#56 The problem with Trauma Culture - Catherine Liu

Welcome to a Wonder Junkie podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Anderson. Nobody knows what's going on. Nobody knows. Nobody has the faintest idea. The best guesses are lies, you may be sure of it. Today, I had a conversation with Katherine Lou, who I heard first on Brian James' podcast. And I also had Brian on the podcast. He wrote a book called Trauma, Delic, and Katherine's in her second book right now. It's almost out, called Traumatized.

I find this subject fascinating. It's about trauma culture and some of the implications that, um, are there when we start to focus on the individual and trauma. Katherine and I disagree about a lot of different things, which I think is important to have conversations with people that do not think like us and to be able to hold different perspectives. And especially in our culture now, where we're seeing a lot more division and people are more tribal, and they're becoming more, um, stuck in these, um, different ways of thinking without being able to hear the other side. So I would like to encourage you to just listen with an open mind and take on some new perspectives. And if you don't agree, that's great. Um, I think it's important to look at different people's perspectives with an objective mind instead of it being something that offends you or triggers you. So either way, enjoy this episode and don't forget to rate the show on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube, and share the episode. Enjoy.

All right, Katherine, thanks for joining me today.

All right. Yeah, I listened to your podcast with Brian James, who I've had on this show, and I really enjoyed talking with him and exploring some of his ideas. And I really enjoyed your guys's conversation, which then led me to reading one of your, um, blog posts, I guess you could call it, about culture. And, um, I think the title was "The Problem with Trauma Culture." I ended up reading that twice, and it was really enjoyable. And I thought, more people are starting to come forth with some of these ideas, but you've been obviously spending quite a bit of time putting them in order and hacking them out. And I want to, I want to explore that with you today, if you're cool with that.

Sure, sure. I have a book coming out next spring with Verso called Traumatized, which is a critique of trauma culture.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I feel like there's a lot of people that are starting to resonate with a lot of what you two are both saying, and there's some other folks coming forth too. And so I'm curious, what the heck got you here where you're, you're spending all of your hours trying to write a book like that? Because that takes a lot of energy and passion and stuff. So obviously there's some roots there.

Um, well, I'm in revision, so the big heavy lifting part is over, I think. But, um, here's what, uh, brought me here. Um, I was kind of in the ground zero at Yale when trauma studies was invented. And, um, I was really interested in psychoanalysis. And without putting too fine a point on it, I was a pretty traumatized kid at the time. So like, something about these courses about trauma and psychoanalysis resonated with me. And there were these, um, two very famous, well, one famous professor, Shoshana Felman, and Kathy Keth, who was an upcoming young woman who was teaching these courses at the time. And I was really into it at first. And then when I finished taking their courses, I kind of walked away from it. And it took me years of processing, like, you know, like 40 years of processing what that was about. And also, um, it seemed to me that it was just very much in the air at the time. It was the 1980s. And, um, it became something very important for people in academia who are doing deconstruction and psychoanalysis to deal with.

Tell me if this is like, too in the weeds, okay?

No way, I'm enjoying. So go forward.

So, um, in doom scroll on the, um, on, um, Joshua Citarella's interview with me, I went into detail about this. I don't really talk about the autobiographical stuff in the book. But, um, what was happening was that was so much part of popular discourse. And I was trying to find ways of connecting my own experiences, now they call it, you know, immigrant trauma, intergenerational trauma, whatever, to what was happening in the world. And, um, one of the things that people were able to talk about as a kind of indication of how enlightened we were, was trauma, right? Through the psychoanalytic lens. And this was the end of the Cold War. So human rights discourse was coming up. Second wave feminism was talking about sexual, um, abuse. And post-traumatic stress had moved from just being something that men experienced after war because of the Vietnam vet movement to bring PTSD into the discourse. And, um, Judith Herman had just written her book, Trauma and Recovery. Like, I wasn't really aware of all of this stuff, but, you know, it was, it offered like a facile way to enter into public discussions about, you know, private suffering. And feminism was always about the personal becomes the political. Looking back on it now, at the end of the Cold War, it was really a way for liberals and people like deconstructive feminists and psychoanalysts to deal with suffering without having to deal with class. And it was a very, and Ronald Reagan was in power then. And, um, you know, we were, I was into, you know, just the understanding what it was to publicly or, you know, academically talk about this kind of stuff. And it became very focused on in trauma studies, the Holocaust, and how you couldn't speak about, so many people who survived had so much difficulty speaking about the, um, event. And they were talk, and these women, these scholars, most of them women at the time, um, were talking about these things that, um, were about fragmentation and, you know, repression and PTSD and all this other stuff. And I was probably going through a version of this myself with regard to my family. But it allowed me to intellectualize what was happening. But looking at this now, you know, this, what, looking back at it now, it was really a great way to individualize, um, suffering and to not talk about social or political consequences. But also to make America, an American discourse, because this was all coming out of America, um, the most enlightened, the most liberal thing. Because when the, when the wall fell and when, you know, communism was falling, this discourse went way through the roof. Like, I had, um, a research assistant do a, um, Lexus Nexus study of the incidents of the word trauma in public discourse in like, major magazines in 1970, and it goes kind of like this, and then about '88, '85, it goes like this. And after, you know, after 9/11, it goes like way up. And one of the things that these people talked about, you know, from Oprah to my professors at Yale, was if we can talk more openly about our private suffering and our traumatic past, we make a better society. Well, at the same time that you have trauma discourse, trauma going like this, you have inequality going like this, you have, um, wages going like this, you have job growth in the center of the country going like this, you have, um, working-class life expectancy going like this. So I'm not saying it's correlated or positive, but I'm just saying all the promises of like, these celebrities and academics talking about trauma did not make America a better country or a better place for the majority of Americans who are non-college educated, working-class people. So in a way, that's like the background to all of this stuff. But, um, I, you know, I, I also think that, uh, um, it, it took a lot of, um, trauma culture takes minority experiences and makes them, um, have to represent suffering for, um, liberal consumption. So, so, you know, you can have, you can tell certain stories as a person of color if you engage in the trauma discourse, in the trauma culture discourse. And this was also like the beginning of a really powerful move towards identity politics. And it was a way for the institutions to assimilate the promises of the Civil Rights and women, and women's movement without doing any kind of economic redistribution or analysis, and just giving everyone like symbolic kudos, like, oh, we see you, we see you. And it still goes on today. And, um, fascinating. This is, I, I don't know if you've read "Virtue Hoarders," but, you know, this class, the professional managerial class that I'm a part of, that therapists are a part of, that the media elites are a part of, really are the greatest proponents of understanding suffering and damage completely in this individualized way. And since that time, since like the '80s, the self-help trauma, um, recovery movement, because you have to have your promised recovery, like Judith Herman's book is called Trauma and Recovery, it, you know, everyone's like looking for a solution. It's like a multi-billion dollar, like, $500 billion industry because, um, people are searching for solutions. We don't have good healthcare. We don't have good mental health coverage. The way that mental health practitioners are being trained is awful. Um, the insurance companies are rationing mental health care, and we have a mental health crisis. And so people are looking everywhere, online, Instagram, whatever, looking for, you know, influencers who will tell them, like, do EMDR, do CBT, um, um, behavioral modification therapies. And, um, Americans are like hungry for purchasable solutions because a lot of these promises. I have some of the books here. There's a book on my bookshelf called "The End of Trauma." They're promising that they can like eliminate your, um, PTSD. These doctors, right? And then it becomes an interesting, um, there's an incentive to market and tally up how much trauma you have as like a virtuous component, right? And I've heard you speak to that, and I've seen it myself, to where if you're not doing the work, or you're not trying to do the healing, or you're not trauma-informed, you're not welcome to the conversation. And it seems to obviously be only in these certain categories of folks that have already met the hierarchy of needs. They've got the food, shelter, water. Now they have time. And it becomes a self-absorbed, self-obsessed movement from workshop to workshop, from event to to event, from book to book. And I think that's the component because we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, you know? Because I've read a lot of books. As a fireman for 20 years, I'm like, okay, what's going on here? What's the root of suffering? What's the nature of addiction? And I've come across some things that are awesome inside of those things. You take nuggets from it. You don't want to say that trauma is not real, or be uncompassionate, and that's not what you're doing. But even Peter Levine, I have him coming on in a week, and I'm excited to talk to him because he's come up with some ideas about somatic and, and elements like that about the body keeps the score and doing somatic practice. And it's all there. But at what point do we just keep healing forever and not go back to work, or not go back to culture, or not have a bigger, larger perspective that has to do with, well, the culture's sick, and why should we feel good when our culture's going off the rails? And so let's get into a little bit more of that because you have a lot to say here, and I'd like to extract as much as I can while we have you.

