Catherine Liu | The Problem With Trauma Culture | HITW 165

When you accept helplessness as a child and you like embrace the child within to feel that powerless produces a lot of anxiety. Yeah, exactly. Totally. Yes. And then everyone, like, oh my God, everyone has mental ill, mental health problems. There's so much anxiety and depression. It's like, yes, when you feel like you are helpless and you are just waiting for other people to recognize you, to accommodate you, to see you, then you're going to be [ __ ] anxious all the time. Totally. Everyone's not going to do whatever you want them to do all the time. And, um, the problem is that there is no powerful rhetoric of adult responsibility and maturity from the [Music] left.

Katherine Lou, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, I've really been looking forward to speaking with you since I discovered your work, um, I don't know, sometime last year, I think. Maybe it was when you're on Josh Citarella's podcast or something, and I was like, just, I don't know, I was really captured by not only what you're saying, but the way in which you're saying it, like, very kind of direct, no [ __ ], no academic jargon. Um, you reminded me a lot of Camille Paglia. Who is, why is she all over the place now? She's gone viral for some reason. Like, people have found her, her, um, YouTube videos or something. I am not like Camille Paglia because I am a Marxist, and Camille Paglia is a cultural conservative lesbian who had a really interesting take on feminism because she thought of herself as was a working-class woman, which was she was criticizing Gloria Steinem and she loved Madonna, um, which is fine. Um, but yeah, anyway, it's, I think it's because we criticize feminism, so people are like, yeah, they're the same. Well, and for me, as someone who's, uh, grown up working class and remains working class, both of you speak up for the working class in that kind of intellectual academic space. True. That's, as a non-university educated, non-academic person, like, as a kind of rogue scholar, I really appreciate that. And both of you have really helped me connect a lot of dots and fill in some gaps in my understanding. And, um, I think like, as I get older, become more politically aware, yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, so I appreciate that. But I'll stop calling you the new Paglia because I was in her, we can talk about this some other time, but yeah, she's a firebrand, but she was very angry, um, at the way academic feminism was going. And I'm sympathetic to that project, but, um, her intellectual life is more like about going back to like myth and religion, um, Catholicism, which I'm also some sort of sympathetic to these days because we've gone, because I think a lot of the, um, PMC virtue signaling is very crypto-Protestant. But, um, I really feel like a class analysis is not just about like being angry at white-collar, at the white-collar academic professional world, it's about like creating a program too. And I don't think she ever talked about programs. But that's also because the left was in so much trouble, there was no, um, figure like Bernie Sanders that people could rally around, you know, even he's a bit tarnished as well. So it was like she was, um, she was like the bad girl of academia. Yeah. Well, and she was, she was like wickedly funny and entertaining too, which she was. She had a really sharp tongue. Yeah. I, and I love that about her. Should love that. And good style too, which I appreciate. Yeah. Um, well, I, I finished your book, *Virtue Hoarding*, this morning after starting it last night. It's a little book, which I appreciate. It's, uh, polemic, which I also appreciate. Um, I like critical thinkers and I like people who are willing to take a stand and call things out to like, to ignite conversation and new perspectives. Um, and so you mentioned PMC, that was a new term for me when I encountered it through your work. And so maybe as like some groundwork for the conversation we're going to have about your upcoming book, *Criticizing Trauma Culture*, if you could just kind of lay out what the PMC is, the professional managerial class, and give some of that kind of, um, historical groundwork for the conversation.

Sure, sure, sure. So, um, there are a lot of orthodox Marxists who are like, um, no, that's not a new class. Marx never talked about them. Um, the professional managerial class, might, we could call it a stratum of wage workers, but I feel like their, their, um, lives, my, my life world is increasingly, um, separated and polarized from, um, working-class wage workers. So I don't think it's enough to say that the PMC is just another part of the working class. Um, they do not, however, own the means of production. Like, they don't own the New York Times, but they work at the New York Times. And they don't own enough capital to be able to live on interest, like trust fund babies or what, you know, Thomas Piketty in the French world calls rentiers. They don't, they can't live on rent, they have to live on salary. Salaries. They make really high salaries compared with blue-collar or non-credential, um, wage workers. And they're a stratum, if you like, of the, of wage workers who emerged really in the beginning of the 20th century in the United States with, um, the rise of professional organizations like the Association of University Professors, the American Association of University Professors, the American Medical Association, the bar. These were all organizations that were meant to regulate the practice of a profession and of professionals against capitalists. So it was actually very, very much about, um, a progressive era moment when we saw that the robber barons and capitalism was reducing the majority of working-class people to poverty and terrible lives that were brutish, short, and hard, as Marx said, or something like that, short, brutish, and hard, or something something like this, that they were wanting to improve the situation on behalf of workers and resisting the domination of capital as such. In 1900, the majority of American workers were agricultural workers with a rising number of industrial workers, like in factories. And by some census, um, analyses, the professionals only took up 3% of the, um, of laborers, workers in the United States. Today, their numbers are up to 25%. And the very, very, the most elite, um, members of the of this class are credentialed through, um, graduate, it's not just bachelor's anymore, they have graduate education, and then they have like a professional certification as well, like doctors getting that MD, and, um, lawyers passing the bar, university professors getting a PhD, getting a job, getting tenure. So it's, there are a lot of credentialing, um, hierarchies within the professional manager class. And the other distinction about them is they manage other people. Because people often say, well, are teachers and nurses part of the PMC? Because they have credentials. Uh, I would say they are, they become managers of other teachers, like principals, or, you know, head nurses, or things like that. So, um, in the early part of, um, the 20th century, you have American companies becoming more and more complex. And what you, what the companies needed was an level of elite managers to manage workflows, to manage the factory floor. And then increasingly today, because we don't make things in America anymore, we've outsourced that to China, what managers do is manage capital, actually. And they're very much part of finance capital. Um, the, um, a very short way of my putting my putting this is that professionals might have been on the side of the worker in 1900. Today, professionals are very much on the side of capital. They help manage capital, make it more efficient, and they help manage workflows to become more efficient. The funny thing is that the very billionaire class, like the capital class, believes also that professionals, like bureaucrats, stand in their way. Like, they just want to be like these niche, like, Superman, like Musk or Thiel or Mark Andreessen, even Mark Zuckerberg, even though he acts like all nice and everything. They just want to be able to do what they want to do and make money. And this class has been associated with regulators, with, you know, people have expertise but don't, you know, go for profit. The problem is that my class is totally on its knees to capital right now. Um, the, the bureaucracy within Washington, the regulatory bureaucracy that might have put a break on just like intense profit-taking and profiteering, they are part of what Trump calls like the Deep State or, you know, the, um, bureaucracy, federal employees. That's why Vivek Ramaswamy and, um, um, Musk want to fire all, all, um, federal employees because in the federal government, they still have that kind of like, break, breaking effect on, um, markets and profiteering. And corporations, for that matter. But, you know, I feel like when I wrote that book, I was very optimistic still. It was kind of between the two Bernie Sanders campaigns, before he got like [ __ ] over by the Democratic Party a second time. Um, but, um, today, I'm much more pessimistic. I'm so pessimistic about, um, uh, a left that can get its [ __ ] together. And, um, I have other projects that I hope will make this more clear. But to the, um, Democratic Party has become very much captured by the values of the professional managerial class. And Barbara and John Ehrenreich in 1977 noted that within left-liberal political organizing, what people call spaces, the college-educated credentialed elite were dominating the Democratic Party, the DSA even. And they said, this is not the way that it's always been in the United States. People came up through unions, people came up through city machines. You didn't have to have a college degree to have some kind of power within, you know, a left-liberal political organization. And this, the apotheosis of this kind of PMC, you know, um, management of optics and branding had to be in the Hillary Clinton campaign, and then in the Kamala Harris campaign. They did all focus groups, all big data. They're basically like depoliticized now. They're like technocratic optimizers. And they have no idea that Americans hated them as much as they did. MH.

