Steven Herrmann is a Marriage & Family Therapist, Jungian Analyst, and author of ten books with a central theme of Spiritual Democracy. His book, Spiritual Democracy: The Wisdom of Early American Visionaries (2014), was the inspiration for David Kopacz & Joseph Rael’s chapter on Spiritual Democracy in Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality. Steven’s books often have Carl G Jung as a counterpoint to an indepth study of William James, Vivekananda, Meister Eckhart, and Emily Dickinson.
In this twentieth episode of the Becoming A True Human podcast, Chris and Dave talk with Steven around the concept of Spiritual Democracy as a nondual or trans-dual inner experience that leads to the outer manifestation of political democracy. Steven traces the concept of Spiritual Democracy back to Walt Whitman’s essay Democratic Vistas and his description of Religious Democracy and the three levels of democracy: economic, political, and spiritual. Broadening the concept to Spiritual Democracy, we also speak of Jeremy David Engel’s concept of Mindful Democracy, and the idea of Inner Democracy and Outer Democracy.
We can think of Spiritual Democracy as a Medicine of equality, respect, and care for all people and all creatures of the Earth. Steven Herrmann’s books and work can be considered a kind of Yoga of Spiritual Democracy and even an Upanishad of Spiritual Democracy. Steven speaks of Spiritual Democracy as an archetype that can manifest in different ways in different people and at different times. From a Jungian perspective, we could view our current turbulent times as living out the shadow of democracy, particularly American democracy. If we do not integrate our personal and collective shadows, we live them out, projected into the physical world. The hope for the future lies in the work of Spiritual Democracy that each of us can practice – in our hearts, in our minds, and in our souls.
This was meant to be a Becoming a True Human podcast episode – but technology failed us and humanity prevailed. Jonathan McFarland was going to join me as a co-host, but he was exhausted from traveling from his home in Spain to England to help care for his brother whose dementia is progressing.
Rob and I made several attempts to record the session, but technology glitched every time, in multiple ways. In the end, this became an old school interview where I tried to scribble down Rob’s words as fast as he said them (which is a lot faster than you might expect from reading his writing, which is measured and rich with interconnections). In the end, I think that this interview is the interview that needed to happen – which is good, as it happened this way…
David R. Kopacz (DRK): Hi, I’m David Kopacz, one of the hosts of the Becoming a True Human podcast. With us today is Rob Riemen – Storyteller, a Gatherer of People, Scholar, Reader, Founder of Nexus Institute, Author of Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal and To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism, and the editor of the Cultura Animi Nexus book series.
I first came across Rob’s name in 2019 when I was at Taylor’s Books, in Charleston, West Virginia – teaching Whole Health to Veterans Affairs staff – when the title and style of his book, To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism, caught my eye. The first essay in the book was based on your 2010 essay published in the Netherlands entitled “The Eternal Return of Fascism.”
I bought To Fight Against This Age and read it on the flight back home – the first of a number of times I have read this book.
Your discussion of the screen word of “populism” for what should rightly be called fascism really spoke to me. In a way, you were diagnosing the social ills of our age and prescribing the remedy of humanism for the plague of fascism sweeping the globe. Your writing, along with that of Rebecca Solnit, Bandy Lee, and Robert Jay Lifton, helped encourage me to start my blog series, “Words Create Worlds,” where at first cautiously, but then more openly began to use the word fascism to describe what is going on currently in the United States. You draw frequently on the work and life of Thomas Mann and also Albert Camus, and his book, The Plague, in which Dr. Rieux works tirelessly to fight against an infectious, unnamed plague – which can be read as an allegory of the fight against fascism. I wrote about “Doctors Against Fascism” and “The Public Health Crisis of Fascism” in the Words Create Worlds essay series.
So, I’d like to thank you for your work and to welcome you to the Becoming a True Human podcast.
Rob Riemen (RR):
Okay, so well, here’s the issue, David. I wrote this essay indeed in 2010 because what I saw was happening here in the Netherlands. And I realized that if the return of fascism can happen in a very small, prosperous country as the Netherlands, that can happen unfortunately everywhere. Why was I so upset by the ongoing use of the word populism by the pundits and the academics and the politicians? Because words matter. Words matter to be able to understand what’s the case. And the whole argument that fascism is such a misused word, is irrelevant if you realize that there is one word which is even more misused, which is the word democracy. Does that mean that we stop using the term ‘democracy’? No of course not. Though it is high time that we start to rediscover what the original meaning of ‘democracy’ is – and then realize that there’s no democracy more today in the USA. Anyway, back to ‘fascism’. In my book I explain, quite clearly I think, that ‘fascism’ is a political phenomenon one recognizes by it’s characteristics. And as the saying goes: ‘If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck – the probably is a duck’. So, let’s use the term fascism to describe what’s happening in the West because this is what it is.
What is not in the book, because I came across it much later, is that in on February 18th, 1933, Winston Churchill – the Winston Churchill – gave a lecture in London, you can find it on YouTube, where he says Mussolini is the hero of our time, he’s our genius, and fascism is the way out of all the troubles we are facing.
This was Winston Churchill in 1933, right? I mean Hitler was already in power. If somebody like Churchill can say these things, it says something about the temptation of fascism, it says something about you know the way out for people in this complicated in this complicated world. but we are supposed to know better, right? I mean we know now what fascism is all about. And I think the big mistake which was made by my friends in the academic world is that they stick to a certain scientific paradigm which does not work for phenomena like fascism or socialism or left or right or whatever. The scientific paradigm is perfect for modern nature, but the scientific paradigm does not work for us human beings in the society in which we are living.
Anyway, this was 2010. We are now in 2026. When the book was published in the United States in 2018, I got a lot of criticism from the Americans. You cannot say this. The New York Times was terrible at that time. And they told me you cannot say that Trump is a fascist because, one, he’s not a Hitler. I said, well, you know, I didn’t say he’s a Hitler. I said he’s a fascist, which is something different. Yes, but for us Americans, a fascist is a Hitler because that’s what we see in the movies. I said, “Well, what about reading books?” The second argument was, yes, but he’s not violent. And then I told him that look, if it’s in the language, it will come out. Always. Which was also an argument in my book. I truly wished that I would have been the greatest fool. Unfortunately, I was right, and all my critics were wrong. And the reason why I became really upset and also angry – look, those people, those pundits, those academics, those politicians, they are supposed to have a commitment to the truth and it is their responsibility to tell the truth.
What did the popular academics have to say? Well, they debated – what kind of populism is it? Is it extreme populism? Is it radical populism? Is it blah blah blah populism? That’s only for, you know, the new PhD they want to write to say, “I invented this term.” It’s all bullshit. So anyway, they were all more interested in staying in line, secure their own position instead of speaking truth to power.
DRK:
Yes. Which, you know, again echoes what happened in in Germany in the thirties, and in Italy too. You write about the loyalty oath in Italy – that Leone Ginzburg was one of the few academics who didn’t sign Mussolini’s loyalty oath – and I was worried that there was going to be a loyalty oath where I was working. I was at the VA, so federal federally employed psychiatrist working with veterans, and you know, when Elon Musk came in and started the whole DOGE, the Department of Governmental Efficiency, they started to just create chaos within all the federal organizations and they started having us report on ourselves. “What did you do this week?” “What did you do this week?” And then they said, “It’s optional if you’ll report on yourself, but we can’t tell you what the consequences will be if you don’t report on yourself.” Then they said we’re not going to prompt you to report on yourself each week, but you’re still expected to report on yourself every week.
Then they banned a bunch of words, but they wouldn’t tell us exactly what the words were. But there were a hundred words in listed in The New York Times, things like “women” and “indigenous,” and “Native American,” “activism,” and “climate science,” and “social justice,” and “trauma.” You know, I’m a trauma psychiatrist working with veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder, and I can’t use the word “trauma.” I was sitting in on meetings where we’re searching for words that we think we need to eliminate, we’re removing studies, like “cardiovascular risk in men versus women” for whatever. And we were told, well, we’ve got to take that out because the word “women” is in the study. The study isn’t controversial at all, it is not about feminism or trans or whatever. It’s just mentioning the word “women.” And, so, I felt that in a very short time we were in Orwell’s 1984 and I was Winston Smith, working at the Ministry of Truth and deciding which words we could use and which words we couldn’t. So, I left the VA.
But you know, what you helped me with earlier on, so going back to 2019, I started a column called Words Create Worlds. I was inspired by a Rabbi Heschel quote – it’s like what you said earlier – “if it’s in the language, it will come out.”
“Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness—or evil—into the world. He used to remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds, he used to tell me when I was a child. They must be used very carefully. Some words, once having been uttered, gain eternity and can never be withdrawn. The Book of Proverbs reminds us, he wrote, that death and life are in the power of the tongue.” (from Susannah Heschel’s introduction to The Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays).
I saw that same thing with Donald Trump, that the words he was using were violent. They were xenophobic, they were words that “othered” people, and they created the distance and separation that can lead to violence. Apologists would be given time in the media to say, “Those are just words, that is just how he talks. He doesn’t mean those things.” And, unfortunately, we’ve seen come to pass that everything that he said – well, maybe not everything, he hasn’t taken over Greenland or Canada yet – but so much of what he said he would do, he has done.
So let me ask you this. As a psychiatrist and a doctor, I diagnose things and I say what the prognosis is and then I say what the treatment is. And reading your book, I saw the diagnosis of fascism and the treatment of humanism. But what would you say our prognosis is right now? You’ve been working, you’ve been, a Cassandra, a man crying out in the wilderness.
RR:
Well, we just finished the preparations for the next issue of my journal Nexus, which is a journal I started in 1991 with an old Jewish publisher, Johan Polak, who by miracles survived World War Two, and then after the war decided that everything he had, he had you know he read a relatively sum of money that he wanted to devote all his resources, all his energy to protect everything that Hitler wanted to destroy. So, he started the publishing house, Athenaeum, he started a bookshop. He was befriended with Max Brod, Elias Canetti, an old school publisher. Anyway, so now 35 years later, Johan never knew the Nexus institute because he died very unexpectedly by a heart attack after the first issue came out, in 1992.
But anyway, this issue is finally here, it will be presented in early October. And I gave it the titled A New Song of the Earth from the Wasteland. And it’s a beautiful book with 27 contributions from all over the world, including Wole Soyinka and many others. And I thought, well, it is exactly this – this is what we are waiting for. We are waiting for a New Song of the Earth from the Wasteland.
DRK:
Like Brecht’s “singing about the dark times.”
RR:
I guess that everybody now has a sense of how bad things are. How bad things are. And the irony of things. That you have a Jewish guy in the White House, Stephen Miller, who’s copy-pasting Eichmann all the time. How’s that possible? But it is possible.
You know, the party once founded by Abraham Lincoln is to put it mildly completely dysfunctional. And the Democrats are even more unpopular than the GOP, which is also an achievement, but that’s America. You know, if you see things happening over here, the picture is not much better. If Le Pen wins the election or Mélanchon wins the elections next year in May, the EU is over. With the new fascist party in Germany. So, we are in a very, very difficult situation and so my prognosis is pretty bleak to give your answer. I don’t see any serious developments to take this out of this mess unless we go back to the foundation.
A book you may know, that saved my life when I was at high school, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s a brilliant book. As a consolation to everybody who’s writing books who have trouble publishing, ninety-nine publishers turned it down. But this guy, the young editor who obtained the publishing rights was very smart, he sent it to the new a literary critic at the New Yorker at that time, called George Steiner, the famous cultural philosopher so often accused about being ‘elitist’ and ‘a conservative” And George Steiner saw the book, and he told his editor-in-chief look, I will review a book which is not there yet, but it should be there, so I’ll write about it. George Steiner made the publication of this book possible in 1974. It became a cult book and eventually : 25 million copies sold. It’s the story about, a man with an IQ of 174, and he got this treatment by your predecessors (psychiatrists), like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But it’s the most brilliant book I’ve ever read about the quest for quality. And what he refers to is the following because that’s the point I want to make.
The current paradigm we have demands that everything fits into a rationalistic technocratic paradigm. But it’s the rationalistic technocratic paradigm that does not recognize moral or spiritual values. It doesn’t because they are beyond that paradigm.
So quality is replaced by quantity.
Now, what is the best in quantity? It’s the bigger number. And the biggest number. So, if you understand these things, you understand first of all why everything has to be useful, because usefulness you can quantify. Then you also start to understand why the economists are the high priest of our society, because they are in charge of the numbers.
You also start to understand why everything that is not useful, which is the whole world of culture and the whole world of spirituality, doesn’t count anymore. It also explains why on social media it’s all about how many followers you have and we’re now having this new phenomenon of influencers with the most silly things, but if you have one million followers, you know you’re an influencer.
For me, it says it all because within this paradigm in which everything has to be useful, in which everything is reduced to an economic value, in which the whole education is reduced to what’s good for the economy or what’s good for the state, we have lost the quality of life. We have lost a sense of what life is all about, and we have lost the meaning of words because numbers are more important than words.
And then this – Nietzsche was for many reasons brilliant, but one of the things he understood better than anybody else is that there was one thing nobody can deal with. And you as a psychiatrist will understand it better than anybody else, which is people cannot deal with emptiness. It’s impossible. When you wake up every morning, you look into the mirror and you and you think my life is fucking empty, brother. There is only one way out. Only one way out. Well, no, there are two ways out.
DRK:
“Man would rather will nothingness than not will.”
RR:
The second way out, okay, there are three ways out.
One is you jump from the bridge.
Second is, you escape.
Third is you go to you, a psychiatrist, and they hope that you can help them! But it is impossible to deal with emptiness. Now, we have created a world which is completely empty because people cannot deal with this.
Here is where the fascist world comes in.
Because it’s the biggest mistake from the left or the liberals or the Democrats or whatever you want to call them. People cannot live by bread alone. The biggest issue is no longer or not solely an economic issue. The biggest issue is a cultural issue. And the left stupidly gave everything away to the right, and even worse than the right. Right? Because the right still wants to speak about God and religion and things of quality. So, it’s this phenomenon of how to turn this around before we are facing even more disaster. I simply do not know. You do your thing, I do my thing, but we are like little drops in a desert. because the general response, you will hear, I will hear is that many people realize – this is not going well.
But they will always tell you when they are working at the university or somewhere else, well, look, I have to pay my mortgage, you know, I’m dealing with two or three kids. What is it I can do? I cannot afford to lose my job. And it goes on to the highest levels. So, now, look, we do what we can do.
My mother, who was a prisoner of war in the Japanese internment camp during the war, always taught us, “there is no there is no energy in pessimism.” Right? And we cannot do our work when we are pessimists. Does that mean we are optimists? No, we are not optimist. I’m not an optimist. I want to be a realist. But it’s a fight and we have to continue this fight and one of the interesting things in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was to blow up an educational system. To blow up this idea that you are there to get grades. That’s why he decided, I won’t give out any grades. But then what good is the university if you don’t get the quantity of being graded? Let them do something else with their life. Go to a bookshop. Don’t go to Amazon, go to a bookshop and educate yourself. Spinoza did it that way, Nietzsche did it that way, Schopenhauer did it that way.
One of my statements when I give lectures is that the elite will not solve the crisis because they are the crisis. They are the incarnation of the crisis. So, they don’t have any incentive to change anything.
I say almost as a joke, but it’s not really a joke, if people would be a little bit less ignorant only a little bit, would any of those people still be in office? None of them. None of them. Well, maybe two or three.
And what kind of products will disappear if people would be a little bit more sensitive about quality? Well, a lot will disappear. So it seems as if it is organized to keep people as ignorant as they are. That’s what they’re doing. And it’s on and this way, and this is why I’m very angry about The New York Times. To Fight Against This Age came out in 2018, The New York Times and asked me if I could write an op ed, and in the op ed I wrote that with Trump, you have the classic contemporary fascist – and they refuse to publish it. Because the number one argument was that it goes against our business model. For The New York Times, the business model comes always first, right? So again, the people are focused on continuing the financial corruption. Financial corruption is a terrible thing, but much worse is the intellectual and moral corruption, and the intellectual and moral corruption comes from our world.
DRK:
It’s like what happened to Dr. Bandy Lee when she wrote her book about The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. The American Psychiatric Association stepped in and tried to silence her, and The New York Times wouldn’t publish her, then no paper would publish her, and she lost her professorship at Yale.
RR:
Yes, that is what is going wrong so deeply with the so-called universities. Our response has to start in the intellectual world.
DRK:
Well, you know, Rob, I’m on the steering committee for the Doctor as a Humanist, and Jonathan McFarland was going to join us today, but he’s got family issues that he’s been dealing with, his brother. Our idea, the reason we think that there needs to be humanism in medicine or what we could call the medical humanities, is because, in our focus on technology (the quantity as you say), we often lose the quality of the human being.
