Theory of Enchantment | Chloé Valdary | EP 220

So I've seen power in its multiplicity of manifestations, and I've certainly come out convinced, for example, that there is nothing more powerful than truth in the word. That's the fundamental source of power, any sort of power that you would actually dare to want. You know what I mean? It's like, do you really want power? Is it what you mean by that? You want arbitrary authority over other people? Really, you want that?

And it's interesting that you say this because I was just re-watching this conversation between James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni. Nikki Giovanni, as a young poetess, is grappling with this because her previous generation was the civil rights generation. She says, "You guys are so moral, and I'm not. I don't know if I'm interested in morality." She says, "You know the saying, 'Gain the whole world but lose your soul,' yeah that saying." And she goes, "Give me the world! I want the world!" And then Baldwin essentially asks her, "Are you sure you want that kind of power? Do you know what that kind of power does?"

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Hello everyone, I'm pleased to have with me today Ms. Chloe Valderri. Chloe is the developer of a theory, Theory of Enchantment, that she's using in corporate work and various other venues. I'll tell you a little bit about her, and then we'll jump into the conversation. After spending a year as a Bartley Fellow at the Wall Street Journal, Chloe Valderri developed the Theory of Enchantment, an innovative framework for compassionate anti-racism that combines social emotional learning, character development, and interpersonal growth as tools for leadership development in the boardroom and beyond.

Chloe has trained around the world, including in South Africa, the Netherlands, Germany, and Israel. Her clients have included high school and college students, government agencies, business teams, and many more. She's lectured in universities across America, including Harvard and Georgetown. Her work has been covered in The Atlantic magazine, Psychology Today, her writings appeared in The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Chloe spoke a while ago with my daughter Michaela, and Michaela enjoyed speaking with her and having her as a guest and suggested that I look Chloe up.

I was instantly interested in her theoretical approach, and I thought it would give us an opportunity to talk about psychological issues and cultural issues. And away we go.

So, Chloe, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me. The first question I have for you, if you don't mind, is why in the world did you agree to talk to me?

This is such a funny question to me because I've actually been a big fan of yours for a long time. I saw you speak in New York City — or actually in Long Island City — a few years ago specifically, and I read your book "Maps of Meaning" last year. I think it's interesting that I decided to read "Maps of Meaning" during COVID. It was a very particular choice, and I actually saw your lecture series on "Maps of Meaning" first before reading it. So I've been in conversation with you, in a sense, for a very long time now, and I count it a great honor and privilege to be able to talk to you today.

Well, that should make you radically unpopular, I would say, all of that. So you read "Maps of Meaning" during COVID? How long did that take you?

I think it took me about a month, and then I actually reread my underlined notes before this conversation just to try to prepare myself.

Yeah, well, it's a long read, "Maps of Meaning." I put an audio version of it out, and I think that's probably easier for people because the sentences are so long that reading it out loud enabled me to sort of emphasize some parts and de-emphasize others. I think that was a good hint as to the underlying meaning.

But okay, so let's talk about what you're doing first. What is it that you're doing as far as you're concerned, and with regards to let's focus on the anti-racism issue, I guess? What is it that you think you're doing?

Sure. So on a very simple level, I have a start-up called Theory of Enchantment, and we do anti-racism work. The way we understand the act of anti-racism is psychologically rooted. I like to say that we take a page out of the sages of the civil rights movement, so Dr. King, James Baldwin, individuals like that. Our understanding of supremacist ways of thinking is psychological.

So the idea is that supremacist ways of thinking occur when a human being experiences some kind of insecurity — deep insecurity within themselves. It could be a feeling of a loss of identity, a lack of belonging, some kind of self-contempt for whatever reason, and then they project that feeling onto the other that looks different from them in order to feel better about themselves, as a defensive mechanism.

So Theory of Enchantment — yeah, sorry, I don't want to go ahead, continue with that.

So Theory of Enchantment says that if that is the case, if that is how this works as human beings, then we have to engage in a series of practices to be in right relationship with ourselves — the totality of ourselves, the complexity of ourselves — so that we become less likely to overcompensate and less likely to project in the first place. So that's essentially what Theory of Enchantment is all about.

Okay, okay. So let me ask you a couple of questions about that. So I put together some topics for a potential discussion a while back. They're kind of relevant to our discussion, so I thought I might address some of the more progressive claims in this discussion.

So here are the claims or questions: Are all white people racist? Well, what's the answer to that? Yes and no. I think — is the West a white supremacist society? Yes and no. Is the U.S. structurally racist? Yes and no. Is gender fluid? Yes and no. Are all men sexist? Yes and no. I believe the yes and no answers to both of those, and so let's start with this racism issue.

So one of the things I kind of outlined in “Maps of Meaning,” I think, is that there are two sources of virulent racism, and one is universal as far as I can tell, looking at the anthropological literature. So one of the things you see that's characteristic of human societies, regardless of their size and location, is that there's a strong proclivity for the members of those societies to regard those within the society as human. This is particularly true of ISIS. You can particularly see this in isolated tribes as human, and all other humans that aren't in the tribal group as not human.

And that seems really deeply rooted. You see it even in chimpanzees, our closest biological relative. So the chimps arrange themselves so that they can function within their own troop, let's say, without tearing each other into pieces, except on occasion. But the chimps will send raiding parties of males around the boundaries, essentially, and if they encounter non-chimp chimps — foreigners, let's say, even if they were once part of that troop and had moved — if they outnumber them, they'll often tear them to pieces. And that was discovered in the 1970s, and it was a major discovery because it showed how deeply rooted this in-group/out-group differentiation is, you know, that it manifests itself even in our closest animal relative.

So if you say, "Are all white people racist?" the answer to that is probably yes. But the corollary is, well, that's probably true of all people, correct? And so it's the problem with the proposal that all white people are racist is that the fact that a skin color is listed in the proposition is a political move, and it underplays the critical severity of the problem.

Yeah, right? Like if it's just white people, that's not a big problem, but if it's all people and even our closest relatives, it's like, man, we've got something to overcome.

And then this is more relevant to what you said, I would say: is given that intrinsic in-group preference and out-group hatred that could easily be kindled, and that might be there deep and even from the beginning, are there ways that we act as individuals that make that more or less likely?

And that has more to do, I think, with the psychological development issue that you were describing. So if I'm bitter and unhappy and resentful and arrogant and hostile, then that proclivity to derogate out-group members is going to be extremely attractive to me. And so if I get my own house in order, well then I'm less likely to need a target for my unexamined malevolence and violence and more likely to be able to get that intrinsic out-group/in-group differentiation under some modicum of control.

Mm-hmm. I think that's — does that seem okay?

Okay, so yeah, I think ultimately, as you just described, the proposal that it is only white people is actually a misapprehension of the human condition and a misunderstanding of the fact that this proclivity exists within every single one of us. And you know, I take a page from Jungian philosophy or Jungian psychology, which argues that a lot of this enters into the world or the realm of the shadow.

So the shadow is everything we do not like about ourselves that we project onto the other. And if a person is bitter and resentful, as you say, about all the things that they dislike about themselves, and they haven't worked on themselves, and again they haven't become in right relationship with themselves, then they are far more likely to take that and, instead of dealing with themselves, project that element onto the other and then see themselves as superior to the other.