So I don't know who your audience are, firefighters, too, or just not really?

I have a very wide spectrum because I'm, uh, a bit of a wonder junkie, so I, I learn about everything, and I interview physicists to people that are into movement and health, and you name it. So it's really a wide spectrum audience.

So I feel like, um, a lot of the scientific discoveries around trauma, really occurred during the, you know, the beginning of the 20th century when people really recorded under when people were, they were studying World War I veterans. And actually, Sigmund Freud was one of the people who were, was reading these, um, um, case studies. And they had these men who were, um, paralyzed, often they were unable to go back to the front. And the reason whenever anyone wants to invest a lot of money in trauma in a government, it's because they want to rehabilitate soldiers to put them back in the front. And what he had, you know, what people were remarking about, and was that these men would have dreams where they were repeatedly, um, reliving the trench warfare experiences. And Freud first came up with this idea that, um, one of the things about a really traumatic event, which breaks our boundaries and our narcissism about, you know, being intact people, is that it is a shock, right? It is just a complete, it rips you apart. And then what you do afterwards as part of trying to recover from it, when you're on your own, is you repeat the trauma, either through dreams or through finding yourself in equally bad situations or relationships, whatever. We all know what that's like now. And he says this is part of the neurosis that trauma produces because we're repeating it so that we can master it again, and we can create this like hyper-vigilant state so that instead of being shocked by this thing that blows up our world and our bodies and, well, it, here's the thing that he discovered was that men who had been wounded physically, who had a physical wound on their bodies, had less trauma, less, um, neurotic repetition because the wound was visible and they could heal it. It was the people who experienced shell shock, just being like shocked in the trenches without having bodily, um, harm done, they were the ones who were suffering from the most severe forms of shell, of what they called then shell shock. And a lot of the unsympathetic doctors were like, they're just pretenders, they're malingering, there's nothing wrong with them physically, they just don't want to go back to the front. And, um, Freud's analysis of this was that the repetition compulsion was a part of, um, trying to master this situation that just like blows all of your boundaries aside. And then, um, but each person has a different trajectory to reconstituting their egos. There's no singular formula because depending on what your childhood was like, if a bomb blows up next to your ear, you're going to somatize that differently than a bomb blowing up next to my ear. I mean, for me, it probably be like, I deserve this. My parents, you know, told me I wasn't, you know, I wasn't worthy, whatever. And then it becomes like part of my fantasy that I can rationalize it, like I deserve this, or, um, or I'm, I'm just attached to it. I don't even have the words for it. I'm just hyper-vigilant all the time. You can see this in a lot of traumatized people, you know, who, you know, women who go from bad relationship to bad relationship, or, you know, men who, um, go from bad relationship to bad relationship, or, you know, people who can't constitute any kind of stability because the adrenaline just keeps running. I, in your line of work, I think this is probably really profound. It's like you're just, you just become an adrenaline junkie because you think like, if I just have my adrenaline up at the right time, then I'll be able to protect myself from this like inconceivably hard thing that could happen. So, um, that it was all about the reconstitution of the soldier's psyche to send them back to the front. That really, the study of trauma, you know, begins in the 20th century. And, um, there were a lot of effective treatments of the traumatized soldier. They weren't, it wasn't very specialized. The, uh, in World War I, they, they found that if they put the hospitals next to the front, and if you suffered shell shock and you went right into the hospital and they treated you kindly, you would heal better so that you could go out and fight again. But if they, if you were sent home, or, you know, you didn't have treatment right away, and people told you you were just malingering, then those soldiers really, really suffered for a long time.

