Cancel Culture From Thomas More To Godward Podcast

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Luke Ford

I suspect that in every society that has ever existed, there have been certain obvious truths you could not say out loud without serious blowback. I don’t think cancel culture is new.

No movie had more of an impact on my childhood as A Man For All Seasons (1966) about Thomas More. I saw him as a brave martyr. Wikipedia notes:

The film and play both depict the final years of Sir Thomas More, the 16th-century Lord Chancellor of England who refused both to sign a letter asking Pope Clement VII to annul Henry VIII of England’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon and to take an Oath of Supremacy declaring Henry VIII Supreme Head of the Church of England….

The title reflects playwright Bolt’s portrayal of More as the ultimate man of conscience, remaining true to his principles and religion under all circumstances and at all times. Bolt borrowed the title from Robert Whittington, a contemporary of More, who in 1520 wrote of him: “More is a man of an angel’s wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons.”

…Upon receiving his death sentence, More denounces the king’s Supremacy over the Church as illegal, citing the Biblical foundation for the authority of the Papacy over the Church and declaring the alleged Supremacy of the King repugnant to the legal institutions of all Christendom. More further declares that the Church’s immunity to State interference is guaranteed both in Magna Carta and in the King’s own coronation oath. As uproar ensues, the judges pronounce the full sentence according to the standard forms: More is remitted to the Tower and condemned to death by beheading.

The scene switches from the court to the scaffold on Tower Hill, where before his execution More observes custom by pardoning and tipping the executioner before declaring, “I die his Majesty’s good servant, but God’s first.” He kneels at the block and the executioner cuts off his head.

I didn’t realize as a child how many people More had burned at the stake for heresy.

Sometimes in life, we get burned at the stake (metaphorically) and other times we burn others at the stake. Sometimes we’re the concentration camp inmates (metaphorically) and sometimes we’re the guards.

A key insight I developed early in my life was that nothing that was human was foreign to me. With a little work, I could empathize with anyone.

I often find it useful to look at the pain in my life as 100% self-inflicted. I take this perspective not because it is necessarily true, but because it can be useful.

When I compare my experience as a Protestant and my experience as a Jew, it seems like there was 100 times as much veneration of martyrdom in Protestantism. God, after all, in Christianity is portrayed as taking on human flesh so he can come to earth and die on a cross to save humanity from sin. Christianity is romantic religion while Judaism is unromantic religion. Jews don’t tend to extoll martyrdom and the next life as much as Christians do. Jews are more pragmatic. They are more likely to make peace with reality rather than to war against it.

Amazon.com notes: “The essays collected in Persecution and the Art of Writing all deal with one problem—the relation between philosophy and politics. Here, Strauss sets forth the thesis that many philosophers, especially political philosophers, have reacted to the threat of persecution by disguising their most controversial and heterodox ideas.”

Wikipedia:

Strauss’s general argument—rearticulated throughout his subsequent writings (most notably in The City and Man – 1964)—is that prior to the 19th century, Western scholars commonly understood that philosophical writing is not at home in any polity, no matter how liberal. Insofar as it questions conventional wisdom at its roots, philosophy must guard itself especially against those readers who believe themselves authoritative, wise, and liberal defenders of the status quo. In questioning established opinions, or in investigating the principles of morality, philosophers of old found it necessary to convey their messages in an oblique manner. Their “art of writing” was the art of esoteric communication. This is all the more apparent in medieval times, when heterodox political thinkers wrote under the threat of the Inquisition or comparably intransigent tribunals.

Strauss’s argument is not that the medieval writers he studies reserved one exoteric meaning for the many (hoi polloi) and an esoteric or hidden one for the few (hoi aristoi, literally “the best”) but rather that their writings’ respective core meanings extended beyond and were irreducible to their texts’ literal and/or historical dimension.

Explicitly following Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s lead, Strauss indicates that medieval political philosophers, no less than their ancient counterparts, in writing, carefully adapted their wording to the dominant moral views of their time, lest their writings be condemned as heretical or unjust, not by “the many” (who did not read), but by those “few” whom the many regarded as the most righteous guardians of morality: precisely those few righteous personalities would be most inclined to persecute or ostracize anyone who is in the business of exposing the “noble” or “great lie” upon which stands or falls the authority of the few over the many. Strauss thus presents Maimonides “as a closet nonbeliever obfuscating his message for political reasons.”

From Haaretz:

For 30 years, Yehiel De-Nur, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who wrote under the pseudonym “Ka-Tzetnik,” was tormented by horrific nightmares. Every night, Auschwitz would visit him in his sleep, and he would wake up screaming, drenched in perspiration. His wife, Nina, heard about a Dutch psychiatrist who healed trauma using LSD, and over a period of two years urged her husband to see him. Finally he agreed, and in the summer of 1976 the couple traveled to the city of Leiden, in the Netherlands from Israel, where they lived. They spent a year there.

