Marianne Williamson and The Invisible Context Problem

Full script below the cut:

So ever since the 2nd round of Democratic debates at the end of July, I’ve been learning about Marianne Williamson. She was kind of a dark horse star of the second round and I took an instant and immediate dislike to her. I’ve never trusted the kind of optimism that isn’t based on some idea. I’ve always understood that that kind of friendly, arm-around-the-shoulder inclusion is done because people want something from you.

A friend once told me that sometimes people want to be led and it doesn’t matter where you lead them. People...really think like that.

Now, I don’t know Marianne Williamson that way, but I do know a little about her.

She’s a native Texan who in her own words spent her youth enjoying bad boys and good weed. Her life changed when she read a self-help book called A Course in Miracles, by psychologist Helen Schucman. It allegedly changed her life.

She went to LA on an decision she describes as “non-rational, which doesn’t mean irrational.”

Which...I don’t feel like I have to say anything else about this woman. “Non-rational, which doesn’t mean irrational” continues to describe her from that point, up until what you saw on the Democratic debate stage.

She wrote her own book and preached about god and created a charity called Project Angel Food and was then forced out out it. She went to Detroit to preach at one of those non-denominational, Brand-X Christian churches. She tried to secede that church from its larger organization and was then forced out of it.

She lost her house in Grosse Point, which is a real place where people lost houses in the 2008 financial crisis. Marianne Williamson’s house was worth $2.7 million. Despite that she describes it as a way to “get dirt under my fingernails again.” Did Detroit ever know how good they had it.

I don’t know if you get dirt under your fingernails living in a Michigan McMansion, but that’s a pattern. I’ll get to it.

She kept writing self-help books and she went back to California and ran for congress and wasn’t forced out because her campaign failed. And now she’s running for president as a charismatic dark horse with no political history...but for Democrats this time.

...

Another great quote of hers is, “what some people call ‘ego’ I call personality.”

In an interview with LA Mag, her wine aunt who believes in crystals facade got disrupted when Monica Corcoran Harel, the interviewer, threw her some pretty standard curve balls. “Who’s your daughter’s dad?” and “What happened with that church secession?” Those are reasonable, if edgy, questions, and in both cases, Williamson gets real, gets serious, and breaks that wine bottle to get ready for a proper glassing.

And that’s who I know her as, from reading about her. That’s the pattern. Hippy-dippy, gentle, god-loves-you-believe-in-yourself-it’s-all-good-in-the-hood until shit gets real. There’s a familiar phenomenon when people try to talk to white folks about racism where we tend to be defensive and we label the conversation uncomfortable, or disrespectful, or offensive. It’s called “white fragility.” 

The social tools of mild control are leveraged to avoid discomfort, and when you push through those tools to have a discussion about something important without distraction or hedging, then suddenly you’re the aggressor. You’re the bad guy. And you enable who you’re talking to to have an emotional response that lets them shut the conversation down anyway.

The roadblocks go up to avoid it and if you push past the roadblocks, they avoid it by talking about the roadblocks. It’s a self-contained sphere of aversion and it’s ugly. And it works.

So I’m talking about a broader model of White Fragility. I’m not going to pull out the Henry the Fifth thing and go all “aspect of the lamb” and then “aspect of the tiger.” I’m not going to do the Sarah Palin version of Henry the fifth and give you that shitty pitbull-slash-lipstick joke (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, count yourself lucky). 

Williamson’s use of fragility isn’t the sign of a competent, manipulative person. It’s not the sign of a grifter’s performance or a snake-charmer who knows how the trick is done. It’s the sign of someone who has lived their life on a cloud of privilege and honestly believes what she’s saying in the moment she’s saying it.

She doesn’t believe-believe it. She doesn’t believe-believe anything, except that good things happen to her because she’s a good person and also money om-nom-nom. She’s an empty suit has been been telling people things that make them feel good and who has been doing things that are good.