So the feminist focus on sexual abuse and sexual trauma that was in Judith Herman comes out of the Vietnam War veterans thing. And she, she was saying, you know, the, the psychiatrists were so sexist against women, and they were like, oh, they're just hysterical, or, you know, they're just crazy. And so she had saw that a lot of them had a lot of these women that psychi, male psychiatrists had dismissed as being just crazy or, you know, involved in relationships that they can't get out of, were actually suffering from a form of PTSD that comes out of sexual abuse or, you know, uh, or just mental abuse in their relationships. So there's this real focus on trauma and healing and recovery. And she works in a clinic in Boston. But, you know, what these women like in the form of Hillary Clinton and these PMC feminists, who second wave feminists who are white collar workers, very elite white collar workers, if they really cared about women, women's health and women's mental health, you know, what they would all be fighting for is single-payer, single-payer healthcare. Because if we had transportable healthcare, then women would not be dependent on men for their healthcare, and you could access mental health care without having to worry about whether or not your insurance could cover it. So the trans, just to stay within the psychic world without looking at the larger political structures of what they want to call patriarchy, is I think one of the biggest mistakes of, um, professional manager or class feminism. And it's not, it's not a mistake for them because their class interests are at at stake here. But, you know, when you look at like working-class women and poor women and their, and dependency on a male provider, this is, well, I think actually, like, working for, for really poor women, there's Medicare. Right? And the, the marriage thing doesn't function as well. It's actually lower middle class, middle class women who are trapped in these relationships with men who have the healthcare. Right now, we don't have any healthcare for any, any good healthcare for anyone. But like, let's say in the '60s, '70s, still, '80s, where there was still stable male employment, you could like, yap on about patriarchy, or you could have been working for, you know, nationalized healthcare. But I just, I, I was just really interested in this moment when a lot of the promises of the counterculture in the '60s get institutionalized without the economic critique side of things. And so, um, my book is very topical about that, but it's also, you know, because I really believe that like, uh, we have to understand ourselves in social and economic context. It's really, we're not isolated, monadic individuals who are having, um, horrible experiences in vacuums, right?

It's hard not to always look at other cultures too, and how they relate to their environment and their upbringing, and how people look at trauma differently, or don't even use that word. Some of them have a different meaning towards it, and it creates a whole different outcome. And I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about Palestinian studies that I heard you mention, and what the outcomes were with that. And then also, so, uh, we'll get into like the 1960s, and we'll get into Vietnam and the DSM and the creation of that whole incentivization structure, because that's fascinating. So let's start with those two, if you want.

So there's, there's a, a learned study that I found when I was doing the, um, research on the trauma book that showed that, and it was done in the '90s, so it was like the first Intifada. And, or, you know, just they were looking at children who had survived, you know, um, warfare or loss of parents. And the Palestinian children were not showing signs of the classic signs of trauma because they had a really strong narrative about where their suffering and their, um, their worldview was embedded in this idea that we were, um, part of this collective struggle for, um, Palestinian statehood. And the sacrifices that we have to make, and our suffering makes sense, has meaning in a social way. And so these British psychologists who'd gone down there to help were, you know, amazed by this, like, you know, what everyone likes to call like resilience, whatever it, um, I find resilience is really important. It's just so commodified right now as a term. But the other, the other thing that was really fascinating to me was this Ethan Waters book called "Sick Like Us," I think, W.A.T.E.R.S. He was looking at, um, Indonesia after the tsunami. He was looking at certain countries in Africa who would, which had suffered, you know, um, genocide or a lot of violence. And he saw that wherever these trauma work, site workers had come, his interviewees talked about their experiences in terms of the trauma that the West, Western, um, doctors that told them to talk about their stories then. But where, um, and so their narrative fit into this trauma culture narrative. And, you know, a lot of the, um, emergency aid that was sent into Indonesia and into Rwanda, they, um, they sent the World Health Organization doctor laborers, sent like trauma packs, which actually, you know, had like, um, female hygiene products and, and antidepressants. Wow. It was like they were just ready to put you on the drugs and anti-anxiety drugs. And of course, the people were suffering a great deal, but the ways, but it was so marked where he saw like interventions by Western doctors and like aid workers, and where there wasn't any, and there were not like great differences in mental health outcomes. But the most fascinating thing for me was his study of, um, schizophrenia in an African country. Forget, no, but there he interviewed and stayed with families, I think it was Mauritius, and he interviewed one family where a schizophrenic young woman lived with her mother and her extended family. And the family just treated it very casually. They were like, oh, you know, sometimes she has these episodes, but she has a place in her life. I mean, it's, it's really like the burden on the mom was incredible, but she was like, taking care of the kids, taking care of grandmother. And the daughter said, you know, I know sometimes I have these episodes, my mother helps me, but I try to help around the house. And it's like pre-modern, pre-industrial life. No one's like going to work 9 to 5, right? But, um, when he, and so there was an integration of schizophrenic woman in the family. And he talked about their treatment of her and her mental illness as casual, casual. Like everyone was very casual about it. But where there was another family that had more exposure to the West, they became very, they were very anxious about their schizophrenic family member and kept talking about drugs and treatments and how we had to get her, her into an institution. And there was a lot of blame and anger, like more reflecting, um, what we exper, how we experienced the onset of youthful schizophrenia and all, which is terrifying, like, which is a terrifying experience. But the more like, um, casual integration of the mental ill person in the social fabric produced like a better outcome, he said, or not worse than high medication and cycling in and out of institutions for this other family, which is what we are exp, what we experience in America, like deep medicalization, you know, medication cycling in and out of institutions where, which are basically holding tanks, they don't do much in terms of treatment. And, um, there was a movement in the 19th century that was, um, that was started by the Quakers. And they felt that if there were these people who were mentally ill, but we should treat them with kindness. Once again, this just like kindness was the, um, the attitude we should take. We should build these institutions for them and not, you know, electroshock them, bathe them in cold water, you know, do all of these crazy scient, pseudoscientific things that people were doing in the 19th century. And just have like a kindness protocol. And that actually prospered for a long time. You need a lot of state funding, you need church funding. And these institutions got bigger and bigger. And then John F. Kennedy's sister was lobotomized in the '50s. Like she was one of the Kennedy siblings was schizophrenic, she was institutionalized, she was in one of these giant institutions. Now, in the '50s, and I think it was without the family's consent or something like this, but, you know, it was a disastrous lobotomy. And JFK was the one who started to close down the big institutions, because he, and that's where we get like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Nurse Ratched, this idea of an institution as just, just in a place where people are being abused. But, you know, actually, amazingly, many of them were quite humane. It was called humane treatment of, me, of mentally ill. And, um, in the '60s and the '70s, especially, everyone's like very anti-institutional. And JFK put in this law that any mental health institution that had more than like 16 beds wasn't going to get any federal government treatment because he felt his sister had been delivered into this, you know, giant factory, which she probably was in some ways. But, you know, why now? What do we do? We have on the street treatment of the mentally ill. They closed down all the big institutions instead of reforming them or giving them more money or doubling down on the humane treatment thing. Um, one of the other side effects of having lithium be a really powerful, um, change game changer in the treatment of schizophrenia was, um, that you could chemically, was like a chemical, um, straight jacket. So you could, you know, actually sedate people enough that they were allegedly not a danger to themselves, they're drooling, whatever, but they're, they can be then delivered out into the world, allegedly. Which is why we have like almost a million homeless people in America. Many of them are have serious mental illness. A lot of mentally ill people are in, um, prison right now. But there's a reason why all these great, all these, I mean, big institutions were closed down. And it actually started, not people like to blame Ronald Reagan, but it actually started with JFK. So there was a lot of, um, um, suspicion of the medical institutions. And I trace this kind of suspicion of the medical institutions into a medicalization of mental illness about which we know so little to find a biological basis for it in the DSM so that we can have the pair of drugs that will go, um, that will accom, that will cure symptoms and cure them by a list. People have not found the, um, basis for serious mental illness, PTSD included. I mean, schizophrenia, there's no brain, there's no like biological somatic difference that you can identify and change. And with a drug intervention. So like, there's clear symptoms of diabetes, and, um, they're drugs to treat diabetes. Doctors agree on what diabetes is. Within the psychiatric community, there's no clear consensus on the somatic basis of D of, um, a symptom. And diseases can change all the time based on the checklist. Like you can have, you know, they used to have, I think, for women, they had this horrible thing that, um, feminists go crazy about. I think they had, it was called like hysterical personality disorder or something. And then suddenly, like, there's a social movement, and it's gone. Me, the, um, PTSD, it's usually to push a certain drug too. It's usually top-down, big pharma, we have a solution, so we're going to create the problem in the DSM, right? In that, in that particular case, it's one example of many.

