Even though while it's true and not a
bad thing but there is less interest in
a certain kind of dogmatic doctrinaire
religious institutional identity there
is clearly an uprising. I mean this is
obvious. This is you know where do you
think all that mindfulness stuff comes
from? Where do you think all those yoga
mats come from? Where do you think all
this health and wellness stuff comes from?
It comes from the spiritual center.
That's Marianne Williamson and she's a candidate for president who speaks the language of people who are
spiritual but not religious. There's a growing number of Americans
that are saying that they have no
religious affiliation at all.
So what are their political views? Well Marianne
Williamson is running for the Democratic
nomination and she qualified for the
first Democratic debate which is pretty
impressive considering she's never held
public office. You have said we have a
problem with the psychological fabric of
our country
as a low-level emotional civil war has
begun in too many ways to rip us apart.
In order to deal with that we must
address it on the level of our internal
being. That's on your campaign website.
You call for universal health care and
Medicare for All, make
permanent the middle-class tax cut,
provide free higher education, including
free tuition for public colleges,
government support for children's
services, establish a Green New Deal.
With progressive policy ideas like that
she's diametrically opposed to the
Republican Party but she's got something
in common with Donald Trump.
Both Williamson and Trump were inspired
by self-help books. I'm talking about
books like The Power of Now, The Secret,
A Course in Miracles.
and most importantly The Power of
Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale.
The great Norman Vincent Peale was my
pastor. The Power of Positive Thinking.
Everybody's heard of Norman Vincent
Peale. He was so great. He would give a
sermon you never wanted to leave.
Sometimes we have sermons and every once
in a while we think about leaving a
little early right even though a
Christian. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Frank,
would give a sermon. I'm telling you I still remember
his sermons. We're used to politicians
who lay out a Christian worldview but
we're not used to people like Williamson
and Trump. So in this video I'm going to
explain how it's possible that they were
both inspired by self-help
books. I'm also going to explain why
they're so different and how their ideas
appeal to a large swath of the American
population that often gets overlooked
and to do that
I'm gonna have to tell you a little bit
about my childhood
When I was growing up, both my parents
were Catholic. I went to Catholic school,
I went to Catholic Church, I grew up
reading Bible stories. But my parents
believed a lot of things that you
wouldn't find in the Bible or in the
Catechism of the Catholic Church. My dad
in particular believed that he could
manifest good things into his life
if he just thought positively. A lot of
people from my childhood believed that
sort of thing. I found it weird that my
dad considered himself very spiritual
even though he didn't go to church but
looking back that point of view is
actually pretty common.
To some people a meditation group is their church.
People who are spiritual but not churchgoers have a worldview as well it's usually a combination of Eastern
thought with Christianity coupled with self-help books and New Age spirituality.
When people hear the term "New Age" they
usually think of crystals or chakras and
that's definitely part of it but a lot
of it is simply a collection of ideas
that come from self-help books.
Number one it's important to focus on the
present moment. Number two all conflicts
are basically internal conflicts, and
number three thinking whether positive
or negative manifests things into
ordinary life. Each of these ideas pairs
pretty well with some of the self-help
books I mentioned. It's important to note
that these books were wildly popular and
they still are. When Norman Vincent Peale
published The Power of Positive Thinking
it was the number two best-selling
non-fiction book for years. It even out
ranked the Bible. So how is positive
thinking supposed to work? Well let's say
that you didn't get invited to your
friends party. You'd probably be pretty mad at your friend.
You piece of shit, you're
having a party without me.
But wait. Are you making this internal issue into a interpersonal issue? Maybe you're blowing
this up bigger than it needs to be. Maybe
your friend just forgot.
Have a positive attitude and maybe send him a
friendly text. If you can't go, don't
sweat it. Definitely don't hold a grudge. Live in
the present moment and let the past go.
It's good advice and it probably doesn't
seem overtly political to you.
The problem is self-help ideas have been
co-opted to further a political
viewpoint. While other people were seeing
president Trump saying just crazy stuff
what I saw was Norman Vincent Peale. He
was the first one who told me that that
you could change your situation simply
by the way you thought.
That was Scott Adams. He's the creator of Dilbert who became kind of like a commentator on
Donald Trump who you might remember is
the president. Anyway a lot of these
self-help ideas pair very well with a
political agenda.
You can be gay and not be a victim, you can be black and not be a victim. What we're seeing spreading
like wildfire is a victor mentality.
The idea that you can overcome anything
that you've lived through. What did you
make of what she had to say?
Well I think that Candace is
commenting about the danger of adopting
a victimized victimization/oppressor
narrative and it's it's a narrative that
the hard left is really been pushing. It
kind of sounds like they're saying if
you're suffering don't focus on the
external cause. Focus on your attitude
towards it. You don't want to have a
victim mentality. But what if you are a
victim? What if you've been discriminated
against based on your race or sexual
orientation? It's not your fault and all
of the optimism in the world isn't gonna
fix the problem. Life kind of sucks or at
least it's kind of a mixed bag. A lot of
people reach for self-help books because
they're having a lot of negative
thoughts. When people have negative
thoughts about their own victimization
they get angry. People get angry about
discrimination and to the self-help
reader that anger is gonna look like an
internal problem rather than an external problem.
Don't be a damn victim. Of course you're a victim. Jesus.
Obviously. Put yourself together.
When you
hear people complain you might think
that they're holding a grudge or living
in the past, when really they're facing
historical injustice.
Sometimes persistent optimism is the
best response to suffering. You can't
change the whole system but you can
change yourself. But when people implore
you to focus on optimism, they might be
distracting you from other solutions.