Ka-Tzetnik’s encounter with Jan Bastiaans was apparently the most meaningful experience of his life, following Auschwitz. “My mind goes numb at the mere thought of Prof. Bastiaans,” he wrote a decade later in his book “Shivitti: A Vision,” first published in full in the weekly newsmagazine Ha’olam Hazeh.

In the book, published in English in 1989 in a translation by Eliyah Nike De-Nur and Lisa Herman, Ka-Tzetnik (the Yiddish acronym used to describe a concentration camp inmate) describes how Bastiaans injected him with the drug and how he was abruptly catapulted from the spacious, pleasant therapy room back into hell, entering the ghetto behind Vevke, the cobbler, when suddenly the cobbler’s bench changes colors “from blinding yellow-green to ultraviolet… elongating like that clock of Salvador Dali’s.” Then, before his eyes, Vevke’s face transmutes into the face of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. The whole of Auschwitz is illuminated by the flames of the bold colors, he writes.

The entire process of treatment is recorded. During the trance, Bastiaans sits next to Ka-Tzetnik and urges him to describe in detail the hallucinations racing through his mind. He also sees to it that the patient does not drown under the horror. Bastiaans tells him that if he hadn’t wakened him he would not have been able to bring him back. You would have remained there, lost in limbo, the psychiatrist tells him.

Five LSD treatments sufficed for Ka-Tzetnik, before he announced that he wanted to go home. The nightmares vanished, and for the first time in 30 years he was able to sleep peacefully. After Leiden, he said, he was no longer the same person he had been before. Under the influence of the treatments, he retracted his famous comment – made when he gave testimony in the Eichmann trial, in 1961 – that Auschwitz was another planet. In an interview to journalist Ram Evron in 1988, he said, “Neither Satan nor God built Auschwitz, but I and you.” In that room in Leiden, he grasped that Auschwitz was the handiwork of human beings, “and it’s Hitler, it wasn’t Satan. He was a person.”

…While the patient was under the influence of the drug, Bastiaans and the clinic staff invoked techniques of psychodrama to stimulate memories and flood the patient emotionally. Bastiaans played Nazi march music for the patients and exposed them to S.S. symbols and effigies of Nazis. He also played roles of characters in situations that the patients had experienced.

“Bastiaans took the role of authority, often it was the role of the caring father but also he might be the camp commander, the person who was feared,” Van Waning explains. “There was always someone supervising in the room, usually a woman. So I might get the role of a mother or sister or a more supporting person. The script wrote itself during the session.”

‘The aim is to live through what happened but also to see it in a larger context, become a ‘witness’ and see that now it was safe.’

So it was a form of improvisation?

“Yes. It all depended on what the patient would reveal. The patient could suddenly say to Bastiaans, ‘You hate me, I can see it in your eyes, you are going to destroy me.’ So within the hallucination, it felt real to him. But the patient might also say, “The way you are looking at me reminds me of the camp commander.’ In that case Bastiaans would not join in ‘being’ that person but ask the patient in what way he was like that person and what kind of feelings that generated. I think that it’s not very fruitful to let the patient identify with these positions completely and for a long time; the aim is to live through what happened but also to see it in a larger context, become a ‘witness’ and see that now it was safe. There is a great risk of re-traumatizing the patient when the patient is taken back into this hell and relives it in that deep, direct sense. It can aggravate the problems, the suffering. So it is important to touch on what happened just enough so that we can be a witness.

Hilary Mantel writes in the second novel of her Wolf Hall trilogy — Bring up the Bodies:

* He finds he cannot think of the dying men at all. Into his mind instead strays the picture of More on the scaffold, seen through the veil of rain: his body, already dead, folding back neatly from the impact of the axe. The cardinal when he fell had no persecutor more relentless than Thomas More. Yet, he thinks, I did not hate him. I exercised my skills to the utmost to persuade him to reconcile with the king. And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.

* He [Thomas Wyatt] will be released, he says. But perhaps not until Anne [Boleyn] is dead.
The hours to that event seem long. Richard hugs him; says, ‘If she had reigned longer she would have given us to the dogs to eat.’
‘If we had let her reign longer, we would have deserved it.’

* The Lord Chancellor says, ‘The truth is so rare and precious that sometimes it must be kept under lock and key.’

Galileo had trouble with the Catholic Church. Notes Wikipedia: “Galileo’s championing of heliocentrism and Copernicanism met with opposition from within the Catholic Church and from some astronomers. The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, which concluded that heliocentrism was “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture”.[9][10][11]

Galileo later defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII and thus alienated both the Pope and the Jesuits, who had both supported Galileo up until this point.[9] He was tried by the Inquisition, found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, and forced to recant. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.”