Add here's some meth, some Adderall, or whatever.

But sorry. Yeah. No, no. Yeah, it's like, um, and, and, you know, what Americans, I feel like right now, we're so vulnerable. Like, we're willing, we're so hungry for diagnosis. Like, I, you know, people just are embracing like, I have ADD, I have OCD, I have this. Like, somehow that makes you, um, visible to, um, the medical establishment. And I think that part of that is also the fraying of our social relations where, you know, we want to have like a scientific definition of our distress because we have so, our our relationships with other people, or even with, we're not okay. Like, let me be really, really, um, uh, goofy here, but capitalism is very, very cruel. And we live in a cruel world, world. And there's no space for like kindness as just a general, like, highly held value. Not among the liberals, not about the conservatives. No. And, and so we look within a world that is so cruel with no kindness, or authenticity that seems to be possible. We think that having a doctor tell us that we have a disorder will give us some kind of relief. And people are suffering, and they do want relief. So it's a, it's an easy way to keep the movement of this hamster wheel, too. And it's, it's one of those things where we don't look at the environmental or cultural or political factors. We look at the individual. And I actually think, which we can get into, I'd like to go into that Vietnam era and the DSM and how things worked out right there. But I am so obsessed and fascinated with this piece of history from the 1950s onward when we had the introduction of the CIA, right? Because if you look at it, just at a broad stroke, which I've looked at it deeper than, you know, most average people, just because I thought it was interesting, but Operation Paperclip and Mockingbird, and you look at where we hired all these Nazi scientists and psychologists, and we gained a really deep understanding of what they learned during the war. And they took all that information and developed our Central Intelligence Agency and started doing experimentation on our own citizens, which is insane. And there's plenty of evidence out there to show what they were doing was so nefarious, and they were doing it for a long time until they got caught. And no one would have ever known about it until some things came forth about that. And that piece shouldn't be overlooked because that is directly tied to all of these other elements of, you could call it neoliberalism, or getting into the institutions where they were all a part of John's Hopkins, Stanford, you look at Harvard, a lot of the institutions were being developed at the same exact time with CIA, um, interconnectedness, right? So it's almost like our whole thought patterns were being shaped directly by nefarious psychological, um, manipulation. And so it creates this whole monster that we're getting into here.

Yeah, I mean, so in terms of like pure ideology, not even just like MK Ultra and stuff like that, we don't, not even to mention MK Ultra, um, the experimentation of L, using LSD on soldiers and civilians. I think there was a frenzy of anti-communism in the '50s, a frenzy which allowed the CIA to condone the killing of a million people in Indonesia, to condone the killing and torture of tens of thousands of people in Chile, for example, all because we were so afraid that communists were going to come and take over America. You know, 3 million civilians were killed in Vietnam because it was a domino effect, and then all of Southeast Asia would be communist countries that were dirt poor, like Laos and Cambodia, that had no, um, um, security threat to us at all, were going to be occ, were going to be controlled by the Chinese. The Vietnamese and the Chinese Communist parties hated each other. They still kind of do. I mean, it was, they wanted sovereignty and a more rational distribution of, um, the wealth of the country after having been exploited by the French for, um, a hundred years, right? The Vietnamese wanted independence, and they had a powerful communist country, communist party that almost everyone except for the CIA bootlickers believed in, right? So in the South Vietnamese got crazy Catholic far-right people. But, but we were able to whip our, whip our own people up into such hatred and ignorance that, um, this campaign, along with the mind control thing that we thought the Chinese had, we thought the Chinese were doing the brainwashing, that was what was the impetus behind MK Ultra and Paperclip was that the CIA thought the Chinese had perfected brainwashing during the Korean War because there were some American soldiers who had defected to North Korea. They didn't want to come home. Usually, these were like, really, really seriously poor, working-class people, like young men who are like, I, I don't want to keep fighting for this country, and here I am a prisoner, and people are treating me with dignity. And the Americans were like, oh my God, they're, they're like perfecting brainwashing because who would want to stay in North Korea or China? They perfected brainwashing. We need to figure out what brainwashing is. Who are we going to call on to help us figure out what brainwashing is? Former Nazi doctors. I mean, we sound like we're crazy, but the whole thing is like, it's all out there now. People know this. You know, there's, um, um, there's that book "Poisoner in Chief" that came out a couple years. I interviewed him.

