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Religion and Justice
Welcome to "Religion and Justice," a podcast brought to you by the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
Hosted by Gabby Lisi (she/they/he) and George Schmidt (he/him/ours), we explore the intersections of class, religion, labor, and ecology, uncovering their implications for justice.
This podcast is a space for investigation, education, and organizing around these intersections. Join us as we engage in thought-provoking discussions with experts, fostering dialogue for actionable change.
Together, we navigate religion, justice, and solidarity for a more equitable future.
Religion and Justice
Therapy, Neoliberalism, and the Social Roots of Distress with Bruce Rogers-Vaughn
In this episode, pastoral theologian and psychotherapist Dr. Bruce Rogers-Vaughn—pastoral theologian, clinician, and author of Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age—exposes how today’s mental-health system locates suffering in individual pathology while ignoring the social and economic forces producing widespread distress.
He explains how research funding, psychotherapy models, and the biomedical frame all shift attention away from the societal roots of depression, anxiety, and addiction. Instead of understanding suffering as a meaningful response to harmful conditions, the neoliberal model blames the individual and demands “resilience” and compliance.
This conversation doesn’t stop at critique. Bruce reframes depression as a meaningful signal, not a malfunction; argues for therapy as deep transformation instead of symptom deletion; and offers a concrete starting point for care that resists adaptation: make friends, build comradeship, recover solidarity. We connect the dots between research policy since 1980, the rise of resilience talk and positive psychology, and why mindfulness without tradition can become just another corporate tool.
Key Points
- The biomedical model serves neoliberalism by hiding systemic causes of suffering.
“It’s a way neoliberalism covers its own ass… so nobody can trace back their suffering to the system.” - Research funding was redirected in the 1980s to brain-based explanations, shutting down community-level studies.
- Modern therapy focuses on symptom removal, not transformation.
“Psychotherapy today has become a sophisticated exercise in blaming the victim.” - Competitive individualism isolates people, fragments identity, and undermines community life.
- Rising mental-health treatment and worsening mental-health outcomes reflect a disconnect between what’s treated and what’s causing harm.
- Debt, workplace performativity, and isolation create what Rogers-Vaughn calls “third-order suffering”—distress whose source is invisible but pervasive.
Dr. Bruce Rogers-Vaughn is a pastoral theologian, licensed psychotherapist, and longtime faculty member at Vanderbilt Divinity School. With four decades of clinical experience, he is known for his groundbreaking book Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age, which critiques how contemporary mental-health systems adapt individuals to unjust social conditions. His work brings together psychoanalysis, political economy, and pastoral care to reveal the deep links between suffering and the structures of neoliberal capitalism.
About Religion and Justice
Religion and Justice is a podcast from the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. We explore the intersections of class, religion, labor, and ecology, uncovering how these forces shape the work of justice and solidarity. Each episode offers space for investigation, education, and organizing through conversations with scholars, organizers, and practitioners.
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The biomedical model is a way that neoliberalism covers its own ass. Because that way nobody can trace back their suffering to the system. So it doesn't become a sort of fertile ground for resistance against an unjust system. Instead, it's simply turned into a symptom to be expunged, pure and simple.
SPEAKER_04:Welcome everyone to a very special edition of Religion and Justice. There are times when Gabby and I are having conversations about the future of the podcast, and we're trying to decide who we want to invite on. The name that keeps coming up for us as we both get a really stupid, shitty grin on our face is Dr. Bruce Rogers Vaughn. Bruce is one of those people that we have just been desperately wanting to talk to for a long time, and we'll hopefully get him on again after this as well. Bruce is one of these watershed figures in pastoral theology and really in the caregiving industry in general. It's really a big pleasure and an honor to have you on here, Bruce. Could you give everybody a little bit of background about sort of where you come from, you know, and what sort of brought you to the profession that you found yourself in now?
SPEAKER_05:It's a dangerous question because I was recently uh in a group where I had to do my whole autobiography. So I could go on a long time about this. I grew up in Fort Paint, Alabama, which is just in the foothills of Appalachia, down below Chattanooga, Tennessee. So I'm a hillbilly at heart, and I did not grow up in the PMC. I grew up in the laboring class. My father was a member of two different unions during his career, 40-something years in the International Union of Electricians. His father and his father's father were both in United Mine Workers. So I come from a long tradition of laborers. Also, most of the white folk in Southern Appalachia have intermarried with Cherokee. So there's Cherokee blood. I don't claim members of the tribe, for goodness sakes, but we all have sympathies with indigenous Americans that you wouldn't expect growing up in the segregated South, as I did. So that's sort of the cultural background I grew up in. I mentioned at the beginning of the book, I'm one of the last people you would ever expect to eventually become a major critic of capitalism. I grew up in a very fundamentalist evangelical Christian home. My father became a minister when I was 11. It was not a militant fundamentalism, it was what I call a naive fundamentalism. The Bible just was true in everything it said without using the word inerrant. Capitalism wasn't really discussed. It wasn't on the table, but it was assumed. From there, I responded to a call to ministry to preach, as we put it, when I was a senior in high school after the death of my grandfather, my maternal grandfather, who was ministered, literate Baptist farmer preacher. He could not read or write. He used to pray in family gatherings that one of his 13 grandsons, sons, of course, this was patriarchy, but one of his 13 grandsons would become a minister. Eleven of the 13 did. I'm the only one who took that call as meaning you would go to college and then to seminary, which I did. I went to Sanford University, University in Alabama, where my life was turned around. We had excellent professors in the religion faculty. I encountered a completely different way of reading the Bible and understanding Jesus, which revolutionized my thinking, set me on a different path. It did not put me on an anti-capitalist path. That path came after graduate studies, after my PhD at Vanderbilt. I moved from chaplaincy into pastoral psychotherapy, pastoral counseling, which I've done now for almost 40 years. I can't believe it, but yes, almost four decades. So the anti-capitalist spirit in me emerged as I was in clinical practice. What we've been told since 19 roughly 80, when the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Mental Disorders, the DSM, third edition, was published, was the beginning in the United States of a complete sellout to a biomedical model of mental illness and psychological distress. I was educated in a psychodynamic world that was not part of that biomedical model, but I began to breathe in the air of this biomedical understanding of mental health care. But people were coming to me, mostly individuals, some couples and families, in distress, usually some form of depression or anxiety, with or without addictions. Over time, and I mean over a long period of time, it was not making sense to me that what people's distress was about was their genetics or their brain chemistry or chemical imbalances or even trauma understood in a restricted sense as being about childhood experiences. I mean, that made sense to a point. But none of that was adding up for me to explain why people coming to me were in the distress they were in. I knew in my gut there was more going on than just something residing in their individual life narratives, as important as that may be. So I began to read and do research related to the mental health field about older theories, classical theories, actually, psychoanalytic theories, all the way back to the time of Freud, that did not understand psychological distress and individual formation for that matter, personalities. They did not understand that as a biomedical process. They understood it as a cultural one. People tend to forget that Freud practiced in Vienna, and he was interested in himself and the social origins of what he called the psychoneuroses. But at the Berlin Clinic, at the same time, the Berlin Clinic was actually founded a little before the Vienna Clinic. All the analysts at the Berlin Clinic were communists and socialists, all of them. And every one of them understood the neurosis as originating in problems in society rather than in the individual. In other words, it had to do with problems between individual psychological, emotional health, and the social realities that people lived in. I began to read more of that material, both old and new, that tried to understand people's problems in a social material context rather than simply a biomedical one. So that's about as short a version I can give you of what led me from Appalachia and Baptist evangelical roots all the way to preaching against capitalism today.
