients, is like, is not only one way to look at this.
Yeah.
[01:01:32] Speaker B: It's so interesting how just saying a few words can do all of that. Like you've just said. You know what I mean? Like, we don't necessarily need to engage in a really curated, like, perfected debate. We can literally just drop in a small sentence, a few words, and then that's like, say, creating the doubt, creating new options, getting people to maybe think a bit more critically.
[01:01:57] Speaker A: Yeah, because the debate doesn't work because, like, we've, like, established facts don't matter. You can't, like, they're willing to debate somebody's humanity. They're willing to debate all these things that shouldn't even be up for debate. It needs to be a bit more nuanced and almost cutting than that. You know what I mean?
So, like, even instead of, like, when you're going, like, towards the narrative route instead of the clarity route, instead of arguing and saying, oh, where'd you hear that? If it's constantly Fox News, that tells them something as well, highlighting patterns that you're seeing point to inconsistent logic. So that's not debating, that's just saying that's a bit hypocritical.
Asking questions and just, like, insert competing narratives in, like. Well, what about if X, Y, Z, Your goal is to loosen the narrative in their head, not fully replace it with something.
[01:02:50] Speaker B: Ah, that makes a lot of sense. You're creating doubt, poking holes. Yeah.
[01:02:55] Speaker A: Like some of our guests have said, like Oliver and Keegan, it's, like, about planting seeds, right? And some people plant seeds, some people just ram people over with a tank. Everyone's got a different approach, but this is one that works quite well from a psych psychological strategy point of view. And then lastly is building a political community. Right?
You want to build community. Isolation is predictive of extremism. It accelerates burnout, whereas community kind of distributes the emotional labor that you're feeling. It protects against shame and it gives more perspective. So you're not just, you know, engaging in confirmation bias constantly because politics is so relational, and no one, absolutely no person can stay sane or engaged by doing it alone.
Which is a lesson I've had to learn for sure.
Lastly is structural agency. So translating this clarity and action into pressure so we can't privately reflect your way out of fascism.
And awareness without action is just kind of like, experienced as guilt or paralysis. Because real change requires collective pressure, material redistribution of things, actual engagement. And this actual action is more important than some kind of emotional performance, as we discussed in the first episode. Because outrage doesn't change anything. Posting online doesn't change anything.
You need to have. You need to do things that have material outcomes. So support unions, donate to legal aid, abortion funds, organizations that support migrants, participate in local campaigns, show up for strikes, write your government officials, coordinate in writing them, support whistleblowers, demand transparency. Like, these are all smaller on the ground things you can actually do. Like, obviously, posting online and educating is super important, but what are we actually doing?
Because it doesn't matter how you're feeling about an issue if the system isn't feeling that pressure. So, like, what's the point? You know, it just goes back to that shock.
And we need to protect and widen the Overton window. We see how the right has been constantly shifting it, right? So authoritarianism works by condensing the language we're allowed to use without backlash.
[01:05:25] Speaker B: What is the Overton window?
[01:05:28] Speaker A: So the Overton window is like what's acceptable in a society.
Okay, so like that window of what is acceptable behavior in your society? So it keeps shifting further and further and further, right?
And there are some great ways of refusing to let this happening. And a lot of them are great for me because they're super pedantic, right?
So it's like refusing certain euphemisms like gender ideology, border security, culture, war. These are all things that they use as tools, right? And be super precise in your terminology. It's racism, it's fascism, it's authoritarianism, it's eugenics. I do not subscribe to the belief that using these terms diminishes their value, which is a real argument that's being had. Support media that calls harm what it is like. A lot of them try to brush over it, like that corporate Polish we were talking about in episode one.
And this is one thing I try and do is publicly affirm stigmatized identities to shift the norms. It's the reason I have Dr. It's the reason I have autistic in my bio. It's the reason I'm Constantly posting about migrants and trans people and lgbt. Lgbtq. My mouth isn't working. LGBTQ people. I just like normalizing the existence of certain people is super important. And I'm going to end on this is collective care and individual care is a political strategy because burnout is a predictable response to chronic overwhelm. It's a predictable response to a lack of support and constant like values based or moral injury. Right. And it's useful to these systems because it withdraws the emotional labor you're putting in the physical labor. It's withdraws your clarity.
Inability to resist rest is a strategy for longevity. It's a way to sustain clarity.
Now, how do we do this?
That's another question.
What do you think?
[01:07:32] Speaker B: How do we rest?
[01:07:34] Speaker A: How to rest? That's something neither and I, neither you or I are very good at.
[01:07:38] Speaker B: I don't know, not very good at it.
I think sometimes it's like you say, it's probably, this is probably more like speaking to that rational part of the mind and the need to intellectualize things, which I don't think is always the best way to do it. But I think the sustainability argument is, I think one that can be helpful where it's like, well, actually if I want to keep doing this stuff, if I want to keep challenging things, then I need to make sure that I physically can.