French philosopher Rene Descartes had to find a modus vivendi with the Catholic Church. “Though raised as a Catholic, Descartes, who had been summoned in 1649 to tutor Queen Christina, was regarded with suspicion by many of his theological coreligionists. His theories were viewed as incompatible with the belief of transubstantiation, in which the bread and wine served during the Eucharist become the flesh and blood of Christ.” The Guardian says: “French philosopher was killed by arsenic-laced holy communion wafer after airing ‘heretic’ views, says academic.”

Wikipedia notes: “The Catholic Church prohibited his books in 1663… Descartes steered clear of theological questions, restricting his attention to showing that there is no incompatibility between his metaphysics and theological orthodoxy. He avoided trying to demonstrate theological dogmas metaphysically. When challenged that he had not established the immortality of the soul merely in showing that the soul and the body are distinct substances, for example, he replied, “I do not take it upon myself to try to use the power of human reason to settle any of those matters which depend on the free will of God.””

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Where Do Journalists Come From?

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Luke Ford

Tom Wolfe wrote in his 2012 novel Back to Blood:

People have such a colorful picture of newspaper reporters, don’t they, all these daring types who “break” stories and “uncover” corruption and put themselves in risky situations to get a “scoop.” Robert Redford in All the President’s Men, Burt Lancaster in The Sweet Smell of Success … If you ask me, newspaper reporters are created at age six when they first go to school. In the schoolyard boys immediately divide into two types. Immediately! There are those who have the will to be daring and dominate, and those who don’t have it. Those who don’t, like John Smith here, spend half their early years trying to work out a modus vivendi with those who do… and anything short of subservience will be okay. But there are boys from the weaker side of the divide who grow up with the same dreams as the stronger… and I’m as sure about this as anything in the world: The boy standing before me, John Smith, is one of them. They, too, dream of power, money, fame, and beautiful lovers. Boys like this kid grow up instinctively instinctively realizing that language is an artifact, like a sword or a gun. Used skillfully, it has the power to… well, not so much achieve things as to tear things down—including people… including the boys who came out on the strong side of that sheerly dividing line. Hey, that’s what liberals are! Ideology? Economics? Social justice? Those are nothing but their prom outfits. Their politics were set for life in the schoolyard at age six. They were the weak, and forever after they resented the strong. That’s why so many journalists are liberals! The very same schoolyard events that pushed them toward the written word… pushed them toward “liberalism.” It’s as simple as that! And talk about irony! If you want power through words in journalism, rhetorical genius is not enough. You need content, you need new material, you need… news, in a word… and you have to find it yourself. You, from the weak side, can develop such a craving for new information, you end up doing things that would terrify any strong man from the other side of the divide. You will put yourself in dangerous situations amid dangerous people… with relish . You will go alone, without any form of backup… eagerly! You—you with your weak manner—end up approaching the vilest of the vile with a demand. “You have some information, and I need it. And I deserve it! And I will have it!”

Frederik De Boer writes:

Recently, after months of threats and intimidation tactics, the New York Times published a hit piece about Scott Alexander and his blog SlateStarCodex, by something named Cade Metz. You can read Alexander’s response here.

I’ll cut to the chase. The piece is an expression of a constant dynamic in media and the Times in particular: the establishment media believes that it is the world’s noble and benevolent arbiter of truth, and the kind of people who work for the Times are immensely disdainful of and actively hostile to anyone who seeks to inform or persuade the public who does not write for one of a dozen dusty legacy publications and who did not go to one of 20 or so elite colleges. Scott Alexander built up a large and immensely influential readership completely on his own, writing a blog that, whatever its faults, stepped far outside of the narrow and parochial currents that Very Serious Media refuses to leave. This was a threat, a challenge to people like Cade Metz who think that it is their divine right to be the ones to tell the story. So Metz set out to destroy Alexander, with the full backing of the official paper of crossword addicts and columns about bootstraps and dynamism. I’m sure a lot of ink has been spilled about this story, and more will come. Understand: Cade Metz wrote this story because he had to punish Alexander for writing an influential publication with no backing from the important people. Whatever anyone else says, that is the reality.

Metz, in his usual style of casual condescension and utter capitulation to dominant narratives, writes “many in the tech industry… deeply distrusted the mainstream media and generally preferred discussion to take place on their own terms.”