SPEAKER_04:You're a professor of pastoral theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School. You've been a licensed therapist for a very long time. All of this culminated in a sort of magnum opus for caregiving professionals in a book you titled Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age. You sort of, in a small part, kind of sketched a little bit of the beginnings of it. You talk about the ways in which neoliberalism is part of the pool that generates what we would describe as sort of mental health problems, right? Does that sound accurate? Yes.
SPEAKER_05:Could you say more about that? Let me give a little prelude to that, since clearly I was thinking about it before I wrote the book, right? I was thinking about this for a while. And by this, I mean about neoliberalism. Once I understood that the clients, patients, I don't really like the term clients, that's a very capitalist term for people who come to see you. The folks who come to see me, I was trying to understand them. So I had to go back to understand people in context. By context, I mean, what is the force shaping culture today and how is it doing that? I mean, I had to go to folks like Antonio Gramsci, who I've never read before until then, and his concept of hegemony to understand how Marxism was not just about producers and workers, it was, but it was also about a larger cultural model of how society gets shaped and what is assumed to be true, including how we understand what it means to be a good human being. So I had to learn about neoliberalism. I had to learn about the current phase that we're in. And by the way, the best history on this is Quinn Slobodian. Lots of histories have been written, but Quinn Slobodian's history came out after my book did. The book titled is Globalists, and he does a superb unpacking of the roots, the ideological roots of neoliberalism back in the 30s, up until it came into power in the 90s. I had to read a lot of stuff about neoliberalism. To understand and push it further than most Marxists would push it, I had to push it into understanding how it was shaping life on the ground. In other words, the lives of the people who were coming to me in distress. What were the dots connecting neoliberal culture as well as the material facts of neoliberalism, like economic inequality, which in itself has a bad impact on mental health? How did the culture shape people? And the bottom line of that really is the radical competitive individualism that accompanies neoliberal culture. Why does that matter for mental health? Well, many ways. One way is it isolates us. So we all live in our individual little iron cages. Iron cage, Ebb and Weber. We all live in our little solitude, almost solitary confinement, in our own little inner worlds of meaning, which we assume has nothing to do with common truth. It just has to do with our individual truths. So isolation is one effect. Human beings are like many other animals. Dogs, for example. We live in packs. We're social animals. When you separate us from the pack, we get sick and even die. Living connected organically with other people is essential for us. Neoliberalism, at its core, Noam Chomsky has even affirmed this. The core of neoliberalism isn't even just economics. The core of it is a systematic effort to dismantle human forms of association. Why does today's capitalism need that? Why does it need to dismantle human institutions and organizations to remove all competition, to its own ideology? So that's part of why people become more depressed, anxious, and addicted is they're isolated. The other part of competitive individualism is we all become our own brand, or as Wendy Brown calls it, entrepreneurs of the self. I mean, look at any of our social media profiles. We're just self-promoting all the time, even when it's not monetized. So what is the upshot of that? The upshot of that is if you're depressed, it's your own damn fault. Even with the biomedical model, which the idea was to destigmatize mental illness, right? But the research shows that that message that mental illness is a disease like any other has actually led to worse stigmatization. So the depressed individual is ontologically different for me because they're biologically different. Something's wrong in their genes, something's wrong with their brains. So they're just different for me. And even if they think it's a disease like any other, so they're not to blame, well, they're responsible for getting better. So if they don't get better and get over being depressed, it's their own damn fault. It became more obvious to me after doing this research about the cultural context of well-being, psychological and interpersonal well-being, it became more obvious to me that psychotherapy, even, as it is done under the neoliberal model, that even psychotherapy today has become a very sophisticated exercise in blaming the victim. Why? Because we locate people's problems within themselves. It's your fault. It's your fault. If you're responsible for it, if it comes from inside you, then you're responsible. And you either have to treat it, get it treated appropriately, and get beyond it. But it's up to you. Perfect. The precedents for Le Guin's comment are people like the Frankfurt School, people like Eric Fromm, Harry Stack Sullivan, I could go on with many others. This was a school of psychoanalysts and psychologists who believe to their core that the societies in which we live is what shapes who we are. Individualism, if we really get right down to the nitty-gritty of it, is a big myth that neoliberal capitalism tells itself and others. We are shaped by the forces around us. We do have agency. If I didn't think there was such a thing as individual agency, I wouldn't continue being a psychotherapist. But what we have to understand is what little agency we have is very small compared to the enormous social forces that bear upon us. Some for good, but much of it for destructive, never existed as a diagnosis, a psychiatric diagnosis until 1980. Even in the former versions of the DSM during Reagan. Exactly. It happened when Reagan was elected, but clearly the DSM was in formation, the 1980 version, DSM III before 1980.
SPEAKER_04:These ancient traditions are trying to say that something important was going on to you, on with you during the Dark Knight of the Soul.
SPEAKER_05:Right. So I'm trained psychodynamically. I mean, one of my teachers in my graduate program was a psychoanalyst, and one of my first supervisors when I was in training was a psychoanalyst. In that training, depression was not a diagnosis. Depression was seen as the psychological equivalent of running a fever. It was not a thing, it was a fever. So when someone is running a fever and goes to the doctor, the doctor doesn't say, oh, we're diagnosing you with fever, and we have a medication for fever. That's not what they do. I understand depression in the classical sense. Depression is a sign that something else is going on. And it is the responsibility of the therapist and the patient in relationship to one another to explore and understand what is going on with the patient and in the patient's world that leads to them being in a depressed mood, in a depressed state. That to me is the therapeutic challenge. If you want to talk about it in a spiritual sense, there's lots of literature going back, as you mentioned, the dark night of the soul. In that sense, depression is about understanding what is happening. What does this mood that has come over me, what is it trying to say to me? And maybe not just to me, to my world, to the world around me. If it could be given a voice, what would depression speak to us? And I first wrote about this in a paper that came out two years before my book did. There was a paper published in the journal called Pastoral Psychology, and the title of the article probably says it all Blessed are those who mourn, depression as political resistance. In that paper, I define depression as a symptom of the immune system of the soul. So when the soul is distressed and becoming fragmented, becoming depressed may be one way that it seeks to find a voice.