And so what, like, you talk about how the PMC has promoted something called trauma culture. So can you just explain what trauma culture is, how you define it?

Um, I think, yeah, I think it's a term that, um, I coined that I'm going to talk about more in the book. When, and the book is just called *Traumatized*, but, um, trauma culture is comes out of like the New Left, like, anti-psychiatry movement. And it had all of these, um, great aspirations, right? Because in the public sphere of, you know, pre-1968, pre-72, um, we weren't supposed to talk about mental illness or mental suffering. These were shameful secrets that, um, people did not feel like they would, they were, um, sanctioned to share in public spaces. And that if they did share it with someone, what disqualified them from public participation. Today, we have the reversal. And the book sort of tells us how it happened, the reversal. But I'll just say, like, today, it's like, you, like, on the liberal side of things, like, if you don't share your trauma, you're actually not participating in public culture. It's like, there's this imperative for everyone to frame their own, their stories as somehow traumatic, and then frame and then, um, brand and shape their public image through the lens of trauma. And I know you've, um, talked about this in *Trauma Delic* as well, is that it is a, a contemporary and I would say social media-driven mythology of the self, that we contain trauma, that we look for cures, that we want to recover, and that somehow there is this like magical cure that we're always pursuing. And there are, you know, you know this, and I know there's like hundreds of thousands of charlatans out there all selling, um, the recovery part of trauma and recovery. But trauma culture then is a kind of liberal ta, liberal idea of, um, what qualifies an authentic person, um, in terms of like subjective knowledge and subjective experience. But it's so like individually driven that I feel like it's a form of blackmail of the other. It's like, I'm so traumatized, you've got to treat me this way. And that, I don't think was the intention of people like Robert Jay Lifton and Judith Herman, although they contributed to this. It's about a kind of radical decontextualization of human suffering and turning it into a brand of, um, public communication. So let me give you, like, an example of how, um, mental illness has been transformed and commodified by our time. This is something I know you're interested in too. Um, Thomas Eagleton was, um, chosen by Eugene McGovern, I think in '72, to be his, um, running mate. And McGovern was like this, um, very liberal but sort of from North Dakota, um, anti-war Democratic candidate. And it turned out that Eagleton had had serious depression in his life and had received electroshock therapy. And when this was revealed, um, McGovern dropped him like a hot potato. But the damage had been done because it was like he had such bad judgment to pick someone who had had, you know, a serious bout of mental illness, serious bout of depression. And so this kind of thing, this reveal of a secret, you know, disqualified Eagleton from participation in, you know, politics as such. He was like damaged goods. Yes, yes. And so we don't, so like, the positive thing is maybe we'd be more accepting of it. It hasn't been tested yet, actually. But like, someone who's been in electroshock therapy could run for high public office. But, you know, we're more tolerant society. So that's like the positive thing. Publicly tolerant. But I would say, like, in the liberal world, and increasingly in the conservative world too, like, the, the personal story of trauma is decontextualized, packaged in such a way that you can, um, participate in a culture of just, um, of individual suffering and recovery. And this allows this kind of community to have take place. But, you know, I think both you and I are interested in other narratives, in inserting that story of tra, of suffering for me, in a thicker context. For instance, like, one of the studies that I read, this is like really tragic now, considering what is happening in Palestine. Um, there was a study done in the '90s by, um, British psychiatrists who showed that, who discovered that young Palestinian children, even though they had been through so much trauma, what, what we would think of as trauma, like war, losing parents, losing homes, they were remarkably free from the classic American, um, symptoms of PTSD. And so, so the psychiatrists were like, trying to investigate why this happened. And, um, what, you know, the British psychiatrists discovered was that they had such a strong national myth or allegory. They felt themselves so powerfully part of a story bigger than themselves, which has to do with Palestine and the Palestinian people and their suffering and their, um, the meaningful struggle for Palestinian statehood gave even children a kind of resilience and robustness and allowed them to come out of their, like, individual focus and feel like, of course, I suffer, my people are suffering. You know, we have to struggle to create our state. And, um, this, this suffering dignifies me, makes me part of a community. And it's not just about my, um, symptomatology and my, um, my, my personal narrative. And I thought that was like, really, really compelling. There's also been a number of studies done where, um, trauma culture has been exported to, um, countries like Indonesia when it suffered that huge, um, um, tsunami and the earthquake, right? Like hundreds of thousands of people died there. Um, the American aid groups and USA, and also even, I think Doctors Without Borders, unfortunately, participate in this. They had trauma packs. And, you know, what were in them? They were like, um, feminine hygiene materials and antidepressants, like a dose of antidepressants. And the psychiatrists were all going in there like, we have to intervene right away. And they found that the people they treated began to speak of themselves as suffering from PTSD. And the people who they didn't treat, the people who they missed, or the people who resisted treatment, just didn't have the symptoms and didn't think about what was happening to them in this, like, very, very American professional class, um, idea of what suffering and its long tail looks like. So I'm really interested in how, um, trauma culture, um, sort of destigmatized personal suffering and private, you know, um, distress. A lot of it had to do with sexual abuse and also, um, Vietnam vets surviving the Vietnam War. But what they did was they gave all, all these symptoms because they created checklists, straight into the hands, they delivered them into the hands of psychopharmacology. Because once the DSM has a list of symptoms, then they can find the molecules that treat those lists of symptoms, and they can sell it to you one drug after another that's supposed to be curing your PTSD.