Well, you know what's interesting is that that narrative you just said about having the enemy, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on communist, whatever it is, I think that's the manufacturing component. That's the scope because what the CIA learned was that we can get people pitted against whatever the thing is, war on viruses, the next one will be aliens, right? Whatever the thing. And you can have the military-industrial complex, which was birthed in that time frame, becomes the machine that's a never-ending profit-making thing if you're always at war. And the only way to get people patriotic is to create the enemy and to get everyone collectively on board and to become feeling like they're okay with whatever the sort of psychopathic move is. And 9/11 was a good example of that. Most people don't want to go there, but it's, it's like Fauci, all these people that are actually running amok and not being held accountable. We have this idea in our heads that we're, we're doing the right thing. You know, we're at war for good reason. And it's, it's very complex and interesting. But I think it's all part of this understanding of the nature of social engineering. And they can get it into the institutions. And now you've got a bunch of mid-30s, usually, um, pretty upper middle class people feeling super righteous about whatever the ideology is that's been presented to them. You know, even the psychedelic movement, which we can get into all the medicine and the models of like, it's the healing agent of our time. And it might be a distraction. You know, all of this could be just self-interested, narcissistically ramped up distraction to keep you from paying attention to what's going on on the bigger scale. We, we're making connections with people because we're so paralyzed by our own sense of righteousness, actually. And, you know, for me, as a member of the left, I just wonder why we can't focus more on private equity. Private equity is raping the country right now. It's taking apart every business and destroying it. It's moving through healthcare, moving through real estate. And then I'm like, why are we fighting these culture wars? You know, why are we, um, unable to, you know, um, be associated with each other and, and organize around these issues? And I found that, I mean, if I raise the socioeconomic political economic issue against, um, the identity politics people, people come at me on X. I mean, just this whole thing happened last week with Vic Chipper's, um, podcast on Jacobin audio video. I mean, it's a social media thing, but it does speak to what you're talking about, is this sort of psychopathology? Is that, you know, he criticized social justice warriors. He said, they're social justice warriors without socialism. And he was very, um, he was very measured about it, but, you know, a little and dismissive. And, you know, he said, we need to, you know, configure, reconfigure the left to fight for social, social, um, socialism and redistribution. And people called him a pedophile. People were like, you don't deserve to be a Marxist. They wanted to like eliminate him from the face of the earth. And then like, everyone was like, Katherine, you have to write about this. I was like, I don't want to write about this. I'm like, I got all this other stuff. But because he used the word woke, and I, I've been talking about trauma, state culture as kind of the, the seed of what gives woke and identity politics, its apparatus. And I, I don't use that word woke. So people just, well, they don't pay attention enough, so they kind of ignored me for a while, except, you know, people who read more carefully. And then I published something defending Vic Chipper, but then talking about how he says like ethnic studies programs were started by, in after, after the unrest of the '60s as a kind of grassroots movement. And I was like, actually, no, there was, the first ethnic studies programs were started at UC Berkeley, and they were founded as broker, as part of a, um, negotiated settlement with a group of people called the Third World Liberation Front, which was led by Richard Aoki, who was an FBI plant in the Black Panthers. He was the first Asian-American, like, high-ranking officer in the Black Panthers. He gave them arms, and he was interned in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. He's kind of a, um, hero of Asian-American studies. But when Eric, um, when Seth Rosenfeld was looking into J. Edgar Hoover's, um, surveillance of UC professors, he discovered as he was foering, you know, the FBI, he discovered that Aoki was actually an FBI informant who had been recruited during the '50s when he fought in the V, Korean War and was a virulent anti-communist who attracted J. Edgar Hoover's attention because he was so anti-communist. And he stayed as an asset for like 20 years. And then, um, Berkeley had the biggest, like, um, student strike, and what did they get? They got ethnic studies on departments. They got to start the first ethnic studies department. He, everyone celebrated him as the founder of Asian-American studies. And for a long time, people were like, no, he wasn't an FBI said. And Rosenfeld put 500 pages of his foyer up on a blog site, and he was making reports to the FBI. He made many, many reports, like, here's this person, here's what this person is doing, here's what, you know, this person is not so radical, this person is moderate. So if you really wanted to build like a UC for the working class, the FBI staged it for a multicultural, like racial adverse working class, the FBI actually staged it by creating a new discipline within the university called ethnic studies. And Chipper's, Chipper's question was, why can't we study the history of minorities within sociology? He's in the sociology department, right? Why political science, American history? And he kind of like, just leaves it out there. So I defended him, but I also wanted to make sure that this part of the history was ta, was, um, talked about correctly. Not a lot of people going to tell you this, but it's all out there. And then, um, um, somebody screen-capped, somebody, I, I went off X the next day because I was like, I don't want to see this. And somebody said, yeah, Amber Frost and Katherine Lou should ordain themselves. It's amazing.