This happens both with the human being of the doctors, who have up to 50% rates of burnout, as do many healthcare professionals, but even worse, we lose the humanity of the patient we’re working with. In technological medicine we run people through protocols and evidence-based production lines.
So, with the medical humanities, I think of a distinction between the technician and the healer. Most of medical education is about becoming a technician. There is very little about becoming a healer. This would fit with your quantity versus quality schema – what can you put into numbers versus what is unquantifiable?
Let’s go back to the basics in our discussion. How would you define humanism?
RR:
Well, we’re dealing with the fundamental questions. The fundamental question everybody is asking, the question at the heart, is the question “Who am I?” Who am I? It’s a question everybody asks and must ask at a certain moment. Now again, if within this paradigm I just described – that’s a rationalistic technocratic paradigm.
Here is where the counter-revolution comes in, right? I mean, in the ‘60s and in the ‘70s, when they started to realize that people are being reduced to numbers, that people are being reduced to consumers, who benefited from this approach?
The financial world and everything related to it. This was so beautiful in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, when we have this reductionism taking place. and when the scientific paradigm becomes the main paradigm to look at a certain person – you start to look for this illness, we give it this name, this definition, etc. etc. But we’re forgetting the person behind it.
DRK:
That’s what we hope to do in the medical humanities – to remember the human person of the patient and the human person of the doctor.
My education included a tradition that was socially engaged, socially aware psychiatry. I studied trauma, genocide, the holocaust. Eli Wiesel came to speak at my university and we read Night with the psychiatric faculty and discussed it before his talk. Also, for instance, the work of Robert Jay Lifton, who wrote about the “witnessing professional,” the idea that as professionals we had a responsibility that went beyond the four walls of the consulting room, beyond a narrow role of being a technician, to include being a witness, bearing witness to the traumatic experiences our patients had been through.
And this I struggle with, and it is what your book, To Fight Against This Age helped me with. What are we to do? What are educated professionals to do in the face of the new epidemic of fascism? How do we fight against dehumanization and how do we promote re-humanization – for ourselves, our patients, and society?
RR:
In the 70s, in your profession there was a very famous book, maybe, I guess it was translated into English as Not Made of Wood: A Psychiatrist Discovers His Own Profession. Well, I mean, we are not from wood. You know, we are people with emotions, with feelings, with things we find very difficult to express. We are full of frustrations, we are afraid, we are afraid of ourselves. Already the Greek Socrates and all the others knew – it’s about the human soul. It’s about the human soul. And how to reach the human soul, how to be able to give expression to the human soul. Well, here’s where the muses come in, right? And this is why we need the world of literature, this is why we need poetry and music, so that you suddenly can see there is a difference between the muses and amusement. The muses will tell you something about yourself. Whereas, amusement is taking away from yourself, right?
You’re with Tom Cruise or Batman or whatever. But what the muses will tell you is to develop the imagination. But again, we have taken away the muses, we have taken away philosophy, we have taken away the concept of the soul. All these things, so the only thing we have to do is to go back to the basics. That’s all and it’s not that difficult. Is there a big business model behind it? Probably not. But it will make the whole world much more humane.
And again, one of the most frightening phenomena of our time. We see it in Israel and Gaza. We see it on the West Bank. We see it in the Ukraine. We see it with this whole AI thing, the dehumanization. The dehumanization. We’re all educated, you quoted Heschel, well, we all were all educated by Eli Wiesel and Primo Levy and we read Anne Frank. It was the main thing in our education: never again. Never again, this dehumanization because you’re a different race or a different religion or whatever. It’s the one thing that should never ever happen again. This craziness of übermenschen und untermenschen. But now in the third decade of the 21st century – the dehumanization. For me, you know, I’m 64. I grew up with the America – well in awe of Franklin Roosevelt, of Truman, of John F. Kennedy and even Reagan, we thought he was a little bit strange figure, but you know, but America was always the big brother we could count on. I mean we know the whole story, America wasn’t perfect, but a source of liberty, right? That’s no longer the case.
DRK:
Sometimes I think that we have become the barbarians we were warning others about. The Jungian shadow – what we hate in others is what we do not acknowledge ourselves. Or the old Pogo cartoon – “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
RR:
But it is not just the United States. Look what’s happening in Israel. I mean, can you imagine what’s happening over there? And, look in Western Europe – how are we dealing with refugees? How are dealing with immigration? We created the Mediterranean as a huge graveyard. And it’s politics, right? Just to make sure that those people cannot come here. So, again, this dehumanization. There are no easy solutions for things. The Palestine crisis is a big thing. How to deal with immigration? A big thing. I recognize that, right? I’m not stupid. But there is no excuse for dehumanization. That’s what’s so interesting about your profession. Again, I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m only fascinated by it. When I was much younger, I read the books of R.D. Laing – anti-psychiatry, right? A kind of movement against everything being reduced to science.
DRK:
That is what I was writing about in my first book, Re-humanizing Medicine – how to recognize the inherent reductionism of the technician compared to the undeveloped compassion of the healer.
RR:
Yes, this goes way back, already in the eighteenth century, Giambattista Vico explained that the paradigm of Descartes is a wonderful paradigm, but it doesn’t work for us human beings and it doesn’t work for society. But it’s a terrific paradigm to make a lot of money with it. You see, that’s the whole issue. And now, I mean, God knows what will happen with this artificial intelligence stuff. I always use now, in talks about this issue, I say, okay, let’s talk about artificial intelligence. What do you think about an artificial friend? Or what do you think about artificial love? Or what about artificial justice? Well, you realize it’s fake. Okay, so artificial intelligence is fake. It’s not intelligent at all. It’s a huge machinery which can make calculations a trillion times faster than we can. But a whole lot of nonsense is coming out of it. Those talk. The chatbots are completely ridiculous. But again, how to defend yourself against it? Well, the only defense is the same defense as we have with fake news. You have to have a critical mind. I mean, and so, I mean, I don’t know if I have to laugh or cry or what is acceptable, yes or no.
But when people that that that now many people already died because they start a relationship with the chatbot. Well, when you start a relationship with your chatbot, you must be very lonely and probably never read a book. Okay? So then you start to talk to the machine. And so you talk to the machine is my life is miserable, you know, I’m lonely, I hate my job, I hate everything. What shall I do? And then the chatbot said, “Well, you know, you better make an end of your life.”
And people make an end of their life. Now, to tell your audience how funny the Netherlands is. Not that long ago it was reported that a family of somebody who committed suicide because of the chatbot now wants to sue the chatbot and we have the discussion if we can put the chatbot in jail. That would be funny, right? We have a machine in jail.
It’s, again, unfortunate that the book is only out in Italian and in French. The Americans don’t want to publish my books anymore. But the longest chapter is about stupidity and lies. And this stupidity thing is a really frightening phenomenon. It’s a really frightening phenomenon. Because again the if we can stop the stupidity, we can stop a lot of things.
DRK:
So yes, I was just thinking about that article in The Atlantic on “The Age of Reading is Over.” I felt worse, as far as the prognosis goes, I felt worse after reading that. Have you read that article?
RR:
It was a brilliant article. A frightening article. It seems to me a very honest article. It only underscores what I just said about the total collapse of education in America, whatever they may call themselves or however many Nobel Prize laureates they have. But the main thing is the following.
Our culture is a book culture. And not only because the Biblical connection, the connection to our Jewish and Christian heritage, or the works of Plato for that matter, but if we if we realize that we’re human beings and you know we are the next generation or we are the generation that will be the next generation or a generation before them. What about the continuity? The continuity is a thing called the human spirit. And this human spirit continues in written works.
It’s so fascinating. Why is it that everybody wants to see the movie, The Odyssey? I haven’t seen it. I read the book, which is fine with me. But, because on a deep level, on the deep level, people have this idea that they are in need of myths. Myths are extremely important because the myths are the expression of something extremely basic. The Odyssey is the myth of going out, the quest of life, adventures, and returning home. Or Faust is the myth of trying to reconnect to the person who passed away and try to bring her back to life. Faust is the myth of striving for absolute knowledge and the absolute. Every culture has these myths.
Now, when you take away a book culture, when you take away this whole cultural legacy, you get where we are now, which is we’ve lost our ground. We’ve lost our fundamental foundation. We no longer know who we are. And this was also a famous statement by the German Jewish philosopher Max Scheler in 1928, just before he died. He said, “In 10 years, in not the last 10,000 years, the human being has become such a problem for himself. Because we no longer know who we are.”