You know, if we're grinding ourselves into the, into the ground, then we're not going to be able to keep going and to sustain what we're doing.
And I was actually, I was talking to my sister about this the other day just in relation to like general work.
But I think as well that a lot of us that have, I suppose, like high standards, maybe even perfectionism, like really passionate, I guess, about the things that we do, we say, you know, well, actually I can keep going, I can keep doing this thing, you know, I can do more. And it's like, okay, well you can, but like, at what cost?
So I think it's kind of also recognizing for ourselves like where the, where our boundaries are and sometimes being strict with ourselves. If we do need to create space and rest for ourselves.
[01:09:07] Speaker A: Yeah, it's such a personal thing. I think we're all gonna be, if we're on this side, if we're fighting for good, we're all gonna feel like shit.
That doesn't mean we can't engage in joy, you know what I mean? It's like the gay movement in the late 80s and early 90s is like one of the reasons that they were able to get the rights and trans rights and things like that is because they were engaging in joy and dancing and going out to clubs and enjoying community. That is so important.
But also recognizing that it is going to burn us out to a certain extent that we are going to need to engage in difficult things.
But then recognizing your own personal limits, whether that involves hours of the day that you can engage in a certain thing or you recognize a personal experience that makes you go, oh, maybe I need a weekend off from social media.
Just like smaller things like that to keep you in the game and also looking out for the people around you I think are so important. And I think that that threshold is going to look different for everyone. And again, we all have to acknowledge that it's going to be stressful, but it's going to be way more friggin stressful if we end up in an authoritarian, fully authoritarian regime and people are being harmed out there. And so that's why it's such a hard thing to figure out is like what is the line?
But that's only something we can each fit. And that's why it's so important to be self aware. Is you guys the biggest weapon against this is our own education and self awareness. That's why they don't want us to be self aware or educated. That's why they want us to rely on our emotions and lack of intelligence or lack of like education or information because that's the strongest weapon.
So the more you can become self aware and socially aware and actually implement that into your life, protect yourself, protect people around you while protecting our society, the better it's going to be.
[01:11:16] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely.
So, well this brings us I guess to the, well to the end of this series, I guess around kind of political stuckness and so on. So across these three episodes we've kind of shown how authoritarian.
We've shown that authoritarianism is fundamentally psychological. So how it spreads through things like shame, disgust, denial, identity, not logic.
So we've obviously spoken a lot around kind of how these patterns aren't necessarily about like awareness for awareness sake. It's about making ourselves harder to manipulate and less likely to slip into this kind of idea of like numbness or fatalism and so on. So it's really important that we have that self awareness so that we can keep making our own choices and not being like a puppet, you know, in this game, so to speak.
So the work of resistance happens on multiple layers like we've spoken about. So our inside selves, in our relationships and in the structures that we support or challenge and we want to emphasize that you do not have to be doing everything.
And this isn't going to look perfect. It's probably going to be kind of messy, you know, if you are someone who is trying to be more engaged.
So what really matters is, like we've said, refusing silence, like speak up, challenge things, poke some holes, ask questions, support the people around you who are doing that. That's also a fantastic role to play. So these really small material actions start to add up and interrupt, like we say, the narratives that are becoming more and more dominant within the spaces in day to day life, in, you know, social media and so on. So it's really important we do this so that we can stop that escalation from happening. Take what's manageable, stay connected to others and keep noticing when you're being pulled towards this almost like simplicity or a despair or a lack of hope and so on. So these are the political tools that are being used against us.
So hopefully. Well, that was a slightly grim point, wasn't it? But I suppose the point of this series wasn't necessarily to bring loads of optimism, but trying to bring in the reality and hopefully trying to bring in like some constructive ways that we can start to challenge things so that we aren't just sat here kind of losing hope and feeling stuck and so on.
So see what you can do.
Yeah, experiment a little bit, let us know how you get on.
And if anything here has helped you to name what you're seeing or feeling, let that be part of how you're resisting the psychological conditions that are allowing things like this to unfortunately thrive at the moment.
[01:14:28] Speaker A: Yes, that was a nice little summary, Laura. I liked. Oh, I'm losing my voice. Hopefully I can get through our, our outro, guys.
Yeah, thank you guys so much for listening. I know these were kind of heavy and longer episodes and we probably left you with more questions than answers. As usual, we really enjoy digging into the messy undercurrents of our current political landscape.
If you have questions, thoughts, rage, we want to hear it. Please drop us a comment or message us.
And if there's a topic, as you want us a topic you want us to get into, just get in touch. If you liked this episode. Don't forget to follow like rate scream from a rooftop, whatever your platform allow allows. God, I'm going. I'm sinking. Guys, you can find all of our links on the but why Instagram page. So head to the bio for everything. And remember, the first step to understanding is asking, but why?
Yeah, Sam.
