Conflict Avoidance In Holy Drag, How Both-Side-Isms Do Not Make You More "Spiritual," & A Call Out To Charles Eisenstein

A Critique of Charles Eisenstein's "Shades Of Many Colors"

Why New Age philosopher and RFK, Jr campaign advisor Charles Eisenstein won’t be clear about who he’s endorsing (while obviously endorsing and apologizing for Trump), why taking a stand and being clear about who you’re voting for gets rationalized as being “polarizing” and “stuck in the Old Story of Separation,” why boundaries, naming integrity breaches, standing up against sociopaths and narcissists, and public call outs are misinterpreted as “scapegoating,” and why anyone not being “non-dual” enough is clearly just not as “spiritual” as Charles.

Like most of you, I’m a fan of peace, harmony, compassion, empathy, being generous in our assumptions of people, offering second chances, and practicing perspective taking. It’s part of any empathic way of relating to regularly put ourselves in the shoes of others and ask, “What’s it like to be you?” These are positive human qualities and spiritual values I cherish.

But I’ve wised up a bit over the years, so now, I’m also a fan of healthy boundaries, spotting the red flags of genuinely dangerous people like Donald Trump and his cronies, understanding the psychology of malignant narcissism and sociopathy, learning how to protect yourself from people who do not extend compassion and empathy to others, and calling out public figures when they’re abusing their influence in dangerous ways.

While I have strong peacemaking parts that get upset when people are disagreeing and hating on each other, I’ve also learned to practice some degree of discernment, employed Internal Family Systems (IFS) as a way to heal my young, idealistic, gullible parts that fear conflict, and had my eyes opened to see some of the darker aspects of human nature, alongside those positive spiritual values I still hold near and dear to my heart.

In wising up, I’ve come to realize that I used to empathize with traumatized people who behave badly to a fault. I exercised the practice of asking “What’s it like to be you?” to my own detriment, extending that kind of empathy to people who were definitely not asking the same about me. By putting all my empathy on those who perpetrate the most harm (to me and in the world), I have historically let myself (and other victims) down, trying to humanize those who dehumanize others and trying my best not to cast anyone out of the wholeness of humanity or write them off as a monster. Because of this tendency to empathize with traumatized perpetrators, I’ve let one “high on the narcissism spectrum” guru after another bewilder, gaslight, and confuse me to the point of crazy-making.

Which is why, after taking a stand in a rebuttal I wrote against an essay by a former close ally and friend Charles Eisenstein during the pandemic- and then staying silent for several years since- I feel called to say something again, in response to Charles’s latest Substack post Shades of Many Colors.

First, a thing or two about Charles, my former personal relationship with him, and what he’s been up to recently. I met Charles in 2014, resonated a lot with his teachings at the time, became good friends with he and his wife Stella and genuinely cared for them both, co-taught with Charles quite a few times, and included quotes from his book, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, in several of my seven published books. I still quote from his book when I teach workshops, from time to time, and I still stand by some of my former endorsements of his work.

I once considered Charles one of my deepest allies, colleagues, and personal friends until about a year into the pandemic. I even stood up for him when I felt he was getting unfairly bullied by the guys at the Conspirituality podcast, who were calling him out without actually calling him to get a comment from him. I was listening to that podcast religiously and I generally agreed with most of their content. And yet, they were critiquing Charles without giving him a chance to speak up for himself. Because of me offering to introduce them, they invited Charles on the Conspirituality podcast in “Are There Really Two Sides,” where Charles gave, in my opinion, a cringe-worthy interview that validated much of what the Conspirituality podcasters were saying about his dangerous both-side-isms.

Charles and I spoke frequently during the early pandemic. For the first six months or so of lockdown, we were part of a 5 person text thread of 3 doctors, along with Charles and his wife Stella, trying to sense-make what was happening. The three doctors, myself included, wound up dropping Charles and Stella from the text thread when Charles continued to send us increasingly unhinged radical right wing media links from websites like sott.net, all in the name of “keeping an eye on both sides.”