It’s this phenomenon of what’s happening now, to the book culture, is completely self-destructive. We’ve lost the basic, enduring foundation of what it means to be human. The loss of book culture, not only in America, but all over the world is a complete self-destruction of culture and who we are as human beings. We can blame Amazon, we can blame publishing houses, for only putting out celebrity biographies instead of works that focus on what is truly important for us as human beings. All the -isms are reductionisms.
Fascism: are you in my “tribe” or not.
Communism: are you in the proletariat or the bourgeoisie?
Capitalism: do you have money or do you not?
All the -isms are totalitarianisms, they are reductionistic fundamentalisms.
DRK:
You write a lot about the soul, and spiritual nobility, and seem to favor a spiritual humanism– this contrasts to many secular humanists who veer away from ideas of the soul and spirit and say that we must be materialists and scientists.
RR:
Well, to put it bluntly, they are wrong. They are deeply wrong.
For me, it is not about a belief in this God or that God, but like Primo Levi wrote, we need the transcendent. We need the notion of the soul, the idea of spirit. Thomas Mann understood this. Nietzsche, of course Nietzsche understood this. Nietzsche’s “death of God” was not about an old man with a beard up in the sky suddenly having a heart attack. No. It was about the loss of the Transcendent and without that we are left with only the will to power, a world of power. Without the Absolute, there is no Truth, no Goodness, there is loss of the fundamental thing that makes us human. The idea of Man, or of Humankind, only that Transcendent notion can unify us as human beings. Without the Transcendent, we fall into categories, identities – we are more than our skin color, more than our gender, or pronouns. Humanism, humanity, is what we all have in common. Without the Transcendent there is no Justice, no Beauty.
The so-called secular humanists are just wrong. They miss the riddle of being a human being. They miss our Nature and our Destiny. It is dangerous when you take away spirit and take away soul – that only leads back into the reductionism and destruction.
This is why the left is so stupid – I think about writing something with that title – I mean, I am the left, I am considered a Social Democrat in the Netherlands, but the left is being incredibly stupid turning to quantity rather than quality. The left has surrendered quality to the right and the more than right. Trump has an instinct to exploit this, a cruel, evil instinct. You can’t be a fascist unless you are a populist. You have to be a demagogue.
CNN, the media, they all made billions on Trump. They could have said, “this is a dangerous guy and we’ll just ignore him,” but they amplified his destructive voice and made billions.
What makes us human is what we have in common, not what is different about us. We need to go back to school, maybe read a little philosophy.
DRK:
Nietzsche wrote about “becoming who you are” and the Greeks spoke about this too. How did you, Rob Riemen, become who you are?
RR:
In a new book – that hasn’t been translated into English yet but it is in Spanish, Italian and French (is not the Cultura Animi publication) – students in Mexico, they were reading my books, To Fight Against This Age and The Nobility of Spirit during the covid period had all kind of questions about the meaning of their lives because of what they had read in these books of my. I was most pleasantly surprised that my books – like a letter in a bottle – arrived in the classroom of philosophy department in Mexico. So I responded to their questions yet not much later I realized I had made a mistake. I should have told them: these are your questions, you have to find an answer yourself – don’t ask me. Yet as I explained in Becoming Human is an Art, I read Nietzsche’s essay, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in which he argues that to get to know yourself starts with reflecting on the important people in your life who have influenced you. Some of the people with the biggest impact on our lives are our parents, so I began to write about my mother. When she was 12-15 years old she was in a Japanese internment camp in Indonesia. She and her sisters never spoke about it. My mother died in 2000. Then, during the Covid-era, I was talking with her sisters who were in their ‘90s and I got to know who my mother was as a person and what she had gone through. And I understood why she educated me the way she did. I grew up in what you could call a sober labor class family, with six kids. My father was a labor organizer, he organized strikes – he was always fighting for social justice and that was very ingrained into me.
My mother taught me to read when I was three years old. I wasn’t very good at anything else, I wasn’t good at soccer, for instance. But reading readily became my passion. When I read Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, I recognized myself in Hans Castorp. That book inspired Nexus – we are just a place where people from all different philosophical perspectives come to sit down to have conversations.
Books were considered holy in our family. We didn’t have much money, so we would have to save up to buy a book. To be educated is a privilege and that privilege comes with a responsibility.
High school felt like a prison to me. It took me eight years instead of six to graduate. When I graduated, I wanted to be free. I wanted to study something completely useless. So I studied Theology for ten years. I read Thomas Mann and all of those around him – Nietzsche, Goethe, the Russians. I met a publisher named Johan Polak, I mentioned him earlier, and we started a journal of European Judaism in 1988. It was difficult to get funding, but finally someone gave us a little money. In 1991 we started the journal, Nexus, but in 1992 Johan suddenly died.
I never applied for the job. Instead of being “editor,” I thought I will be the “founder” and the “president.” So, we started Nexus, and Edward Said was our first Nexus lecturer a year later Amartya Sen and then we have had former President Richard von Weizsäcker from Germany I wanted to only do things that were interesting. I didn’t want to have to rely on funding that constrained what we did. Nexus is the most independent institute in the world. We bring in people who disagree with each other. My father, a union leader, always taught me any siblings said that when the strike is over, you should be able to sit down with the other side and have a glass of wine, that they were opponents, but not enemies. I don’t believe in “cancel culture,” we all need to sit down and talk together.
DRK:
Well, Rob, we’ve had some technical difficulties, and I’ve switched to doing this old school transcription style, which is why I am furiously scribbling notes as you talk. Our video broke down, our audio broke down, our transcription broke down – so I am doing this the old school human way, like I do with Joseph Rael.
RR:
Well, sorry for my technology karma!
That reminds me, Stephen Greenblatt has a book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, where he traces the journey of a 11th century monk from Italy to Germany where he finds a manuscript of Lucretius and transcribes it fifty times.
So, we are doing this interview the human way!
DRK:
Thank you for being patient and I think that this ended up being a good way to do this interview.
To close, Rob, we call this podcast, Becoming a True Human, and this phrase comes from my mentor Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) who teaches from his own experience and comes out of the Southern Ute and Picuris Pueblo Indigenous cultures of the Southwestern United States. We like to ask our guests, what does “Becoming a True Human” mean to you?
RR:
Once, all of us will inevitably die. Hopefully after a long life, after not too heavy of a burden of illness. And in old age we will be lying in our bed – and in those last moments – what are you going to think back to in your life? Will it be like Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illich, a life of regrets? Or, will I have lived the life that I was supposed to do, the life that I was given, that I had the talent, and that my parents had the expectation of. Or, will it be other way, the life of less than the True Human Being? Maybe there will have been money, fame, power – only to realize that you had only accumulated a whole bunch of zeros in your bank account?
Johan Polak, who helped found Nexus, he had a small fortune from his family, but he put it all in the publishing house Athenaeum and bookstore. He died in 1992.
In “The Idea of Europe,” George Steiner wrote that we are fortunate people. The only thing you have to do is find and follow your passion. You may be poor, but you will be happy.
We can still do something in which we believe.
Most people are not happy.
DRK:
Thoreau’s “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…”
RR:
It is important to realize that with fortune comes moral responsibility. This is Thomas Mann, as well. Gifts come with responsibilities.
Now, the stakes are higher than ever. There is endlessly more going wrong on the supply side than on the demand side. There are too many people afraid to step outside, to step outside of the paradigm. People focus on being popular, on numbers of followers, on being an influencer and they forget about quality. When you are on your death bed, only quality matters. The Transcendent is not to be found in quantity, in numbers; the Transcendent is only found in quality and that is the spirit and the soul – and we only find that by knowing who we are, by reading books, by having discussion with others.
Gavin describes thinking about and working on this book for many years, and includes his own teenage experiences that he is grateful his own GP didn’t label as mental illness, but rather needing to learn how to make friends and share “food, time, stories, secrets” (10). He also was accepted into a master’s program in cognitive neuropsychology at Cambridge – which he decided not to pursue and ended up going back into clinical medicine, training in emergency medicine and as a general practitioner.
Gavin reviews themes of his book: that we are unfragile and have tremendous capacities to grow even after or in adversity, that diagnoses and medications can reinforce the mistaken belief that we are fragile, and that diagnoses are forms of pattern recognition – but with mental illness many of the influences are cultural and social, rather than biological.
