Becoming A True Human podcast #19: Ours is a Book Culture – Rob Riemen

Posted on September 5, 2026 by davidrkopacz

Ours is a Book Culture: An Interview with Rob Riemen

You can also read this InnerView on SubStack

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 18^th, 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 11^th 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.

Words Create Worlds.6 Doctors Against Fascism

Posted on October 16, 2020 by davidrkopacz

“Words create worlds,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.[1]

“Words create worlds.” These are the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, here is the full quote, remembered 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.”^[2]

I have been writing this series, Words Create Worlds, based on the words and writing of Rebecca Solnit, Rob Riemen, Timothy Snyder, Madeleine Albright, Jason Stanley, and physicians: Bandy Lee, Robert Jay Lifton, and Judith Herman. I was inspired by these authors and particularly by Riemen’s To Fight Against this Age: On Fascism and Humanism and Rebecca Solnit’s Call Them by Their True Names and their discourse about how words shape our reality. The title for this series of essays comes from Rabbi Heschel who cautions us to be careful with the words we use. I fear that these last four years we have been over-cautious in coming to call the words of the current president of the United States of America fascist. Dr. Bandy Lee’s Twitter profile states, “Uninvolved in politics until politics invaded my area of expertise. I take my professional responsibility to protect society seriously.” Similarly to Dr. Lee, I feel compelled to speak up politically because fascism is a public health crisis. As Foucault wrote, the “first task of the doctor is therefore political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government.”^[3]

The Responsibility of Spiritual Democracy

As I was working on Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality with Joseph Rael, I began to see that while the spiritual path may lead away from society at first, it eventually leads back – one returns after initiation with a new found sense of responsibility for the land and all the creatures that live on it: four-leggeds, two-leggeds, fin-ed and wing-ed. The spiritual path leads to a sense of Oneness, of non-duality. When you start to feel One with creation, you realize that you are responsible for creation. Words create worlds. The etymology of the word “responsible” goes back to a similar word, “answerable.” To be on a spiritual path, which Joseph would say is the same as the path of being a True Human Being, is to be answerable to the Earth. This led me to feel that we had to write a section of the book on the responsibility of the spiritual seeker.

Joseph Campbell taught that the hero’s or heroine’s journey had three stages: separation from the known world, initiation into the new world, and then return to the old world, but now transformed and carrying a responsibility for healing and transforming the world. For our book, this meant writing about our interrelationship with the land; about moving from “other” to “brother and sister;” about Oneness and non-difference; and about the concept of spiritual democracy – the spiritual responsibility we have for all beings. This responsibility led to us losing our publisher as the book turned out to be 500 pages long.

Joseph Rael, in the early 1980s had a vision of men and women sitting in a circular structure, half above ground, half below, singing and chanting for world peace. He followed this vision across the globe, helping to create over 60 Sound Peace Chambers on four different continents. He was recognized by the United Nations for this work on world peace. It is this spirit of peace that leads to my now needing to speak words of peace to counter the 20,005[4] divisive words of fascism.

Being Present with Suffering

Words Create Worlds. To be silent or neutral is to take the side of the bully. There are times that one can lose one’s humanity through inaction. Yes, it is true that one can act without humanity as well, that is a definition of fascism: actions without humanity and against humanity. When I was going through medical school in the early 1990s, struggling with the dehumanizing aspects (Perri Klass described medical school as, A Not Entirely Benign Procedure), I was also reading the Chicago Tribune regularly, trying to understand what was happening in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. I had read about World War II extensively when I was younger, I knew about fascism and genocide – but I struggled to make sense of what it meant to be a human being in the late 20^th Century as I was immersed in learning the language of pathology and despair as I learned to diagnose and treat illness. I was overwhelmed by with the feeling that I was not being taught how to be human and present with either my suffering, my patients’ suffering, of the suffering of the world.

In The Shadow of the Slaughterhouse, D. Kopacz

In the Shadow of the Slaughterhouse: Silence is the Only Real Crime Against Humanity

I brought my friends together to write and to bear witness to the age. I was reading the Beats in those days, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and I loved how they created their own interpretive community and supported each other. The Beats didn’t shy away from suffering or madness, but bore witness to it, as Ginsberg wrote in Howl, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…” Or as William S. Burroughs wrote to Allen Ginsberg, “Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.”[5] My friends and I put together an unpublishable manuscript that included cut-up art, multiple perspectives, and no coherent theme, other than a bunch of twenty-somethings let loose in the big city and reading a lot of books and trying to find their way in the world. I titled this collection, In the Shadow of the Slaughterhouse: Silence is the Only Real Crime Against Humanity. It included essays I wrote on the Native American genocide (from Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee) and an essay on witnessing and the survivor (from reading Terrence des Pres’ The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps). In a way, these essays on Words Create Worlds are a continuation of In the Shadow of the Slaughterhouse: Silence is the Only Real Crime Against Humanity. I cannot remain silent as the shadow of fascism falls across the country.