And that's where supremacist ways of thinking come from. And it doesn't actually have to be racial; it can also be in-group, as you just described with chimpanzees. It doesn't have to be strictly racial or ethnic.

Yeah, well, there are plenty of inter — like there's plenty of conflict between, let's say, groups of isolated people who are of the same race, right? So yeah, that's — so obviously the racial distinction isn't the only distinction. Now we could have a reasonable discussion between left and right wing about, well, here's some other issues like, okay, well given that proclivity for out-group derivation and the temptation to use your violent tendencies on the other, what exacerbates that?

And so one of the propositions we're wrestling with is, well, your own psychological lack of development. So if you're a better person, maybe you could get that under control. And that implies you could be a better or worse person.

But there's another issue too that the left concentrates on pretty constantly, which is — and this is a reasonable question — is that if you see a society where one group on average has more power and authority than the other group, does the temptation posed by that power and authority exacerbate the proclivity for racism?

And so then you could have a conversation about whether being white in America, let's say, tempts white people more towards racism than not, but you could have the contrary conversation too. And you could say, well, are those who are on average, say, speaking in groups more towards the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution, because they're somewhat alienated and potentially bitter about that — and perhaps for good reason — are they more tempted towards racism because things aren't going so well for them?

I mean, we don't know, right? But it's a nice starting place to look at this problem — it's hard for us to wrap our loving arms around the out-group. That's a deep human problem that would be a lovely place to start.

Yeah, well, I think there's also this misconception that there's no alienation if you are in power or one experiences no kind of alienation or no sense of alienation if you have quote unquote material power, which I think is a flaw in the argument.

Well, it's an interesting weakness, I would say, of socialist arguments in general, is that there's a tremendous critique of the structures of the economic system, but there's also the presupposition that if you just had enough money, things would be much better for you.

Right. They would be somewhat better in some ways, you know, we have to be clear about it to a certain point.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and there's also problems that money doesn't solve — many.

And so it would be lovely if material security actually produced full security, but it doesn't.

Okay, okay. So we seem to be reasonably in alignment about that. So now practically speaking, tell me what you're doing and how often you're called on.

The corporate world has become rife with DEI — but DEIS, how I like to phrase it, because I'm not very happy about it — the notion of this catchphrase diversity, inclusivity, and equity, and there are training programs everywhere to hypothetically increase people's awareness of those and their proper behavior.

And I think the evidence that those programs work is extraordinarily weak, and there's a fair bit of evidence that they're actually counterproductive, which I find more compelling. But perhaps not, but that's the practical landscape for your activities at the moment, is that correct? You're working essentially as a consultant as well as a writer?

Primarily as a consultant, I do some writing here and there, but it's primarily consulting. And, you know, people can basically either enroll in our online course, which we have, or the companies can bring us in to facilitate workshops that elucidate the essence of the course or kind of serve as an appetizer or a teaser to the course.

Okay, so how are you marketing that? How successful are you? Why do you think it works? Practical questions, because there's obviously a huge market for this.

So why your thing, and why are you sure that you're not doing harm? Just out of curiosity.

Oh yeah, that's a great question, I'll try to answer the first few questions first. So we've actually had no outbound marketing strategy to date. Everything has kind of been organic. Basically, I've been interviewed by a number of different publications and on a number of different podcasts, and those are the things that drive people to discover the Theory of Enchantment.

There's been no paid marketing outside of, you know, just me showing up on a podcast to talk about these ideas. And one of the other drivers — so we have that piece, but the other piece is that a lot of companies are bringing in these more toxic diversity and inclusion programs, and they're wreaking havoc in the workplace.

They're actually causing —

Justify that claim, because that's a pretty radical claim that they're wreaking havoc. Those are fighting words, let's say. So why do you believe that? What's your evidence for that?

So I have been told by folks on our demo calls that we have with potential clients. I've been told these stories about how they bring in very specific diversity and inclusion programs where people are encouraged to segregate themselves based upon skin color. Their lived experiences are assumed because of their skin color, and this ends up fostering a kind of resentment on the part of people of all different races and all different ethnic backgrounds.

And it also ends up fostering a kind of animosity between peoples of different backgrounds and ethnicities, and so then these companies end up looking for a kind of balm or kind of remedy to actually fix that problem.

And balm, B-A-L-M, balm, not B-O-M-B.

No, no, a softer version.

Yes, exactly. So, but they're looking for some kind of medicine to fix the situation that they unwittingly brought in and didn't, you know, were totally oblivious to.

Okay, so that's your typical experience, is that you're being brought in after the DEI process has resulted in an unpleasant outcome?

Yes, it's either that or an individual or group of individuals in an organization. They're being told that this is the way to do diversity and inclusion, but it's not sitting well with them. They feel intuitively that something's off, it doesn't speak to them, and then they go out and search for alternative approaches, and then they may come across Theory of Enchantment.

Okay, okay, okay. So I wanted to touch on something that you mentioned about the DEI process — the idea that it's another one of these propositions that's worthy of investigation — the validity of lived experience. Now you would say, well, are you an authority? Are you an unquestionable authority on the nature of your lived experience? And the answer to that is yes and no.

It's the same as those other questions that we discussed because there's obviously a domain of subjective experience that you have unique access to about which in some sense I can say nothing — like if I see that you're in pain, if you tell me you're in pain, I can decide whether I believe that or not. I can decide whether or not that is a credible claim as far as I'm concerned, but I cannot tell ever exactly the nature of your experience.

And so in some sense, you are an expert, an incontrovertible expert on some aspects of your experience. So that part of the claim is valid. The question is, well, what's the universalizing significance of that? And just because it's true for you doesn't mean it's true for everyone. Just because it's true for you doesn't mean that it's true for all people who share any particular element of your immutable characteristics. All of the rest of that is questionable, but a lot of these claims fly because, well, they're true in some sense.

You could say, well, is the U.S. structurally racist? Well, it was set up for the benefit of the people who set it up fundamentally, so yeah, in some sense all cultures are set up to benefit particularly the people who set them up. And then if there's other people who come in, well, you know, they have a harder time of it.

And is that structurally racist? It's like, well yes and no, but the no is important to assess as well as the yes, right? To get an even-handed take on these and also to find out how universal this is or how particular it is to that particular country. Like all countries are set up for the benefit of a relatively homogenous group because otherwise it's not a country. If it isn't homogeneous, people aren't playing the same game, right?

So the fundamental problem is homogeneity versus heterogeneity. That's a really deep problem, you know, because the problem is, well, how do we all get along together and play nice like children — civilized children in the playground — while simultaneously being quite different from one another at all sorts of levels of analysis? It's a huge problem.

Well, this is the essence of the American project, which is ultimately a conundrum, right? Because our motto, our model is "E pluribus unum" (out of many, one), which is actually an incredibly difficult thing to accomplish, given the human condition. And so I would say that America is quite different from any other country in the sense that it does hold this up as its motto, as its ideal to which it aspires to, but it also simultaneously has this storied history of not just having a homogeneous culture in the typical sense of the word, but of course also in perpetuating systemic cruelty against the other— in this case, speaking particularly of African Americans.