SPEAKER_01:I want to make a distinction here for our listeners, because you get into it very clear in caring for sure souls in a neoliberal age, but you're consistent with it in your other writings as well. But that depression being a symptom of another problem, the way our neoliberal psychotherapy world treats depression as is we can fix it if we can teach you how to comply in the current social and economic order. The reason it's a problem is because you're putting gunk in the cog that you're supposed to be for us. That's like what the problem is. I think you just touched on it pretty well. After I read your book, I then moved on to internal family systems by Dick Schwartz and then started therapy with IFS and somatic experiencing. What was so foundational in that for me was that I realized that the individualistic approach that our society and our social structure enforces on us, we do it to ourselves internally too. I just thought that an individual is a whole as itself, there's not distinctions between parts, which is also what our social and economic order teaches is that like you are responsible for all of these things. It's your fault that you have depression or anxiety or all of these things to fix it. You just need to perform better in your family at work, and all of that is compliance.
SPEAKER_05:There's cracks in every hegemony, as Gramsci himself taught us. But the dominant model today in psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy is really one of adaptation. So what it is trying to do with suffering individuals is to better adapt them to the existing system. Correct, Abby, as it is. So under this model, it's the individual that has to change, not the system. And psychiatry and psychotherapy, psychology exist to help individuals do that, to adjust to the system. Well, clearly something's wrong with that model because more and more people are getting therapy. Go online and look at the numbers. More and more people are seeking therapy, and the mental health is getting worse and worse. So what's going on here?
SPEAKER_01:What's interesting is for you when you open this book, your clients that were most pivotal in you discovering this, folks that are middle class or upper middle class or even upper class who maybe didn't have childhood trauma and were still experiencing all of these signs of distress and maybe weren't in a situation of economic precarity the way that a working class or a working poor person was. And that was really pivotal to me as well to realize hold on, the whole system is affecting the whole people. It's not just isolated to those at the bottom. The system is destroying everyone, regardless of childhood trauma indicators.
SPEAKER_05:Yes. I'm not saying childhood trauma is unimportant. There's lots of great research going on now about trauma. We do have to be careful. I want to put up a warning here. It's often the best theories that get co-opted by the neoliberal state or the corporate state, if you want to call it that. And that includes trauma theory. So trauma theory is now getting twisted to apply only to specific personal narratives of trauma, not to any trauma, for example, that might emerge from living in a particular society, but only trauma from living in a particular family or from, you know, childhood sexual abuse, rape, and so forth, which are terrible. I would not erase trauma theory, I would recontextualize trauma theory. I'm going to sound like a no-fuggy today, so I'm going to go back to Eric Erickson. Remember the famous developmental psychologist, Eric Erickson, who was a psychoanalyst. Erickson's most famous book was called Childhood and Society. Now pause for a minute. Just imagine a title like that being published by dominant forms of psychiatry today. No, it wouldn't happen. Not in the United States. And here's what Erickson said that he would add to this discussion, Gabby, about trauma. He would say, of course, childhood trauma occurs. Of course, children are affected by what happens in their family that they grow up in. But he would add, that family and that childhood is itself shaped by the larger societal context. So we're not talking about either this or that. We're talking both and.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Well, and then that that society itself is imposing trauma on the members of the family, which is then impacting their not that responsibility gets removed from individual actions, but that the trauma is coming in from all sides at that point. Existing in the society, conforming to the society, and then the stressors that come with attempts to conform in the society. What your model showed me, and it was revolutionary, was that no wonder I'm so exhausted all the time. Not only do I have childhood trauma, not only do I have economic trauma, I'm also existing in an economic and social system that is a continuation of all of those things. It hasn't stopped. There's not been a sort of end to the experience of constant conforming, constant exploitation of labor. And then any sign that I'm resisting that is bad. The system doesn't like that. People who want to conform to the system for whatever reason don't like that. But your model in particular changes accountability from just an individual perspective. If society is playing a role in our families, our communities, the expectations of the economic system are being imposed on all of us, that changes accountability just from an individual to everyone. That's why the corporate uh system doesn't like what you're saying. It's pointing the finger at the ways that it's retaining and obtaining the power.
SPEAKER_05:The biomedical model, we may think of this from the standpoint of hegemony, Gramsci's word. The biomedical model is a way that neoliberalism covers its own ass. Because that way nobody can trace back their suffering to the system. So it doesn't become a sort of fertile ground for resistance against an unjust system. Instead, it's simply turned into a symptom to be expunged, pure and simple.
SPEAKER_04:I have some sort of like Seinfeld imagery or maybe uh soprano imagery, or I'm thinking of all these different TV shows. Everybody loves Raymond, where uh the mother finds out their her son is going to therapy and she's thinking, they're just gonna start blaming mom, aren't they? And I'm thinking of the neoliberal state finding out that uh one of their children is going to Bruce Rogers' bond. Oh, well, Bruce is just gonna get them to start blaming the neoliberal state, aren't they? I actually want to jump back to a point that you made that gets to the title of a presentation you gave to the psychotherapy division of ACPE last October. And the title of the presentation has a question mark at the end of it. It starts out with a declarative statement, or at least it feels very declarative. Psychotherapy has become a weapon of the neoliberal state. And then here's where the question part, I guess, is can psycho-spiritual liberation save us? But I'm interested in mental health care working and how is it working today? Because it seems like you just brought up a stat that says we're seeking more mental health care, but mental health is on a massive decline. So could you fit all those pieces together for me about how psychotherapy is has become a weapon of the neoliberal state? And then this inverse relationship, or is it even a relationship, or is it something greater? This sort of rise in the seeking of mental health care and the decline of mental health.
SPEAKER_05:Well, the neoliberal state part, maybe we've already talked about a little bit in terms of an individualized theory of how psychological distress emerges, is a way to avoid talking about the external conditions, the societal conditions that may play into a person's depression or anxiety or whatever. That part maybe we've talked about some. The part you're bringing in that's new, I guess, from that talk I gave last fall, is that more and more people are doing therapy, but people are getting, to use the slang term, sicker and sicker. So where is the disconnect? What is happening? Why are people getting sicker if they're seeking more and more mental health services? The reason is there's a disconnect between what is actually affecting people suffering the most and what they're being treated for. This is parallel to psychological or psychiatric research. When Ronald Reagan came into office, one of the executive orders he wrote, yes, there were executive orders before Trump, Ronald Reagan wrote an executive order to the National Institute of Mental Health. In the order, he said, we will no longer be funding research on the community or societal origins of mental suffering. That's exactly what the order said. Prior to 1980, there was a very robust community psychology and a community, what was it called in psychiatry? In psychology, it was called the community psychology movement. In psychiatry, it was called something else. I think social psychiatry or something like that.