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I've had, uh, Edward Tick, who's a psychotherapist, on the podcast. And he's done a lot of work with Vietnam veterans and actually taking them to Vietnam to meet Vietnamese survivors. And, um, one of the things that he talks about is how the Vietnamese people who were subjected to so much in the Vietnam War showed less signs of trauma than the returning US veterans.

Yeah, yeah. I think it has a lot to do with that, that bigger, seeing yourself not as an isolated individual, that it's your own personal trauma and suffering, but, uh, you're part of a collective identity. And they were struggling for freedom, and they were part of a long anti-imperialist struggle. And, and they accepted the suffering as part of that struggle, right? So now we're so atomized, and we're so individualized in America, and we're so depoliticized that we can say that, um, you know, our suffering has no meaning except as an individual story. And therefore, the hero's journey, yeah, we have to recover because we have to recover in this lifetime, or else we'll never be cured, you know, it's just trying to. And the hero's journey is the mythologization of that recovery. Now, there are some things that are very valuable in it, but that's, it's very, very much a part of the New Left move of from leftism away from labor struggles to individual professional managerial class expert-driven struggles. Because if you even think about, like, the labor movement in the United States, like the, the struggles of the 1930s, when, I don't know, I don't know about the situation so much in Canada during the '30s, but, you know, 40% of Americans suffered from malnutrition. There was, um, massive unemployment, especially for men, young men. It was like 90% or something. Like, people rode the rails. There's a great, um, study of the Civilian Conservation Corps that people did about, you know, this thing that Franklin Delano Roosevelt started. He sent young men to the national parks to clear brush, just to give them a job or some food, right? And, um, they said that that when a young man reached a certain age, like 12 or 13, their parents would kick them out of the house because they couldn't feed them. They'd be like, your time to go, you know, make it on your own. And so this was the beginning of hobo, and homelessness is actually, um, these families were so stressed that they couldn't, you know, take care of their, their old, their eldest sons. And the eldest son was supposed to go out there. And the CCC, you know, helped conserve national parks, but it actually fed people because there was not enough food in the, and gave young men a mission. Yes, that's right. And they were, and they lived together, and they had, and it was a non-army sense of collective life. Eventually, many of them went to World War II. That's what solved the malnutrition problem was actually them being sent to World War II. But the, the larger issue is also like, this was the most radical time in America. People really thought capitalism was failing. And you have this sense of like, um, collective struggle, that we need to make a better world. We're suffering so much, right? And somehow, like, when we get to the 1950s, which is a really anti-communist moment, and everything, and materially is much better, that's where, like, the psychological sense of discontent and suffering become fully, you know, um, commodified. And, um, the labor movement, which is still active in the '40s and the '50s, is marginalized by the left thought of as the old left. And the new left is all going to be about, like, um, emotional work, inner life, and freedom and dignity of the individual. But our freedom and our dignity is tied to our collective existences. And trauma culture does this thing where it just creates this kind of radically decontextualized idea of suffering. So, um, Marx called the factory, the hidden abode of exploitation, where, you know, the capitalist would work the workers so hard and extract as much labor from him or her as possible, where, and that's where profit was produced, right? And I think that the new left didn't want to think about labor conditions or working work anymore. They became very, very obsessed with, especially on the feminist side, on new left feminism, became obsessed with child sexual abuse. And it was, and I call this, like, their obsession with the hidden abode of seduction. And this, one of the ways in which it became historically framed as important, um, as a social problem, was that in the early '60s, um, radiologists discovered in X-rays of little kids that their bones, like a lot of them had, um, signs of scarring that meant that they'd been beaten. And there became this, um, public kind of awareness of the prevalence of child abuse throughout, um, the United States. And by '72, Walter Mondale, who wanted to be president at the time, took the cause of child abuse awareness and passed laws about child abuse awareness that were that could garner bipartisan support. And one of the things about, um, the ways in which people framed child abuse in Washington was that it could happen in any class. Like, it wasn't just poor people, it wasn't just African-American people, it wasn't just people in the countryside, like this was happening everywhere. And this created a kind of moral panic about child abuse. It actually did not decrease the incidence of child abuse because it does actually correlate to, um, material deprivation. And, um, in the book, I call this the gentrification of child abuse of the social problem because it became framed and was, um, um, and confessionals came out where, um, you know, you could say, like, oh, this wealthy family, this perfect family is hiding a terrible secret. And in, um, one of these great public service made-for-TV movies called, um, *Something About Amelia*, Ted Danson and Glenn Close play a couple, um, in and parents in a family, which Ted Danson is abusing his daughter Amelia. And the narrative, and they're like, this great upper-middle-class couple in the 1970s. And, you know, this is the kind of thing I would watch as a kid, be like, I can't believe people live like that. And, you know, they have everything, but there's this abuse happening. They go into therapy, and Ted Danson, like, is welcome back in the family. There's so much trust in, like, social work and counselors, high school people, they're all reporting on it. And that was that came out in 1978. And by 1986, Oprah Winfrey went on TV in front of hundreds of millions of people and confessed her having been a victim of childhood sexual abuse. And so it became a media-produced social problem that actually did not look at a lot of the social science research about its prevalence and how to, um, how to deal with it as a social issue. And it became this like, like it could happen anywhere. And it inspired enormous, incredible hysteria, where the MCM Martin Nursery School trials, I talk about that. Do you know about that? Yeah. Where, yeah. But tell, tell people a little bit about it.