Boy, I wonder why! Perhaps – this is too crazy to contemplate – perhaps it’s because the mainstream media has been a complete and utter failure in its most basic functions for decades, an absolute cesspit of bad reporting, warmongering, deference to power, coverage slanted towards the interests of the rich and powerful, obsession with meaningless cultural trends and complete disinterest in stories of immense importance, a totally collapsed line between editorial and advertising, a greying workforce that knows less and less about the world and which is utterly resistant to learning…. People really hate the media, and they do because the media sucks at its job. Don’t take my word for it! Of all of the industry’s many pathologies, the funniest is its members’ inability to understand why they’re so hated, given that they have done nothing but fail for my entire adulthood. If the industry engaged in self-reflection, they might figure it out. But… they won’t.

… the New York Times is of course an entirely partisan publication, one which is in utter thrall to the Neera Tanden wing of the Democrat party. It’s the house paper of affluent class-never liberals, the kind of people who give to charity but quietly vote against tax increases in public referendums, the kind of people still will pigeonhole you at a party to insist that they like the Wire more than you do, the kind of people who go from Bowdoin to Teach for America to a year finding themselves by fucking and drugging their way across Echo Park, only to wind up in a Park Slope townhouse that really wasn’t as expensive as you think! and send their kids to private school so that they can concentrate on their careers in UX design and advertising….

Alexander is not one of them. He’s not in the New York media social rat race, so he’s not a part of their culture. He’s not on Slack. He doesn’t tell the same tired, shitty jokes that journalists make on Twitter literally from the minute they get up to the minute they go to bed. He’s not performatively filling his feed with only women writers and artists, because he’s just not that interested in cishet men anymore, man. He doesn’t make references to whatever shithouse bar in Nolita media people used to go to after work to snort coke. He doesn’t use Twitter as an outlet to scream his dedication to BIPOC to the world, knowing this will look good on his resume. He’s not a thirty three year old white person who speaks like a Black teenager, like half the journalists on Twitter. And most importantly, he jumped the line. He didn’t get paid $250 a week by Refinery79 for 60 hours of work for two years to climb the latter. He had the audacity to think that he could circumvent the system and challenge the official narratives.

I used to watch the naked social climbing going on, and it was the source of my disgusted fascination with Media Twitter. The fundamental thing that you need to understand about media Twitter is that it is a somewhat grosser, more explicit version of what media socializing is in real life: an endless, white-knuckled effort in pure careerism and influence trading. You ever see someone in the media announce that they’re changing jobs on Twitter? It is the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. I guess I understand the need to announce your career changes, but why do people always respond with absurd hyperbole on Twitter? “You are the greatest and best person in the world!” You don’t have their email address? You can’t text your congratulations? If you aren’t close enough to the person to do that, why are you congratulating them at all? And don’t even get me started on launching an independent tweet of your own (being sure to tag them, of course). DM them with your sincere happiness for them! I guarantee it’ll mean more. Do people who work at Geico do this shit?

…It’s a culture that’s full of bizarre rituals that only make sense if you understand that none of it is sincere, that all of it is motivated by the desire for social and professional gain.

You have to understand: most writers are losers, or at least, they secretly think of themselves as losers. They were losers in high school and never got over it and were surprised to learn that they couldn’t get their novel about Facing Adulthood with My Multiracial Friends in Bushwick published and so didn’t get the literary celebrity they felt they deserved. So they dive into the media ecosystem where they are delighted to find exactly what they were looking for: a new high school, a replacement for the one where they were a fucking loser, where this time they’ll be the quarterback, they’ll be the head cheerleader. And so they get up every morning and jockey for rank. They horse trade. They seek favor. They amplify work they don’t really respect because the person who wrote it is more popular or successful than them or both. They pretend that terrible, terrible jokes told by terminally unfunny people are entertaining, because they know the other person will reciprocate.

Anyone with the audacity to write from outside of that world is a target.

You will have noticed an explosion in the use of the terms “conspiracy theory” and “misinformation” lately. Ostensibly a response to the pathetic rump that is QAnon, this is the establishment media grasping at power nakedly. If you haven’t rode the Q train lately and you aren’t on Slack and you don’t tweet incessantly about how fucking deep I May Destroy You is, if you don’t participate in media rituals, if you don’t have a blue checkmark, you’re probably writing misinformation. You may have noticed that many people now cast SubStack as a hive of the alt-right and conspiracy theorists, despite the incredible ideological diversity of the platform. SubStack is a threat to the hegemony of establishment media, and so it must be politically toxic. Joe Rogan is reviled not because he and his guests say some stupid shit – and they do – but because he is immensely popular outside of the official channels, he is decidedly not part of the culture of media or overachiever culture in general, and his show is massively more successful than their terrible podcasts.