Our communication ended after I invited Charles to a private conversation regarding his views about the vaccine, false equivalencies between Jews in concentration camps and the willfully unvaccinated, and his publisher’s subsequent public statement about donating proceeds from his books to charities that support the people Charles was insulting by comparing Jews in Nazi Germany to New Age anti-vaxxers. I said that if he wasn’t willing to engage in a private, behind the scenes conversation and issue a public retraction of his essay, I would call him out publicly. His response to me was “Go right ahead.”

As I, a conventionally trained physician, became more pro-public health guidelines and Charles became more radically anti-vax, anti-establishment, and deliberately contrarian, and as I finally felt moved to take a firm public stand against Charles’s disinformation during a time of global crisis, we had to finally part ways in our personal relationship.

Charles and I have had no personal contact since the rebuttal I wrote in August 2021 led to his publishing company North Atlantic Books taking a public stand against that same essay comparing the willfully unvaccinated to Jews in the Holocaust in their public call out Disavowing Disinformation.

Still, it brings me no joy to call out Charles, yet again, for publishing dangerous disinformation that might mislead vulnerable people he strongly influences. I still care for Charles as a human being, and I sincerely wish him and his family well, even though we no longer see eye to eye. But…

Going Off The Deep End

I saw the seeds of his right wing radicalization during those first few months of the pandemic, when Charles was sending three doctors, two of which were on the front lines of Covid and one (me) was on the front lines of the digital disinformation campaign, right wing media articles spouting Covid disinformation, conspiracy theories, and obvious propaganda that was getting called out by the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD, a man who is in my circle of physicians mentored by Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, and who I trust a great deal. Charles was hob-nobbing with many people in the Disinformation Dozen, who were found to be responsible for 65% of the misinformation about Covid on the internet, among them RFK, Jr, Kelly Brogan, and Sayer Ji, while I was busy talking to friends in the CDC and high positions of public health, trying to publish their statements to counteract the disinformation Charles and his Disinformation Dozen cronies, including my former colleague Christiane Northrup, MD, were spreading to a collective audience of 59 million people.

Since that parting of ways, I’ve observed Charles’s path only loosely, from the sidelines. I’ve heard gossip from mutual friends that I mostly ignore and listened to ongoing critiques from the Conspirituality podcast, including their criticisms in their book Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat. I know he went on to join the campaign staff for anti-vaxxer-in-chief RFK, Jr, to the bewilderment of other campaign staff, as written about in this Wall Street Journal article. He was allegedly getting paid $21,000/month to be a “senior campaign advisor,” a job which seemed to amount to going into the mountains to “download” spiritually-sourced campaign advice from the nether regions, to pass along to the candidate he was managing. The statements he put out on behalf of Bobby Kennedy, Jr. were, IMHO, vague, non-committal, and confusing.

Which Side Are You On?

Now that RFK, Jr offered to endorse Donald Trump if he’d give him a staff position, and then he flipped and offered to endorse Kamala Harris if she would, RFK, Jr has officially dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump. That has put some pressure on Charles to make a statement about who he now endorses, now that his boss has endorsed Donald Trump. Is Charles now a MAGA supporter? Will he turn on his boss and support Kamala Harris? Or is he too “non-dual” to actually take a stand and pick a side that isn’t another un-winnable contrarian?

The Charles I once knew seemed radically liberal ten years ago when I knew him best. He was progressive to the point of a true bleeding heart, with compassion and care for human rights for all. He presented himself as a progressive, liberal, New Agey activist on the side of democracy, social justice, and environmentalism. I could never quite pin him down to tell me who he voted for (or if he even voted), but I know that he posted a sign in his front yard during the 2016 election that said:

“Trump lover? Clinton lover? None-Of-The-Abover? Black? White? Red? Brown? Or Some Other Color? Each Woman Is A Sister Here And Every Man A Brother. Let Us Put Our Judgements Down And Love One Another.”

People cheered on Facebook. I liked it too. I mean who doesn’t want us to just love one another?