In his book, he writes,
“Every mental health problem I see in clinic has at its core a tendency that, in a more measured dose, or different context, could contribute to human well-being, rather than detract from it,” (34).
He also speaks of the doctor as medicine and describes a distinction between the role of the doctor as a healer and as a technician, for instance, “It felt like the first time in my medical career that someone had earnestly tried to show me how to be a good doctor rather than a master of a set of technical skills. Dr. M called it being ‘an effective GP’ rather than ‘another pill-pusher’” (76).
Gavin gives a wonderful answer to our question of “What is a True Human?”
“For me, I would argue that all the world philosophies pretty much agree that the three big priorities for human life should be about developing your kindness and your compassion to your fellow man and being humble about the limits of what you really know and understand, and developing and fostering a kind of reverence both for the fact that we’re even here on earth and for earth itself and for other people. So those three: humility, compassion, reverence, I think becoming a true human is somebody who is able to prioritize those three and focus on them, and bring those…to fruition in their life.
But also, you know, you can get a bit too serious on this as well. I think it’s also really important to cultivate some levity and a little bit, well, a big dose of curiosity…and also equanimity, calm, even tempered in the face of adversities or in the face of bad news, good news. So those are like the added extras.”
Gavin ends the podcast with a quote from the closing of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy:
“Be not solitary, be not idle, SPERATE MISERI CAVETE FELICES [unhappy ones, have hope; happy ones, be cautious]” (Burton quoted in Francis, 250).
Chris and Dave invite their old pal Nikhil Parekh MD, to join them to talk about their past work on Whole Health for Veterans Affairs (VA) and for ideas for the future of Whole Health work now that they are all no longer working at the VA. Nikhil is trained in Occupational & Environmental Medicine and is currently working with the University of Michigan. They share memories of teaching together and working to create the transformation of Whole Health at the VA. Whole Health was first started in 2011 through the national VA Office of Patient Centered Care & Cultural Transformation. Whole Health is the VA’s version of holistic, integrative care and self-care program for veterans and VA staff. Nikhil and Dave worked as Whole Health Education Champions and Chris worked on the contractor side, helping to develop and teach Whole Health classes to VA staff, alongside Education Champions like Nikhil and Dave.
Whole Health, the VA, and all federal employees, have been affected by changes in US government – a sudden shift with the new administration that led to Dave and Nikhil both leaving the VA. Dave describes how it felt like an instant creation of a hostile work environment with random, demanding, and unclear emails from DOGE (Department of Government “Efficiency”), and confusing communication coming down to leadership and from leadership to staff. Dave describes sitting in on review meetings where they had to comb through existing educational materials and remove suddenly censored words such as “women,” “female,” “trauma,” “diversity,” “Native American,” and “sociocultural,” to name just a few words.
They review Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief: depression, anger, denial, bargaining, and acceptance, and speak about their personal experiences of the grief of no longer being part of the transformational Whole Health program.
Chris asks Nikhil what “becoming a true human” means to him
“But then I realized that there was a life outside of the VA and it’s okay to pivot and realize you are greater than that. I think no matter what struggle anyone listening to this podcast is going through, you are greater than that struggle, especially if you maintain your integrity, maintain your ethics, maintain your value system, because that is going to carry you through whatever personal and professional challenges you’re having in your life.“
“And so I say leaving the VA made me human. And it was actually, I will say this, like a weight coming off me the day I dropped off. I literally, people were checking in on me. was like, I’ve never been happier. I’m so happy to be shed of this. And, and I do miss, you know, I miss the people I worked with. miss the veterans. I miss it tremendously. But at the same time, it was destroying me instead of making me become human.”
I recently had the honor of presenting at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Well-Being Wednesday series and I’d like to share my slides on my evolving work on Post-Burnout Growth.
Struggle is inherent to any practice, and so it is inherent in the practice of inner democracy.
At the individual level, struggle is part of every practice, whether meditation on the cushion, yoga on the mat, or a workout at the gym. It is human nature to have inertia and entropy causing us to all away from practice. We all know that we feel better after meditating, doing yoga, or working out, and yet it is human nature to want to put it off, not do it, or fall off the practice even though this may be logically self-defeating. We know that these practices lead to a feeling of well-being after completing them, but other priorities pop up between us and well-being.
The practice of inner democracy also yields a form of well-being, a state of oneness or nonduality which is similar to experiences we can have in meditation and yoga. Inner democracy is a practice because it is not completed once and for all, but requires a continual, regular input of energy in order to maintain nondual well-being and nondual interdependence. This is the practice of moving from Me to We. Democracy is about caring for self and other, about caring for all. As Jeremy David Engels, in On Mindful Democracy, describes true democracy, “working together to care for each other and the life we share,” (4).
How does the journey of inner democracy start? Something happens in life, a calling, a disorientation, an experience in nature, a tragedy (in one’s life or in the world), a stirring of the heart. Something happens that helps the individual shift from an identity of Me to We. Once this transition or transformation from ego to inner democracy occurs, outer democracy follows.
Even once a state of inner democracy is achieved, it can be lost.
This loss can happen internally, for example falling off the practice, or it can happen from external events which disturb outer democracy. This inner or outer disturbance or disorientation can spark the individual to a deeper personal calling to further develop inner democracy to meet the outer challenge. Inner democracy is a practice as there are so many daily experiences in society that pull us from We to Me.
Joseph Campbell’s description of the hero’s journey and subsequent descriptions of the heroine’s journey by Maureen Murdock and Valerie Estelle Frankel describe struggle as inherent in the journey. Whether it is overcoming outer opposition or overcoming some inner obstacle, the hero or heroine passes through a time of struggle and doubt on the journey of transformation.
Jack Mezirow describes transformational learning as requiring a “disorienting dilemma” that sets the learner on a path of transformation in who they are, not just in learning objective data or facts. The journey of transformation requires some form of inner or outer struggle.
Gerald Arbuckle has described how social and spiritual movements can drift from the founder’s initial vision. The institutionalization of a human movement can lose touch with its original mission. Arbuckle sees the necessity for periodic “refounding” of social movements. Refounding is often led by a “refounding person,” who goes through something like the hero’s or heroine’s journey – personally – and then returns back to the group to reinvigorate it with a renewal of the original founding vision.
Simply voting once a year or every four years is not enough to maintain a healthy inner democracy. It is a practice and practice is a struggle.
Currently, we are in a crisis of democracy – it can feel like everything is not only falling apart, but that democracy is actively being torn apart. The struggle can feel like it is too much. To remember that struggle is inherent in inner and outer democracy can reframe the issue, from one of a problem to one of an opportunity. The current crisis is a call to refound inner democracy within ourselves and then to work to restore outer democracy. The practice of moving from Me to We is never finished.
In Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, she draws on the science of the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly as a metaphor for the transformation of society – it requires a lot of struggle and pain to change the old into the new:
“this metamorphosis has become a metaphor for the transformation of society, often with the sense that we are at the stage of dissolution…A butterfly is the end of a caterpillar. The beginning—the next era—comes after the end of the last one, and in between comes a lot of falling apart,” (4).
Democracy is an ongoing struggle, both inwardly and outwardly. We struggle to become better heart people (as Joseph Rael says) and we struggle to build a society based on We rather than Me. Struggle isn’t bad, it just is. Rejecting struggle obscures the path forward. If the caterpillar breaks out of the chrysalis too soon, there will be no butterfly.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Third Edition. Novato: New World Library, 2008.
Campbell, Joseph with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. New York: Anchor Books, 1991.
Engels, Jeremy David. On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2026.
Frankel, Valerie Estelle. From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey through Myth and Legend. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2010.
Kopacz, David R and Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow). Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD. Pointer Oak/Tri S Foundation, distributed byMillichap Books, 2016.
Kopacz, David R and Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow). Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality. Seattle & Marvel: Condor & Eagle Press, 2020.
Kopacz, David R. Caring for Self & Others: Transforming Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Soul Loss. Palisade: Creative Courage Press, 2024.
Mezirow, Jack. “Transformational Learning Theory,” in Jack Mezirow, Edward Taylor, and Associates (eds.), Transformative Learning in Practice. San Francisco: Jossey- Bass, 2009.
Murdock, Maureen. The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness. Boston: Shambhala, 1990.
Solnit, Rebecca. The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2026.
In this series of essays, in the 250th year of the United States of America, I will develop the idea of Inner Democracy – a democracy of mind and heart and soul – to complement our outer democracy.