So you have these two warring trends or histories within the American system which makes this question of how to have these civilized children playing together a deeper question and a more difficult question to solve, because America holds itself up as having this model or having this ideal rather of out of many, one.

Right, right, right. Well, it's a great ideal if you can manage it because you get all the benefits of diversity, which means — and so we can talk about diversity. Why do you want diversity? Well, because how do you know you're right? And maybe you're not, and someone who thinks differently than you might have the key to to solving the problem, and you might really need that solution.

So that's another issue about the diversity mantra. It's like, well, yes diversity, but then we might want to specify — well, let's really think hard about what we mean here with diversity. And, you know, I'll speak psychologically. I think the best way to conceptualize diversity across human beings is certainly not racial. I think that's an appalling proposition.

You can certainly conceptualize diversity usefully in terms of personality, and we have a pretty good taxonomy of personality. It's not perfect, but you know, extroverts have their utility and introverts have theirs, and highly creative people can be great entrepreneurs, but they're very easily scattered.

And it's burdensome to be interested in everything, let's say. Agreeable people are compassionate and warm, but it's easy for them to get resentful. Disagreeable people are competitive and rather blunt, so they can be hard to get along with, but they'll tell you what they think — so that's useful, etc., etc.

And so we wouldn't have that five-dimensional diversity of human beings if there weren't ecological niches for all of those combinations. So you can see — but what do you mean by that? Well, sometimes the best thing to be is an extrovert, so imagine you're like extroverted and really low in negative emotion, so you don't have much fear and you're out there.

Well, you're probably a target in an authoritarian state. Yes, because you just won't shut the hell up, and you're not afraid. Yeah, right.

So being an emotionally stable extrovert, that's a lot of fun — there's a lot of positive emotion — but you're a performer, you're out. You're not going to hide, and so maybe the introverted neurotic who is hiding at home was much more likely to survive, and so on and so forth. And you can walk through all of the traits and say, well, in this situation that trade is more appropriate, in this situation that trade is more appropriate. We need the diversity that feeds our … and all of those intrinsic differences shape the way we think as well.

I mean, extroverts think like extroverts and so on. You see that effect even in political affiliation, at least to some degree. So the idea that diversity is useful — that's a good idea, yeah.

But then the manner in which that's conceptualized, there's the rub. And now, you said in your work you're taking a page from the more classical civil rights leaders.

Yes, so those would be, I would say, in some sense the traditionally recognized moral leaders of the black community. Is that a reasonable way of conceptualizing Martin Luther King, for example?

I think that's partially true, yes.

Okay, how is it? What's it missing?

Well, I would say that the black community recognizes both Dr. King and, let's say, Malcolm X as, if not completely, you know, virtuous in every sense of the word, certainly capturing the fullness of the human condition.

So I can only really explain this or try to explain this in psychological terms. So I think Martin Luther King represented the being who had a sense of pathos, but a sense of the fact that someone was common to the entire human race and believed that it was better to suffer injustice than to commit injustice, because ultimately the person who commits injustice becomes corrupted and suffers an even greater kind of suffering.

And so this is why he advocated for non-violence and things of that nature, whereas Malcolm X represented the more aggressive reactive response to being beaten down. And I think that the black community would argue that both of these personalities are necessary to learn from—to learn from.

That's a good example of diversity and personality right there.

My suspicion is that Malcolm X was less agreeable, technically speaking, than Martin Luther King personality-wise.

Yeah, yeah, and he can make a coherent political case from that perspective, absolutely. But then he started, which is interesting. Unfortunately, in the end he was killed, but before he was killed, he actually began to change.

So when he went to Mecca and he saw white people who were Muslims — who he had no conception that that was even a thing — he realized that what he was being taught from the Nation of Islam was taught that white people, ironically, was taught that white people were an inferior race.

He learned to see his fellow white brother and sister as, in fact, brothers and or sisters, and he began to change, which is what got him into trouble. But still he represents — and from a personality perspective — this more combative response.

And I think the proper answer to that is not the conservative answer which says we like Dr. King and we dislike Malcolm X, but actually to be in conversation with both. Because the danger becomes if you sort of repress or suppress the Malcolm X type response, then that becomes a shadow.

Malcolm X represents a natural human response to someone being beaten down, right? And if you repress it, then it becomes a shadow that you're not looking towards and you're not acknowledging, and that can become so unhealthy down the line, so toxic down the line if you don't recognize that impulse within yourself to respond with anger or to respond with aggression.

So I think that the healthy approach to this is to study both Malcolm X and Dr. King and say what can we learn from both? How can we grapple with each? What can we take from each to synthesize and integrate a holistic way of being?

Okay, so back into the corporate world. So you're called in at least upon occasion when the traditional DEI approach has gone wrong. And it isn't surprising to me that it goes wrong because what it purports to do is unbelievably difficult.

And speaking as a clinical psychologist in relationship to such problems, there's many more ways to make it worse than there are to make it better, that's for sure. And so what is it that you do that's so different when you go into a company under the rubric of the Theory of Enchantment? How do you differentiate yourself from the DEI crowd?

And we should go back to the issue of inadvertent harm producing as well, right? Because how do you know it's not going to go terribly wrong?

So it's a great question. So we have three fundamental principles, and again this goes back to our animating main idea, which is that anyone can fall into supremacist ways of thinking. It doesn't matter if you're black; anyone can fall into it because it's a part of the human condition, and it's this outgrowth of projecting your own insecurities.

So we have three fundamental principles: they are treat people like human beings, not political abstractions; criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down or destroy; and try to root everything you do in love and compassion.

And I can define what I mean by love a little bit later, but these are our three principles. And so all of the exercises that we give people are essentially in service of having people be able to embody those practices, and the exercises are not just dry or wrote or strictly academic; the exercises actually use the arts as a medium to dispel these teachings.

So what I mean by that is, let's take the first principle: treat people like human beings, not political abstractions. We'll take an artist like Kendrick Lamar who has this song called "DNA," where he says in the song, "I got power, poison, pain, and joy inside my DNA." You know, Kendrick Lamar is a Pulitzer Prize-winning hip-hop artist, so people know him. People are aware of him. If they're not familiar specifically with his raps, they understand who he is in the zeitgeist.

So we're familiar with him somewhat. And then we say, "Okay, what do you think the artist is saying here about the complexity of what it means to be a human being when he says, 'I got power, poison, pain, and joy inside my DNA'?"

And you can do that rather than saying what the answer to that is. We ask it to our participants in our workshops. That's the other thing: the workshops are very participatory; it's not like me lecturing strictly. It's a highly participatory experience.

And so what comes out of that is, "Oh, I think the artist is saying that we're all capable of good and evil or we're all capable of experiencing complex emotions simultaneously that could be totally contradictory."

This is what it means to be a human being, and so that naturally leads to the understanding of the fact that the human being is in a way inexhaustible, and that I, as a human being, because I am capable of doing good and evil, can then see someone who has made a mistake or perceive someone who has made a mistake, let's say, who has insulted me personally, for example, I can still see that person with the fullness of their humanity, and I can see that person as just as that person just did something harmful.

I can also see that person as equally capable of doing something good, even as I'm capable of those same things. And so what ends up happening through this process is I start to become in relationship with my own complexity and my own inexhaustibility, and then I begin to perceive complexity in the other.