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Power and Powerlessness: The Eternal Struggle Over Social Status (2-15-21)

Posted on February 16, 2021 by Luke Ford

https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/tom-wolfe-biography
https://www.cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-tesla-trump-power.php


https://www.cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-tesla-trump-power.php

Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty

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The Left’s Favorite Conspiracy Theories (2-16-21)

Posted on February 16, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 70% of country suffering devastating cold
02:00 Texas has rolling power outages
04:00 People want a magic key
20:30 Jonathan Haidt notes both left and right deny science
36:00 Michael Moore Presents Planet of the Humans Full Documentary Directed by Jeff Gibbs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auxxevzMY1I
37:45 Andrew Cuomo dodges blame for New York’s Covid devastation in nursing homes
57:00 The Jewish Question, https://lukeford.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/JewishQuestion-Ryan-Faulk.pdf
1:23:30 Jonathan Haidt: the political chaos isn’t over yet, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKGQkmf-EUA
1:25:20 Southern Dingo & two latinos discuss ethnic identity, https://youtu.be/CjOmLPkwS4A?t=6908
1:47:00 Analysis: David Pakman v Richard Spencer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ1WK4klmek
2:07:10 Nick Fuentes on Richard Spencer
2:09:00 The Goyim Defense League, https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounders/goyim-defense-league
2:18:00 Nick Fuentes on Patrick Casey 2/15/21, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFj5guTwe7k
2:26:00 Mind-Body Syndrome aka Back Pain, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=137060
2:26:45 Bobby Fischer Comparing Jews To The Devil. Also Mentions Jesus Catholics and Arnold Schwarzenegger
2:28:50 Southern Dingo on Patrick Casey vs Nick Fuentes, https://youtu.be/k7cFlgSDu3k?t=1179
2:35:00 Howard Stern apologizes to his mom for masturbating to Gilligan’s Island
2:38:50 Lionel Nation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sXy5yBaONY
2:44:00 Apricot Sky (1995), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hry69g_evSQ
2:49:00 Better Bachelor: 300 women surveyed, and yes, they still find a way to 100% blame men, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUVDPirF6VU
2:52:30 Kenneth Brown’s creative process, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmPnRaqtnNM
2:54:00 Kenneth Brown compilation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN-cIPnNTUE
2:59:40 Lionel Nation on Valentine’s Day 2021
3:01:00 Christian Zionist says Jews are superior
3:06:45 Russell Brand: Building A Better Society: have we run out of new ideas? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN7UCUDzXGA
3:08:40 Russell Brand on porn addiction, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_KLg_yG7YI
3:15:20 Abide With Me – Acapella Arrangement, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ99O28UpJo

https://www.city-journal.org/html/real-war-science-14782.html

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Mind-Body Syndrome AKA Back Pain

Posted on February 15, 2021 by Luke Ford

Dr. Howard Schubiner blogs:

…there is no separation between the mind and body in the sense that physical stimuli (e.g. an injury) immediately produce changes in our minds (emotions, reactions, etc.) and emotional stimuli (e.g. a scare, a verbal criticism, etc.) immediately produce physical reactions. The relationship between the mind and the body are immediate for survival. It would take too long for thought processes to engage prior to reacting if we happen upon an angry bear. Our survival instincts of an immediate reaction (running, freezing, etc.) are much quicker. William James, the father of psychology, noted that it is not true that first, you see a bear, then your feel fear, and then you run. He reasoned (and we now know he was correct) that you actually see a bear, then you run, and then you feel fear.

Our minds and bodies are constructed (through the process of evolution) to maximize survival. When an animal is frightened, it immediately goes into one of the survival reactions: fight, flight, freeze, or submit (play dead). When we get overwhelmed in our life, our body will react in a way that is designed to help us out of the situation. For example, I saw a woman who had a very difficult childhood with neglect and abuse. Her reaction to this was to look for love and attention whenever and wherever she could find it. She grew up and always attempted to appease others and tended to neglect her own needs. Like many people with MBS, she had a very strong dose of the “shoulds” (as Dr. Sarno often refers to Freud’s superego or conscience). As her life became more complicated and busy, she tried to do more and more for everyone else. Finally, her body reacted by giving her severe migraine headaches and fatigue. These reactions were her body’s way of trying to protect her, i.e. forcing her to rest, to lie down, to stop doing so much for everyone else and to do something for herself. Unfortunately, she there was a great cost to this response, i.e. severe pain and fatigue. I believe it is useful to view the body in this way, as trying to help us, to protect us, rather than as betraying us, which is a common thought that many people with MBS have…

If you pay close attention to your body, you will find that you often have physical reactions (often very mild ones) to common emotions that occur. However, you will usually not be aware of the emotion, because most emotions are subconscious. In fact, about 95% of all of our thoughts and feelings are located in the unconscious mind. (more on this in the next blog) The other day, I saw a friend who had an earaches. He asked if I would look in his ear to see if there was an infection there. The pain had started when he was singing in his choir in the dress rehearsal for a concert. The man next to him was singing close to his ear when the pain started. His eardrum looked perfectly normal and as soon as he learned that there was no infection, the pain went away. This is a very simple and common story. He was nervous about performing in the concert and the singing in his ear gave his mind the opportunity (the idea?) of creating ear pain as a way of alerting him to the nervousness. Accidents and injuries often present the opportunity for the mind to create chronic pain, if there are particular stressful events occurring at the time of the accident. Whiplash is a good example of this; the strain on the neck from an accident would typically heal within a week or two, unless there is something causing the nerve connections to become chronic.