SPEAKER_01:It all comes back to Reagan.
SPEAKER_05:In a simplistic way, we could say that. Quinn Slobodian would correct us a little bit, but it's it's roughly that's how the timing goes. But what was parallel to that is research from Reagan on in the U.S. and then eventually around the world went into biomedical research. It was George H.W. Bush who declared when he came into office this is the decade of the brain. That's what he called it, the decade of the brain, meaning all psychiatric research that was funded by the government was going to go into studying the brain. So this is when the contemporary, robust field of neuroscience was born. Now, here's the problem with it. Neuroscience, I don't put it all down. It's contributed some interesting things to what we need to know. We've spent billions, literally billions of dollars trying to tie depression, anxiety, and other diagnoses to genetics, to the brain, to various things inside the human body, with absolutely nothing to show for it. We've come up with no empirical evidence that says that the brain or the body is the bottom line cause for psychiatric suffering. Zero. Still not there. The same thing, parallel is going on in psychotherapy. So we've been spending millions, if not a few billion dollars, on what is now called ESTs, empirically supported treatments. Empirically supported treatments are developed not in psychotherapy offices, they're developed in psychology departments of universities. Well, how do psychology departments earn their keep, so to speak? Well, they earn it by serving the powers that be. The emphasis now in psychotherapy is to eradicate symptoms. The purpose of psychotherapy before the neoliberal age was a transformation of the self. Transforming the self, personal change, deep-going personal change. Not so anymore. The purpose of the dominant forms of psychotherapy today is to expunge symptoms. Remove depression, remove anxiety, get rid of panic attacks, get people not addicted anymore, whatever the symptoms are. It's not about personal transformation.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I mean, aren't there even forms of like Lacanian psychotherapy where if you were to come into your therapist and be like, I'm unhappy, they'd be like, Yeah, that's probably for the best. There were forms of psychotherapy that kind of said happiness is not a goal you should be trying to shoot for in a fulfilling, deep life and meaningful.
SPEAKER_05:Outside the United States, you know, there are other forms of psychiatry and psychotherapy that are pushing back. And there is even in the United States. I mean, we could get to nuancing this shortly if you wish, but I'm focused on the dominant thing, what's being taught in master's and PhD programs in psychology and mental health in the United States. And what's getting taught there are these ESTs. Well, what is an EST? Well, they form these little research modules based on medical research, where you have a control group and you have an experimental group and you try to control the variables, right? The best source for debunking this is Jonathan Shedler. So for your listeners who want to follow this up, Jonathan Shedler, S-H-E-D-L-E-R, is on the faculty at the medical school of the University of Colorado. Shedler has shown that empirically supported treatments aren't even well supported empirically. I'll give an example. In a number of these research modules that tried to say compare psychoanalysis to some sort of brief solution-focused therapy, what they would do is not bring in an actual psychoanalyst or study what psychoanalysts are doing in the field. They would train a graduate student to operate according to the following principles. He or she or they weren't even a psychodemic therapist. They were being trained to act like one for the basis of the research. And then that would become the control group to which they would compare this new empirically supported treatment, the triumph. Well, you can get the idea of how this skews the research. So Schedler has found that the research is by and large flawed because it focuses on a very short-term outcome because, you know, you got to get tenure. And the results that are measured, he says, don't last. So when they follow up these groups a year later, the good outcomes that did occur haven't lasted. I'm rolling back to your question about why are people getting more and more therapy, but people are getting worse and worse off in terms of their well being. The other answer, of course, is that neoliberalism is growing and getting exponentially more powerful by the year. So what we're up against is also increasing exponentially. So there's multiple reasons why people are getting worse in terms of their well-being.
SPEAKER_01:I'm getting to the back half of your book now. You start talking about how neoliberalism is a voice-denying rationality, and it has sort of like these three prongs, named desymbolization, de-institutionalization, and desubjectification. Can you pause for a minute and walk us through each of those?
SPEAKER_05:I shamelessly stole these, and my French is terrible, so forgive me if I don't pronounce his name right. Robert Danny Dufu was a French philosopher who wrote a tremendous book called The Art of Shrinking Heads. These were the terms he used in that book. You can tell it's French by how long the words are. I'll walk you through those. Deinstitutionalization. What Dufu meant by that was that neoliberalism, as I put it earlier, quoting Noam Chomsky, is a systematic dismantling of human forms of association. So it erodes what we call traditional institutions. One obvious one is religion. Churches, congregations, mosques, their size, area of influence is dissipated. And we see that today. I mean, Gen Z is the most non-church going generation we've ever seen since the United States has been recording religious involvement. But it doesn't stop at religion. And DeFour is very clear about this. It goes to things like labor unions and civic organizations and neighborhood organizations. All of these are being systematically dismantled. What is left? The only institutions that are strong are those that support neoliberalism. Large corporations, the banking system, the finance system, governments actually get bigger rather than smaller. All the talk is about reducing the size of government in the U.S. But in fact the research shows the government gets exponentially larger, even under Trump. Just look at the big, beautiful bill. How many billions and trillions of dollars that is going to add to the federal deficit? So the only institutions that prosper are those that directly serve neoliberal interests. All the other institutions are systematically eroded. That's deinstitutionalizations. People become more and more lonely, as I mentioned before. Desymbolization goes along with it because the lives of institutions are nourished and fed by their historic narratives. Marx had historic narratives, the revolt of the proletariat, and all that went with that. Labor unions have narratives. So these are symbolic narratives that support the lives of these collectives. I had to smile when I got to that place in the book, reading The Art of Shrinking Hits, because he actually calls these soteriological narratives. In theology, we refer to those as narratives about what salvation looks like. So these narratives get eroded as well. We no longer have stories of meaning that have depth, that feed our souls, that sustain communal as well as individual lives. And so individuals are left with nothing but their own narratives. This really makes me want to cry. People have to create their own individual personal narrative out of thin air, the stories of their own little lives. I'm not demeaning people's personal narratives. I've lived a life of listening to people's personal narratives. It's important. What makes me want to cry is those personal narratives have progressively been disconnected from any story of common humanity or of their community or even sometimes their family. That's desymbolization. And one thing that goes with that, by the way, especially my Catholic scholars would want me to say, is the removal of ritual. So life becomes deritualized. And here again, we have to create our own personal ritual. There's a whole self-help literature based on how to create your own personal rituals to live by. Imagine that. That wasn't even needed prior to the neoliberal age. And finally, the third one is desubjectivation. Well, the subject in this case means the self, the individual self. And desubjectivation means the fragmentation of our actual experience of being a cohesive self. So now we're more likely to experience ourselves in fragmented ways. You know, we don't have as much of a durable sense of who we are over time as we used to. And this in itself is leading to what we talked about, dramatic increases in depression, anxiety, or even the sense of a going-on being, of being a self in worst cases, which leads to, I guess, your question about third-order suffering.