But eight years later, and after his latest statement about why he won’t go public with who he’s actually endorsing for President, I see things much differently. On the surface, I hear flowery language from a Yale-educated smartie pants trying to make a case for why he’s more enlightened than those of us who have come out publicly about our endorsements. According to Charles’ logic, public figures that take a stand and actively endorse a mainstream candidate are “othering,” scapegoating, polarizing, feeding divisiveness, and unraveling national unity. Unlike him in his smug superiority, those of us who go public with our endorsements are feeding the “Old Story” and participating in the “Story of Separation”, othering any candidate by endorsing one or the other (while tacitly making it sound like he’s actually endorsing Trump, a case made brilliantly by Drew Delliger in his Substack essay Charles Eisenstein Endorses Trump But Thinks You’re Not Clever Enough To Notice, Part 2 and seconded in today’s Conspirituality Podcast RFK, Jr’s Pet Guru Blesses Trump).

The truth is that you can’t get away with saying there’s nice people on both sides of this Presidential election, the way Trump did during the Charlottesville white supremacist march. You can’t justify becoming a Trump advisor with this kind of circular rationalization.

“As fate and circumstance have brought me adjacent to the circles of the ‘powerful,’ I will continue to devote to them a portion of my attention, so long as I am useful there. They are not as powerful as we think, but neither are they without power. They have their role. But their real power comes not from winning elections. It comes from how they win, or lose, and who they become in winning or losing…”

He justifies his failure to examine the policies of Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, to take a stand for one over the other, with yet another rationalization.

“I could go through the list of Trump’s policy ideas and compare them to those of the Democrats, but I won’t — for two reasons. First, my point here is not to argue the relative merits of him as a candidate compared to Kamala Harris. My point, rather, is that the narrative that collapses a complex and changing person into a caricature of evil is untenable. And it is precisely this narrative that makes him, and anyone linked to him by a chain of association, untouchable in polite society. It would sure make things easy if this election were a simple contest of good versus evil. But this is the way of thinking that is tearing the world apart. Those who think that way always consider themselves to be members of Team Good, of course. If your opponent is evil incarnate, then any means to stop him are justified. So to say that Donald Trump is anything but pure evil (or some dehumanizing equivalent), to fail to say something derogatory, will incite fury among Team Good, for it contradicts their very identity and their understanding of the world. It offends them to say that I agree with some of Trump’s opinions and disagree with others, or that some of his ideas have merit. Because then I am elevating him to the status of full human being. I am validating his inclusion in polite society. Those people will recite the litany of Trump’s crimes and misdemeanors, his sayings and doings, as proof that I am deluded in believing him to be someone of normal sanity, empathy, and feeling. Certainly he is no saint. But in the context of information warfare, with its cherry-picking and decontextualization, its hype and its spin, its narrative management and weaponization of media, one must be suspicious of the story that Trump is a singular danger to democracy…The second reason I won’t spend more time comparing the policies of Trump and Harris is that the terms of the whole policy conversation are too shallow. What really needs to be done is not articulable in the lexicon of policy. It is beyond the pale. The polarized, divisive debates obscure what we really need to be talking about, and the menu options that politicians offer us obscure any real solutions.”

Say what, Charles? Seriously?

He apologizes for Trump by making outright dishonest claims.

I hate to disappoint any of my readers who demonize or lionize the man, but, having at this point something of a backstage pass, I can tell you that neither pole stands anywhere near the truth. It is almost impossible to see the real man through the fog of today’s information war.

He is not a strategic genius out-maneuvering the deep state in a match of 4D chess. Nor is he a Mussolini figure, a bigoted fascist marshaling resurgent far-right forces to elevate him into dictatorial power. He is not even particularly right-wing.

Huh? Not particularly right wing?

Not to be an apologist for a Trump apologist, but because I know Charles personally, I just want to risk taking a stab at translating what I hear under the seductive spiritualized lingo. I hear this little boy crying, “Stop fighting everyone! Why can’t everyone just get along and love one another?” As much as Charles’s essays evoke ire in me sometimes, I want to hug those young conflict avoidant parts, to comfort them, to reassure them and help co-regulate those young parts that seem to grab his pen a lot of the time.

I have little girl parts that cry out in the same way from time to time- feeling hopeless, frightened of war and violence, and despairing about the state of our world and the degree of distrust and division in my country. So my young parts can empathize with Charles’s young parts. They really can. I get it. It makes sense to me. I teach trauma healing to doctors and have been in therapy for a decade, so I understand that hurt people hurt people, and I understand that even those with sociopathic and malignant narcissistic parts only become that way because they were harmed as youngsters.