We are at a crisis of democracy, there is extreme polarization, accusations of “the other side” being “fascist” or “socialist/communist,” and levels of mistrust in each other and in our democratic institutions that have not been seen in generations.
As Parker Palmer has written, in Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit (2011),
“If American democracy fails, the ultimate cause will not be a foreign invasionor the power of big money or the greed and dishonesty of some elected officials or a military coup or the internal communist/socialist/fascist takeover that keeps some Americans up at night. It will happen because we—you and I—became so fearful of each other, of our differences and of the future, that we unraveled the civic community on which democracy depends, losing our power to resist all that threatens it and calls it back to its highest form,” (8).
We think of democracy as a form of government, as something outside of the individual person, but Palmer reminds us that democracy is ultimately about “you and I,” and not about something “out there.” Democracy is a “government by the people,”[1] and we are the people. The kind of democracy that Palmer envisions, one that is “worthy of the human spirit,” is the kind of democracy that moves us from Me to We. This Journey from Me to We is a difficult one, and it starts inside each of us.
Jeremy David Engels, in his book, On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World, defines “true democracy” as “ working together to care for each other and for the life we share,” (4). Democracy, for Engels, is about collaborating and caring, not just for ourselves but for our shared life together on our only ecosystem of the Earth.
There is a crisis of democracy in what we even mean by “democracy.” Is democracy a libertarian ethos of being able to maximize one’s own life, liberty, and, happiness, regardless of the consequences to others and the environment; or, is democracy a higher, spiritual calling of caring and collaboration?
Engels brings our focus on democracy from the individual to the community through synthesizing the spiritual traditions of yoga, Buddhism, and Christianity. He draws on Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh’s, “interbeing,” an intellectual/spiritual understanding of the interconnectedness of life, and the Christian community building of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “beloved community,” which then leads to democratic action. Engels re-writes the Declaration of Independence into a Declaration of Interdependence, recognizing the inherent interconnectedness of life.
Mindful democracy is a pathway and practice for developing the experience of inner democracy which can then be practiced in its outer form as building the beloved community and democratic action in the world. Inner democracy is an inner experience within the individual that can then lead to an outer democratic citizenship and government. We can think of inner democracy as a variety of spiritual democracy.
Steven Herrmann has written about the idea of “spiritual democracy:”
“Adopting the big idea of Spiritual Democracy, the realization of oneness of humanity with the universe and all its forces, can help people feel joy, peace, and interconnectedness on an individual basis. It can also inspire us to undertake sacred activism, the channeling of such forces into callings that are compassionate, just, and of equitable heart and conscience, and give us some tools to start solving some of these grave global problems, while uniting people on the planet.”[2]
Spiritual democracy, as defined by Herrmann, is founded upon an experience or realization of “oneness” and “interconnectedness.” He believes that this experience of inner democracy can lead to outer action, “sacred activism.”
Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) and I wrote about Spiritual Democracy in our book, Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality. We drew upon Herrmann’s ideas and combined these with Joseph’s perspectives, we spoke about the “inner journey of the democratic shaman,” and summarized a version of the Hiawatha story about Bringing the New Mind of the Great Peace. We made this chapter available as a free pdf download.
In a Becoming a True Human podcast interview with Jeremy David Engels, Chris Smith and I spoke with him about his book, On Mindful Democracy, and ideas about spiritual democracy, mystical democracy, inner democracy, and he had an idea of putting together a group of writers and thinkers to talk about The Varieties of Democratic Experience, with a nod to William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience.
I would like to further develop some ideas around inner democracy, drawing upon the work of other writers and some of my past writing. Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) and I wrote a chapter on “Spiritual Democracy” in our book, Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality. This draws heavily on Steven Herrmann’s work as well as Joseph’s teachings on peace and the idea that we are cosmic citizens. As Engels did, I drew upon Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of interbeing and Martin Luther King Jr.’s beloved community in my book, Caring for Self & Others: Transforming Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Soul Loss, particularly in chapter ten, “Becoming Caring: Caring for All.” I am indebted to Jeremy David Engels for his book and for such an inspiring discussion in our podcast interview.
The perspective on democracy I would like to develop is the idea that the greater sense of “oneness” (or interbeing, interdependence, nondualism) that an individual experiences, the more fully they will be able to embrace the idea of democracy, which will lead to more vigorous outer expressions of democracy. A practice of inner democracy would, thus, be a contemplative path of the development of a conscious experience of oneness. This leads to a tripartite structure:
Inner Experience of Oneness
Idea of Democracy
Outer Expression of Democracy
This tripartite structure follows the paths of the hero or heroine’s journey (as developed by Joseph Campbell), and the structure of initiation (separation/initiation/return) that Joseph Rael and I followed in Becoming Medicine. It also follows the structure of Jeremy David Engels’ book, On Mindful Democracy (xi-xii):
Stand on Common Ground (Interbeing)
Walk the Path of Interdependence in Community (Beloved Community)
Practice Democracy with Hands and Heart
The idea of mindful or inner democracy can be grasped with the mind, but a mental concept may not be as resilient as an inner experience of democracy – of interbeing, oneness, interdependence – which then leads to outer expression. In this sense, mindful democracy can be a pathway to creating a foundation of inner democracy that then supports the idea and what Engels calls the “hands and heart” of outer democracy.
Inner Democracy could be taught through practices of reflection, contemplation, deliberation, dialogue, meditation, experiences in nature, or any experience in which the individual developed an expanded sense of self beyond the limitations of the ego and the flesh.
The movement of the individual from an identity of “me” to an identity of “we” underlies the inner practice of democracy.
Interestingly, there are many names for an experience of Oneness: nondualism, interbeing, unity, transpersonal, and nondifference, to name a few. There are also many names for interrelationship and interdependence: I/Thou, Me/We, beloved community, and others.
One of the reasons I am excited about following this thread of Inner Democracy is that it provides a positive focus and practices that can be done irrespective of outer events in the world. In my Words Create Worlds series, I have focused more on resistance and opposition to words – uncaring words, words of Me-First, and words of fascism. Through Inner Democracy I am seeking to focus on building inner strength during difficult times. Perhaps chaotic and painful experiences in the outer world could even lead one to fall back upon practices of inner democracy. Inner democracy builds hope, resilience, post-burnout growth, post-traumatic growth. I agree with Jeremy David Engels’ view of democracy as caring and collaboration.
Ultimately, democracy isn’t something done “out there;” democracy is also, perhaps even originally, about doing something “in here,” in the inner space of the psyche, the work of cultivating inner democracy.
“government by the people, system of government in which the sovereign power is vested in the people as a whole exercising power directly or by elected officials; a state so governed,” 1570s, from French démocratie (14c.), from Medieval Latin democratia (13c.), from Greek dēmokratia “popular government,” from dēmos “common people,” originally “district” … + kratos “rule, strength.”
What we are experiencing now is a predictable, straight line from the words that Donald J. Trump has spoken.
The uncaring world we are living in has been created, uncaring word by uncaring word of our current president and those who are drawn to him. It is as simple as that. It is as simple as that.
What we put into the world in words, what we bring forth from that deep inner place of creative power within ourselves, creates the world we live in. We are makers and unmakers of our reality.
The inspiration for this essay series, Words Create Worlds, comes from Rabbi Heschel. He said, as recounted by his daughter, Susannah Heschel:
“Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness—or evil—into the world. He used to remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds, he used to tell me when I was a child. They must be used very carefully. Some words, once having been uttered, gain eternity and can never be withdrawn. The Book of Proverbs reminds us, he wrote, that death and life are in the power of the tongue.”[1]
Rabbi Heschel warns us of the power of words and how they can bring holiness or evil into the world. This is the power of choice that we have and the power of our breath shaped into meaning and symbolism through the sound of the letters that we string together into words.
Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) also has taught about the power of Sound – of Being & Vibration – and how the sounds of letters and words carry the power of meaning. In the Tiwa language of Picuris Pueblo, the word for God is Wah-Mah-Chi, Breath-Matter-Movement. We could say that Wah-Mah-Chi, Breath-Matter-Movement, is a Word that creates other words and these words create our world. Creator, Wah-Mah-Chi, is a Word that creates other words and worlds. Breath comes through Matter and becomes Movement.
I am invoking spiritual teachers, but the principle of words create worlds also holds for poets, artists, singers, teachers, educators, and politicians – people who can use their words for either bad or good, or as Rabbi Heschel says, for holiness or evil.