Yeah, and it's unfortunate because we've gotten to the point where I think it's been engineered this way, and it seems obvious more now than ever, especially with soci, with social media. There's obviously been proven when you at Tristan Harris and the people that engineered these social platforms, they're talking about they're going to Congress, going, we quit our jobs at Facebook and Google because of the way that we were hiring psychologists, sociologists to get everybody divided and angry and outraged. And we funnel, oh my God, it's incredible. This guy's brilliant. He wrote, he actually made a documentary called "The Social Dilemma." And it's all about the, the engineering of basically this attention economy, which is what we're in, where everybody's trying to capture attention and drive the attention, which is social psychological engineering. And the people that it's tied to go back to the same roots of the CIA. It's not like these are separate. These are all interconnected entities. And if you're trying to drive profit or attention, and you're trying to drive social behavior, it gets really interesting. And so for you and I to be able to have a conversation and be kind to each other and be able to disagree, that's the point that we're missing in this culture. We need to have conversations with people that we don't agree with. That's what my podcast is for. I like talking to people that have different ideas, expose them to myself and others. And then it's instead what people do is they see a title or a headline, or they hear a clip or a soundbite, they get outraged, they cancel you, they call you a racist or a whatever. The, the keyword is to discredit all of the things that you are. And so it's about, it's about virtue signaling and gaining the social status. And it's been engineered that way because that's what gets attention. You know, um, the, the whole thing about liberals and Li, you know, liberalism being a mode of, um, active skepticism and tolerance has completely disappeared. The so-called liberals can't stand anyone who might take a skeptical but open-minded idea to their nostra. So they're calling Trump the fascist. There's a new form of author, arianism that is absolutely intolerant, as I've just found. I knew it was going to happen too. Like, that's why I got off X. I was like, okay, I'm going to write this piece. You're like, putting lamp screws on me. I think it is time for us to go to war. And, you know, what they're going to come after me. They're going to tell me to kill myself. They're going to tell me I'm a Nazi, a Nazi Bolshevik. They're going to tell me that, me, that we are all like traitors to the cause. And there are some professors who participated in this too. Here's the other thing that's interesting is that the woke defenders, they'll never go to their crazy followers, their moms, and go, this is not acceptable. Like, they're getting off on this, you know? And, um, the social engineering part of it is destroying our ability to think and reason and argue. Like, I need to pursu, if I have an idea, I want to persuade you of it. I don't want to force you to believe me. But right now, like, I've heard this from many graduate students in graduate seminars. If they express any kind of skepticism or question, like, what decolonialism is, or what the latest, you know, um, phrase is, they get shouted down. People are screaming at each other. I mean, this didn't happen when I was in grad school. They're just like, shut up, shut up, you got to shut up. And, um, you know, there were a lot of, there's a lot of posing and condescension and authoritarianism when I was in graduate school, but we didn't have these shout fests. Like, I think this is a new thing. And the person who is shouted at, like, they don't change their minds, but they're intimidated and won't speak up anymore. You know what I mean? Like, there's a kind of retreat. And I think that's the hollowing out of all, like public spaces is that, you know, um, if someone really believes in something and they're being shouted down and they're not convinced, then they just like retreat into private life. But we're talking about this kind of like greater, um, sense of isolation, a greater sense of loneliness. Is all we have? Or else they're told, like, I have to keep my mouth shut for self-interest, blah, blah, blah. Well, do we live in a totalitarian society where we have to like keep our mouth shut for self-interest? Because that sounds like Nazism to me. And I, I hate that. You know, I hate being told what I should think or what I shouldn't think. But right now, but I'm in a university where we should have academic freedom. And I feel like all of these effects that are coming out of the attention economy and social media are actually changing, um, the nature of what it can be permitted to be discussed in institutions where you're supposed to have freedom. And there's just, there's so much fear. I can't tell you how much fear there is in, in my world right now. And there, you know, they want to blame Trump. There's a lot of like bad, um, that goes on with Trump. But, you know, my like, liberal colleagues, like my God, it's the apocalypse. And I'll be like, well, you know what, like USA, I, um, hated them, but,