I also understand that, first and foremost, sociopaths and narcissists need to be stopped. We can empathize with people like Trump and his insurrectionists when they’re safely behind bars and far away from the palaces of power.

Why We Go To Therapy

While I have young parts that also hate conflict and want everyone to love each other, that’s what therapy is for- healing our young parts so they don’t write essay after essay from a conflict avoidant little one instead of taking a firm stand as an adult in order to leverage power, privilege, and influence in an ethical way. We go to therapy so we can be courageous enough- and ethical enough- to be willing to piss off half our audiences in order to go public with which side you’re on during a time of a democracy-threatening crisis of integrity in the United States. We go to therapy so we can set and enforce boundaries, call out perpetrators, hold ourselves and others to account, and extend empathy to our own hurt parts, and also the hurt parts of others, but without collapsing those boundaries meant to protect ourselves, others, and society. We go to therapy so we don’t have to be so conflict avoidant that we can’t take a stand without thinking we’re scapegoating someone or casting them out of the wholeness of humanity by naming their abuses.

I’ve written quite a few posts lately about how conflict avoidance, spiritual bypassing, anger phobia, shying away from confrontation when it is necessary to hold someone accountable, calling for more peace and less polarization, and general cries for more harmony and less divisiveness can be the enemy of integrity. (You can read them here and here and here.)

So I won’t get into the weeds with the arguments I make for why conflict avoidance and spiritual bypassing can flip your moral compass upside down. But I will say this.

Every time I hear a white, cis, hetero, able-bodied, socioeconomically privileged male mansplaining like Charles and crying out, “Stop polarizing!” And “You’re being so divisive” and “Choose love, not fear,” I want to say, “Which side are you on, man?”

Because right now, as much as I like love, light, rainbows, and unicorns, and as much as I used to have real fondness, affection and respect for my former friend Charles, and as much as I want peace on earth and harmony in my country, these are dire times, and we need everyone with power and privilege to leverage our power and privilege to take a firm, clear stand for which side we’re on. And if you’re not on the side of equal human rights for all humans, especially those with various marginalizations, if you’re not on the side of fighting for Civil Rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, children’s rights, women’s rights, the rights of the impoverished, immigrant rights, disabled rights, neurodiverse rights, and all the rights, for all people with less power and privilege, then you’re on the wrong side of history right now.

In the words of the late great Paul Farmer, MD:

“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.”

Donald Trump’s entire agenda, and the agenda of the MAGA supporters who back him, is based on the idea that some people matter more than others. I’ll give some Trump supporters the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge that many of them have been duped and indoctrinated by a sociopathic cult leader to believe that a wealthy, white, billionaire male, cis, hetero convicted felon and rapist will have the backs of working class people who have been struggling to make ends meet and get ahead in America.

But I just can’t give the benefit of that doubt to Charles Eisenstein, who should know better and yet has failed to take a public stand against the man his boss just endorsed. As they say in the social justice world, silence is violence. So let me appeal directly to Charles.

Charles, I know you love your New Story/ Old Story, Story of Separation and Inter-being, Ascent of Humanity ideals (which I only learned recently might have been appropriated from Thomas Berry’s The Dream of the Earth (Sierra Club, 1988.)

I know we once bonded over wanting the world to be a more beautiful place than it really is. I know your heart was once aimed at a desire for real love, unity, and peace- and I love those qualities in you. But the jig is up. I’m not saying it’s not a sweet ideal. I’m just saying it’s not a realistic one, not a mature, adult world view grounded in an understanding of real human nature and its inherent “us versus them” tribalism.

When you’re dealing with real sociopaths and malignant narcissists, you need to take a stand with the victim, rather than apologize for the sociopaths. Don’t try to spiritualize your understandable grief at how human nature actually works by leading your followers into magical thinking and fantasy. Don’t call out the victims of people like Donald Trump for “being in their victim story” and encourage them to take personal responsibility for every horrible, random, unexplainable thing that happens to them. Don’t invalidate their stories with “That’s just a story.” Don’t deny your own natural empathy by siding with the perpetrator and betraying the real victims here- the people who are being actively victimized by Donald Trump, and by extension, your boss RFK, Jr. Don’t try to distract us from the horrors of what has happened on Trump’s watch by promising us a utopia that has never actually materialized, no matter how many New Age gurus and culty narcissists have cashed in on our young, naive, gullible, innocent desire for utopia.