The brain is set up to help us survive. It has mechanisms for immediate reactions to avoid danger. And these mechanisms are intimately tied into the body. In the modern world, we rarely meet bears, but we are commonly confronted with acute emotions and stresses in our daily lives. These stresses frequently result in bodily responses, such as increased heart rate, changes in blood flow to our hands, tension in our stomachs, bladder reactions and muscle or nerve pain. When these stresses are linked to childhood emotions, the reactions are likely to be even greater. I teach all of my patients to pay attention to their bodies, because their bodies are a warning system and they will always alert us to ways that we are reacting to stress and emotions in our lives. The more this is understood, the better off we will be as a society, because people (and doctors) will appropriately recognize common physical symptoms as MBS, rather than as signs of a serious disease.

Much more on this in the future. If you pay close attention to the mind and the body and look for the connections between the two, you will typically learn a great deal about what affects you, what drives you, what scares you, and what makes you tick. This self-knowledge is a great reward for taking unconscious thoughts, feelings and reactions and looking at them with the conscious mind.

Dr. Schubiner writes: “Several decades ago, if a woman came to the emergency department with a fracture and a “story” about falling out of bed, most doctors sent her to the orthopedic surgeon to fix the fracture and then home. Now, we ask more carefully about the fracture to make sure that it was not caused by domestic violence. We look for the underlying cause, even if the cause is related to social, rather than medical, factors. It is time for us to look more carefully and clearly at physical symptoms for which there is no clear disease in the body. We will find the underlying cause: Mind Body Syndrome.”

Dr. Schubiner writes:

An auto accident is a powerful situation to have happen. It can definitely “shake you up.” Whiplash occurs after auto accidents, but it turns out that whiplash does not occur after auto accidents in all countries (more on this in a later blog). A study done to look at this was conducted by putting people in a simulation room and having them experience an auto accident. Despite the fact that their neck did NOT move at all, 10% of the people developed Neck Pain that lasted at least 4 weeks!! In some way, they expected to have neck pain and they did. These people were also those who had the most stress and emotional distress in their lives at the time of the experiment.

I have a friend who went to one of my lectures and read Dr. Sarno’s excellent book, The Mindbody Prescription. He had been having chest pains, despite a normal exercise stress test, so his heart was physically fine. After reading the book, he started to pay attention to the times when his chest pain occurred and he found (lo and behold) that there were stressful events or stressful thoughts preceding the pains each time. When he made the connection and dealt with his stress and his thoughts, the chest pain disappeared. Later, he also noticed that his nasal congestion disappeared too. He had nasal congestion in the garden, cutting the lawn, etc. and now he could breathe fine and participate in these activities without problems. He was amazed. A few weeks later, he told me about a time when he was in his home talking to a friend. His friend confided to him that he was having a hard time, was depressed, was on medication and was suicidal at times. My friend suddenly started sneezing, coughing and his eyes were watering. He had to excuse himself and went to the bathroom. While there, he had this thought: “Boy, that got me out of there!” He realized that his body had reacted in a way it “knew,” by the “allergic reaction.” Just as suddenly, the reaction stopped. He realized that his body was trying to protect him from the uncomfortable situation by creating the sneezing/coughing reaction…

What do you think is the result of the ads on TV for medications for anxiety, erectile dysfunction, fibromyalgia, insomnia, restless leg syndrome and others? Here is a powerful message suggesting that people get these symptoms. Some of the people watching are in stressful situations in their lives and this can easily trigger the development of MBS symptoms. So, the ads actually serve to increase the number of people who may develop MBS. That is not good for our health. Fortunately, the more we know, the better we are able to cope with MBS by recognizing that the mind can cause physical symptoms. So, when I get a physical symptom, one of the first things I do is ask myself two questions: “What is going on right now?” “Why might I have developed this symptom?” The answers are often quite obvious.

