S8E03: How to Do Social Justice This Election Season Without Being a Jackass: When Charisma and Vibes Interfere With Healthy Communication, with Matthew Remski of the Conspirituality Podcast

Healthy systems, be they families, organizations, or countries, require healthy leadership. In our work as therapists, coaches, and cultural critics, we pay attention to the following question: How does one communicate to the larger system that they are a healthy leader?

This week, we talk with Matthew Remski (@matthew_remski), co-host of the Conspirituality podcast (@conspiritualitypod) about two strategies that folks use to develop influence.

Charisma.

Vibes.

Of course, these are notoriously difficult entities to quantify. And as we talk about with Matthew, there are significant consequences to a system when it assesses success primarily through one's charisma and vibes. 

A system that places high value on charisma and the construction of vibes is one that is prone to practice jackassdom. The projection of an emotional experience at the expense of healthy discussion about policies, positions, and context encourages moralism, virtue signaling, and blaming.

Matthew talks with us about:

• Experience v. Expertise (8:00): Jeremiah starts us off, “Too often a social media brand will post something based on their own individual experience, not connected to any sort of larger research, cultural or historical precedent, and identify it as truth …  But expertise requires years, if not decades, of practice, study, asking questions, and wrestling with the complexity of one particular area.”

• Experience Informing Expertise (10:00): Julia adds, “You and I have a theoretical model based in an understanding of the science of relationships and sexuality that informs the way that we operate and informs the way that we operate at any given time. Our experience shapes the way that we consider the scientific process. The scientific process includes expertise and our new practice of science creates new experiences.”

• Charisma & Substituting Scope of Practice (21:00): Matthew says, “Because of that fragility, that underlying anxiety, this person in this leadership position always has to try to generate a kind of halo effect. They always have to reach beyond what they're actually doing to make it imply more than what it actually does. […] Charisma itself is anxious, and it must always come up with something else to justify what it's offering.”

• Yoga & Charisma (24:00): Julia shares her experience of being a yoga teacher at one point, “Some classes are more popular than others, and they tend to be more popular based on who teaches it. And that teacher doesn't necessarily have any additional qualifications, and often they are speaking outside of the scope of practice when the person leading the ovarian health yoga probably is not an expert in women's health or anything related to the ovaries.”

• Yoga & the Industry (26:00): Matthew discusses, “There is an outsized percentage of top yoga instructors over the last 20 years. who come from theater and film or from the professional dance world […] And I think a lot of people actually come up against a block. They're like, "Oh, I have this Aesthetic skill. I can move through space. I can sing and I can dance. But now I'm using those skills to communicate spirituality. Is that okay?" The wellness world  brings that contradiction into a lot of sharpness.”

• Manufactured Charisma (29:00): Jeremiah highlights, “The other way that you can develop charisma is through outside production processes. We see things like film editing on Tiktok, for instance […] I imagine we're going to see different ways of people developing this manicured image that I am the expert because I have this really well produced film or that I have figured out how to engineer my voice to sound in a particular way.”

• Healing & Reparative Engagement (37:00): Matthew offers, “I think that many people who are disillusioned from church life because of institutional abuse, and rightfully so, will often find themselves, in positions in which it feels like it is impossible to trust that community can be safe, or that people can actually be earnestly helpful and dependable and not betray each other, right?  And so, it becomes an existential threat to the health of a person's recovery after coming out of a high demand recovery group or an abusive church environment. And so what Eve Sedgwick recommends is what she calls reparative reading. Looking to the people around you to see what are the things that are actually enjoyable or pleasurable or generative that you can actually focus on and through your attention.”

• The Loudest Voices (41:00): Matthew points out, “Sometimes the loudest voices are the most abstract voices. They're the stickiest voices. I think that's really the problem. The more you can simplify something, the stickier it will get.”

• The -isms & Moral Superiority (43:00): Julia says, “Something that I've noticed in liberal groups, especially the exvangelical groups, is that there's a moral superiority that can come with the paranoid reading. Like, well, I know better now because I left this group. So I see all the isms, right? I see the sexism, I see the homophobia, I see this, and you don't see it. You don't see that power differential.”

• Self-Flagellation (53:00): Matthew highlights, “It's very easy for the politics of material change to be subsumed by this sense that as a person, I have to become a perfect vessel of something in order to be the change that I want to see in the world or something like that, right? […] Self flagellation that comes along naturally with the feeling of demoralization in late capitalism, that it's very, very difficult to be successful.”

• Being the Perfect SJW (56:00): Julia says, “We have to be the perfect social justice warrior because God forbid we'd be called out or even worse called in. And then at the same time, we're also obsessed with self flagellating and talking about the work that we're doing and all of the ways that we're confronting our internalized stigma, and we're trying to do both at the same time: Avoid being called out while also making sure that we self flagellate and tell everyone I know about my privilege and I'm gonna preface every single thing I say by recognizing these are my areas of privilege.”