And this is important because if I’m able — that’s the anti-stereotype.

That’s right.

Then I’m less likely to caricature the other.

Okay, okay, okay. Right, right, right, okay.

Yeah, because one of the things that bedeviled social psychology continually — there are many things — is that there's often a failure to distinguish bias and prejudice from heuristics.

So like we simplify virtually everything we perceive and interact with all the time automatically. We can't — and it's a good thing we do because, well, this inexhaustibility that you just described, well, we have to — well, that's right, it's exhausting.

That's the thing is that if you're wandering around enraptured by everything — like good luck trying to cross the street, right? So we're — what we see, technically, what we see mostly is memory and the memory is a heuristic, it's a supposition.

Like I noticed, for example — I wrote about this in "Beyond Order" — I can really remember the neighborhood I grew up in. I can picture every house, but I can't picture the houses in the neighborhood I live in now even though I've lived there 20 years.

And it's because I see house — generic house. I don't see what I saw when I was a kid, which was all the detail. And it's a good thing because, well, when you see — this is when you're wandering around with two-year-olds; they're completely enraptured by everything, but they have absolutely no ability to engage in structured goal-directed activity.

It's one of the delightful things about them, but it also means they have to be cared for nonstop. And so we have this — now what you're proposing is that if you get people to reflect on their own complexity, including their moral complexity — so they open up a space and think about how much of themselves is beyond them, beyond their control, even for better or worse — then you can suggest to them that other people are like that as well, and that's the anti-stereotyping move.

Yes, and also you can begin to understand how people could come to the conclusions they've come to or how people can make the decisions they've made, even while simultaneously disagreeing with those decisions.

And so you can disagree without dehumanizing or demonizing.

Yeah, things can go very badly wrong in your life, and part of the reason also to appreciate the diverse complexity of other people is that they might be able to offer you a solution when you can't, when you really need one, because they think differently than you do.

And so that, I guess, meditation on your capacity for suffering is also a possible avenue to appreciating the diversity of other people.

I think this is what Plato argued in "Gorgias" but his retelling of Socrates and Socrates's sort of — Socrates is someone who's trying to pursue the truth at all costs, and Callicles — and I don't know if I'm pronouncing that name correctly, but Callicles was the senator who believed that truth was basically defined by brute strength or power, which should sound familiar because it is familiar to our times these days.

But Socrates goes into this thing about pathos, about becoming the suffering that is common to all human beings. And once you understand the suffering that is common to all human beings — that not only have you suffered, but all human beings suffer — you're able to become in existential relationship with other humans.

And without this understanding, you will never get there. And this has a connection to the arts, because it is the awareness of suffering that is present in so much of the West in particular as artistic genius.

It's in Shakespeare, it's in the African-American blues tradition, it's in Dostoyevsky, right? It's in Steinbeck, this understanding of human suffering, which is ultimately inescapable.

And this is also why the idea that raising the material standards of everyone — which, again, is important to a certain extent, but is ultimately insufficient — because it will not enable us to escape the ultimate suffering that is a part of the essence of the reality of existence.

When you say, "Treat people like human beings, not political abstractions," that’s really — you just outlined in some sense what that means in terms of your practical approach. You're assuming a simplistic stereotype; you're assuming that that's more likely to be applied to people who are different, which I think is true.

And that the way through that is meditation on complexity and suffering — something like that, on some level, yeah?

Okay, okay.

It also means, correct me if I'm wrong, that your unit of analysis is the individual.

Fundamentals, yes.

Okay, and that definitely puts you in philosophical opposition to the purveyors of the typical DEI approach because their fundamental level of analysis, I believe — it seems to be the case, they pronounce — state that it's the group in one form or another.

Yes, but I think they're ultimately confused. I don't think it's the deliberate — I think there's some confusion happening.

Yeah, well, these are complex issues, right? And there are groups of people, and group identity has a reality, and sometimes it's an important reality.

And so figuring out how to rank these levels of analysis is no easy business. That's at the essence of the problem in some sense, right? Is how do you conceptualize the relationship between the individual and the group, given that both those levels of analysis exist?

Well, I actually think it's deeper on some level than that, and I have a theory that I want to run by you. I would be very curious to hear your thoughts.

So if you look at what a lot of diversity and inclusion consultants say in their slideshows, they say that they are trying to fight against quote-unquote "whiteness."

How do they define "whiteness"? They define "whiteness" as — they define it as either/or ways of thinking, no? Yes, I've seen those lists.

And these are — I'm quoting. So, you know, either/or ways of thinking, power hoarding, analytical forms of thinking, linear forms of thinking, etc. Yeah, it's completely — it's really something to see that it's incoherent at best, but —

Yeah, if you look at what they say, they want — they say they want a kind of interdependent interdependency or an understanding of our interdependence as human beings. They want this sort of relational way of being, right?

And what they're essentially arguing for, if I read between the lines correctly, is a kind of alienation that has taken over culturally their lives.

And that's interesting because these diversity consultants tend to be more or less left-wing. But if you were to go into right-wing circles, there's this great book by Timothy Carney called "Alienated America," which looks into how many conservative, white, rural-based Americans voted for Trump or why they voted for Trump in the 2016 primary.

So not in the general election, in the primary when they had other Republicans they could vote for. And he argues that the reason why the people who voted for Trump voted for him was because they were suffering from incredible amounts of alienation.

And he traced it back to an experience of — you could actually see which counties that voted for, let's say, Trump over Mitt Romney. These were counties that were more likely suffering from alcoholism and deaths of despair and opioid crises and things of that nature, the disruption of civic institutional life, etc. So I find this is fascinating.

Because what this means is you have on the one hand left-wing diversity consultants who are confusing — I think, they're conflating race with culture in many ways, but what they're calling for is an end to alienation.

Well, simultaneously, the way that they're calling for it is alienating towards white, rural, right-wing conservatives who for a whole host of reasons, but including that, are influenced to vote for individuals like Donald Trump.

Which means there's a common theme, which suggests there's a common theme. And the common theme is alienation.

So what is it about alienation that creates this kind of behavior in people, regardless of whether they're on the right or the left? What is the role that alienation plays in this entire conversation, and how do you think — what do you think the alienation — what does alienation mean? What does — what's your understanding of that as a phenomenon?

Yeah, so I think that the issue is actually civilizational and not political. And so there are — you'll find that there are places where I agree with certain left-wing consultants and there are places where I will agree with certain right-wing critics.

But I actually think that what's happening is that fundamentally in America we've lost a capacity to relate to one another. We've lost a capacity to be in a relational way of being with each other. And actually, I would argue that that goes back all the way to certain aspects of the Enlightenment, and in particular, Descartes.

So I would argue — so Descartes is considered by many to be the father of the Enlightenment, but he came up with this idea known as Cartesian duality, which argues that there's a distinction between the mind and the body. Descartes was not even convinced that his own body existed.

So his belief was that there was a distinction between the mind and the body and that not only was there a distinction, but these entities, so to speak, were opposed to each other. And so there's this incredible philosophy of rupture that was perpetuated throughout the Enlightenment because what that means, if you deny the body fundamentally as relevant or as of significance, what you end up denying is the relevance of human suffering.