Let’s get gay.

Because all of this has been prelude. Marianne Williamson was an early supporter of AIDs patients. The charity she founded was originally made to bring meals to housebound gay men dying of AIDs in LA. And it did. And it probably made the lives of a lot of people who were dying alone...a little less alone.

That wasn’t all she brought those men. Y’see, Marianne Williamson’s books are self-help books. Specifically, self-healing books.

…

She says that people who are overweight generally have some trauma they need to get past. She’s an anti-vaxxer, but hides behind cloaks of “some vaccines are good” and “Big Pharma is bad” and “let’s look at the science on both sides.”

She thinks anti-depressants cause mass-shootings and that depression isn’t a real illness.

And she has said that “AIDs is not more powerful than god.” That’s a direct quote.

Y’see, she’s a faith healer. Without snakes or whammies or speaking in tongues. If god loves you, if you love yourself, if you have faith...then you can overcome it. The “believe in  yourself” platitudes of someone who knows god is real because he makes people write all those little checks.

The problem is...is that when you tell someone they’re sick because the world is unnatural and they have to find the purity within is that they don’t believe they’re sick because a protein-coated genetic sequence is replicating itself inside of their body. And--and so they stop taking the medications that stop that protien-coated genetic sequence from replicating in their body.

I mean, why would they? If the virus isn’t wha’ts making them sick, why pay for anti-viral treatments?

Marianne Williamson said she never told anyone to stop taking their medication and honestly, that...willful ignorance and moral hedging in the face of a question that would make any decent person pause...if there is a hell, I know it punched her ticket there.

…

If we need a laugh line, here’s her description of AIDs, “Here are some enlightened visualizations: Imagine the AIDS virus as Darth Vader, and then unzip his suit to allow an angel to emerge.”

*bitter laughter*

Y’know, they say anyone can be a writer, and they’re right. Totally right.

She adds a bit later “the healing doesn’t come from the pill. It comes from our belief.”

So people stopped taking medications and they died. Lots of different people. But for the purposes of our narrative focus and your ability to put a specific face on it. Gay men suffering from AIDs, died believing their faith would save them. 

Because they believed her. They bought her books and they died and their money bought her suits, and her shoes, and her hair stylist, and her dental cleanings, and--I assume--one hell of an editor. Something to think about when see her suits, and shoes, and hair, and her thousand-dollar smile.

…

Now we talk about the meat of it. The invisible context.

The notion put forward Marianne Williamson and people like her the notion that love or moral Purity will save you. That you’re inherently perfect and it’s corruption--trauma, negative feelings, an unnatural society--that moves you away from being a skinny, undepressed, not..dying of AIDs or cancer...person.

Consider demands for pay raises. Lots of folks respond with “well, get a different job.” Don’t change things by creating a disruption. Inflation is planned at 2% year-on-year by the government, but that’s invisible. Treating wages as a natural state of affairs and ignoring the context of inflation. The assumption is that how much people make is determined by the output of an invisible anus and not the choice of a real person.

That person and the choice are invisible, and therefore part of the “natural” state of things.

Consider the notion that drugs and crime are things that spontaneously generate from bad people like it was once thought that maggots spontaneously generated from spoiled meat. That bad people engage in bad behavior and that punishing those people is necessary, punishment that’s however bad it has to be to get the desired result. And if they die...well, they were bad people.

Poverty, reactions to social injustices, and mental illness...those behind-the-eyes causes are invisible and therefore the actions of fraud, and assault, and addictive behavior mark individuals as innate frauds, assailants, and addicts.

Consider professionalism. I was reading about society as an abstraction. We don’t know how most things work, and we rely on others to have an in-depth knowledge of that how those things work. They have education, training, and experience that makes them experts in their field. Professionals.

And yet, we do have people who do not see that education, training, experience. People who whom knowledge is invisible, but for who “competence” is real. You see, you always hear stories about accidents caused by bad doctors and bad pilots and bad scientists or whatever. Those people had “knowledge,” but hindsight tells us they lacked “competence.” 