How to Write About What You Are Not Supposed to Write About (But Are Ethically and Professionally Bound to Speak)
I started this series of essays out of my concern about the rise of Donald J. Trump as a political figure. His words were so clearly uncaring: he bullied, he name called, he threatened, he spoke about America First, but he really meant Me-First. I have felt compelled to speak the truth, as a psychiatrist, but even more so as a human being.
Lies as Politics
Lies. Donald Trump lies,[2],[3]habitually, repeatedly, and knowingly. He is trying to shape a narrative, he is trying to create your reality, he is trying to create your world.
Lying is not just a personality quirk, there is also a history of lies as politics. Bruno Frank wrote Lüge as Staatsprinzip (The Lie as State Principle) about Hitler and the Third Reich. Frank wrote: “Never before in history has any public group lies with such absolute, voracious, and poisonous shamelessness as has this party for more than a decade;” and further that the essence of fascism is “the total deception of the nation.”[4] Lying is not just a way of life for an individual, it is a political principle for fascism.
Trump believes that he is above the law, even more so as president. “On January 23, 2016, Donald Trump notoriously declared, ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,’” quoted by Jonathan Chait in a piece entitled “The logical end point of Trump saying he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue,”[5] Trump’s words of getting away with murder are now creating our world. As Chait writes:
“That statement was understood at the time as a metaphorical expression of the depth of Republican voters’ commitment to him. Ten years and one day later, his administration’s agents shot a disarmed man on the street in full view of the public. Perhaps we should have taken him not only seriously but also literally.”[6]
The problem is, we didn’t know how to respond to Trump at the time in 2016, even though it was clear to me that his words were dangerous. As a physician, professional, and psychiatrist – I was (and am) concerned about the risk to the health of the populace and the health of our democracy, but I restrained myself out of an abundance of professional caution and also concern about the Goldwater Rule, which states that psychiatrists cannot “diagnosis” a public figure they have not met with clinically. But to warn about dangerousness is different than labelling a public figure with a diagnosis.
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump
In 2017, Yale psychiatrist and expert in predicting violence, Bandy X. Lee convened a group of mental health professionals around the topic of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. The conference led to the publication of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President and then later expanded to a new edition with ten more experts, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President – Updated and Expanded with New Essays. Dr. Lee ended up losing her position at Yale, then she created the World Mental Health Coalition, and has dedicated her work to illuminating the dangerousness of the current president.
I watched the first Trump presidency with concern. I also recognized, as a psychiatrist and as a human being, how Trump’s words and actions were right out of the “fascist playbook.” In 2020 I was moved by the mosque shooting hate crime in Christchurch, New Zealand to start the Words Create Worlds column. (I will list each essay title with links at the end of this article). Looking back, I think the pandemic and Trump’s mishandling of it, and his use of it to divide the country rather than bring it together, helped tip my hand to write in a more open and critical way about the public health emergency of Donald J. Trump. While I was cautious back then and did not want to overstate the risk of “just words,” I now feel that my concerns are valid and vindicated by the second Trump presidency where his words are moving into action and creating our world. In fact, I called Trump the anti-Doctor as his words were not only hurtful of people’s feelings, but dangerous to people’s lives and to American democracy.
Fifth Avenue to Nicollet Avenue to Iran
Donald Trump did not shoot someone on 5th Avenue in New York City, but armed, masked men carrying out the orders of the president, shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in her car after dropping off her 6 year-old at school, near East 34th Street and Portland Avenue in Minneapolis on January 7th, 2026. This was, ominously, five years and a day after the January 6th 2021 attack on the United States Capitol.
Instead of Fifth Avenue, it was 34th Street and Portland Avenue. Instead of Fifth Avenue, it was Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, where Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an ICU nurse who worked at the VA (Veterans Affairs) was shot.
Trump and his team of ne’er do-wells immediately went into “blame-the-victim” mode. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem lied about Renee Nicole Good, accusing her of “domestic terrorism.”[7] As with lies about Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief of staff, said that Pretti was an “assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.”[8] Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Pretti “attacked” officers while “brandishing” a gun.”[9] However multiple eye witness reports and video footage showed that these were lies. The administration had to walk back its portrayal of a mother dropping off her child and a VA ICU nurse. The president even said he “felt bad” about the killings, but even worse about Renee Nicole Good’s killing as her parents were Trump supporters.[10]
Since I first started this essay, the United States of America and Israel have started a war with Iran. The lies continue…
“On February 28, during the opening hours of the assault on Iran, a missile struck a girls’ school in southern Iran, killing more than 170 people – most of them schoolgirls.”[11]
Rather than waiting for the truth of an investigation, Donald Trump immediately blamed Iran for using a US made missile to kill its own children. However, the evidence is pointing to the children being killed by the United States:
“Preliminary investigations suggest the school may have been hit by a US missile because of a targeting error, though the exact circumstances remain under investigation.
Analysts say the strike may have been caused by outdated targeting information, as the school is on the same block as buildings used by the IRGC’s navy and the site of the school was originally part of the base.”[12]
The Cusp Where Words Become Worlds
I have to keep writing this column on Words Create Worlds.
The risk of remaining silent, at this point, is greater to my humanity than the risk of speaking is to my conservative professionalism or my safety.
We are on the cusp of words becoming worlds – actually we are beyond the cusp, beyond the event horizon pulling us into the black hole of fascism. Donald J. Trump has told us, all along, what he intends to do. Republican politicians have minimized his words, saying “they are just words,” “that’s just who he is, he doesn’t really mean he is going to [fill in the blank: take over Greenland, make Canada the 51st state, invade Mexico to combat cartels, remove Palestinians from Gaza and build luxury hotels, jail his opponents, kill his opponents, run for a third term, invade Iran].
I have seen this coming. I did what I do as a writer, I wrote about it. I educated about fascism.
Yet, I feel I have not done enough. Is there anything one person can do to stop the steady slide from democracy into fascism? Actually, “steady slide” is a mischaracterization – the United States of America did not “fall” into fascism, it was pushed.
Politically, with the House, Senate, and White House controlled by Republicans, it seems to depend on Republican politicians who need to break with Trump before it is too late. But it is already too late. Trump began as much of a buffoon as Adolf Hitler was in the early 1930s – no one took him seriously. The power Trump has is the power of the tongue, the power of mass hypnosis, the power of lying to people, telling people what they want to hear and making them feel good about uncaring, and the power of intimidation. Republican politicians have colluded with him in deforming American Democracy into the power of American Empire.
Bruno Frank, the author of Lüge as Staatsprinzip (The Lie as State Principle), whom I introduced earlier, quotes Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf on how lying words can create worlds:
“All this was inspired by principle ─ which is quite true in itself ─ that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods…For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.”[13]
Uncaring Words Create Uncaring Worlds
What we are living in the United States right now is the uncaring world created by the uncaring words of Donald J. Trump. These are the words of fascism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, infantilism, and me-first-ism. I have often thought that if Republican politicians asked themselves “Am I being kind, am I being compassionate,” that they would make different decisions. But kindness and compassion seem to have lost their appeal to MAGA and the Republican party. Instead, they speak words of power, words of me-first, words of us vs. them, words of hate thine enemies, and words of vengeance and retribution. MAGA and the Republican party have become, in the words of Adolph Hitler, “expert liars…who conspire together in the art of lying.”
If we hold uncaring feelings in our hearts and we speak uncaring words into the world, we will create an uncaring world.
Caring Words Create Caring Worlds
In 2025 I published my sixth book, Caring for Self & Others: Transforming Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Soul Loss. I wrote it as a follow-up to my first book, Re-humanizing Medicine (2014). I wrote Caring for Self & Others because I felt there was a need for a practical handbook for health care professionals, educators, and leaders – but it is really for anyone who cares for others as part of their life or jobs, which is most of us.
“Transforming burnout, compassion fatigue, and soul loss,” I wrote, “requires individual practices as well as institutional reform” (4). While I was mostly thinking about hospital and clinic settings as the place of institutional reform, we are in a place with our democracy that it also requires institutional reform in order to be a healthy place to live, love, and work.
Health Care Workers can burnout and develop compassion fatigue, where they feel they no longer have anything to give. The human imperative to resist fascism, you can call it activism if you like, also carries the risk of burnout and compassion fatigue – how can we keep caring when the suffering seems endless? We need to learn how to care for ourselves as we are caring for others. We need to learn how to replenish our own hearts of caring. The book has a number of exercises and meditations to help individuals to refill the cup of their hearts.