This is not the succinct entry into the topic of Doctors Against Fascism that I envisioned – but then, the fight against fascism is not through bullets or bullet points, but through re-humanization. What is more re-humanizing than stories about human beings trying to make sense of suffering and bear witness? It is our humanity, our shared humanity, that protects us against the dehumanization of fascism. All of us, as human beings, are responsible for humanity because we are part of humanity. Similarly, as creatures of the Earth we are all responsible for the Earth, as we are part of Her.

What it Means to be a Professional

I have been thinking about the idea of medical activism and what it means to be a professional.[6] In my work on re-humanizing medicine through the compassion revolution,[7] I have argued that much of what we are taught in contemporary medicine is how to be a technician rather than on how to be a healer. A technician is not a professional, necessarily, but someone who performs a set of route protocols and techniques. A healer, on the other hand, is someone who learns techniques, but who also learns humanity – for it is our human presence that we must bring to suffering. While a technique or protocol might treat a disease, suffering needs humanity and compassion. To this end I have continued to argue that as physicians we should be good technicians, but that we must also be good human beings. To be a good medical technician, we are required to engage in Continuing Medical Education. To be a good human being we have to seek out our own Continuing Human Education – this is what I call the counter-curriculum of re-humanization.[8]

To be a professional means that we answer to a higher calling than just simply doing our jobs or staying in our lanes,[9]^,[10] it means that we are responsible to humanity. This means that our job does not end at the walls of our exam room – our job as healers is to attend to the public health of humanity.

Witnessing Professionals

In an interview with Bill Moyers, Robert Jay Lifton describes the concept of health care providers as “witnessing professionals” who have a responsibility to confront malignant normality (such as when lies and cruelty become normality). Lifton ends the interview with the following statement:

“I always feel we have to work both outside and inside of our existing institutions, so we have to…examine carefully our institutions and what they’re meant to do and how they’re being violated. I also think we need movements from below that oppose what this administration and administrations like it are doing to ordinary people. And for those of us who contributed to this book [The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump] — well, as I said earlier, we have to be “witnessing professionals” and fulfill our duty to warn.”[11]

As Psychiatrists We Feel Obliged to Express Our Alarm

Robert Jay Lifton is psychiatrist and psychohistorian I greatly admire, he is a living example of a witnessing professional who has worked at both the individual and the societal level for healing. He and Judith Herman (another psychiatrist I respect) wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times March 8, 2017.[12]

“To the Editor:

“Soon after the election, one of us raised concerns about Donald Trump’s fitness for office, based on the alarming symptoms of mental instability he had shown during his campaign. Since then, this concern has grown. Even within the space of a few weeks, the demands of the presidency have magnified his erratic patterns of behavior.

“In particular, we are struck by his repeated failure to distinguish between reality and fantasy, and his outbursts of rage when his fantasies are contradicted. Without any demonstrable evidence, he repeatedly resorts to paranoid claims of conspiracy.

“Most recently, in response to suggestions of contact between his campaign and agents of the Russian government, he has issued tirades against the press as an “enemy of the people” and accusations without proof that his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, engaged in partisan surveillance against him.

“We are in no way offering a psychiatric diagnosis, which would be unwise to attempt from a distance. Nevertheless, as psychiatrists we feel obliged to express our alarm. We fear that when faced with a crisis, President Trump will lack the judgment to respond rationally.

“The military powers entrusted to him endanger us all. We urge our elected representatives to take the necessary steps to protect us from this dangerous president.” (Robert Jay Lifton & Judith Herman)

A Duty to Warn

Dr. Bandy Lee organized an April 20, 2017 conference at Yale, entitled, “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn?” From this conference grew the first edition of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, and then the second edition with 37 experts, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Dr. Lee and colleagues then formed the World Mental Health Coalition and published The World Mental Health Coalition Documents, which collects conference transcripts, media transcripts, letters and statements, a report on the Mueller Report, and a Prescription for Survival. Dr. Lee writes:

“Since society is one of psychiatry’s primary responsibilities, next to that of patients, there is unquestionably a duty not only to warn but to protect and to promote its wellbeing. We are bound by law in most states, as now replicated in multiple countries and even in fields outside of mental health, that we must warn even those who are not our clients in the case of danger. We also have an obligation not only to warn but to take steps to protect potential victims if security personnel will not act; safety is always first priority.”[13]