In California in the mid-'80s, the height of this kind of, um, um, child abuse hysteria, a schizo, a woman who eventually was diagnosed as schizophrenic, a schizophrenic, a very distressed mother said that her child had come home and said that he had been, um, sexually abused by a member of the McMartin family who ran a, um, nursery school in Southern California. The stories became more and more baroque, and the police, the investigating police and social workers managed to get stories out of all the children that said that they were forced to drink rabbit's blood, they were killing rabbits, there was a basement torture chamber. They showed them dolls, they like, this is what happened to me. They bulldozed the nursery school. There was no basement, right? Yeah, Satanic ritual abuse and Satanic panic and all that, you know. After 15 years of torturing this family, they were all released without, um, accus, you know, they were all released, they were all exonerated. There's actually no proof. The first trial condemned them. They, in the appeals, they discovered that the social workers and everyone were asking very suggestive questions to these people. And the woman who brought the first set of, um, accusations in this very, like, wealthy, cute beachside neighborhood in Southern California, she killed herself. So you can see how, um, the media is so much a part of the way we've talked about tra, we can't talk about trauma culture without talking about media right now. So a lot of media stuff was driven by television, best-selling novels at the time, newspapers. Today, trauma culture is promoted by social media, and it's liberal, you know, it's liberal social media. Yeah. And I can understand why it's attractive for people to share their stories to the public because you get so much sympathy and affirmation. It's a way of gaining prestige, especially if you're a politician or celebrity or someone who's working in healing culture, it's kind of becomes your credentials.

Yeah, that's right. That's absolutely right. I, I really do feel like it's become a new kind of credential. And, um, in the book, I really go into the, um, Instagram Live feed that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did after the January 6th, um, um, attacks on the Capitol, where she says, you know, she was hiding in the bathroom of her congressional office, and she heard all this knocking on the door and these people pounding, looking, saying, where is she? Where is she? And I was watching it because it was a lockdown, and also I was like, very much a fan of hers. And, um, in the middle of this with 400,000 people on Instagram, she goes, yeah, so, uh, I realized I, it brought back a lot of PTSD. And I know I haven't told a lot of you this, but, you know, I was sexually assaulted. And I'm so sorry, guys, I'm telling you this way, but, um, and this just brought back all the stuff. I'm like, girl, what are you doing? What the [ __ ] are you doing? Like, this is one of the most sacred and terrible things that can, forms of violation for women. And you're telling people on 400, and your 4, 400,000 followers, you don't even know people already attacking you for being superficial and blah, blah, blah, blah. From the, you're just making like, from a mother's point of view, I was just like, you're just making yourself more vulnerable, number one. And you're not talking about the politics of what actually happened because it's a political act. These people invaded Congress. It's not actually about you and your trauma. Yeah. Right.

Yeah, I wrote about how I thought peak trauma culture was when Gabor Maté did a pay-per-view interview with Prince Harry. And it was basically, basically a televised therapy session, even though Gabor Maté is not a therapist, he was a family doctor, not trained in psychology. Harry has gone on and really, really, like, I feel like he's so lost, you know. He made that, he went, underwent like EMDR on screen for the, um, made-for-Apple TV, um, series that he did with Oprah called *The Me You Can't See*. So it's the first time that he's done this. It's like he's leveraging his own, you know, um, notoriety, fame, whatever you like. And, um, you know, people's craving for secrets about the Royals, and people's craving for the fact that you can see that someone who has hundreds of millions of dollars still suffers from the shocking death of his mother. And he is very sincere and does therapy, like EMDR therapy on screen with Oprah for Apple TV. I had forced myself to watch it so none of you all have to watch it. But, um, that's all, it's all in the book too. I did not know about Gabor Maté. So he's looking, Harry legitimately is suffering. He's a human being who's really had to go through some fair extreme experiences, not only losing his mother in this public way, but now he's got on his, he's trying to leverage his recovery journey for publicity in the guise of helping people. He keeps saying, I'm helping people, I want to give back, like, give back what? You know, you want attention. This is what people. And what are people going to gain from watching Gabor Maté do therapy on you? Like, people, people who are really suffering might get some kind of void feeling of solidarity with him, but it's mostly spectacle. And, you know, you and I know, we all know how limited that kind of relief is, like, oh, I'm not alone for one second because I'm watching something on a screen. It's really sad. But peak, that is Prince Harry, Oprah, series, *The Me You Can't See*, and Prince Harry with Gabor Maté, that really is peak trauma culture. I feel like it's peaked also because of the Trump thing. But still, we had this whole thing in my department where everyone's like, after November 6th, do you want to check in and talk about your traumas? Like, this is so inappropriate. Like, this is the, if I am traumatized, my colleagues are the last people I want to talk to. Yeah. Right. But people did perform this, like, oh, I'm so upset. And I was just like, how do you even not, how do you assume that some of us are not happy, uh, that some of us might be happy for whatever reason, because Harris supported the genocide, or because we're Republicans, that we might have a different experience of November 4th? Me, no. Yeah. Might have felt like a great relief for some of us, right? And there's some shock in Floyd about the fact that she never condemned Israel. And, you know, what she got her ass handed to her. So even though, you know, that the guy coming in is bad, you're still like, well, you know, you were in power, you guys were in power, this was happening on your watch.

Yeah, I always felt that the, the left would eat itself. There's not a real sense of, uh, loyalty there, um, in this new left, anyway. The new left. Yeah, yeah.

Um, I, I want to talk a little bit about, you know, you've been talking about the focus on the individual. Let's talk about neoliberalism because, like, I know when I started to get into some of this stuff, it was a term that just felt kind of real hazy to me. I could, I could really think of, uh, Margaret Thatcher saying, there's no such thing as society, there is only the individual. And how everything kind of like runs downstream from that to this atomized individual where trauma culture playing into it, like it becomes your personal project to work on your personal trauma. And it's up to you to pay for the therapies. And of course, it's like a never-ending project because there's always more trauma. When you feel like you're done with your personal trauma, then you got to go back and heal your ancestral trauma. And on and on and on. And I see that as just like part of, like, the freedom of, of liberalism. Like, I think Mark Fisher talks about this, or Byung-Chul Han, maybe, when we get too much freedom, we kind of like fill all of that space and time and resources with these little projects, with these personal projects, whether those are relationships, or keeping up my social media account, or healing my trauma. Um, and so this is some stuff that's just kind of like going through my mind. I wonder if any of that, uh, resonates.