Let us grieve that this is the actual state of our country, that some traumatized humans are power hungry, tribal, greedy, ruthless, sociopathic, and prone to abuse that power, privilege, and ruthlessness. Let us feel the heartbreak that we are as divided as we are, as far from real unity than this country has been since the Civil War. Let us grieve all the freedoms we’ve lost under Donald Trump’s policies and Supreme Court appointments. Let us process the devastation we feel when we see the ecocide, the genocides, the human rights violations, the inequalities, the crushing blows against the ideals many who fight for human rights have been fighting for as part of the activist resistance for centuries now.

Charles closes out with a call for compassion:

The revolution we are seeking has compassion at its core. Compassion asks earnestly, “What is it like to be you?” “How did you come to be as you are?” “What is your story?” “What are your circumstances?” “What are your hopes?” “What are your fears?” “What do you want?” “What do you need?” And, as Orland Bishop says, “How must I be, so that you may be free?”

Compassion, empathy, perspective taking- hell yeah! Conflict avoidance- not so much. Feeling compassion for those who threaten democracy, human rights, and public safety is not enough to stop sociopathic wanna-be dictators from harming our country and its citizens.

Let us be inspired into action by the words and actions of Sikh Civil Rights activist and lawyer Valarie Kaur, who said this in 2016.

What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country that is waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor? What if all of our grandfathers and grandmothers are standing behind now, those who survived occupation and genocide, slavery and Jim Crow, detentions and political assault? What if they are whispering in our ears “You are brave”? What if this is our nation’s greatest transition?

What does the midwife tell us to do? Breathe. And then? Push. Because if we don’t push we will die. If we don’t push our nation will die. Tonight we will breathe. Tomorrow we will labor in love through love and your revolutionary love is the magic we will show our children.

Push means “Do something.” Don’t just talk in conflict avoidant circles. Don’t discredit the activism of all the brave ACLU lawyers who have been fighting and pushing back against Trump’s dehumanizing policies. (If you haven’t watched the wonderful documentary about a scrappy team of heroic ACLU lawyers fighting Trump during his presidency, watch The Fight.) Pick a side and take a stand, Charles. Or take yourself out of public life if you don’t want to use your power, privilege, and influence ethically.

It’s okay if you don’t wish to fight. But then back off and shut up. Your writings are not benign, and they’re not helping anyone. Please don’t exercise your influence to cause the often vulnerable trauma survivors who follow you to rationalize being apolitical and conflict avoidant alongside you. Now is the time for all who consider themselves “spiritual” or who care about human rights, the environment, public safely, and basic dignity to rise up. All non-violent protestors need to actively breathe and then push, to fight, fight, fight- for what you believe in, for what you stand for, for the kind of country you want to live in.

This is not a time for both-side-isms, false equivalences, and pretending you’re not endorsing a candidate while minimizing the policies of Kamala Harris and blessing Donald Trump. If you’ve gone to the MAGA side, just admit it, Charles. You’re an American. You have a right to your opinion and your vote. Just don’t try to gaslight and hoodwink us into thinking you’re not taking a side. Your side is clear underneath all the murky water your conflict avoidant parts are hiding under.

And just to be clear here, I have publicly endorsed Kamala Harris- twice. I have gotten hate mail and death threats because of doing so- from people who claim to be “spiritual,” some of whom are not even US citizens. I believe in democracy, so I believe all registered American voters have a right to vote- for whoever they wish to vote for, unimpeded by laws meant to suppress the votes of those who might dump Trump.

So…you choose, people. You vote for who you believe will best serve us. But please, I beg you, don’t justify any waffling, apolitical, too-spiritual-to-pick-a-side, conflict avoidance, false equivalencies, utopian delusions, or both-side-isms by quoting Charles Eisenstein.

And Charles, as a former friend who still cares about you, it’s okay to say “I made a mistake here.” You don’t have to double down when you’ve made an error. Mature, evolving human beings try things out, take risks, make mistakes, apologize, and sometimes have a change of heart. You can come back from the hole you’ve dug for yourself, if you can find the humility to do so.