What you end up denying is the experience of certain aspects of reality that are fundamentally embodied experiences, including things like pain and suffering. Ironically, there is another theme or element within Western history which exists in the arts that are part of Western history and Western civilization that do not deny the body.

And so I think that this alienation ultimately is centuries in the making and centuries in the coming, and it kind of comes from this philosophy which said, well, there's also a universal element to that, I would say.

And this is something that the aliens have highlighted. I would say perhaps more accurately than — although existentialist philosophers and psychologists put their finger on it too — which is this idea of this Heideggerian idea of Throneness, is sort of the arbitrariness of our existence.

You know, you happen to be a black woman and I happen to be a white man, and we didn't choose that — it's just pop. Here we are. And there are preconditions to our existence that we didn't choose. We're also beneficiaries of and puppets of our culture that we happen to inhabit, and the culture was made by people who weren't us and who are no longer alive, and so it's not our own creation.

And none of us feel entirely comfortable within it. That's an inescapable part of the human condition. We're subjugated — we're subjugated to suffering, mortality — that's the biological hell in some sense. But we're also subject to the arbitrariness of our cultural constructions.

And that’s a permanent existential problem. And then there would be, what would you say, idiosyncratic variants of it that would be culture-specific that are more — more, what would you say?

You can use the example of Descartes in the West in that more specific sense. This is a universal problem, this idea of alienation.

And part of the question is how do you overcome that? And when you were talking about sympathy with universal suffering and appreciation for complexity and diversity, I had images of crucifixion in my imagination. I thought, well, part of the reason that that image — a very strange image to be worshiped, to be so regarded as sacred for so long, to be so central — is a image of the universality of suffering.

And inexhaustibility. And so — and it's to see that crucified possibility in every individual that's at the center of the Christian ethos.

And but also the capacity to transcend it, right? Well, that's built into that story, and it requires a death and a rebirth.

Right, and you can think of that psychologically as well as ontologically — that that's the religious question is what does that mean in terms of the structure of reality? But we do redeem our crucified diversity and all the trouble that gets us into by a sequence of deaths and rebirths that happen every time we're wrong and we have to rebuild ourselves.

And in any narrative of redemption, like the Exodus story, you see that as well: this escape from tyranny, this descent into chaos, and then reconfiguration.

And so I thought in "Maps of Meaning," I posited that identification with that process was redemptive rather than any of the states.

Right.

That you are this thing that's on this journey of continual self-transcendence, and it's the process itself. But the issue is that Cartesian duality, or one of the issues, is that Cartesian duality and its obsession with certainty and mathematical certainty has a problem with the unknown — an existential problem with the unknown — because it's fixated with certainty.

And I know that in “Maps of Meaning” you draw this connection to, I believe it was Milton’s depiction of the adversary of Satan, and how the evil being is not someone who represents the other but someone who cannot handle the unknown and who is fixated on certainty of an absolute sentence, and in being fixated with certainty claims to be God.

And I can see that trend within the Cartesian revolution or the Cartesian element of the Enlightenment and being obsessed with certainty. You deny your shadow; you deny all the parts of yourself that you do not like, and then you project that shadow onto the other, and then that causes so many complications — and that's putting it mildly down the line.

How deep into the woods, weeds, let's say, do you go in these seminars?

I mean, well not this deep, not as deep as this conversation, but this is what my brain is often doing in between time.

Let's go to another principle: criticize to uplift, empower — never to tear down, never to destroy. Never are strong words, but I understand what you’re aiming at because it’s in relationship to the third principle, I believe.

See, when I take — talk to students about literary criticism, let's say, so let's say — and this is a problem that needs to be discussed in some detail in our culture generally speaking.

I mean, you can take a look at a figure like Freud or Nietzsche, let's say, and if you're inclined to, you can find something they said that you're going to find deeply offensive, and then you can throw them out completely, which means, well, it simplifies your life because then you don't have to read them, right?

And that does make your life a lot simpler.

Yeah, right. But what you lose is whatever these people had to say. And so criticism is separating the wheat from the chaff, like in its proper sense.

It’s — you criticize something so that you can take away what's of value and leave behind what isn’t. That's the purpose. And so that proper criticism isn't destructive; it's redemptive.

And why wouldn't you — you would criticize harshly for a variety of reasons. You might want to hurt someone, but even more simply than that, you might just want to ignore them because we really want to ignore almost everything, and no wonder.

Like how many things can you deal with? And so if you can write someone off, you can ignore them, and perhaps that’s — that's more straightforward, but the criticism to uplift, it's part of the therapeutic process.

You know, I mean partly what you're doing if you do their individual psychotherapy with someone is you're trying to help them decide what to keep and what not to keep and what to develop and what not to develop.

And you can't tell them that because you actually don't know who they are.

Yeah. You actually don't know.

And if you do tell them as a therapist most of the time, A, it won't work, you'll just alienate them, right? And B — well, what if you're wrong?

So you have to ask them and you have to help them. Collaborative empiricism is what the cognitive behaviorists describe it as; like, well, watch your life for a week.

See when you're doing better and when you're doing worse and see what you’re doing when you’re doing better and when you’re doing worse.

Let's see if we can get you doing more of what makes you better and less of what makes you worse.

And that is an understanding of suffering; it's an appreciation of complexity. There's humility in it because what makes you stable and strong and productive — able to overcome your suffering — is going to be exactly the same as what works for me — definitely not!

And you may not know what it is because you're complex beyond your own capacity to understand, that's for sure.

Yeah, it's a problem.

Well that's the inexhaustibility.

Right, that goes right.

So criticize — practically speaking, how do you teach that to people in your seminars? How do you go about —

Well, we teach people to do shadow work or kind of an element of shadow work where we say to people identify someone that you do not like or whose behavior you don't like, and by I don't like, I don't mean simply you find it problematic.

I mean behavior that triggers your ego in such a way where you begin to see yourself as greater than or superior to that person. It's a very specific definition.

So identify someone whose behavior — I’ll put it more succinctly — triggers your ego, right?

And then identify what is it about that behavior that triggers your ego and then identify how that behavior shows up in you.

And what that does is it enables you to see the other person's faults as faults, but not as something completely inhuman or foreign to your own capacity to engage in those faults.

Which makes your critique of them more likely to be rooted in a desire to see them be better or become their better selves, as opposed to a desire to see them fall, which is still — if the intention is to see them fall, to harm them, you're still in that inflated ego.

You're still operating from that desire to have yourself be superior to that person or to prove that you are better than that person, in which case, nothing has really changed in that exchange.

And this is important because if you criticize to tear down — Maya Angelou has this wonderful quote where she says, "If you tell someone over and over again they are nothing, they are less than nothing, they will say to you, 'Oh, you think I am nothing? I will show you where nothing is!'”

And they will become even worse than what you have accused them of being. And the moral of the story is that a person cannot develop character unless they are valued.

And when I think of that quote, it's not just you deliberately or explicitly telling someone vocally, 'You are nothing.' It's also you showing them, right?

If a young person grows up in a dilapidated home where the parents have basically all but abandoned the child, the message that is being sent to that human being is that you are nothing, right?