I, I feel like, um, there, there was an attempt, like in the '60s maybe, to do like systems therapy, where R.D. Laing thought, like, I can't just treat an individual, I have to treat his whole family, or her whole family, because mental illness is so deeply connected to, especially for young people, connected to family systems, right? And I was like, really into that for a while, but I never found anyone who actually practiced that. Yeah. Also, you can't drag your family into therapy with you. You just can't, because they don't want to. You're not going to make them do it. But, you know, on, um, I like to talk about, like, the decontextualization of trauma culture. It's like, it plucks us all out of context so that we're in this void. What you were talking about, maybe about this freedom, is about just like being in a gravity-less void, which is very much about social media and being online, where you are having to reinvent your own mythology completely devoid of any connection to other people. So, um, it can put you into, it can put trauma therapy actually into all of these really [ __ ] up situations because if you look at, um, Robert Jay Lifton's work with the Vietnam vets, right? And he wrote that book called like *Homeward Bound* about PTSD. It really was the first book that brought into, um, consciousness what the Vietnam veterans were suffering from. And some of the most important two or three people whose case studies he worked on, partially because, um, a woman who's now like completely lost to this history, named Sarah Taylor, a nurse at the VA in Boston, brought this man to, um, Lifton's attention, was that they, he called him the My Lai Survivor. The My Lai Massacre, Seymour Hersh wrote about, where there was like a bloodless run-of-the-mill killing of civilians in the My Lai peninsula, in the My Lai area, that took place over three months. They just went in and killed 30,000 civilians, maybe more. And, um, 3,000 a day or something like that. 3,000 civilians were killed a day. And the My Lai Survivor was really suffering from all these symptoms that we call PTSD now, because he was a witness to it. He didn't stop it, but he saw, like, his colleagues from Company Charlie, like bayonet kids, eviscerate, um, old people, drive women into hiding places and then rape them and kill them. Like, and his PTSD was actually about his fear of being a whistleblower because he had been to a congressman, and he was afraid, like, his former, um, vets were his former brigade members were going to kill him in the United States. And so Lifton talks about, like, the journey, the hero's journey, and his journey, and how we're healing. And I was like, at some point, you have to condemn the war. I mean, at some point, you have to look at this situation. It's not, he called it like extreme situations of atrocity, and he calls him the survivor, and he's a prophetic survivor, and he's going to teach us all how to be now. And I was like, okay, this guy was, did this incredibly courageous thing. He couldn't stop anything, and he was powerless to do anything while he was there. And, um, he was witness to one of the most horrific atrocities of civilian killing in the Vietnam War, which Seymour Hersh uncovered step by step. But we don't hear in *Homeward Bound* from from the psychologist anything about the context of what happened, the larger massacre context that was happening. So when we think, when I was reading a lot of this as the Gaza stuff was happening, I was writing this, where everyone's, oh, why are we not more upset? We did this in Vietnam. We did this ourselves. We killed Vietnamese civilians indiscriminately by the tens of thousands. And it came up, and Hersh actually did all the research. Like, did your own research. There was an order from the highest commander in Vietnam that said, I want body count. Every company has to tell me how many Communists they killed today. MH. So these, of course, the Communists were like, in, they were guerrilla, they were fighting guerrilla warfare. It was very, very hard to find them, right? They were. And so Company Charlie just decided, we're going to kill everybody we see, and we're going to call them a communist. Which is what's happening in Gaza too. Like, we're just going to kill everyone, and we're going to call them a terrorist. And that context for PTSD's emergence as a set of symptoms has no political or ethical or moral core. We're just, if you've killed a hundred people and you feel really bad about it, we're going to try to cure, cure you. Now, I'm sure, like, maybe you felt forced to do this, but, you know what? You did kill a hundred civilians, right? So there is this, like, um, political atrocity context that's not just about an individual's recovery. Like, we all have to figure out how we're complicit in situations like this. And what I did in the book was I really thought about how it was chain of command, and it was pressure from like the managers of the war, was like, please bring me those numbers. Those numbers are not good enough, right? It's a quota, like a factory worker. Exactly. And so it was like a protocol of control. And the person at the bottom does all the killing, gets the PTSD, feels the most powerless. So it's actually about the labor conditions and the authority conditions in a chain of command that is so deeply corrupted from the very top, right? And just like the, the labor struggle, it's up to that person at the bottom to then reintegrate into society, uh, to seek out therapy for their trauma and their burnout. Now, like a work, right, burnout, or whatever, however work damages you. Well, their their inability to reintegrate, you know, like, and so then we see that now with a lot of returning veterans, not finding any solutions in the psychopharmaceutical, uh, industry, as they're going down to Peru or Ayahuasca healing or all kinds of different things. But it's up to them to do that. Yeah. And, you know, I was reading about the Ayahuasca stuff and I was thinking about how it's so much part of a ritual that's part of a community with a long history and tradition, because we don't feel, we don't have those anymore. So we're like trying to poach on other people's rituals, um, extreme experiences to solve our problems. But, you know, we, it, it's not that we can't build those rituals again. It's not that we don't have community here, or that this can't happen here. It's just that you feel like you're so alienated, you've been ejected from the industrialized world, and you have to go to the global South and try to, um, poach some solutions from them. But it's also because you think there's going to be the perfect cure. I, I'm sure you have to. And I, I've been through a lot just this past year, but also, you know, I was pretty [ __ ] up as a kid. My parent, my father beat me, my mother was extremely cruel to me. And, you know, it's taken me this long, getting older, to realize it's never going away. It's never going away. Those, the effects of that kind of thing never go away. I can rail all I want against the injustice of like, why do other people have better families, or, um, try to find like, the perfect therapy, or whatever. It's not going away. And it's, if you make your peace with that, and you see, and you accept, and this is like a quasi-spiritual thing that you have to get to, I think, I guess that I had to get to was just like, accept this is my lot in the world. This is my struggle. And it actually makes me more connected to other people because I see it in them too. Yeah. Yeah.

Need to make it my identity. I don't want sympathy from people who don't know me. But I feel like any knowledge that I have of, you know, the damage that it's done to me and to the culture, I can try to articulate.