know, but I can't say that I'm just like, "Oh yeah, yeah, it's really bad." Uh-huh. Yeah, inadvertently, the guy is like, actually taking on the National Security State. I mean, he wants everything to be a real estate development, but all the liberals have is like the, um, support of these underhanded agencies like us, us a, which was, you know, instrumental in doing a lot of regime change in different places by promoting different kinds of, um, and, you know, um, vulnerable and un, you know, places of unrest in different kinds of countries. And, uh, USA is not an innocent player in foreign policy. And there's a lot of just, um, I guess when you get beyond looking at individuals like a Donald Trump or a Biden, which is part of the distraction, you look at what it's all tied to underneath. And what's happening is people are ideologically possessed. They're righteous and they're unable to have discussions with people they disagree with. And that's the real win if you were to try to really control a culture. And if you, you read Brave New World back in the day, and he had to revise it 10 or 20 years later because he thought, Huxley goes, "Oh my God, I thought this was going to be hundreds of years in the future. This is happening in our lifetime." And what seems to be is just this idea, he didn't even know we'd have social media. He didn't know what the thing was that the so-called authoritarian would use. But I think it's a mixture of things. One being screen time, social media apps that are based on narcissism and self-help and all this stuff that keeps you distracted with your own self-interest. Meanwhile, you know, the people playing chess are running a muck while you guys are infighting about who the, it's like watching WWE wrestling or something. And that seems to be this, this the scapegoating of how they get away with all this stuff. It, you, you know, the, the, I would only disagree with you there is that my only disagreement with you is that the elites are not that competent. A lot of the effects are like unforeseen effects and things like that. Like if you look at it, it's a lot of it is brute force stuff. It's not very like sophisticated and not, it's not very refined. I mean, um, when we, when we think about how the power of, um, social media is so oppressive, you think, oh, it's just, it, it's all, um, a conspiracy from the very beginning. But, you know, it, it's like people falling down rabbit holes or, you know, having a channel be the path of least resistance to profit. I mean, in Shoshana Zuboff's book, Surveillance Capitalism, she shows how Google was really trying to like, remember when they were like, "Don't be evil"? They were really, really trying not to be evil up to a certain point when they investors in around 2001, 2003, right after the, um, 9/11 and then the stock, the first dot-com crash, like, you guys got to make money, you know? How are you going to make money? I've heard different theories where Google and, you know, the, the owners, the founders, and Facebook have all been tied to the Central Intelligence agencies from the gate. And it is quite an interesting theory to think. I don't think it's all a grand conspiracy, but I do believe that there's intelligent, um, engineering behind a lot of it. And that's where the internet was developed by DARPA, as DARPA, which was part of the DOD. And there's no way that the internet would have had this kind of fast development without massive government support. At Champaign-Urbana, Berkeley, there were a couple of nodes. But I just think like the drive for profit is very improvisational. It's very opportunistic. Sure, the incentives are there. But the other thing is like, you don't, we don't even, I think the social engineering is a side effect of just wanting like close contact with people all the time on social media for data collection. The, the real irony of this is that we're not even, they, we're not even making, we're not making good products anymore in America. We're making money off of a fantasy of advertising and data collection. This, there, there, Google now just sells your data to advertisers. Then you get like some Google popup soon on, um, some websites. It's not even effective. It's not like, how often do you click through an ad that's targeting you? It's like one big giant shell game and they're moving money from one place to another. But they feel like the advertisers feel like they can't not do this. And Google's like, "We can't not do this. This is what we have to sell." So we're producing, um, the, the social engineering part is, they, they want to keep you engaged so that you're like, all your clicks are collected and they're selling like a virtual you to whatever like ad agency that will then broker your data to someone else. But the fact of the matter is, it's not even a widget that necessarily works. Do you see what I'm saying? It's like, it's just, it's like a shell game that's, it's like a giant con. Advertising, um, doesn't like, social media online advertising is how they're making profit right now. And it's not even that great. What Amazon has done though, is they've done cloud computing. So they are providing all of the cloud computing stuff for people so that they can make, they can sell things very cheaply. You look at American main streets, they were decimated by, you know, um, first shopping malls, then big box shops, then Amazon, right? So what you have is a destruction of the small capitalist for like greater and greater accretions of wealth. That to me is the critical aspect of it. And capitalism is opportunistic and not necessarily competent because they don't need a streamlined, they don't need a good product at this point. They just need to keep the money moving. They need to keep the data moving and they need to keep you online. And then the social engineering part of it, to me, is like, um, like a side effect benefit. Yeah, I can see a lot of that too. And then if you look at what the power of AI is going to be and is already, um, the people that are the so-called transhumanists, I'm sure you've heard that term, but the people like the Ray Kurzweils and Elon Musks and the big tech guys who are actually more powerful than most countries at this point because they're tied into this whole incentivization structure. But they're mining your psychological data to a degree that we couldn't wrap our heads around. And when you look at the amount of power you have when you understand the nature of human consciousness and you plug it into a supercomputer and an AI and you have this capacity to build something that's exponentially beyond our imagination, um, able to do and run processing power, what does that look like in the future? I think it gives certain small amounts of people even more leverage to create something that we can't even wrap our head around, like a dystopian future. And it is a, it's a religion. It's, it's an interesting phenomenon here. It's already here. It's here. I'm excited about it because I'm like, you know what? The, I'm a, I'm a rational optimist only on the foundational level of like, all right, how did we get here? No one knows. Where do we go? We don't know. But we're here. I'm grateful for the fact that I'm alive and awake and aware. I'm trying to look at it as, okay, how can we impact and maybe keep it from going off the rails while we're here? But you also can't just live in fear and existential crisis from it either, you know? So there has to be a little level of meaning, hope, and maybe have a little bit of an impact, which is why you write, I'm sure. Um, you know, this is the thing. The thing is that I feel like, um, the creative processes and the very fact of like human autonomy and our ability to create beauty in the world is, is kind of indestructible. And that's always giving me a lot, like hope. That gives me hope. And it's not, it's, and the reason why I'm angry is because with all our resources and rational and progress, why are there so many people suffering so much from deprivation? Like, what we should be doing is giving everyone the leisure and the freedom to enjoy like technological progress. So when I get really, that's when I get really, really, you know, um, disturbed by just the irrationality of it all. But, um, when you think about how the working class lived in the 19th century under the industrial, the heavy industrial revolution, um, you know, life expectancies were in the 30s, right? And especially for the working class. So now we have people, um, who can live longer, not great, not satisfactory lives compared with these Ray Kurzweils and Elon Musks. But I feel like the arc of emancipation should still be liberating the largest number of people possible from just like abjection and deprivation and suffering so that we can all thrive. And if you, if you think about my life or, you know, your life, I don't know where you come from, but what my parents went through and who they were and who their grandparents were, it, it is amazing that I can enjoy the life that I can. But the problem is, you know, I still think there's still so much, um, um, there's still so there's still so many things that we need to do for, um, um, for humanity. And we can do it. And these [ __ ] are not going to do it on their own. No capitalist has ever given up profit because of, um, the kindness of his heart. And when you think about the violence of, um, the promised revolutions from 1848 to 1896, the only reason why we got an 8-hour work week was because people were afraid. The cap, the, the bosses were afraid of the workers. They had been, you know, they'd been pushed to the edge and there was a general sense of like disorder at