SPEAKER_01:You are listening to Religion and Justice. Coming up, more of our conversation with Bruce Rogers Vaughn. In traditional paradigms, there were two orders of suffering. The first comprised forms of suffering that are simply given in the human condition: death, grief, separation, illness, disability, natural calamities, conflict, physical pain, and so on. In previous ages, people dealing with first order suffering generally did so from within collectives that accompanied them in their distress, with a more or less durable and cohesive sense of self, and with cultural narratives and liturgies that helped make sense of what they were enduring. Second order suffering is distress produced by human evil, whether individual or collective, direct or indirect. Examples of this include malicious acts of individuals, such as murder, violence, theft, fraud, deception, etc. As well as collective actions such as war, root violence, enslavement, oppressive working conditions, and injustices focused upon identities like racism, sexism, heterosexism, ethnic or religious-based discrimination, and so on. This also comprises oppression emanating from Foucault's disciplinary societies. Here, significantly, the source of suffering is readily identifiable, even if, in the case of disciplinary control, it is rather impersonal, as in the state, the corporation, or the church. And there's a palpable potential, if not the actuality, of forming collectives for resistance. There are as well narrative resources at hand for articulating such a resistance. Bruce is proposing in this book that heretofore the theories and practices of pastoral care as well as other forms of soul care have been directed towards these two orders of suffering. We have not yet, in Bruce's estimation, developed theories and practices adequate for addressing the new chronic, which then leads into what you call third order suffering, which is the new normal for human distress appearing under neoliberalism. It's not easy to articulate, as you write in the book, perhaps impossible to articulate in terms of how easy it is to sort of articulate the first and second order suffering. So I'm gonna give you the challenge of articulating it to our audience.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah. Third order suffering, I say in the book, it is not exactly true that it has never existed prior to the neoliberal revolution that has occurred since 1980. But in other periods of history, it existed only in times of great cultural upheaval or the ends of whole civilizations, or like when a whole country was colonized and their culture was ripped away from them, like what happened to Native Americans during the period of colonization. Third order suffering existed then, and it'll make sense why when I say what it is, but it existed as a transition from one cultural domination to the next. What is new today is that third order suffering has become normative. It is becoming normative as we speak in this interview. So what is it that's becoming normative? Well, people are unable to identify the source of their suffering. As you mentioned a while ago, in first and second order suffering, we knew exactly why we were suffering. We were diseased, we were sick, we were dying, we were grieving, we were suffering injustices, we knew who the people were imposing upon us were who were perpetrating the injustice. In third order suffering, the enemy, if you just want to use a metaphor for that, the enemy has become invisible. We don't know what we're up against. We can't even describe it. In other words, we have nothing to resort to except blaming ourselves. We don't know that we have anything else to blame. I call this one part of what I refer to as in third order suffering is a double unconsciousness. The first unconsciousness is what we're talking about now, is the external source of our distress or suffering. Neoliberalism is so diffuse, it's just the water we're swimming in. We can't name a person, place, thing, or even an institution that is oppressing us unless we make it conscious. The first unconsciousness is toward the external world. There was a psychologist in the UK named David Smail, he's recently deceased. But Smail says when we talk about the unconscious, the biggest unconscious that matters is the external unconscious, what we're unconscious of that is outside of ourselves, what he calls the distal powers rather than the proximal powers. The other uh part of unconsciousness in third order suffering is we we become unconscious of what is within us, of what we used to call the inner world, the inner life of the self. I call this zombie suffering, walking around falling apart, but we're hardly aware. So the internal unconsciousness is at its deepest levels. I'm gonna quote Kierkegaard here, as I do in the book. Kierkegaard talks about despair that is not aware of itself as despair. Third order suffering is suffering that is not aware of itself as suffering. So people can look perfectly fine, they're going along with their lives, they can even appear successful, they can be entertained. There was this book published a few years ago called Amusing Ourselves to Death. Kierkegaard couldn't have said it better, but Kierkegaard did write about that. So we have people who are successful in the neoliberal systems, maybe they're financially successful, they seem to be happy and cheerful. If you pause them for a second, they would become very depressed. Or they appear to be successful, but there's a secret life. And usually it's a secret life of addiction. Either a substance addiction or some process addiction, addiction to work, addiction to sex, addiction to money, or whatever else. That would be all the definitions of addiction. People will suicide these days out of thin air with no previous mental health history whatsoever. How is this happening? People can be sick and not know they're sick if they're suffering from third-order depression. In its deepest forms, they don't know they're suffering. And even if they did know, they wouldn't know why. There's a bit of research that I put up on a slide in that talk last fall. This research actually came out of China, a psychological study of Chinese students in universities. And over 60% of them said that they have no internal dialogue. 60% of these Chinese students in these studies, undergraduates, universities. So we're talking what, probably Gen Z or something like that, said that they had no internal dialogue. In other words, there's no internal conversation with themselves going on. And the researchers even pushed this to the level of imagery, said that they were having no internal images either. In classical terms, we would call this an erasure of the subject. The article I found online, a journalist was interviewing two psychotherapists who were trained under the dominant models, no doubt, I might add. One was a marriage and family therapist, the other was a social worker, as I recall. When she was interviewing them, they were trying to say, this is simply neurodiversity. There's nothing wrong with this. It's just the way some people happen to live. And when I read that, I was horrified because I thought they were trying to turn the absence of being a self into neurodiversity. So therefore it's okay. But what we're really talking about here are individuals that can only live and react in the present moment.
SPEAKER_04:You talk about zombie suffering, and in philosophy of mind literature, there are questions around, you know, sort of what is a mind? And they'll have these things about can you imagine a mind without the epiphenomenal feelings being there? Right. The stuff that you just sort of like a human being sort of feels things, but they don't have that like billiard ball, you know, neuron is hitting another neuron, and then your hand rises or pulls its hand off of a hot plate or something. And it was a thought experiment. And I remember reading this and being horrified by this thought experiment. Like, yeah, I guess I could imagine that like the solipsistic world I'm living in where everybody around me is just, you know, this robot that's moving around without feelings. You talk about McDonald's of emotions.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, McDonald's of emotions. So there's a great book out there if you're in for heavy reading, Mestrovik.
SPEAKER_04:Nothing you've mentioned so far is too heavy. So I've I'm glad that we're now bringing on the heavy reading here.