Yeah, I, I think that way about my own difficult experience too, is that, you know, over time, I've come to see it as a kind of gift in that it's made me incredibly empathetic towards others, and it causes me to take action to try to affect things in my community, and then to use whatever skills I have to write about it, or do podcasts, or create media around it, questioning the kind of unquestioned narratives around the stuff. Which brings us to like, you know, uh, one of my psychological heroes, James Hillman, his big critique of the developmental psychology view of childhood trauma being the source of our adult problems, and therapy's, uh, insane kind of obsession with that, and always looking backwards to find the root cause. He said that ultimately that depoliticizes the individual because it consulates the wounded child archetype, which is inherently non-political, because the wounded child is powerless, which is one of the aspects of the, the traumatic experience. And I completely agree with that. And you're nodding your head, and I think like, this is where the, the healing culture needs to become more politically aware and more politically active, which I think is actually part of the healing of these childhood wounds. You know, um, um, Robert Jay Lifton said, you know, the Vietnam vet can turn his trauma into an anti-war position. And I feel like when he was writing in the '70s, these men were so wounded, it's like, we can't, he called them like the pro-war prophets, who could come back to society and show us the way. I think that was way too premature. That was premature. And when it was also from the point of view of a professional who had the distance to be able to do that. But I think that if you, and he, like, privileged, and a lot of feminists privileged this notion of the survivor who has this, um, privileged view of things. And I, I don't think, sorry, that's the hero's journey in a nutshell, the return, and what are you bringing back to heal the, the culture, the society, right? The gift. That's right. That's right. It's very aspirational and very idealistic.

Aspirational. And one of the things that kind of bothered me about it was that it was so formulaic, like, yeah, here's the person, here's a trauma, here's your survival, here's your return, here's your prophecy. And, but what I wanted to get back to this idea of neoliberalism as a kind of creating and promoting this idea of a social vacuum, which is really important for understanding like how people or individuals then started to relate to institutions and each other. Like, you can't depend on anyone, you're disconnected from everyone. Your, the family unit fights for survival, the individual fights for survival. It's only about this kind of like competition that we, um, are engaged in. And you could even say that trauma then becomes like a brand, a brand or a marker of prestige in the competition for more resources, more attention, etcetera. Um, I, I do really believe that there are many ways to survive trauma. It can make you more empathetic, like you, or it can make you more psychopathic. Like, I survived this, why can't y'all survive this? Like, y'all [ __ ] so there are two ways of there. It's not guaranteed at all that a survivor will have a higher sense of ethics, you know. And whether or not this is for their healing or not, you know, there are plenty of people who are just total psychopaths because they survived to hardship and they're like, you know what? I have no empathy for anyone else. Right? It's like, kind of the Trump thing. It's like, well, come on, get over it. Pull up your bootstraps, get to work. You know, I did it. Yeah. And that could very well be the reaction too of a survivor. They're they're not always going to be better people. But

What I was going to talk to tell you about with regard to the child thing is very much about what I was, what was driving in the psychological imagination of the professional managerial class. They don't like people with less power demanding less power and fighting for it and making their lives hard. That's why they love helpless victims like children. That's another reason why, like children, be, and I think this become like deified, yeah. So anyone, so you're, um, always like saving someone and that's like the, yeah, right, absolutely. Or the infantilization of anyone who has a difference, who has to, um, then be accommodated all the time. Yeah, I, I, you know, I find this part of liberalism so condescending and so destructive. But, you know, I'm in Academia. I'm like in the core of this, um, you know, the cauldron where all this stuff is made. And, um, one of my colleagues literally said, because we're talking about attendance, and she literally said the other day, "I don't care if they're lying to me. It's okay. They lie. I'm just, I'm not going to take attendance." And I'm like, "Wow, then, you know, you're just promoting lying." Yeah, no accountability. You think you're being tolerant, but you're actually promoting lying. You're say, like, lying's okay. Yeah. How's that different from Trump, right? Yeah.