And then that child, more likely than not — unless there's some mentor or something that intervenes in the process — the child will grow up actually internalizing the message thinking that they are nothing, and they will act accordingly.

So our speech that we use to critique or to correct others and indeed ourselves is super critical, and we have to make sure we're not compounding or making worse a situation instead of ameliorating it, which ultimately should be our intention.

A bunch of ideas were going through my head while you were describing that. One of the things that I found deeply soul-troubling on my tours was the hunger that people had for words of encouragement.

I was struck to my core by how many people were starving for words of encouragement.

And I mean, I really mean that quite literally — words of encouragement, words that would help them be courageous.

And part of that was the message, I suppose, the message that each of them as individuals had something unique to offer, that if offered optimally, or that everyone would benefit from, that we would all be lesser without that offering, and that was important.

And part of the purpose of moral striving, and that that was true of everyone, and I — I'm still — I don't know how much that affected me to see how desperate so many people were for words of that sort.

And that's part of that alienation too, I think, that's rife in our culture because we also have this guilt and induced proclivity to denigrate ourselves as human beings — a cancer on the planet, that everything we do is environmentally harmful, that all our activity is malevolent and ignorant.

I mean, we are limited and often corrupted beings, but you know, we've only had ecological awareness as such in some sense for like 50 years, so you know, how fast can we really learn this?

And we are striving to live despite formidable obstacles, natural obstacles and social obstacles, and so it's reasonable to note now and then that we don't do so badly for given the terrible constraints that we operate within.

So that's, I guess, part of that appreciation for the commonality of suffering and vulnerability.

And so, okay, so your level of analysis is the individual, so that's definitely different — that's definitely different.

Now in terms of rooting everything you do in love and compassion — let's go to that. What do you mean by that exactly?

I mean, because that can easily be a cliché, right? I mean instantly.

Yeah, so I'm pulling from two traditions, which I think you'll appreciate. Two wisdom traditions — one being the Christian wisdom tradition, which is rooted in agape love.

My understanding of agape love in the Christian tradition is a kind of love that enables us to become more human.

So John Verveke, who I know is one of your colleagues, who talks about agape love as the kind of love that a parent who has unconditional love directs toward a child, and who in directing that love actually enables a being to become more human.

Because when you're born, you're sort of this blob, right? This helpless, defenseless blob. And then the love that a parent actually can direct to you, if it is the ideal agape love, actually enables you to become more human.

And that interestingly enough involves this criticism, right? You know because, well, for example, when my son was — my son is more disagreeable than my daughter, so he pushed boundaries quite hard.

He was quite disagreeable in that regard, and it was really interesting to watch him toy with a boundary. Like he would just worry that boundary like mad.

And now and then he'd go off to a daycare or something like that and interact with other kids, and he'd come home sort of possessed by the spirit of some misbehaving child he'd encountered that day.

And he'd push us with that pattern of behavior. Sometimes that would last for a while and my wife and I would get together and say, look, this kid is going off the rails a little bit here for a week.

He doesn’t get away with anything — nothing, nothing. We just clamp down on him. And every time he deviates a tiny bit — because he was testing, testing all the time — we're going to stop him.

And every time we did that, his behavior improved, he got happier, and he liked us more. But what we were trying to punish him — what we were trying to do is to help him draw those fine distinctions between what constituted optimal behavior and sub-optimal behavior, and that was really true in the domain of play and humor.

You know because there’s a real fine line between being playful and teasy and funny and annoying and aggressive and narcissistic. It's a really fine line.

And so it's a lovely thing to be able — you need that critical eye to help guide a child for whom you want the best to understand those fine distinctions.

And that's part of separating the wheat from the chaff.

Yeah, I think you — I hadn't made that connection before actually, but you're right.

And I would say this is important because agape love is what Dr. King said was the ultimate ideal that the civil rights movement aspired towards and wanted to embody.

This was a part of the reason why when people would go out and protest segregation in diners, before they would go out to protest, they would actually ask themselves, "Am I harboring a spirit of resentment? Am I harboring a spirit of rage or vengefulness?"

And if I am, then I'm not going to go out to protest today because I'll just end up projecting that onto the person that I'm protesting.

And they ultimately believe that even while I am fundamentally and vehemently disagreeing with this action that these people are engaging in — this racist action, this dehumanizing action — I want to make sure that how I comport myself does not dehumanize you in turn.

And even more to the point, the way I comport myself is informed by the spirit of agape love, which means seeing you as made in the image of the divine, even as you are engaging in this problematic behavior.

Which is a very difficult thing to do and to practice, like in live — when you know people are calling you racial slurs or people are threatening you with lynchings or people are actually in the process of lynching you.

It is an incredibly difficult thing to practice and embody, but this attests to the strength of that movement, and I think there's so much more we can learn from that movement.

And part of the Theory of Enchantment's goal is to sort of resurrect the spirit of that movement and bring it back into public discourse — and I think it has been lost to some extent.

Well, lost and just difficult, and precisely that you described, right?

I mean wouldn't it be lovely if we could comport ourselves in that manner; you know that the goal of your interactions with someone is to call, to do what you can in all humility to call forth the best in them at every possible — in every possible way?

And I do believe that to some degree you do that with truth in speech, with careful attention to your words.

And you know I've seen some of that, I would say, well, again perhaps most particularly in the tours that I've done, talking to people about their attempts to improve themselves and their desire for that element of — that's an element of the patriarchy in some sense, right? Is that that invitation to mold yourself in a certain way?

But that should be encapsulated within this overarching love, and what is that love?

So in a more abstract sense, the love is — you think that's a hard thing to manage because we're also angry about the limited preconditions of our existence and our subjugation to tragedy and our subjugation to tyrannical authority built into the structure of existence than to rise above that with your best self and still to wish for the best to manifest itself instead of being angry and wanting revenge for those that terrible suffering is.

But you know, what's the alternative? It's to make the suffering worse, to make the tyranny worse.

I mean you can be attracted to that because you get so angry, and it's like, well, to hell with everything!

Why? Well because look what's happened. Look how injustice is. Look at how much suffering there's been!

It's like, we'll make — let’s let everything burn. And especially those who perpetrated — but well we know where that ends up, and hopefully that isn't where we want to go.

So yeah.

Have you seen the film — have you seen the film "Wonder Woman," the first one?

That's a good question. It's possible I've forgotten many movies.

So why did you bring it up specifically?

It is fundamentally about this question, because the villain Ares, god of war, has this perception of human beings and says that it’s not worth it.

And he poses this proposal that he offers to Wonder Woman, and he says, "Come with me and we'll destroy everything because man has ruined everything and we’ll rebuild essentially a Garden of Eden."

And Wonder Woman's response is basically, "Everything you have said about man is correct, but man is also so much more."

And this is ultimately why she refuses his proposal, and it's a beautiful movie. I highly recommend it.

Even watching is something I would highly recommend.

Yeah, so that's — well, this is part of that yes/no answer issue is that all these claims are true in some sense, is that, you know, as human beings, well we’re capable of just spoiling the planet.

And we have to be careful of that, but that it's easy for that to turn into contempt for humanity, and that's just not the proper — that's not an answer that's going to get us anywhere.

And I really like your story about the meditation that the protestors engaged in under Martin Luther King’s direction.