SPEAKER_05:I'm blanking on his first name. His last name is Mestrovik, but he he's a U.S. citizen. He he's on a faculty here in the U.S. But the name of the book is Post-Emotional Society. And he says in that book, something that is related to this third world suffering I'm talking about. He said, on the surface, we live in all of this emotionality. It's all about vibes and feels, right? We use the word vibes these days. It's all about the feels and the vibes. But he says when you try to dig underneath the vibe, there's nothing there except what's going on in the present moment. So if you ask someone who feels happy, well, why are you happy? Let's talk about what's underneath this feeling. They don't have any answers, except extremely superficial ones, because the ice cream tastes good. We're even told by these gurus that, you know, mostly are paid by the PMC, professional managerial class, for those who don't know what that stands for. We're even told by these gurus, live in the present moment.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I think about where I'm so exhausted from the job I just got done doing, and I'm with my child. And there's a double injunction where I'm I'm tired and I'm being with my child, and I'm like, oh my God, I'm so tired and depressed. But then society is also telling me, well, you should be living in the moment of really enjoying this time with your child. And you're like, I can't, what are you what the hell am I trying to do here, right?
SPEAKER_05:So we have a peculiar relationship with emotions these days. We treat emotions almost ontologically. Emotions are not to be interrogated for what they mean, they're just to be appreciated for what they are. So don't ask me what my feeling says or what my feeling means. You're just supposed to respect that that's what I'm feeling. Don't question it. That's where we are these days.
SPEAKER_01:I want to pivot for a second into class analysis because you go well into this into class struggle in the caring for souls in a neoliberal age. And I think it's even more relevant now as our national debt in the United States and our individual debt are at all-time highs. I'm just going to quote you again. The desubjectivation occurring in the neoliberal workplace has been highlighted by Boltansky and Chiapello in the new spirit of capitalism. They note that in this sort of labor, one's very self becomes a means of production. The worker must behave such that the customer or employer is convinced that she is really sincere in her carefully performed demeanor. Corporations have learned that empathy has become big business and that empathy makes money because customers are far more likely to return to stores and service providers and even pay a premium for receiving a certain kind of interaction. A human resources manager for a retail giant boasts that his employees are extorted and trained to provide miles of smiles and adds that it's got to be a real smile. This practice not only oppresses workers who are denied in the spontaneous response of self-expression because they must follow a corporate script, but it commodifies human relationships. The end result for laborers is disastrous. Employees are left to manage the dilemmas of authenticity, integrity, and their sense of their own natural, spontaneous personality, which all spill into their private lives. Our thoughts, interpersonal desires, and even our feelings belong to work rather than to ourselves. And most importantly, the repetition of pseudo-authenticity blurs the boundary between the real self and the virtual self. We may ultimately, as we were just discussing about this study out of China, lose our grip on what it means to even be a self. And I think that points to not only are we commodifying emotions, we're we've commodified this self such that like it's even harder now to form genuine relationships, retain connection through conflict without immediately feeling like we're denying who we are as a person by compromising on something. And this is outside of abusive context. So I also want to have that, Bruce, she said it, but I just want to say it again. Can you say a little bit more about that in relation to our work? And then also by extension, debt that debt has almost become an identity that turns the blame onto the debtors, uh, that it's like a moral sin to have debt now.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, I'm no expert on Marx. I think there's just no better resource for understanding how capitalism works, especially in the industrial age in which Marx lived than his work. I don't know how much Marx could be expected to have foreseen where we are today and what is happening to laborers today, how third order suffering crops up in labor. But I think workers today are somewhere on a spectrum between knowing they're being performative and therefore manage somehow to survive as far as an individual self being a self, their selfhood can remain more or less intact. But of course, they become resentful of being put into this performative state. They know they're being commodified. In a sense, you might say they're primarily enduring second-order suffering, which was the predominant thing under Marx with labor, was second-order suffering. In third order suffering, though, we have another part of that spectrum where we have workers and laborers who genuinely become confused about whether their happiness when they're at work is authentic or not. So the line becomes blurry about when they're being real and when they're not being real. They're not quite sure. Especially when there's this demand from management that their smile has to be a real smile. That was actually a quote from someone's interchange. So this becomes a kind of evisceration of the self, or at least a mangling of the self, so that the line becomes blurry between what I'm actually experiencing and what is performative, right? That's how third-order suffering looks in the workplace. Lacan talked a lot about this. People become unmoored from what he called the real. What is real, really real, actually authentic, not marketplace authenticity, but real authenticity, we begin to lose our grip. And it becomes hard to determine when we're in the real and when we're in the performative. I hope, Gabby, I'm responding to your question. Another example of it for laborers that I mentioned in my book is debt. Well, of course, most laborers today are in debt. There's an Italian thinker named Lazzarato, who's written a book, Indebted Man, but he's using man in terms of human, right? And he says, unlike prior versions of capitalism in which debt was expected to be a temporary state. In fact, you were expected to pay off your debts if you're a responsible human being. Today, he says, we live in what he calls infinite debt. Debt today is infinite. In other words, we're never expected to pay it off. The responsible neoliberal subject does not pay off their debts. They quote, manage their debts. They quote, service their debts. You hear the labor language here? They service their debts. They're not expected to pay them off. In fact, you're discouraged from paying off your debt. You're just supposed to pay whatever it says the minimum monthly payment is, whether it's your house or your car or anything else, credit card. Pay the minimum payment. And we know if you pay the minimum payment, you're never going to pay it off. Everybody knows that, right? So I mentioned in the book that the indebted subject is not just laboring when they're at work. They're laboring in their sleep because they're still in debt while they're sleeping. And their debt is making profit for the company, even while they're asleep. Why? Because neoliberal economies run on financialization, not simply production. Most of the money circling the planet today is not money, profit made from the sale of goods and services. Most of it's speculation on financial instruments, which are based on debt. So where Marx is correct and continues to be applicable is all of this debt can still be traced back, as Philip Goodman said in his book, Theology of Money, all money can be traced back to sweat and blood, even the most esoteric financial instrument. Why? Because it's based on debt. All debt has to be paid off by sweat and blood.
SPEAKER_01:But you said we do not simply access the means of production, we have become the means of production. I remember when I read that, because that's the type of thing that people aren't thinking about. They're exhausted from work. You're also exhausted because you're constantly being extracted from.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:I would almost long for the days when we just come home physically exhausted.
SPEAKER_01:Mm-hmm. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:Instead we come home physically and emotionally exhausted.
SPEAKER_01:Yep. You clock out at work and you're not really done. You're not really done.
SPEAKER_04:Even self-care has that. You're doing it not for your family or for yourself. You're doing it so you can get back to another form of labor.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah. I'm serious. Laboring on the self becomes another form of labor.