Just speaking about the, um, the kind of condescension. I mean, that's one of the things that drives me crazy when I hear, uh, liberals on whatever platform it is, the kind of condescension that, um, a lot of these, the tone that a lot of these women take when they're speaking to the public. And sitting there, you know, my wife and I, we're in our 50s, and there's like, uh, AOC talking to us like we're 12-year-olds or something. Like there's something you really need to understand. And and the fingers come together. And it just, and it amazes me that, um, other, it doesn't rile other people. Uh, it does. It does. I mean, that's, but I think there's so, so much support for that kind of thing, right? And, um, I think it has a lot to do with this infantilization, that it's attractive for people to be in a depoliticized, powerless position in a way, because then you don't have a responsibility to go out and take action to affect change. But you, you know, what I also feel like it produces when you accept helplessness as a child and you like embrace the child within to feel that powerless, produces a lot of anxiety. Yeah, exactly. Totally. Yes. And then every, like, "Oh my God, everyone has mental ill, mental health problems. There's so much anxiety and depression." It's like, yes, when you feel like you are helpless and you are just waiting for other people to recognize you, to accommodate you, to see you, then you're going to be [ __ ] anxious all the time. Totally. Everyone's not going to do whatever you want them to do all the time. And, um, the problem is that there is no powerful. I'm trying to formulate it. I've got a bigger project on responsibility. There is no powerful rhetoric of adult responsibility and maturity from the left. It all comes from TRD. People like, "God, you know, I want to be a trid woman. I can have, I can have, I can be a housewife and I can do this," and like that's what I do. And it's up to every man to be a provider and like, yeah, yeah. And my man will be a man. It's like, which I get it, but it's like an overcompensation, right? Yes, yes. And so there's that like weird, you know, very stylized R, um, rendition of Trad. But on the left, we have just like babies. Like, "Oh, we're just, we can be anything we want and, you know, please recognize us. We're in a polycule. I'm Amorous. I'm just, I'm doing this whole thing. I'm do, you know, my hair looks really disgusting, but this is my thing. You've got to like recognize me." And everyone's about like recognition. And it's actually not about recognition when you're grown up. It's about respect. You have to respect people and respect yourself. And if you talk like that, and the left, they're like, "Oh, you're such an an authoritarian." But there's a, there's a kind of like scary peer-to-peer authoritarianism that polices left, um, relations. I mean, a lot of therapy, it, uh, it cultivates passive aggression. And therapi language is very passive aggressive. It is still looking for control and power, but in a very underhanded, nefarious way, right? You agree? I, there's this kind of, um, idea that just like expressing your feelings, getting in touch with your feelings, and then expressing your feelings, and everyone just doing that as transactions, as an intersubjectivity, like that's enough. Not enough, actually. And oftentimes, you can't directly express your feelings. It's not the right context for that to happen. And part of being a grown-up is being responsible to your context and being responsible to your feelings to the point where you can understand, like, maybe this is not the right time for me to express these feelings. And because I, I respect the context of my, um, situation. So like in the, um, you know, when we were in Zoom world, um, a lot of white-collar workers would get on Zoom. Like we'd be in these alienating meetings and your boss would basically, like the chair of my department would ask you to check in. And you, and everyone would be like, "Yeah, I'm okay, but..." And I'm like, "Why? Why are you like taking this order? You don't need to express yourself. Like, we need to help our students get a good education right now because they're being [ __ ]. Let's try to get that together. Let's try to figure out how we can make this work as best we can. We do not need to be checking in with each other and producing ourselves like babies with this kind of expressivity." So it's like, it's this whole thing about the blurring of boundaries, like you were saying earlier, the blurring of boundaries or the dissolving of boundaries between the the private and the public. Um, my personal pain becomes public spectacle. But then also, this is a great point, that how it bleeds into quote unquote professional spaces, where we're sharing our private struggles in a professional setting where it's just, uh, not relevant and not appropriate. And so that has also has something to do with like the therapize, is like, all, all there are no real boundaries around that stuff. And yeah, that's a problem. It, it is really a problem because then you can have like the most distressed person take everyone hostage in a group. Yeah, I've had that happen in meetings. Sure. Yeah, we've all seen this happen now. And there has to be a clear way of, because we don't have a left protocol for mutual respect, but I feel like we have to come and strength. People like us who have similar points of view have to come up with a language where if this happens to us in meetings and organizations, we can say, you know, "I'm sorry you feel that way, but it's really not appropriate for you to express this in this way now, or we need to get this done." So if you do this now, in like left spaces, you're canceled for being like, whatever, like a horrible person. But there has to be a way in which we can reinstate this idea of higher expectations about people behaving like adults and reaching goals together. A shared objective reality has to be strengthened for us to be able to change that reality, not the sharing of our subjective, highly subjective, irrational experiences. And it's okay if we don't share those experiences with people. Yeah, I don't even think those people really. Okay, so here's the other thing I was thinking about was like, maybe they're just so lonely. And I have people we could share our private, most for you know, intimate forms of distress with. Maybe these people actually don't have that kind of relationship. So actually work or political organizing becomes that space, becomes your support group. Yeah, that's really terrifying. Rather than your like action group or your professional group, it becomes a support group. And once again, it is the blurring of the boundaries. But that makes you so vulnerable to manipulation by your boss. Oh, totally. Yeah, they've got the inside scoop on everything that's going on in your life. Why would you do that to yourself? Yeah, self-protection. And I mean, the trauma people would say, well, that's that's a result of your trauma is your lack of healthy boundaries. So if we're going to heal that, if we, if we accept that, then the way to heal that is start to like build up those boundaries. Uh, you know, have some discernment around when it's appropriate to share private things. And so that is part of your healing process, if you buy that. That's right. Yeah, like it's got to be enacted in in the culture. That's right. That's right. And it's got to be enacted in such a way that shows that it produces more positive outcomes for the collective, right? Yes. Yeah. Real socialism. Like we, like if we get backed down with everyone's sensitivities, everything we just like police each other. But what are we actually trying to get here? Well, that's what I think like, is this somehow consciously or unconsciously, uh, like kind of indoctrinating everyone into this trauma culture? Is it a way for the neoliberal elites to maintain power because we're all so busy like in our little hamster cages trying to tend to our personal trauma and making space for each other and all of that, that like nothing's being challenged, nothing's changing. Um, you know, in my darkest moments of conspiracy theory thinking, I think it's really, really good operational ideology because ideological work is about keeping the status quo. So people who are so self-involved and infantilized will never question or be able to work together with others to change the status quo. So like in my darkest moments, yes, I, yeah, like therapy is the new opiate of the masses. Oh, absolutely. And there's so much bad therapy out there. Therapists are being trained badly. Insurance companies control your access to therapy. Everything is be cognitive behavioral because you have to have produce results right away. And therapists don't feel like, I don't want to blame them, it's the formulation of the profession, but they feel like they have to do the things that are e, they have to chase the trends so that they can look attractive and distinctive, stay relevant. Yeah. And they also have to write the reports to make the insurance company give you more time because it has to know that it's working. And so, um, and then there's a kind of expectation that you have, you know, what we talked about before, complete recovery, which we've talked about is not fantasy. Yeah, total fantasy. So what do you do when you are just trying to create some kind of healing without the trajectory of complete, um, recovery? I feel like that the whole notion of, we have to change our whole notion of healing, actually. Totally collective. You know, P capital is so powerful now. And we can't have a lot of babies running around thinking that thinking they're left progressives because babies will not change the world. Yeah, that's right.

Um, maybe to to finish up, talk a little bit about, okay, so on the right now, all the pundits, all the talking heads, throw the word socialism around and and accuse people on the liberal left of being socialism socialists and pushing, uh, socialist agendas. And and that's a danger to our democracy and all of that. But what I think you've pointed out, and maybe help me understand through virtual orders, is that, uh, what we see in neoliberalism isn't real socialism. So could you draw, draw a line there and and illustrate the distinction between socialism, um, versus what the right thinks is socialism? Real socialism, we're not even close to that yet. But we have some institutions that came out of like, that are social, quasi-socialistic, like the post office. I don't know. What Canada, Canada's more has more like democratic socialism. But, uh, public schools in America, like you pay taxes, you send your kid to school. They would like, the right would like to privatize all of that. And, um, the whole idea that, um, we, we could have shared ownership of the means of production, like the workers owning their companies. We're so far away from anything like that. And yet our society would not function if there were not these like, um, still quasi-socialistic institutions like public schools. You can move into a neighborhood, check your kid into that public school. If you show, um, proof of residency, not pay a dime. It's incredible. That's quasi-functioning socialism. Now, of course, because the public school budgets are cut so badly, um, we parents for all this, all of this stuff. But some progressive public schools, like in Minnesota, actually, they provide meals too. And it comes out of everyone's taxes. And their tax, don't their contribution to a public treasure that then gets redistributed in this way. Um, well, see, we don't have anything like that outside of, yeah, very limited spaces. So I don't know what they're talking about.