I mean, I've seen often when I've counseled people who are in terrible situations, terrible legal situations for example, where they're just boxed into a corner and being tortured to death for absolutely unjust reasons.

One of the things we always did while strategizing was to help maintain the attitude that nothing should be voluntarily made worse.

And I'll tell you, like if you're in a difficult circumstance — a really difficult circumstance where everything is at stake — and you drift into resentment and start making your own moral errors, the only potential pathway to your way through might have been compromised.

So because you just can’t afford it.

Yeah, well you’re going to cause more trouble, and like, what makes you think you can take more trouble under these circumstances?

Maybe there's some thin line that you can walk that will get you out of the situation reasonably intact, but if you fall prey to dark and unexamined motivations, that may be the end for you in all — in all important ways.

So, and this is important — because there’s so — part of my critique of the progressive take on diversity and inclusion, or an aspect of it at least, is this idea that people in power — material power, people who have material power — somehow have it all.

As if people in the — who have material power are incapable of falling into that very same spirit of resentment and making their lives absolutely worse.

Although on the surface it may look like they are oppressive—and of course they are in a certain way — but it's interesting.

So James Baldwin was in a debate in the '60s, I believe, maybe it was the '50s. I'm not sure, but he was in a debate in the UK, and he was debating a conservative, actually, William F. Buckley.

And he gives these opening remarks about the specter of racism in the South, and he talks about the Alabama sheriff, the racist Alabama sheriff who takes his baton and beats a young black woman.

And this is a very controversial statement, but if you understand anything about pathos or anything that we've been talking about, you understand what he's saying.

He says on some level, "I have to assume that this racist sheriff is a man, and presumably he loves his wife, and he loves his children, and he loves to get drunk now and then.

But yet he doesn’t know what drives him to pick up the baton and hit this other human being and beat this other human being. In some ways, what has happened to the other person that he beats is bad, but what has happened to him is in some ways far worse."

And this is not about power; this is not about material access to power. This is about the existential implication of what happens when a person becomes sort of corrupted by power, right? And falls into an absolute kind of hell and perpetuates hell.

Right, that is in and of itself a kind of nightmarish thing to contemplate.

One of the things I learned, in part from Jung but also from many of the other people I read, was don’t be so sure you know where true power lies.

Yeah.

I mean, and so for me, like true power lies in beauty, true power lies in truth, and I mean that most practically.

I've met people at all walks of life. I’ve had a very diverse range of encounters with people, partly because of my travels and partly because of my work as a clinical psychologist.

I've worked with people at every level of the ability spectrum — from people who really struggled to fold a piece of paper well enough to put inside an envelope to people who've generated world-shaping technologies.

And so I've seen power in its multiplicity of manifestations, and I've certainly come out convinced, for example, that there is nothing more powerful than truth in the word. That's the fundamental source of power — any sort of power that you would actually dare to want.

You know what I mean? It's like, do you really want power? Is it just — what do you mean by that? You want arbitrary authority over other people? Really, you want that?

And it's interesting — it's interesting that you say this because I was just watching — re-watching this conversation between James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni.

And Nikki Giovanni, as a young poetess, is grappling with this because her previous generation was the civil rights generation, and she says, "You guys are so moral, and I'm not. I don't know if I'm interested in morality."

Get like you. She says, you know the saying, you know, "Gain the whole world but lose your soul," yeah that saying.

And she goes, "Give me the world! I want the world!" And then Baldwin essentially asks her, "Are you sure you want that kind of power? Do you know what that kind of power does to a person? How it corrupts people and how it causes people to make these very violent, brutal, cruel decisions?"

"Are you sure you want that kind of power?" And it's a really beautiful exchange, so it definitely resonates with me what you're saying.

Yeah, well, all right.

So I'd like to ask you some more cultural questions. Sure, okay, to comment on some broader cultural figures. You talk about Robin D'Angelo. Tell me about Robin D'Angelo and that set of ideas, if you don't mind. Tell me what you think.

I really don't think that often about Robin D'Angelo. I know she wrote a book called "White Fragility," which was published last year and was all the rave.

I found it incoherent, but I learned why.

What was incoherent?

Maybe this isn't productive. Like, I don't want to — I don't want to push you into commenting on Robin D'Angelo. Maybe that's just not a reasonable place for this.

I'm interested in your take on some of the figures who are in some sense leading the culture that's producing the DEI seminars and all of that, and so that's where — what I'm trying to explore.

So my issue with Robin D'Angelo is my issue with many of the — many of the figures who are touted or who are promoted in this space, which is they seem to define the black experience exclusively in terms of degradation and peril, as opposed to a capacity to understand actually the incredible richness of the black experience.

Certainly, there’s on the one hand experience with cruelty and brutality, but also has this incredible tradition, especially as manifested in the arts.

Okay, so let me ask — I want to segue into something that I'm pulling out of the Atlantic article that was written about you.

Okay, sir, this will be a more productive way of approaching this, I think.

So Abram Kendi is quoted here: "Before and after the Civil War, before and after Civil Rights, before and after the first black presidency, the white consciousness dules the white body, defines the American body.

The white body segregates the black body from the American body. The white body instructs the black body to assimilate into the American body. The white body instructs the black — sorry, the white body rejects the black body assimilating into the American body.

And history and consciousness duel anew. The black body, in turn, experiences the same duel. The black body is instructed to become the American body. The American body is the white body."

It's like I read that and I thought, "Ah, no, no, no, not exactly."

Like I get it, I get it.

So what is — my take was way worse than that response.

Okay, well, I want to hear it right away.

Well, here's where I think the mistake is being made, and it's a fundamental mistake.

It's like, it isn't obvious to me, as a Canadian, say looking at the United States, that a huge chunk of the American body hasn't been remarkably defined by black culture.

It's unbelievable.

I mean, and it is, especially in the arts.

And that's a statement of admiration, not of denigration.

It's like there isn't anything in some sense that's more closely aligned than the combination of beauty and truth than the arts.

And to look at black domination in some sense, or at least massive influence in an endless array of cultural spheres, especially musically— and God, where would life be without music? It would be unbearable without music.

And so this black genius, and you see it manifest itself in ways that just compel imitation.

Yeah.

They compel this tremendous imitation, which is real admiration.

Right, that's real admiration.

It's continually imitated to think of the effect of black music on, well, just every genre you can think of virtually.

And so what is that sort of state? What's part of that statement?

Well, look, cultures are set up to benefit the dominant group, and it has to be that way to some degree because there is this problem of uniting the many into one, right? It's a big problem.

But to make a blanket statement like that, it's like it isn't obvious to me that the American body is so pure, white.

It's not obvious to me at all.

Well, part of my issue with Ibram Kendi is not simply his mischaracterization of the impact that white people have had on our country, but by extension his mischaracterization of the impact that black people have had on this country.

One of my favorite authors is Albert Murray. He wrote an incredible book which is actually a collection of his writings called "The Omni-Americans."

And the subtitle is "Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy."

And there's an incredible parallel between what he writes about the African-American ethos — what he calls the African-American Idiom as expressed in music — and Jungian's ideas about the hero's journey.