Agent 488 (aka Dr. Carl Gustav Jung)

There are precedents of psychiatrists using their skills for public health and safety. Robert Jay Lifton’s career as a psychohistorian is an example – understanding dangerous movements such as: Nazi Germany, Chinese thought reform, Aum Shinrikyō, climate deniers, and the current president of the USA. Swiss psychiatrist, Carl G Jung (aka Agent 488)^[14] was recruited by the United States during World War II to provide psychological profiles of Hitler. Jung’s descriptions of Hitler’s psychology and behavior are eerily similar to the current president of the United States:

“All these pathological features— complete lack of insight into one’s own character, auto-erotic self-admiration and self-extenuation, denigration and terrorization of one’s fellow men (how contemptuously Hitler spoke of his own people!), projection of the shadow, lying, falsification of reality, determination to impress by fair means or foul, bluffing and double-crossing — all these were united in the man who was diagnosed clinically as an hysteric, and whom a strange fate chose to be the political, moral, and religious spokesman of Germany for twelve years.”^[15]

Jung cautioned about Hitler’s systematic lying which he described as pseudologia phantastica. Is our current president’s 20,055 falsehoods (as of 7/9/20) another example of pseudologia phantastica?[16]

“A more accurate diagnosis of Hitler’s condition would be pseudologia phantastica, that form of hysteria which is characterized by a peculiar talent for believing one’s own lies. For a short spell, such people usually meet with astounding success, and for that reason are socially dangerous.”^[17]

After World War II, many professionals wondered, “Why would so many apparently rational, even educated people, follow a fascist?”^[18] Jung would say that those who do not deal honestly with their own shadow project it on to “others” who are then seen as bad, dangerous, untrustworthy. Jung saw Hitler as an inferior personality who was over-taken by his own shadow, projecting his own darkness on to the world and then trying to destroy his own darkness by destroying others. From that perspective, a fascist movement is a giant psychological experiment and a fight between those who have little self-awareness and do not take responsibility for their own darkness and those who are committed to truth and reality and are willing to introspect. Jung describes the formation of mass psychosis and mob psychology:

“Its leader will soon be found in the individual who has the least resistance, the least sense of responsibility and, because of his inferiority, the greatest will to power. He will let loose everything that is ready to burst forth, and the mob will follow with the irresistible force of an avalanche…[H]e symbolized something in every individual. He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”^[19]

The Plague of Fascism

As I have watched this regime unfold over the past four years, my early uneasiness has gradually turned to alarm. I think it is time for the Doctor to make the diagnosis: fascism, prognosis: serious.

In 1947, Albert Camus wrote his allegory on fascism, The Plague. Camus cautioned us, through his indefatigable Dr. Rieux,

“I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when all this ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing. Later on, perhaps, they’ll think things over; and so shall I. But what’s wanted now is to make them well. I defend them as best I can, that’s all.”[20]

Dr. Rieux’s commitment to defend sick people as best he can reminds us of the professional commitment of Drs. Lee, Lifton, and Herman, as well as Dr. Fauci and all the frontline health care workers doing the best they can during this pandemic. Just as Lifton encourages us to be witnessing professionals, Rieux’s writing bears witness to the peoples’ suffering:

“It could only be the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.”[21]

Camus’ choice of a plague as an allegory of fascism resonates with our current situation. We are currently in an actual viral pandemic of Covid-19 and this viral plague has further illuminated the plague of fascism. The president’s deplorable and counter-scientific handling of the pandemic has led to the United States of America, the country with the most expensive health care system in the world, and with 4% of the world population, to account for roughly 25% of the cases of Covid-19 worldwide. The president has contradicted and undermined scientists and physicians, he has encouraged the opposite of public health measures (ridiculing masks and those who wear them), he has preached economy over public health, and has spread over one-third of the global misinformation on the virus.[22] And, as of 10/2/20, the president himself is now infected with Covid-19, a carrier of the plague of the pandemic and the plague of fascism. However, we knew all along that we were electing a sick individual who is a plague – a plague of lies, a plague of bullying, a plague of divisiveness, a plague of crookedness, a plague of Covid-19 and, ultimately, a plague of fascism.

Doctors Against Fascism

The way you learn how to diagnose something in medical school is to see case after case after case – until it becomes automatic. At the first signs or symptoms, you see the incipient signs of a more serious illness. This is why we need Doctors Against Fascism – to diagnose and warn us that the fascist bacillus is starting to dehumanize our population and make it vulnerable to fulminant fascism.