Dr. Schubiner writes:

…genes are NOT destiny in relation to migraine, fibromyalgia, and other syndromes that make up this disorder. While scientists can identify certain genes that are found in association with these syndromes, they will not necessarily be expressed, i.e. they can be “turned on” by what happens in our lives, e.g. stress, emotions, life circumstances, but they can also be “turned off” by changes in our lives, e.g. control, understanding, acceptance, happiness, love.

Certain MBS disorders are commonly seen to “run in families” such as Neck Pain, headaches, stomach pains. However, we must realize that MBS is contagious (see Blog #6) and that it is very easy for certain MBS symptoms to be produced by the mind when stressful events occur in our lives. Which MBS symptoms are “chosen” by the mind depends on a lot of things, but one of those things is what might be reasonably expected. And it makes sense that our minds might expect to have a symptom that “runs in the family”, i.e. that others have.

Dr. Schubiner writes:

Job satisfaction is the most important factor that appears to determine if someone will develop chronic back pain or return to work after back surgery…

When stressful events occur, it is known that the muscles of the body can tense up. In fact, the body is capable of tensing very specific muscles during a stressful event. It is not necessary to be aware of any emotions at all. The body may react to stressful events while we may not be aware that we are troubled by something. This occurs because the centers in the brain that cause reactions in the body are in the sub-conscious part of the brain, particularly the hypothalamus, which controls the fight, flight or freeze reactions.

There are two typical ways that back pain can start. One is with an accident, an injury, or with back movement. In this case, there is usually some degree to tissue damage due to the injury. The pain associated with the injury will usually decrease over time and go away once the injury has healed. If there is no serious medical damage, such as a fracture or an injury that damages the spinal column or nerves (doctors can diagnose these conditions with X-rays, MRI’s and by a neurologic exam, of course recognizing what we discussed above that an MRI abnormality is often not diagnostic of a medical condition if the neurologic exam is normal), then the pain should improve within a few days or weeks. However, the pain signals that start in the back and go to the brain can get “learned” as mentioned above and a vicious cycle can get started. Who is more likely to have this vicious cycle begin? The development of chronic pain is most likely in those who are the most stressed or distressed at the time of the accident. The brain has an area called the anterior cingulated cortex (ACC). This part of the brain amplifies pain signals and is activated by stress and emotions. Therefore, once the vicious cycle gets learned by the nerves, and this signal gets amplified in the brain and then muscle spasm and tension increases which increases pain.

Back pain can also start without any injury or accident. In this case, the muscle tension is started by the nerves coming from the brain in response to emotions (whether these emotions are recognized or not) and pain ensues. Once the pain occurs, the vicious cycle can become learned just as in the example above.

Over time, if the back pain doesn’t go away, the individual is likely to become less active and begin to worry and develop fear. These things exacerbate the pain by causing more muscle tension. The longer the pain lasts, the more likely that the individual will develop frustration, exhaustion and depression.

Dr. Schubiner writes:

Things to do:

Notice what has been hidden;

Understand what has been a mystery.

Speak what has been unspoken;

Confront what has been avoided.

Accept what needs to be accepted;

Forgive what needs to be forgiven.

Change what needs to be changed.

Here are some of the levels (as I currently see them):

1. Learning that TMS exists, that emotions can cause pain

2. Understanding one’s own emotions, prior stressors, core issues that have lead to the physical and emotional symptoms

3. Starting to uncover these core issues and emotions in writing

4. Speaking the truth to oneself, through writing, meditating, reprogramming the mind

5. Recognizing hidden barriers in our own mind that may prevent us from getting better (see week 3 of the program); honestly asking ourselves the question: Why might my mind prefer to hang on to these symptoms?

6. Speaking the truth to others, telling others what you need, expressing anger or apology or forgiveness

7. Accepting what needs to be accepted; forgiving what needs to be forgiven

8. Doing things that we need to do, physical things (activities), but also things we want to do, and most importantly, figuring out what things need changing in our lives and actively working on those

9. Letting go of past issues, recognizing that what has happened “should” have happened and that fighting reality is a horrible way to live (see the work of Bryon Katie in week 4 of the program)

10. Creating our new self, deciding who we want to be and making that a reality, deciding how we will respond to issues and making that happen

There are many steps and each person may need more of one or more of another. It’s your job to figure out what you need to do. Fortunately, you have a great teacher in this process: yourself, i.e. your mind and your body. It will very clearly tell you when you are doing what you need to do and it will tell you when you still have more work to do. Our bodies talk to us in their language. It’s up to us to decode it. Unfortunately, it’s language is the only one it knows and it if often the language of pain. But pain is nature’s way of alerting us to the fact that there is something wrong. It may be that we just stubbed our toe or placed a finger on a hot frying pan, or it may be that we are stuck in a difficult situation at work or in a relationship. There is a recent research study done by Naomi Eisenberger at UCLA in which they showed that the pathways in the brain that are activated by emotional distress (in this case, a game where the person is excluded; i.e. social exclusion) are the same pathways that are activated by physical pain (i.e. the anterior cingulated cortex). This shows clearly that there is really no difference between emotional pain and physical pain. They are one and the same and the mindbody (as Dr. Sarno calls it) will decide which one (or both) we feel.