Self-help is always political. In fact
Norman Vincent Peale was part of a
campaign against the New Deal. He argued
that the New Deal wouldn't be good for
the American psyche and that it would
make people less free.
Positive thinking is not inherently bad but if you never
think any negative thoughts about
yourself, you could become kind of a
narcissist whose detached from reality.
The best way to understand the things he
says that don't sound true is that he's
literally thinking his way into a new
reality and the the facts are not as
important as you think.
The past doesn't
exist. It doesn't exist. It's only in our
minds. So if President Trump says blah
blah fact and you say "That's not true.
That's not what happened."
The truth is that it doesn't exist
either way.
Why do I have to you know
repent why do I have to ask for
forgiveness if you're not making
mistakes. I work hard.I'm an honorable person.
But have you ever asked God for forgiveness?
Is it possible that there's a right way
and a wrong way to read self-help books?
is it possible that Donald Trump isn't a
New Age virtuoso but a New Age heretic
and if that's true, what does that make
Marianne Williamson? Maybe a New Age
Messiah or doctor of the New Age church
Marianne Williamson
agrees that your internal state affects
your external circumstances. She agrees
that negative thoughts cause suffering
but she doesn't blame people who are
suffering
What about starving kids in Africa? Are
they poor because their consciousness is
out of alignment with love? Now obviously
we're not saying, well at least I'm not
because some people I think are, I am
certainly not saying that there's
something in the consciousness of that
child that somehow is not as loving as
ours. Right. I find that obscene actually.
I find that kind of viewpoint really
morally obscene. Yes. However you can say
that those children are starving from a
lack of love. The love in this case on
the part of the industrialized nations
of the world. You know in the United
States we spend seven hundred billion
dollars a year on our defense budget.
Right now we are stuck as a species on a
level of personal love. We are stuck on a
level of personal love for people we
like or love for people who are like us
and the love that will save the world is
not just love for people that we like.
It's not just love for people that we
know. It's not just love for our children.
it's love for all of the children.
She also empathizes with people that call
out their own victimization. She says she
used to be an angry leftist but realized
that anger wasn't the right tool for
sustained action.
I think Joe Biden, when he said something
about we don't we don't need an angry
nominee and a lot of people on the Left
got very upset about that and said I'm
angry you know I've been marginalized.
I've been discriminated against because
of this presidency and I think that
anger in that rage is useful as an
organizing tool. What do what do you
think about that? I think moral outrage
is not born of anger. Moral outrage is
born of love.
And women you know women have known this
forever we express our fierceness we're
called angry, so we know there's a lot of
projection and a misuse of that word to
hold people down when we're expressing
our passion. When you allow anger to be
the fuel for your for your political
activism, it's like choosing white sugar
as opposed to how a healthy diet as your
nutritional support. So white sugar will
give you an adrenaline high and you have
all this energy and then you'll crash
political change is a marathon.
Marianne Williamson is showing that self-help
doesn't have to be self-centered. She
believes in Medicare for All.
She believes in reparations and she
wants to create a Department of Peace.
She arrived at these policy ideas
through her spirituality and she's
teaching people to think of spirituality
as a path to political action.
I sometimes wrestle with the idea that
faith and spirituality are often about
acceptance and finding inner peace.
Actually there is no serious spiritual
or religious path anywhere that gives
any of us a pass on addressing the
suffering of other sentient beings. You
know I grew up in a in a generation
where we read Ram Dass and Alan Watts in
the morning and went to political we
went to anti-war protests in the
afternoon. So during that time of the 60s
and the 70s the issue of revolutionary
cultural change was both external and
internal. It was cultural, sexual, musical, and it was political.
I want to be very clear.
I'm not saying that I think New Age
ideas are good or right. Personally I
think it's a lot of mumbo-jumbo.
Years ago I developed the idea that if you got a letter in the mail, the contents of the
letter would be a variable in a
Schrodinger's cat kind of a way until
you looked at it.
This is a load of barnacles.
No matter what you think
New Age ideas are kind of like a meme
that's caught on. They're part of how
people think and talk about themselves.
They're part of people's spiritual
perspective and the right wing has
already done a good job infiltrating
self-help.
It doesn't have to be that way. We can
change the stories that were telling
ourselves or at least change the meaning
of them.
I think of it as the transformation between the Good
Samaritan and the conscious Samaritan
So the Good Samaritans walking down
the road and the Good Samaritan sees a
beggar and gives them alms and then the
Good Samaritan continues journey down
the road and sees another beggar and
gives them alms. After about the sixth or
the seventh beggar the Good Samaritan
says to himself "Why are there so many
beggars?" That's how I feel about my own
transformation.
My parents didn't see the link between spirituality and politics. When the financial crisis hit, they both
became more spiritual but they never
talked about what caused the financial
crisis. We would always talk about
whether or not it was right to give
money to homeless people on the street.
It just felt like when we were having
that discussion, we were kind of assuming
that there were just always gonna be
homeless people. We should think of
ourselves as part of a collective
consciousness where someone else's pain
is my pain.
Maybe I don't think it's mumbo-jumbo.
It's always possible to
contort spiritual ideas to serve a
political purpose. In America that's been
happening with Christianity for a long
time. But that's why Marianne Williamson is
doing something important. She's trying
to turn people with spiritual yearnings
into Good Samaritans. She's persuading people by understanding
their spiritual perspective. So are
self-help books ruining America?
Not if Marianne Williamson has anything
to say about it.
You know sometimes people talk about spirituality like it makes,
it diminishes your brain cells. It
doesn't make you less intelligent but it
makes you more strategic.
Thanks for watching my video. If you liked it please
press the appropriate buttons. If it made
you think let me know and let's have a
chat about it. Have a very nice day.