The Doctor is in and has bad news for you – the prognosis of our nation’s health is serious. We are infected with fascism – it has taken hold in the brains of many of our citizens and it is spreading through our institutions. Words Create Worlds and we are surrounded by 20,055 and counting words of fascism. Every lie is an assault on reality and every bit of reality that is eroded weakens the immune system of democracy, making us vulnerable to infection with the unreality of fascism.

The Growing Stack of Books I Keep on My Desk as a Reminder

…

This series, Words Create Worlds, grows out of my work with Joseph Rael on peace. In Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality, I felt compelled to write about the responsibility of mystical, visionary, and shamanic experience—that we must work toward “Spiritual Democracy.” At its deepest point, mystical experience leads to an awareness that we are all one and this comes with a responsibility to challenge words of separation which ultimately lead to fascism. Mystical experience is a pathway that leads us to question who we are and gives us a responsibility to use our words wisely to create worlds where we are becoming the medicine that our world needs. As Rumi says, “We are pain and what cures the pain.”[23]

[1] Life Between the Trees blog, https://lifebetweenthetrees.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/words-create-worlds-monday-morning-parable/. I first came across a shorter instance of this quote in the Omid Safi reference below.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 38.

[4] “In 1,267 days, President Trump has made 20,055 false or misleading claims,” Updated July 9, 2020. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker’s ongoing database of the false or misleading claims made by President Trump since assuming office. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?utm_term=.27babcd5e58c&itid=lk_inline_manual_2&itid=lk_inline_manual_2

[5] William S. Burroughs, letter to Allen Ginsberg The Letters of William S. Burroughs, Vol. 1: 1945-1959, p. 227.

[6] David Kopacz, “Medical Activism: A Draft Working Paper,” (8/11/20) in the Being Fully Human Blog, https://beingfullyhuman.com/2020/08/11/medical-activism-a-draft-of-a-working-paper/.

[7] David Kopacz, Re-humanizing Medicine: A Holistic Framework for Transforming Your Self, Your Practice, and the Culture of Medicine, Washington DC: Ayni Books, 2014.

[8] Ibid. Also see David Kopacz, “A Proposition for a Counter-Curriculum in Healthcare Education and Practice,” (9/10/16), Being Fully Human blog, https://beingfullyhuman.com/2016/09/10/a-proposition-for-a-counter-curriculum-in-healthcare-education-and-practice/

[9] “Doctors Revolt After N.R.A. Tells Them to ‘Stay in Their Lane’ on Gun Policy,” Matthew Haag, The New York Times, Nov. 13, 2018. The original criticism was in a Tweet from the NRA, “Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves.” https://twitter.com/NRA/status/1060256567914909702.

[10] “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns: At ‘woke’ medical schools, curricula are increasingly focused on social justice rather than treating illness,” Stanley Goldfarb, Wall Street Journal, 9/12/19.

[11] http://billmoyers.com/story/dangerous-case-donald-trump-robert-jay-lifton-bill-moyers-duty-warn/

[12] Robert Jay Lifton and Judith Herman, “‘Protect Us From This Dangerous President,’ 2 Psychiatrists Say,” The New York Times, March 8, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/opinion/protect-us-from-this-dangerous-president-2-psychiatrists-say.html

[13] Bandy X Lee, “American Psychiatry’s Complicity with the State,” in Bandy Lee (ed) The World Mental Health Coalition Documents, 299.

[14] Jung was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the organization that eventually grew into the CIA and INR, to provide psychological profiles of political leaders, foremost among them Adolf Hitler. Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography. New York: Back Bay Books, 2003, pages 481-495.

[15] CG Jung, “After the Catastrophe” (1945) in CW 10 Civilization in Transition, page 203.

[16] The Washington Post Fact Checker, 7/9/20, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?utm_term=.27babcd5e58c&itid=lk_inline_manual_2&itid=lk_inline_manual_2

[17] Ibid., 203-204.

[18] For a recent analysis of this question, see John Dean and Bob Altemeyer’s Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers.

[19] CG Jung, “The Fight With the Shadow” (1946) in CW 10 Civilization in Transition, 220-223.

[20] Albert Camus, The Plague, New York: Vintage International, 1991, p. 127.

[21] Ibid., 308.

[22] Sarah Evanega, Mark Lynas ,Jordan Adams, Karinne Smolenyak, “Corona virus misinformation: quantifying sources and themes in the COVID-19 ‘infodemic’”

Click to access full.pdf

[23] Rumi, “We are the mirror as well as the face in it,” The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks, 106.