SPEAKER_01:And then you also, and this you're quoting Lazarato here, but he said debtors interiorize power relations instead of externalizing and combating them. They feel ashamed and guilty. And then you say what this suggests is that we consider debt to be a form of moral injury, and that uh one sense of self begins to dissolve as they identify their very being as a source of injustice.
SPEAKER_05:And by moral injury, I mean neoliberalism as a system. Now I'm talking about the economic aspects of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism as a system is constructed to indebt us all, and yet we're blamed for being in debt. It's both. You can't live today without being in debt. And yet you get blamed for taking on too much debt that you can't pay back. When that's exactly what the system is constructed to make you do.
SPEAKER_04:Since we're really trash talking certain industries here, where does positivity now come into this?
SPEAKER_05:Positive psychology never existed prior to neoliberalism. Does that surprise you? That's when it happened.
SPEAKER_04:But joy, aren't I supposed to be trying to be joyful? Aren't I in control of my behavior?
SPEAKER_05:Aren't I in control of my own mind? A good source on this is William Davies, who teaches at, I think at Goldsmiths in London. He wrote a great book called The Happiness Industry. It opens with a guru speaking to, of all places, Davos in Switzerland. Well, say what Davos for those who don't know. It's an international meeting of corporate executives. Yeah. The ultra-wealthy that meets in Davos, Switzerland once a year. So they flew in this person. I don't know what his religious background was, but he was sort of a neo-Buddhist guru of some kind. Right. To teach them meditation and to live in the moment. Okay. He uses this as a case example to talk about the happiness industry and how there is actually an industry right now that capitalism is very much into and making a lot of money off of it to sell people products and to sell people experiences to make them happy. And positive psychology is very much a part of this. But to go back to the statement where you were leading, George, in psychoanalysis, the objective was not to make people happy. The objective was self-understanding and fulfillment as a human being. That's not identical to happiness.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:And that's without even getting to the religious background. The understandings of the spiritual journey were not about happiness either. It was about finding meaning and purpose in this life.
SPEAKER_04:Uh, you said a phrase just two minutes ago where it kind of jumped up and bit me for a second, and I just wanted to address it again. You said psychotherapy is intended to help you change. Right. Deep going change, not just circumstantial or superficial. Tell me how that's different than the sort of trying to fit into a certain mold of society or trying to fit you into a certain in other words, how is how is it different from a change that has a predetermined point of arrival, right?
SPEAKER_05:Yes.
SPEAKER_04:A lot of therapy models seem to be driving towards trying to get you to fit into society.
SPEAKER_05:I'm going to give you what may sound like nonsense answer to your question. So contemporary psychotherapy lives off of this neoliberal ideology of individualism. I mean radical competitive individualism. We all have our own truths. And to question anybody to aim toward a common truth is considered now heresy. You're not supposed to do that because if you did it, you would violate people's personal truths. That's the understanding. That's the radical individualism I'm talking about. Okay, here's the thing. There's a huge difference between individualism and individuality. Individuality, okay, I'm a Christian minister, so y'all let me lean back on my Christian identity for a moment. In the Gospels, Jesus says, it's recording one or more of the gospels, you are so precious to your father in heaven, forgive him the ideology of father in his day, you are so precious to your father in heaven that even the hairs on your head are numbered. How's that for individuality? If the Father in heaven knows when one of these little sparrows fall, how much more does he know when you are suffering? That's individuality. Individuality is a recognition and an affirmation and appreciation of everyone in their idiosyncratic uniqueness. That's individuality. We're all different. Every religious tradition teaches this in their own way, and Judaism and Christianity certainly do. But true individuals are shaped by and arise out of genuine organic communities who then appreciate them for the unique person they are. But we live in an era, the neoliberal era, when we think the only way you could survive as an individual is to not be part of anything. And the minute that any human relationship, and I mean the whole spectrum from intimate relationships all the way up to society and institutions, the minute a relationship becomes inconvenient or uncomfortable or distressing, we're taught to exit. And we call that exit self-care. Isn't that ironic? Now please understand, both of you, George, Gabby, I'm not offering a justification for people submitting to abuse. That's not what I'm talking about. Anybody should exit being abused. But we've gone way, way, way in the other direction.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's an avoidance of conflict. I mean, because we've been trained and perceived that conflict is a threat to the individual, or really individualism has trained us that conflict is a threat to the individual and that if someone's personal truth, you know, live your truth, if that's different than yours, it's a threat. And so the best way to protect yourself is to not expose yourself to people who don't share your truths. But the truths aren't even necessarily communal anymore either. And so there's also no communal checks and balances, if you will, not to make community like with government terms.
SPEAKER_04:Can you zero in then on the positivity stuff? Because I'm really this is one of my favorite points to get upset about. So what is it about positivity then? Is it a disregard for the social material conditions? Like what's going on in the positive psychology that you would critique?
SPEAKER_05:Boy, there's lots of ways to talk about this. To talk about it philosophically, it's a form of philosophical idealism. It's sort of an anti Marx view of the world where we divorce people completely. I'm I'm not this is no exaggeration. We completely divorce people from the material conditions of their existence and put their Mind in another world so that they can experience happiness. Let me tell you to where the extreme to which this goes. The father of positive psychology, he and his team were hired by the U.S. Army because they told the Army that if they would let them use their methods for positive positive psychology on soldiers who had experienced combat, that they could prevent PTSD so that they could put the soldiers directly back into the field. And they received a multi-million dollar contract with the U.S. Army. This is an example of what I mean by removing people from their material context and making them happy, or at least removing unhappiness. Martin Seligman, he goes by Marty Seligman. Yeah. He's the father of the. Basically, yes. Which is opposite, Gabby, right? To what we were saying earlier. When a depressed person comes to me and presents themselves, what I immediately begin a conversation about is well, there's obviously a reason you're depressed. Let's let's talk about that. In other words, we assume their depression means something. It's the fever. The symptoms. The fever. It's the symptom. Our challenge is not to get rid of the depression. Our challenge is to understand it.
SPEAKER_01:We're telling ourselves something is wrong. Something's off in some situation, whether that's societal or an isolated relationship that we have with one person or a group of persons or whatever it is. If something is disjointed, we're fragmented from connection with others or safe relationships with others.
SPEAKER_05:Positive psychology is actually probably, we should see it as a branch of CBT. CBT stands for cognitive behavioral behavioral therapy.
SPEAKER_04:Here's the next one I want you to add. Seligman and others believe that psychology focused too heavily on disorders and deficits rather than the strengths that allowed people to lead happy, and this is the term I want you to get to, resilient, meaningful lives. Can you talk about resiliency for a moment?