The Compassion Revolution & the Counter-Curriculum of Caring
In Re-humanizing Medicine I called for a Compassion Revolution in health care and now we need a Compassion Revolution in politics. We need to not just think about ourselves, we need to think about others. We need to not just care about ourselves, we need to care about others. Actually, I would argue that “caring” only for self is not really caring, it is more selfishness. Caring breaks down the boundaries and walls between self and other. Caring naturally shifts us into a transpersonal space, what Thich Nhat Hanh called “interbeing” and Martin Luther King, Jr. called the “beloved community.”[14] Caring connects us – connects us to ourselves, our hearts, our souls; connects us to other human beings; and connects us to our environment and ecosystem.
In medical school, I felt I was losing an important part of myself, I felt like I was losing who I was, my kindness, my sensitivity, my caring – my soul. Over the years I have developed what I call a counter-curriculum of caring, or rehumanization, as an antidote to counter-act all the forces in our modern world that leave us feeling dehumanized.
“These counter-curriculum practices grew into the practices for the ten dimensions of caring in this book. This book is a counter-curriculum of caring, reminding us in the midst of our busy days as technicians, educators, and leaders to take the time to care. Our current curriculum and operating procedures are creating burnout, compassion fatigue, and soul loss. The proposed counter-curriculum transforms burnout, reigniting the heart of the healer, the soul of the educator, and the vision of the leader; it gives us an antidote for compassion fatigue by giving compassion to ourselves―refilling the medicine bags of our hearts; and it helps us recover and nourish our souls, revitalizing and reconnecting all the dimensions of our humanity.”[15]
It is one thing to define a problem, to understand it, but how do we address the problem of uncaring in the USA and the world? I wish I had an answer for you, but I think each person has to figure this out for themselves, consulting their own hearts in the darkness of sleepless nights. I do think the heart can guide us.
And our souls? What about our souls?
I use the concept of “soul loss” as a metaphor for burnout and compassion fatigue – for the costs of caring. How do we recover our souls when we feel we are losing them – as individuals and as a country? We have to search, we have to be still, we have to go into the darkness – our own and that of our times. As Michael Mead writes in Awakening the Soul:
“As the inner dynamic of transformation, initiation means the continuous breaking open of areas of the soul to reveal hidden capacities and inherent gifts. When life pulls at us from the outside and the soul pushes us from the inside, we reach the point where pain and longing requires that we change. … Whatever interrupts, breaks us open, or breaks us down―whether it is the trauma and shock of a loss in life or the drama and exhilaration of success―also initiates us into a greater knowledge of ourselves.”[16]
Meade’s book repeatedly reinforces the idea that the crisis can awaken the soul which then gives the support that is needed for the particular crisis. Caring for ourselves entails caring for our souls, which then give us the strength to further care for ourselves and then to care for others.
What can we do? When you find yourself in a dark place, when you feel you are at your limit, when you feel burnout and compassion fatigue, when you feel a sense of soul loss – that is the time to consult with your soul through inner practices that lead to outer actions and outer actions that lead to inner practices.
Q: What are we going to do now? A: Whatever needs doing.
Q: How are we going to do it? A: I’m not sure, but check with your heart, check with your soul. Let your heart and soul find the caring response as the antidote to the uncaring world we are living in. The answer is in caring. Caring for what? Caring for yourself & caring for others.
Inner Democracy
One way of caring for Self is cultivating Inner Democracy. I am starting another series of essays on this topic and will be posting them soon. In addition to the outer work of challenging words creating worlds of fascism, this inner work is an antidote to uncaring. Creating Inner Democracy is a practice of Caring for Self & Caring for Others.[17] This work owes a great deal to Steven Herrmann’s work on Spiritual Democracy and Jeremy David Engels On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World.[18]
I will leave you with an exercise from Caring for Self & Others, one that actually came to me when I was working with Joseph Rael on our book, Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD.
Imagine and visualize what the heart does on a physiological level in the body.
The heart receives (through the right atrium) the blood that has traveled throughout the entire body. This blood has the lowest oxygen content; all the tissues of the body have already absorbed oxygen from this blood―it is blue, venous blood. From the perspective of tissues, it is “bad” blood, no longer oxygen-rich. As the heart receives and accepts this “bad blood,” it doesn’t complain or cling to it, but gives it away, lets it go, and it passes on to the lungs. There the blood is replenished with oxygen. The heart then receives again, only this time it is the “best blood,” the most oxygen-rich. Once again, however, the heart doesn’t cling or hoard the goodness for itself, but gives it away to the rest of the body.
Hopefully you are seeing the metaphor of how your heart works physiologically and how you can work with suffering in your life. How much do you cling to the good? How much to you reject “bad” life experiences, which could be blessings in disguise?
Sit back for a moment, closing your eyes. Focus on what your heart is doing an average of 60 to 80 times a minute. Receiving depleted blood, giving it away; receiving replenished blood, and giving it away. Become aware of this ongoing process within you.
If you would like, focus on this same movement in your life.
Think about a situation in which you experienced suffering. Remember to step back and use some of the grounding techniques discussed in chapter 2 if you feel overwhelmed.
Allow yourself to receive it. Once you have received it, give it away again, allow it to transform, and then allow yourself to receive it again, then give it away once again. Go through this cycle of giving and receiving for as long as feels right to you. Breathe in deeply―let it flow through you; breathe out―let it go. Practice this breathing in/letting go three more times. Feel the movement of the action of your heart throughout your being. Take a deep breath, and open your eyes.
This exercise of giving and receiving shows that compassion begins within our own hearts, that we must be willing to accept both the good and the bad in order to fully feel and fully live and fully love. Transformation occurs when we accept through receiving and let go through giving.
[1] Heschel, S. in “Introduction,” Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition, 1997.
[16] Michael Meade, Awakening the Soul: A Deep Response to a Troubled World (Vashon, WA: Greenfire Press, 2018), 72-73
[17] For now, you can reference my writings on spiritual democracy and caring for all:
Caring for Self & Others: Transforming Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Soul Loss (ch. 10, Becoming Caring: Caring for All). Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality (ch. 14, Spiritual Democracy) – this is available as a free pdf download: https://www.davidkopacz.com/becoming-medicine
Jeremy David Engels was kind enough to join us on the Becoming a True Human podcast! Listen in for an enlightening discussion of a revised Declaration of Independence – A Declaration of Interdependence!
Jeremy David Engels discusses his new book, On Mindful Democracy with Dave Kopacz and Chris Smith. We start by asking him about the nature of the “true human” and “true democracy.”
In the book he defines true democracy as “working together to care for each other and the life we share,” (4).
The book is divided into three parts, recognizing our common ground, walking the path of interdependence in community, and practicing democracy with hands and heart.
Jeremy has drafted a new interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as the Declaration of Interdependence.
Throughout the book and our discussion, he draws on Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of interbeing as a foundation for our common ground of mindful interdependence – and he draws on Martin Luther King Jr.’s concept of the beloved community as a model of mindful working together to foster true human connection.
Jeremy elaborates the concepts of “enemyship” (viewing relationships as us vs them, and competitive and conflictual – the opposite of interbeing) and mindful deliberation as a modality of working with tensions within the individual and within communities. He tells us that “there is no way to democracy, democracy is the way,” (103).
We discuss a great idea of bringing together various thinkers on contemplative forms of democracy, such as mindful democracy, spiritual democracy, and inner democracy – into The Varieties of Democratic Experience (with a nod to William James).
Jeremy closes our discussion with a poem from his book, entitled Hope (p. 155):
Hope
Snow melts from a tree branch Someday soon it will be a cloud And rain will fall on new leaves
There is spring in winter And winter in spring Take heart
Earth Child of Spiritual Democracy – Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow)
Now, more than ever, we need to reconnect to Spiritual Democracy.
War, violence, and aggression directed inward toward a country’s citizens and outward toward other nations and peoples – is not democracy.
In our book, Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality, Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) and I dedicate chapter 14 to the topic of Spiritual Democracy:
“Spiritual Democracy is a living connection, allowing the flow of spirituality through our lives, embracing the divinity in all creatures and the divinity of the Earth. Spiritual democracy is the way we treat others when we learn to see the divine in all things and that we, too, are part of divinity. It is a sacred way of being. Periodically, we forget that we are divine as we live in this world of matter and go through its trials and travails. We, as individuals, as well as we as people, need periodic renewal at the font of spiritual democracy. To seek renewal is to be a Seeker, yet so many “religious” people are becoming fundamentalists.” p.381
Being Fully Human 