Words Create Worlds.5 To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism & Humanism

Posted on October 9, 2020 by davidrkopacz

“Words create worlds,” said Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.[1]

To Fight Against this Age: On Fascism and Humanism[2] by Rob Riemen

The Words Create Worlds series of essays was inspired by Rabbi Heschel’s warning of the way certain words led to the Holocaust, Riemen’s To Fight Against this Age, and Rebecca Solnit’s Call Them by Their True Names. I felt compelled as a health professional to speak up about fascism, based on the warning flags of the current US presidency and other world movements. In my youth, I was fascinated with World War II, later as a professional I became interested in trauma and the role of the trauma therapist as a moral agent – not just a neutral technician, but a human being who takes a moral stand against human rights abuses, what Robert Jay Lifton calls a “witnessing professional.”[3] As I have watched this regime unfold over the past four years, my early uneasiness has gradually turned to alarm. As physicians, we need to remember our higher calling to function as witnessing professionals for the health of society.

I think it is time for the Doctor to make the diagnosis: fascism, the prognosis: serious.

Fascism is a sickness, an illness, a disorder. It spreads through false-fixed beliefs (delusions), scapegoating (projection), and its continuous stream of lies creates unreality (impaired reality testing). Fascism infects the individual, but it spreads through the community. As a doctor, I am trained to diagnosis and treat sickness. As a doctor, I am trained to attend to individual health as well as public health. Some would say that doctors need to shut up and “stay in their lanes.”^[4]^{,^[5]} However, as someone who has read Nietzsche,^[6] has read Robert Jay Lifton, Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, Rebecca Solnit, Madeleine Albright, and Rob Riemen – I have learned from history and I have studied epidemiology – people staying in their lane and just following orders leads down a deadly road.

It is Time to Call it Fascism

Could it really be happening again? Right here in the USA? The erosion of democracy and the growth of fascism and totalitarianism. I think it is time we started calling it anti-democracy and fascism. Umair Haque thinks so, see his article “What Does it Take to Fight Authoritarianism? The One Thing Americans Still Won’t Do,” in which he writes:

“I don’t blame Americans for not getting why they have to say fascism. It’s a complex and subtle set of thoughts to understand, this responsibility.

And yet if I say ‘not calling racism or sexism racism or sexism is legitimising it,’ you get it instantly. Get exactly that logic for fascism and authoritarianism now. That moral, social, and personal responsibility.”[7]

The Leader spews a continuous stream of “false statements,” otherwise known as lies, propaganda – to confuse and disorient opposition and to mobilize a base of followers into a false-fixed state of loyalty and unreality. There are so many lies that the footnotes start to eclipse the text. During his presidency, the president of the United States had made more than 20,000 “false statements,”[8] which we should just start calling lies and propaganda because there is a method behind the madness – the method of the fascist playbook.

It sounds like a constant stream of gibberish, (just try to read this two hour speech), it makes no logical sense, but it appeals to biases and emotions. It is propaganda: “othering” and demonizing of groups of people: Mexicans, immigrants, Muslims, and women, “Antifa,” “radical leftists,” “anarchists.” Every event is amplified and weaponized to create divisiveness. He casts doubt on the institution of elections and hints that he will not honor the results or submit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses.

And This Also Has Been One of the Dark Places of the Earth, D. Kopacz

To Fight Against This Age

Let us turn to Rob Riemen’s To Fight Against the Age: On Fascism and Humanism (2018). Riemen is the Founder, President, and CEO of the Nexus Institute, “a leading international center for intellectual reflection to inspire the Western cultural and philosophical debate,” and is the editor of the journal Nexus.

I picked up Riemen’s book, by chance, when I was traveling for work and was in Charleston, West Virginia. I found it at a nice little bookstore, Taylor Books. I bought it on impulse and then was fascinated by it and finished it on the flight home. The book consists of two essays, “The Eternal Return of Fascism,” (originally published in 2010) and “The Return of Europa.” In keeping with the theme of Words Creating Worlds, Riemen writes that “to be able to understand something,” you have to “call it by its proper name,” specifically, “populism…will not provide any meaningful understanding,” (18). Even more specifically:

“The use of the term populist is only one more way to cultivate the denial that the ghost of fascism is haunting societies again and to deny the fact that liberal democracies have turned into their opposite: mass democracies deprived of the spirit of democracy,” (19).

Fascism Rests on Dehumanizing Others

I have personally been concerned with the objectification and dehumanization that happens in medical education and medical practice (see Kopacz, Re-humanizing Medicine – 2014). The antidote to dehumanization is quite simple in theory: re-humanization. The more difficult questions are: What is a human being? How is the soul of the human being lost? How is the soul of the human being regained? Riemen reaches a conclusion similar to mine about the limitations of numbers and the scientific method and the need for the humanities and a whole person philosophy.