Well, as neoliberalism becomes the norm in North America, um, you know, we see it up here too. And what is, you know, starting in like the 60s and 70s was a social democracy. There's a lot of social support. But as that, I think you call it, uh, through, um, austerity. And I was thinking about that word. Okay, so it's like, right, it's, it's pulling budgets. Right. And so what we see happen here is when those budgets get pulled, it's up to the individual schools and the parents to raise money for things like food programs, extracurricular activities, rely on volunteerism. So again, like that, to me, is like real tangible, okay, what is neoliberalism? What are its effects? That to me is a really, uh, tangible example of it in action. I was telling like my husband and tell, because he grew up in Germany, but I'll tell anyone who cares to listen, but I grew up at the tail end when public schools and especially in New York were really, really well-funded. We had a dedicated music room. We had instruments that they lent out, like violins, so we could just take home. Like, I could just take home. We didn't, my parents didn't have to pay for any of that stuff, right? My son grew, so I grew up in a suburban New York, um, public school system that was very close to the Bronx. It was not a wealthy neighborhood. It was not a wealthy town. Our neighborhood was like maybe a little wealthier than the rest of the town, but we had like arts education, really great, um, music program. And the parents were constantly like doing fundraisers for this, right? And we had dedicated music rooms. My son's like grew up in a very wealthy part of Orange County. All of the stuff parents had to raise money for. There was no dedicated art room. There was no dedicated music room. Like it was a multi-purpose room. It's like, so sad, you know? We had like a music studio and we had an art studio and we had an a [ __ ] auditorium. And it was not a fancy school, but they don't even have this here in California. Partially because of the, um, tax revolt of the 1970s and '80s. So if you starve the public treasury, of course, there all be going to be these private voluntaristic things that I have to fill it in for. But what's even scarier is public-private partnerships where private corporations will come in and suck the blood out of the public treasury. For instance, schools now pay for-profit private companies to administer standardized testing. In California, thing called STAR testing. And so the call, um, these, there are a number of private, well, they're they call themselves not-for-profit, but they're privately held companies that sell standardized testing to the schools. Like there are vultures just wring profit from every gap in the public treasury. Like this, like it's hard. If I was to really think about this stuff, like this stuff literally does drive me crazy. It drives me crazy that students have to take out student loans that allow them to pay for higher education and City Bank makes money on the interest because the government pays the interest, federal dollars, public dollars to City Bank when they're in school. The moment they're out, they're paying interest on their student loans to get that education. You know, like this kind of stuff should be motivating us to act together. But we're so, um, bereft of practicality and solidarity. We don't have the attention span to do this. We love like some crazy new identity. I, I really do feel like it is conspiracy theory where there are, they do have like, you know, um, scabs on left organizations to like drop the crazies in and, you know, make it. I mean, look, you can look at things like MK Ultra. I mean, this [ __ ] is real, like mind control experiments on the public here in Canada at McGill University in Montreal, it was going on. Know, I know. So like that to me, that stuff is so insane that when I do spin off and I think, well, maybe this is all part of a neoliberal agenda to keep us depoliticized and powerless. Well, maybe it is. But also ideology. It's called ideology. And, you know, the, um, great critics of of ideology, like the Frankfurt School and George Lukacs, they're not taught in schools because everyone's like, "Oh yeah, they're such elitists. We need a program of education and ideology critique." This is like my, well, that would be, uh, handing over the tools for the dismantling of the master's house. Yeah, I don't know. It's just, it's, well, we have to do that, you know, um, at grassroots level. Like, and I think it's important to have voices like yours out there where you're not speaking in, you know, academia-ese, but you're speaking in working-class language that I, even a guy like me, can understand. Although when I read your work, like you, for for people like you, I've stopped being able to, um, do that academic thing anymore. I can't. If I want to, I just don't see any point in it. And I don't want to talk to those people. And I feel like, um, the general intelligence, the the average or ordinary unhappy critical thinker is my audience, not some like fancy English professor Marx who's going to judge me no matter what I do. And believe me, they do judge me. So.

Well, I think you got to, like, you got to speak to and inspire the people who are directly affected by a lot of these policies, um, because they're the ones feeling it and they're the ones that are angry about it. But it's not like my colleagues are not affected by these policies. It's that the has been so captured by the values of the managerial class of managers and their bosses. And then like the fragmented, the fragmentation of ident politics too. They're afraid. They are [ __ ] afraid. Yeah. And it's not like their lives are like just so great. No, but they can't get themselves on the side of the people. No matter what they do. Scary, because the the proletariat, the the dirty working class are like unpredictable, right? And don't play by the rules. No. And so, you know, no matter how awful I think Trump is, like, I do feel like it was a finger in the eye of these like lip, of these libs. And maybe like Trump is scary enough to really wake the the liberal left up and go, "Okay, maybe like we've been ignoring these people." Not me. We've been too distant. Maybe we got to get down on Bernie Sanders level and start talking to people. I wish that were the case, but an unforced error was so huge. Yeah. Can't actually go back to recover from that. Yeah. Oh, no, I think so too. But this has been a great pleasure talking to you. Uh, yeah, I feel like I've just been in, uh, Professor Lou's class for the past hour and 15 minutes or so. It's great. Boring, but, um, it was very fun. Very fun to talk to you. And you'll edit this down at some point. You'll let me know when it goes up online to. Totally. And, uh, when do you think traumatized is going to be available? I think at the end of this year, 2025, I'm hopeful. Oh, wow. No sooner? Okay. And in the mean, slow, my, um, my editor is still like going through the edits. So eventually it'll, it'll, it'll be better for the long process. Sure. And in the meantime, you've got a substack, clue anon, which is funny, C L I Anon. And, uh, you do monthly meetings as well as you're doing, uh, you know, writing according to like, what's going on in the culture and stuff like that. But I also love that you focus on like film too. Um, I'm a film professor, so I have to. But yes, we do monthly reading and discussion groups at clue and on for paid subscribers. We have a really great community right now. It's growing. I mean, it used to be really intimate, but it's growing. And, um, it, it's a great place actually to meet people from all over the world. People who participate in that, um, discussion group, people work in the government, people who work from New Zealand, Australia, Poland, England, Wales, um, people who are West Coast of Canada. I was at the last one. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And, um, it's a place. It's not recorded. We have a lot of freedom with regard to what we say, but there's a lot of mutual respect too. I really, really enjoy that part of it.

Well, one of the things I want to see more of is, um, for public intellectuals to be paying more attention or, you know, have some background in aesthetics, art, and pop culture. Yeah, because that's also what speaks to the people. Yeah, you know, what an art should not be a specialized thing for rich people. It should be the aesthetic education should be equally distributed across all of society. Well, see, now you sound like Camille Paglia. Yeah. Did she say that? Okay. Yeah, yeah. She spoke a lot about that. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. So maybe you are the new Paglia. Even if you, maybe, maybe. Okay. All right, Katherine, thanks a lot. Thanks. Take care. [Music]