the end of the 19th century that made the big guns give concessions. Now, what do we do? We have an 8-hour work week or 40-hour work week, 8-hour work day. It's not really enough for working-class people to, um, survive and pay the rent right now. We're just, um, we're kind of regressing with regard to the arc of, um, prosperity. You want to see the future? Go to China. It is insane what, um, kinds of technological progress is taking place there, just with high-speed rail. And with that though comes a lot of, there's, there's never like a perfect utopian system, obviously, because if you go to China, there's also social credit systems and social credit scores being implemented, full surveillance. Um, you're looking at, there's surveillance. The social credit score is a [ __ ] is [ __ ] there's surveillance everywhere because you pay everything on your phone. I, everything. I'm going to Shenyang this week on Wednesday and that's for Fang Gang for them to practice something like yoga or movement. And there's people being persecuted for it. And there's all kinds of issues in China that we could get into. But it's everywhere. It's not like one country has it figured out. Okay, I'm not, I'm not. No, it's not. But I'm, I'm definitely anti-Falun Gong. I think they're a cult. Yeah, well, even if they were a cult, you should be allowed to have your religious freedom and do what you want to do. And if I was say to practice yoga and to be thrown in a box for it or to not be allowed to practice it or, you know, it doesn't matter what you are. And for, I like freedom at the foundation of the human condition. And, you know, it doesn't mean I should go and hurt anybody else. But if I'm practicing a movement, breath practice that doesn't go along with the tyrannical authoritarian leader, that's pretty crazy, right? And we saw what happened with COVID. And so we could get into all that. But, um, I, I don't think, you know, happened what happened with COVID was there were protests and the government in 24 hours took down their restrictions. Like they responded. It was crazy. They went way too far. And the people like rebelled. And I feel like the, the general rebellion, the sense of rebellion in China is still really powerful. There's like a powerful anti-authoritarianism there because people know like, there's so many of them. Like if you just all go like, "I'm not doing this anymore," the government can't, doesn't have any power over you. A lot of rules are negotiable, um, there. And, uh, it, it's a different kind of authoritarianism. It's a totally different kind of authoritarianism. Um, have you ever been to China? Have you ever been to China before? I'd love to go, but no, I haven't. Oh, okay. So, you know, there's just, I've been to Japan. But so the thing is that, um, don't believe the hype. Don't believe the propaganda. It's a, I just came back December. My husband was just there. My son is teaching there now. It's a really complicated place. There's a whole different kind of expression of dissent and dissatisfaction because the working class has still is building that country and the middle class is dependent on them. I'm not saying they're empowered necessarily, but nominally through the government, like the government says, "We represent the people." And if you're thinking about individuals and just like liveliness and just, um, um, like personality-wise, like the Chinese are just amazing. I mean, if you don't speak Chinese, it's hard to get to. They're like incredible. They're, they, they, the, you know, they'll criticize the government. Like they won't go on WeChat. They'll be like, you know, "Don't do it online," but they'll criticize the government. They'll talk about very, very frankly about their lives. I have very close friends there. I have family there. Nobody has ever [ __ ] mentioned the social credit system. And, you know, what they'll say, they'll say, "You have a credit score, right? That credit score follows you everywhere you go and you can't, you know, get loans or something like that." I'm like, "That's right." What they do have, what they do have is you get a human resources dossier. So everyone has that. It's attached to your, um, um, ID number, like Germany has an ID, national ID too. So if you do something really shitty at one job and it's, and your HR person puts it in your file, that's going to be follow you where you go, wherever you go, it's going to be really hard for you to find another job. And if you have a boss who doesn't like you, then you're in trouble because then they'll, they'll like put the report in. But a lot of people, you know, how people get by, get around this, they become entrepreneurs. Capitalism still works. Small scale capitalism still works there enough where you can be like, "I hate my dollar job. I'm, I'm going to do some hustle thing where, um, you know, I'm going to do import export or something like that. Like I'm going to find my way through because there's the economy is still growing and there's still like room for this kind of like hustle thing." Sometime, you know, of course, every Chinese parent wants their kid to like go to college and get a white collar job and do well. But once you're in the white collar system, like you have, um, you have a personnel file that'll follow you wherever you go. That, that is that is the thing that, um, that's the closest thing to an actual social credit system. And it was started because so many people did start their own businesses and they didn't pay their workers. So they were like, "You know what? You, you're in debt." And, and they're still not paying their workers. But a lot, a cab driver I know said he worked construction for a while and the construction bosses often wouldn't pay him. And so he preferred driving a cab. And he said, you know, "I drive this. It's like Chinese Uber." He goes, "You know, I drive, you pay me, I get paid right away because I can't deal with that anymore." Because that, there's a level of like cheating that goes on, um, there. But, you know, in 1970, my dad's family didn't have electricity, running water, or, um, they lived in a beaten earth house which probably they had lived in since 1700. And now everyone lives in a high-rise. And, uh, all my cousins' kids went to college. So they're like, really lovely kids, you know, really lovely young people, just like amazing. And I'm still like stuck there going, "My God, if I go to my hometown, where am I going to go to the bathroom?" You know? Like I haven't caught up with like what kind of progress has been made there. So I love to, yeah, I'd love to learn more about it. It's such a complex and interesting huge organism, you know, every country is, I guess, but China and itself is like its own, you could study it for a lifetime and live there for a lifetime and barely nick the surface, I'm sure. So I, I definitely am looking at it through a very limited lens. But, you know, even the ability to speak online, to say, get online right now and to still be able to speak freely is such a big thing that I hope we can maintain. At least, I'm a big freedom of speech guy. And I think that if you can't share ideas, you're losing the, the most fundamental thing that we could ever lose. No, and that, that is that, that is a big problem. That is a huge problem. There are ways in which you can get criticism out there to the government. And the people were like, "We, we don't like lockdowns anymore." And when I was there last year, they were like, you know, they locked down that building in Xinjiang, people burned up there. We're like, "No way, we're not doing this anymore." I was like, "Okay, you know, all right." I didn't bring that up, but you guys did. Um, it's, it's a, you know, it, freedom, freedom of discussion is such an important quality. But the America right now, the limitations on in America are something you and I are obviously thinking about a lot. A lot of people are thinking about that in China. And I personally can't bear the nationalism. That's what I, you know, find kind of just very oppressive and kitschy. But I'm amazed by how many good films get made. I'm still amazed by like how much good culture there is. And I only, I wish that, you know, there could be more freedom there. But, you know, what their excuse is? They're like, "We can't do that because Americans are going to come in and [ __ ] things up. We don't want Facebook here. We don't want that. We, we don't want American social media here." Yeah, and, and it's a weird balance because if you want to have a strong country, there's an interesting element where you almost have to keep things, certain control factor. And if you want to let things be loosey-goosey, you got Burning Man to the far end where it's just a big mess after one week. They can't, they can't manage anything. So there, there's got to be a fine mix. Where is that at? I don't know where the perfect balance of freedom and chaos is. But, you know, it's lucky that we're able to do this right now and to learn from each other and share perspectives. And I went down for way too long, but, oh, it's all good. And I know you got to get going. Yeah, I got to get going. But do you mind a brief second and just say like, if you were going to die today, what would you want to share with the world? Oh, wow. Um, the voice of reason is quiet, but it will not be silenced. So [ __ ] y'all haters. I like it. Hey, thanks for your time today. It was fun. Oh, thank you. All right. AB, thank you for listening to the episode. Be sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes, and rate the show. I hope you enjoyed the episode. What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.