“Science and technology will never be able to provide us with a complete understanding of the human being with his instincts and desires, virtues and values, mind and spirit…The humanities and the arts” provide “the only knowledge that could provide a true understanding of the human heart,” and that “the real requirements of a democratic civilization [are] the wisdom of poetry and literature, philosophy and theology, the arts and history,” (19-20).

How does fascism return to civilized democracies? Germany, itself was a democracy, Hitler was elected and then gradually did away with democratic institutions, consolidating power. Riemen puts it bluntly, “the main reason fascism can return so easily in mass democracies: ignorance,” (21). The ignorance of history. The ignorance of social psychology. The ignorance of power and fascism. If we don’t call it by its true name, as Riemen and Solnit both implore us, we will have no chance of confronting and stopping it.

Riemen takes his title of his book, To Fight Against this Age from Nietzsche, whom he paraphrases, “we should not accept the blind power of the actual and that instead of conforming to the whole noisy sham-culture of our age, we have to be fighters against this age…It is now upon us to fight against a zeitgeist that destroys the spirit of the democratic civilization,” (27).

You Let Your Magic Tortoise Go, D. Kopacz

The Plague of Fascism

Riemen writes about Camus’ allegory of fascism, The Plague,[9] commenting on the “fascist bacillus,” he tells us that if “we want to put up a good fight, we first have to admit that it has become active in our social body and call it by its name: fascism,” (34). We must diagnose the problem before we can treat it correctly.

Riemen’s book was published in 2018. Now we have the strange juxtaposition of an actual pandemic being used as a fascist tool for promoting divisiveness and effecting the first purge of this regime, 200,000+ dead in the United States as of late September – 25% of the global deaths for 4% of the global population, at least we are “great” at something. Even stranger, now we have a president who is actually infected with a virus he is hell-bent on spreading to others.

Riemen, following Nietzsche’s critique, sees a problem with European and Western culture – that we have lost spiritual values. “With the loss of spiritual values,” he writes, “not only did morals disappear but so did culture in the original meaning of the word: cultura animi, the ‘cultivation of the soul,’” (38). We have become the barbarians. Barbarian originally meant “unintelligible speech,”[10] again, just try reading through this transcript.

This “cultivation of the soul” and the recognition of our common humanity is what humanism is founded upon. Fascism is the opposite of humanism – it is about the degradation of the soul, it is about exaggerating the differences between human beings into a false and superficial sense of sameness rather than seeing “out of many, one,” e pluribus unum.

Writing in the mid-1930s, Menno ter Braak noted that fascist movements were focused on “stimulating aggression and anger.” Riemen summarizes that a fascist movement:

“was not actually interested in finding solutions, had no ideas of its own, and did not want to solve social problems, because injustice was necessary for maintaining an atmosphere of vilification and hatred,” (51).

Lousy at Democracy, Super-Good at Fascism

If we look at the current US presidency, we might be tempted to call it incompetent – and from a perspective of democracy it would be right to do so. However, if we view the current president through the lens of fascism – he is hypercompetent. He is lousy at democracy, but he is super-good at fascist.

Menno ter Braak focused on the use of “social resentment vented on a scapegoat who was blamed for everything: the Jew.” Riemen further summarizes ter Braak’s view:

“At the same time, this movement considered itself to be the eternal victim of the ‘left’ or the ‘elite’ and harbored a deep aversion to intellectuals, cosmopolitans, and anyone who was different…[with a] continuous use of slogans and empty rhetoric…it was reactionary,” (52).

Fascism is Semi-civilization and Promotes the Cult of Resentment

Fascism is “semi-civilization” and promotes “the cult of resentment.” These are the rules that the current US president is very good at, he consults the fascist playbook at every turn and fascism is winning and democracy is losing.

How did fascism gain hold in European democracies? By using those democracies against themselves. Both Hitler and Mussolini were voted into power. Riemen writes that both the liberals and the conservatives caved in to fascism because they thought they could gain something from it. It is the classic devil’s bargain of “the end justifies the means.” This is based, or maybe we should say de-based, on the idea that getting power or money (the ultimate materialist focus) is more important than human values, civility, decency, or humanity.

“The liberals no longer defended the freedom principle of European humanism but became interested only in the freedom of the markets: that is to say, As long as we can earn money,” (56).

We see this today – somehow the stock market in the US seems to give permission for fascism, as long as we can earn money.

“The conservatives were unprepared to unscrupulously exchange the protection of spiritual values for the preservation of their own power, under the veils of ‘tradition’ and ‘social order,’” (56).

We see this today, the conservatives going along with the president, even when it seems to violate their own principles, as long as they can preserve power and social order. This is the definition of fascism: power and order become more important than principles, ideals, more important than human beings.