SPEAKER_05:Yes. So part of the empirically supported treatment focus today is very focused on resiliency. That's one of the huge objectives.
SPEAKER_04:Massive in the military, too. Resiliency.
SPEAKER_05:Of course, because you want virtual resilience. You want to return soldiers to their assignments as quickly as possible. You don't want them to be sidelined.
SPEAKER_04:The capacity to re-engage in the fight.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah. So the quick fix is extremely important in that context. But resiliency to me is another way of, and those who use the term now are going to disagree with me. But I do think this is another version of blaming the victim. So we tell people if they undertake this tool that we're going to teach them. I don't care what the tool is, it's a CBT tool. It can be mindfulness, it can be yoga, it can be a certain level of thinking or mess self-talk that you're supposed to teach yourself. It doesn't matter what it is. It's some sort of cognitive behavioral method that you can literally perform. And once you do it, if you do it right, you will then be resilient against what? Against anything negative. Any negative emotions, negative experiences, you will be able to, quote, overcome, and here's the other buzzword, flourish. Flourish. Flourish. If you will just adopt these tools. Now things are beginning to change, by the way. I told you there are cracks in the hegemony. I did an intake with a 20-year-old man just about a month ago. A college student, referred by his parent, who was a therapist. This is a young man who'd been in therapy most of his life, because after all, he had a parent who was a therapist, and we got lots of therapists. He did not want to come. So one of the first things he said to me when he sat down is that he didn't want to be here, here in this room where I'm sitting, because he'd been to lots of therapists and they were all negative experiences. I'm using this as a symbol that things are beginning to shift. There's beginning to be pushback against this dominant model I'm talking about. He asked a question. I'm going to listen to you. Try to understand you. He looked like he'd never heard that answer before. So it sounds like I'm trash talking contemporary therapy, and in some ways I am. Jonathan Shedler says that empirically supported treatments are basically forms of psychoeducation. And he said psychoeducation is just fine. It has its place, but it's not therapy. Psychoeducation can teach you things that some of which can be useful. But therapy, to go back to my point earlier, is about personal transformation and change. It's about changing yourself. It's not about expunging symptoms. It's not about resiliency. And it's certainly not about just being positive and happy. So here was a young man saying, I don't want any more therapy that just tells me I need to do more yoga or practice mindfulness. And by the way, I'm not putting down yoga and mindfulness. I'm just saying it's how they're treated and used and regarded that's the problem.
SPEAKER_01:Covering up symptoms. They're not actually transforming an individual. They're helping that I mean helping is a that's a loose word thing right now, but they're helping the individual cover up X, Y, and Z so that they can feel like they can function.
SPEAKER_05:Here's the way I heard it. He said, I do not want you to treat me superficially. Don't give me a bag of tools and send me away.
SPEAKER_04:It's interesting too, mindfulness and yoga are almost this, and I'm probably using your language wrong here, but the sort of de-institutionalization of it, but they are attached to traditions. I knew a physical therapist. He said 75% of the cases of injuries that he would be working with people to uh rebound from came from going to yoga classes. And I was like, what do you what the hell do you think is going on there? And he said that it took a religious practice and turned it into a stretching thing for wine moms in suburbia. And when you disambiguate it from the tradition and the rituals that it was made to enrich, you get this thing that just is prone to injury. And I wonder again, too, if like mindfulness, right? It was a sort of meditative practice with a long religious tradition in different religious groups. Christianity has a certain kind of quote unquote mindfulness, you know. I'm thinking of the Jesuits, right? When you take mindfulness away from it and you think you can run it through the silicone valley tube, get the perfect little nugget out, you know, the kernel in the husk, you get something actually kind of dangerous.
SPEAKER_01:And historical narrative as well. It's devoid of everything that went into creating it, embodying it, living it.
SPEAKER_05:It's it's kind of like saying we're going to use a performative model of third-order suffering to cure third-order suffering.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm laughing, but I actually don't know what you mean there, Bruce.
SPEAKER_05:Well, if you decontextualize and dehistoricize a practice, you've made it unconscious of its history.
SPEAKER_04:What would you then prescribe medical model here again? To the person who would use the language, my mental health, I am unwell. I'm having bad thoughts all the time. All I can think of are the thorns in my life. It just seems like everything's getting worse. Who should I be seeking out then to talk to about these sorts of things? Or what should I be doing? Bruce, fix me.
SPEAKER_05:What should I be doing? You want my two-word answer? Making friends.
SPEAKER_04:Fucking a Bruce. Making friends, making comrades, I'd also say.
SPEAKER_05:Solidarity is the answer. Solidarity, so I'm using more the Marxist or labor phrase, but it's a very good one. Finding our common humanity with one another. Identity politics, maybe in its original version, was to be applauded for its efforts. But what it has become by being co-opted by neoliberal politics, it has added to our isolation. Instead of us finding common humanity with others, we're retreating into our identity community, where others are more like us. They're mirroring us back. Friendships and other forms of solidarity involves getting to know someone who's not like me in so many possible ways, including politically for that matter.
SPEAKER_04:With that, we have very little time left at the end. And we we always we always end uh our uh conversations with Augustine's line about hope having two beautiful daughters, anger and courage, anger at the way things are and the courage to change them. So what are you angry about and what gives you courage at this time?
SPEAKER_05:Me? What I'm angry about is the global oppression of the masses. We're talking 80 to 90 percent of the population of this planet of all identities, but they're all oppressed in mass. I'm angry about that. And that it's done deliberately. The ruling class are not unconscious. They know what the policies are. That's what I'm angry about. What I'm encouraged about, as I said earlier about the client that I met a few weeks ago, there's increasingly pushback, yeah, both on a personal level and a social level. We're seeing it right now in Mamdani. He's making it very clear. I'm standing up for everybody. I'm pro-Palestine, and I can talk to you why I hate what he does and sit right beside my Jewish brother here who's helping me in my campaign. Nothing is sticking. So keep an eye on that as a sign for what lies ahead.
SPEAKER_04:Thank you so much, Bruce, for being with us. And we're gonna have to have you on again because uh we're gonna have to talk about money at some point. I'm all into money now.
SPEAKER_05:Money is affecting us too, it's part of it.
SPEAKER_04:All right. Great to be with you. See you guys. Thank you.
SPEAKER_05:Bye-bye.
SPEAKER_00:And you have to read up to your friends. And yep, one of the stuff.
SPEAKER_01:You are listening to Religion and Justice. This podcast is a project of the Winland Cook program in religion and justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. We'll be back after this short break. You are listening to Religion and Justice. We'll be back after this short break. You are listening to Religion and Justice. Coming up, more of our conversation with Bruce Rogers Vaughn. Thank you for tuning in for this episode of the Religion and Justice Podcast. Our show will continue after this short break.