Even if the problem wasn’t one of actual competence, like it was a mechanical failure which no trained individual could have stopped, some people believe that a competent person can always prevent an accident. I won’t go into why--

--it’s Hollywood and media in general, especially shit like Batman and Die Hard, but I won’t get into it--

--so the deal is, if you’re a competent person, then...don’t you already know as much about vaccines as a doctor? As much about whether the Earth is round as a pilot? 

Education is invisible. Competence is manifest in winners.

This points to the idea of an invisible context. A status quo that is natural and which is made unnatural by disruptions. Some people are naturally paid less. Some people are born criminals. The world could run fine without engineers and scientists because iPhones and plane flights and medical research could all be done by competent people. And we’re all born healthy and made less healthy by the unnaturalness of the world.

Low wages (for other people), harsh criminal penalties (for other people), and inhumane imprisonment (for other people), in the form of sickness & diseases & ostracization are natural and required and “good, actually”.

And fixing it, those idiots are the real problem. Everything was good until those guys started rousing rabble.

And this system works well if other people are doing worse than you. Because, they haven't bowed as deeply, or as long, or as submissively to the prevailing, invisible economic and social realities that rule the world. Fools. Losers.

Until you...are doing worse. 

Until you are sick. Until you don't make enough for what you do, until someone you love is addicted to opioids.

Suddenly, despite your moral obsequiance you are being treated as a loser. 

At that point, you can learn about all that context and lobby to change the system, like those fools from earlier.

Or...

You can wield their words to protect your moral standing like an ape brandishing a railgun. Ignore all new information that might help you understand how hardships happen, and find a scapegoat to offer up to the invisible anus of the market.

So you have this f****** situation where two people with the same histories of poverty and drug addiction draw down on each other, one trying to change the system and another saying the system is fine the only reason the system crushed THEM  is because someone else was trying to fix it.

The invisible context problem is that if there was a point where society was perfect except for dissent, then the only way it can restore society to its natural form is to crush dissent and regress to a time that didn’t exist.

It doesn't allow for understanding of why Society fails. It doesn't allow for analysis. It doesn’t allow for solutions.

It can silence and destroy aberrations, but it cannot solve problems. Folks who believe in invisible context believe angels get more done than fucking taxes.

It cannot perpetuate itself across the generational gap that destroys civilizations. No generation that is consumed by the next was ever great.

The greatness is not in clinging imaginary virtues to your chest and decrying how your successors do not have them. A society is not great if it cannot raise its successors to want to uphold it. It cannot do that if its belief and its own greatness is rooted in comfort and a belief in a natural order whose only flaw is change. 

There is no natural world to go back to, no Great America “to make again.” 

The solution to stagnant wages isn't to get a higher-paying job the solution to rising incarceration rates in brutal prison conditions isn't to stay out of jail, and they solution to misfortune isn’t to be blessed by gods.

Marianne Williamson represents the thought that “God is more powerful than AIDS,” the belief that folks who aren’t pleasing to the eye are the results of moral impurity or psychological damage. The thought that everything is pleasing to the eye and healthy by nature and that all departures from that come from our failings. That the hardships in our lives are something internal that we can control.

That is convenient some of us, but a false premise. Sometimes the solution to problems involves working with other people. It involves upsetting the status quo. It requires change in cooperation. You cannot think yourself to health. You cannot purify the country to Greatness. There is no invisible, natural, convenient order to the universe. It is just us.

It is just us and it is just us together. Solving problems. Facing facts. And no solution to our problems will magically appear because we need it or materialize from our past. Our past is filled with ignorance. Disease. Magical thinking. Charlatans. Callous indifference. selfishness. The present has those things too of course, but the present is the only time that we have to abolish them from the future.

That’s all for today.

Keep asking questions and keep learning.