After World War II, after Mussolini and Hitler were defeated, some still worried that we had not learned the lessons of history. Riemen reminds of that both Albert Camus and Thomas Mann, both Nobel Prize winners, warned of the return of fascism.

“Camus and Mann…as early as 1947…stated that fascism was a political phenomenon that had not disappeared at the end of the war and that we could now describe as the politicization of the mentality of the rancorous mass-man. It is a form of politics used by demagogues whose only motive is to enforce and extend their own power, to which end they will exploit resentment, designate scapegoats, incite hatred, hide intellectual vacuity beneath raucous slogans and insults, and elevate political opportunism into an art form with their populism,” (60).

A Realm Where Words are Separated from their Meanings

Riemen warns us, as early as 2010, that “this is a new outbreak of the plague,” (60). But just as you cannot treat a disease you cannot name and diagnose, you cannot appropriately respond to a movement if you cannot call it by its true name – fascism. We, in the US, were sick, even before the Covid-19 pandemic, we were in the throes of a revival of an old illness – the pandemic of fascism. We entered into a realm where “words were separated from their meanings and reduced to slogans,” (61).

Again and again, throughout this essay, Riemen reminds us that the cure to fascism is the medicine of our human unity and spiritual/moral values. This is not about religion – many of the most vocal followers of the president are “religious” people who are more interested in power than in human goodness.

“Our true identity is determined not by nationality, origin, language, belief, income, race, or any way in which people differ from one another, but precisely by what unites us and makes the unity of [hu]mankind possible: universal spiritual values that shape human dignity and that every… [one]…can adopt,” (67).

“Anyone who really wants to be a humanist rejects every form of fanaticism and learns the courtesy of the heart and the art of conversation, dialogue,” (68).

What is needed is not a political solution, but a human solution. We need to remember our original instructions and the principles and tenets of spiritual democracy. While fascism is a political movement based in materialism (money and power), its cure is a spiritual movement based in humanism (soul and spirit).

Continuous Lies as Politics

Riemen describes the Party for Freedom (PVV, Partij voor de Vrijeheid) in his native Netherlands in words that sound like the current US president’s playbook. Fascism is not creative, it is not novel, it is really just the same damn thing, over and over again – the basest aspects of our material nature. It is the propagation of dehumanization through dehumanization. The PPV offers

“the shameless opposite of the Judeo-Christian and humanist traditions: vulgar materialism, oppressive nationalism, xenophobia, ammunition for resentment, a deep aversion to the arts and the exercise of spiritual values, a suffocating spiritual bigotry, a fierce resistance to the European spirit, and continuous lies as politics,” (68-69).

Doctors Against Fascism

The way you learn how to diagnose something in medical school is by seeing case after case after case – until it becomes automatic, at the first signs or symptoms, you see the incipient signs of a more serious illness. This is why we need Doctors Against Fascism – witnessing professionals to diagnose and warn us that the fascist bacillus is starting to dehumanize our population and make it vulnerable to fulminant fascism. In the USA, there has been a growing concern about the signs and symptoms of fascism since 2016. Riemen has been seeing it in Europe since at least 2010 and we see it spreading all over the globe – a pandemic of fascism in Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, Philippines, England, Brazil, India, and the United States of America.

The Doctor is in and has bad news for you – the prognosis of our nation’s health is serious. We are infected with fascism – it has taken hold in the minds of many of our citizens and it is spreading through our institutions. Words Create Worlds and we are surrounded by continuous lies as politics.

This essay seems to have found a natural ending-point here. I will pick up with the rest of the review of Rob Riemen’s book, To Fight Against This Age: Fascism and Humanism, in the next installment of Words Create Worlds. Perhaps I will develop this theme of Doctors Against Fascism more.

…

This series, Words Create Worlds, grows out of my work with Joseph Rael on peace. In Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality, I felt compelled to write about the responsibility that grows out of mystical, visionary, and shamanic experience—that we must work toward “Spiritual Democracy.” At its deepest point, mystical experience leads to an awareness that we are all one and this comes with a responsibility to challenge words of separation which can ultimately lead to fascism. Mystical experience is a pathway that leads us to question who we are and gives us a responsibility to use our words wisely to create worlds where we are becoming the medicine that our world needs. As Rumi says, “We are pain and what cures the pain.”[11]

[1] Life Between the Trees blog.

[2] Rob Riemen, To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

[3] Robert Jay Lifton, “Foreword to the First Edition: Our Witness to Malignant Normality,” in Bandy Lee (ed) The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2019.