Our job is to listen. Our job is to pay attention to our bodies. They are trying to help us by being our teacher. Learn to see what events, emotions, and thoughts occur with increased and decreased pain. Be kind to yourself and to your mind and to your body. Start doing the work of healing yourself. There can be several steps as outlined above. And there is much work to be done for most of us, but this is the essence of being human. Our highest level of accomplishment is in seeing ourselves clearly, in taking control and making changes that need to be made with honesty and with kindness.

* The Guest House

By Rumi

This being human is a guest house

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness

comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture.

Still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

Dr. Schubiner writes:

The anterior cingulated cortex (ACC) area of the lower part of the brain causes pain to be increased and the things that cause the ACC to be activated are thoughts and feelings of being afraid, guilty, worried, trapped, overwhelmed or angry. Of course, these thoughts and emotions happen to everyone. In addition, certain types of individuals tend to put extra pressure on themselves, have a tendency to be perfectionists and are often sensitive to criticism. It isn’t difficult to see that musicians tend to fit this personality profile.

The area of the brain that reduces pain is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and this part of the brain is activated by clear thinking, understanding, being in control, processing thoughts to avoid worrying or guilt, and dealing with emotions by rationalizing, reappraising and letting go.

Dr. Schubiner writes:

The reason symptoms can come and go, alter and change, or transform into new symptoms is that they are all caused by the same underlying physiological issues. These pathways are described in earlier blogs and consist of activation of the amgydala (emotional memory center), the anterior portion of the cingulate cortex (amplifies pain due to fear, worry and frustration), and the autonomic nervous system (activates the fight, flight or freeze reaction). These cause a variety of changes in the brain and body such as increase in muscle tension or muscle spasm, alteration or spasm of muscles in the bowel or urinary tract, activating or inhibiting nerve signals that control our activity and feelings. Once these nerve pathways get activated, they tend to quickly become sensitized and then “wired” to produce learned connections that develop a life of their own and can persist for months, years or even decades unless they are stopped by MBS/TMS therapy. Note that these are physiological changes, i.e. temporary alterations that do not produce tissue destruction or damage, as opposed to pathological changes, such as cancer or heart disease…

The brain will continue to produce “other” symptoms or substitute symptoms for a variety of reasons. One, it’s not ready to give up yet (and you may need to continue to be firm with it). Two, you haven’t yet integrated the changes that you need to make in your life or in your psyche (obviously you have to figure out what those changes are, and that’s where therapy may help as well). Three, you haven’t yet accepted yourself fully and completely, i.e. you are still fighting yourself, doubting yourself, being afraid of symptoms or of certain issues/events in your life. Four, you haven’t yet learned what you need to learn from your symptoms. This may sound odd, but several people in the program have directly asked their symptoms (in meditation or in writing) this question, i.e. “what do I need to learn from you?” Increasingly I have seen that the body is basically trying to protect us by producing MBS/TMS symptoms. Once we recognize this, we can work with our mind and bodies to calm the fears, deal with the issues in our lives which are stressful and produce the danger signals that cause activation of the fight or flight reaction.

Dr. Schubiner blogs: “A common response to triggers is to avoid them. People learn to avoid the movements or foods or people or events. However, that is exactly the wrong thing to do. When you avoid the triggers, you actually give them more power over you. What you really need to do is to overcome them. You need to retrain your brain to avoid developing the MBS symptoms when you encounter the triggers. The way to do that is to be brave and to look forward to encountering the triggers bit by bit and to learn techniques for stopping the nerve pathways that get triggered. The techniques to use are self-talk, breathing and other meditation techniques, therapeutic writing, psychotherapy and a variety of other psychological techniques, such as EMDR.”

Dr. Schubiner writes: “The three major factors in the development of MBS are: 1) External stress, 2) Internal pressures that we put on ourselves and 3) Suppression of emotion or feeling trapped in the difficult situation.”

Dr. Schubiner blogs:

the prevalence of back pain was much lower in East Germany prior to reunification, however, after the two countries unified the amount of people with back pain in East Germany gradually increased to the level of that seen in West Germany, where it has remained. The authors suggest that the cause of the rise in back pain in East Germans that back pain is socially contagious. This is their explanation: “We hypothesize that back pain is a communicable disease and suggest a harmful influence of back-related beliefs and attitudes transmitted from West to East Germany via mass media and personal contacts.”

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