He argues that the idiomatic expression, as musically expressed, in things like the blues and jazz and swing and hip-hop — this is not simply a literal thing; it is a metaphorical expression of this capacity to play with whatever life gives you, including the negative potential and positive potential.

The capacity to play is what affords a kind of elegance that emerges out of the base muck of life, right?

And he calls it impromptu heroism culture, which sounds very similar to the hero's journey.

And that capacity to play is precisely what has been admired from the wider American culture and which has allowed black American culture to pervade American culture and turn it into this composite.

And so the problem is much more embodied.

Composite too, so it is —

In some sense, the cart.

Yeah, you bet.

It's a medication, and it works so well because it's not propositionalized — it gets underneath the propositions.

So you have said in "Maps of Meaning" that it is action right that presupposes ideas.

And John Verveke has said that, you know, we've been caught up — part of the problem that we're dealing with in the West is this false understanding of meaning as derived from propositions, when it is in fact participatory ways of knowing that give rise to propositions in the first place.

And so African-American culture, black culture is a very embodied, participatory, relational experience, especially as expressed in the arts.

And this is what is admired in the wider American zeitgeist.

And so Ibram Kendi has, I would say, that he has been filled with far too much despair, and he is actually underestimating the power of black culture in his book, among other things.

But that is incredible because, you know, he comes with this desire to end racial injustice, but doesn't see that he has actually a blind spot which mischaracterizes America, the American experience, and fundamentally depicts the black experience exclusively as degradation, which is precisely what white supremacists do.

And that’s the irony in all of this.

And that's a tragedy in all of this.

Why term at the Theory of Enchantment? You're careful with your words; you obviously thought about that for a long time.

And yes, so, yeah, I mean this — it's interesting because I feel like the term enchantment came to me almost in passing.

I was trying to figure out how to — and we don't have to get into the details of this, I'm happy to get into it if you'd like, but I was trying to teach people or figure out a framework that could teach people how to love each other in the agape sense of the word.

And then I began to ask myself, what are people already in love with?

And so I ventured into pop culture because pop culture shows us what people are already in love with.

And I started to study aspects of our popular culture, which included things like Disney films and Nike and Beyonce and all these brands that have quasi-religious — actually, not quasi-religious — like devotion from their fans.

And I was just like, why — what is happening there?

That's so interesting, because it means that you — well, this is one of the problems I have with the rationalist atheist types.

It's a major problem.

It's like forget about the ontological claims of religion and that — that isn't the issue in some sense as far as I'm concerned.

And this touches on your discussion of Descartes.

It’s like people obviously — obviously have the capacity for religious experience.

We have the capacity for awe, and you could say, well, awe isn't a religious experience. Well, that's a matter of definition, and we could play that game, but if the awe is deep enough — and it’s a definitional issue — is for all intents and purposes, deep awe is religious, or we need another word that means the same as religious if we're going to talk about it.

And you participate — that participates in that in dance and in music and in these popular stories, which is why I've been so interested in taking apart Disney films, for example.

And they're very expensive productions. They're very labor-intensive, the people of genius work on them, they have huge cultural impact, and they're extraordinarily popular.

It's like, what's going on here exactly?

And so it's definitely worth an analysis, and I think you're wise to start with, “Well, what is it that people are valuing and why?”

It's an empirical observation in some sense; this is where they're deriving meaning and value, and the deep study of that is a religious study, and well, there's just no escaping that.

So, okay, so you're looking at pop culture, and I'm looking at pop culture, and I'm studying Disney and Beyonce and Apple and Nike and all these brands, and I'm looking for a common theme to see if there's a common pattern across all of these.

And the common pattern I'm seeing is that all these brands are creating content where their audience sees themselves — their imperfect selves and their potential reflected in the content, which is why they gravitate toward it.

And so I'm seeing, you know, these Disney films that are motifs for the human condition, where this imperfect flawed would-be hero has to go through a series of ups and downs, and ups and downs, and ups and downs to discover their potential self and emerge the hero.

I'm seeing, you know, almost every Nike ad being this narrative for this, you know, sort of junior varsity athlete trying to become better and better and better at her craft and then emerge in a spirit of excellence.

I'm seeing Beyonce say things like "Who run the world? Girls!" And women gravitate towards that because they see their potential reflected in those lyrics.

And it's a universal ideal that compels us to imitate, and that's what attracts our attention.

And that pattern — to identify that pattern is to look for what is truly religious because the pattern that underlies all of the pattern that underlies everything that compels us is the religious pattern.

And it's the religious instinct that orients us towards that.

And that is not an ontological claim about the structure of reality.

I'm not saying anything about God.

This is a different kind of conversation right now that might point to God, and in some sense, it most definitely does, but that isn't the same as the discussion about whether God exists from a propositional perspective, which would be the wrong question anyway, I would argue.

But yeah, so I was seeing all of this emerge from the research that I was conducting, and then at the time I also read a book called "Enchantment," which was written by Guy Kawasaki, the former marketing director of Apple.

And he defined enchantment as a process by which you delight someone, where a person sort of starts to open up to life.

Like it's an enticement, an invitation, an attraction, so to speak.

And he said that this can be present in a human being, a product, and an idea.

And he also said that Steve Jobs used this idea to design Apple products, to sort of figure out this — the aesthetic of what Apple products should look like.

And meanwhile, you know, the idea of enchantment correlates very closely with Disney because Disney takes place in these enchanted forests and these magical kingdoms, and there's this underlying concept of enchantment.

And so I just decided that enchantment seemed like the proper word to define this or to describe this phenomenon by which we start to open up to the complexity of ourselves and thus to others.

And can — which can give us a sense of a relational way of being as opposed to a consuming way of being, right?

Eric Fromm, the philosopher, wrote a number of essays on the difference between having and being, and how he talked about how in the West in particular we have become caught up in this need to consume where we define our identity according to how much we possess — according to how much we have, as opposed to our capacity to become wise — to be.

Right? Not to have, but to be.

To be — that should also be viewed with a tremendous amount of sympathy because it wasn't that long ago when we were all like struggling to feed hand-to-mouth in the face of terrible privation and starvation.

It's very well —

Yes, yes.

So that's another place to have some sympathy for hyper-consuming human beings.

It's like, oh look, we have enough — well, that's never happened before, ever! So now we don't really know what to do with this.

Yeah, I hadn't thought of that, but that's very well said.

And it's not like we don't need — you know, we have — we do have to have things, right, to survive.

We have to have food and water and shelter, but we've fallen into what John Vervake calls this modal confusion where we say, "I want to be mature, so I need to have as many carbs as possible," right?

So we're confusing the having mode with the being mode.

So enchantment — the objective of enchantment, of the Theory of Enchantment, is to bring people back to this relational way of being and to be in balance with the complexity of themselves, which includes the having modes, right?

Which includes our shadows, which includes our aggression, which includes our angst and anxiety and our melancholy.

It's not to the end of suppressing any of those sort of more negative, darker emotions, but to be in balance with all of them, which is what Jung said was the ultimate ideal or the ultimate objective of doing shadow work in the first place.

So what kind of — what's happening when you're giving your seminars, as far as you can tell?

Like what do people experience, and what kind of feedback are you getting from the people you're working with in the corporate world?

Yeah, we get really good feedback. So we give surveys out after we do