[4] “Doctors Revolt After N.R.A. Tells Them to ‘Stay in Their Lane’ on Gun Policy,” Matthew Haag, The New York Times, Nov. 13, 2018. The original criticism was in a Tweet from the NRA, “Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves.” https://twitter.com/NRA/status/1060256567914909702.

[5] “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns: At ‘woke’ medical schools, curricula are increasingly focused on social justice rather than treating illness,” Stanley Goldfarb, Wall Street Journal, 9/12/19.

[6] Richard Huelsenbeck, German-American psychiatrist and Dada-ist who was investigated by the Nazis and forbidden to write, once said, “We are psychiatrists; we are Germans; we have read Nietzsche; we know that to gaze too long at monsters is to risk becoming one―that’s what we get paid for!” (Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, p. 211). Marcus’ book traces the spirit of protest from punk rock back to earlier art movements that were cultural and political critiques of the times.

[7] Umair Haque, “What Does it Take to Fight Authoritarianism? The One Thing Americans Still Won’t Do.” Eudamoinia & Co, Sept 25, 2020, https://eand.co/what-does-it-take-to-fight-authoritarianism-the-one-thing-americans-still-wont-do-676dfb86794b

[8] Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, Meg Kelly, “President Trump has made more than 20,000 false or misleading claims.” The Washington Post, July 13, 2020 at 12:00 a.m. PDT

[9] Albert Camus, The Plague, New York: Vintage International, 1991.

[10] https://www.etymonline.com/word/barbarian

[11] Rumi, “We are the mirror as well as the face in it,” The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks, 106.

Being Fully Human

Living an Integrated Life

Tag Archives: Rob Riemen

Becoming A True Human podcast #19: Ours is a Book Culture – Rob Riemen

Words Create Worlds.6 Doctors Against Fascism

The Responsibility of Spiritual Democracy

Being Present with Suffering

In the Shadow of the Slaughterhouse: Silence is the Only Real Crime Against Humanity

What it Means to be a Professional

Witnessing Professionals

As Psychiatrists We Feel Obliged to Express Our Alarm

“To the Editor:

“In particular, we are struck by his repeated failure to distinguish between reality and fantasy, and his outbursts of rage when his fantasies are contradicted. Without any demonstrable evidence, he repeatedly resorts to paranoid claims of conspiracy.

“We are in no way offering a psychiatric diagnosis, which would be unwise to attempt from a distance. Nevertheless, as psychiatrists we feel obliged to express our alarm. We fear that when faced with a crisis, President Trump will lack the judgment to respond rationally.

“The military powers entrusted to him endanger us all. We urge our elected representatives to take the necessary steps to protect us from this dangerous president.” (Robert Jay Lifton & Judith Herman)

A Duty to Warn

Agent 488 (aka Dr. Carl Gustav Jung)

The Plague of Fascism

Doctors Against Fascism

Words Create Worlds.5 To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism & Humanism

“Words create worlds,” said Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.[1]

I think it is time for the Doctor to make the diagnosis: fascism, the prognosis: serious.

It is Time to Call it Fascism

“I don’t blame Americans for not getting why they have to say fascism. It’s a complex and subtle set of thoughts to understand, this responsibility.

And yet if I say ‘not calling racism or sexism racism or sexism is legitimising it,’ you get it instantly. Get exactly that logic for fascism and authoritarianism now. That moral, social, and personal responsibility.”[7]

To Fight Against This Age

“The use of the term populist is only one more way to cultivate the denial that the ghost of fascism is haunting societies again and to deny the fact that liberal democracies have turned into their opposite: mass democracies deprived of the spirit of democracy,” (19).

Fascism Rests on Dehumanizing Others

The Plague of Fascism

“was not actually interested in finding solutions, had no ideas of its own, and did not want to solve social problems, because injustice was necessary for maintaining an atmosphere of vilification and hatred,” (51).

Lousy at Democracy, Super-Good at Fascism

“At the same time, this movement considered itself to be the eternal victim of the ‘left’ or the ‘elite’ and harbored a deep aversion to intellectuals, cosmopolitans, and anyone who was different…[with a] continuous use of slogans and empty rhetoric…it was reactionary,” (52).

Fascism is Semi-civilization and Promotes the Cult of Resentment

“The liberals no longer defended the freedom principle of European humanism but became interested only in the freedom of the markets: that is to say, As long as we can earn money,” (56).

“The conservatives were unprepared to unscrupulously exchange the protection of spiritual values for the preservation of their own power, under the veils of ‘tradition’ and ‘social order,’” (56).

A Realm Where Words are Separated from their Meanings

“Anyone who really wants to be a humanist rejects every form of fanaticism and learns the courtesy of the heart and the art of conversation, dialogue,” (68).

Continuous Lies as Politics

Doctors Against Fascism