Dismiss Whatever Insults Your Own Soul [TE]

Welcome back my friends to the Trenchant Edges.

Sorry that we’re not doing the Dawn of Everything again, I’ve been trying to hunt down a documentary about Atlantis but it’s unavailable yet.

What is available is a lot of interviews that are basically advertisements for it. Frustrating really.

Whitman is an excellent teacher in the art of living.

They do have a cool pitch: Atlantis is real and just off the coast of Cadiz, Spain and the ruins there closely match Plato’s descriptions.

And they have scans!

This was going to be about that but as is the nature of my business every rabbit hole finds 5 more and I want to keep my momentum here going.

And this is going to be a little different than I’d planned. The title is from the preface of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and it makes a beautiful point:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . . . . . . The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work.

Why Atlantis?

As I mentioned in my last essay, I fucking hate Atlantis and I hate it because of something specific: I only care about Atlantis at all because it keeps coming up and I resent having to know things about it.

In the tapestry of history, it’s a shockingly interconnected knot.

Most of this in modern days comes through Ignatius Donnelly’s intuitions in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World and Ragnarök: The Age of Fire And Gravel.

There are immensely complicated knots within this knot, from the ideologies supporting settler colonialism to the budding studies of archeology, comparative mythology, and the sheer History Channel of it all. Plus all the occultists that riffed off Donnelly means the entire new age milieu is a descendant of it.

Atlantis isn’t so much a cause but a symptom of something larger happening.

And despite the worst parts of it like the rise of the Nazis or modern antivaxxers, I think there’s something important and potentially good going on here.

In the long view, premodern European society was built around reflexive deference to authority. To Church, landlord, and king. Modern academia and nation states are the grandkids of this system and inherit many of their quarks as all descendants do.

Antivaxxers correctly criticized the phrase, “Trust the Science!” as being insufficiently skeptical for the scientific method to work. But they were foolish to do so because that skepticism was already built into the system and yes, experts are better at being skeptical in their field than novices.

But they were right to be skeptical anyway because the damn political leaders did shit like say masks didn’t work to try and manipulate people into not buying them all before making them mandatory.

Who the fuck wouldn’t be confused and suspicious by that paternalistic bullshit?

But on the scientific side: There were repeated signs of potential covid treatments that could have worked (Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are the big two) who had initially promising studies that were later proven wrong or done badly.

As with all true medical research the process was messy.

I pick antivaxxers here because they’re a group of people who I disagree with who’s concerns I shared at the time and who’s conclusions I continue to disagree with.

Hell, they’re even backhandedly right about Big Pharma profiteering: Bill Gates initially lobbied against relaxing intellectual property rules in the World Trade Organization. Though he eventually came to accept a narrow relaxing.

Lots of Science! lovers loathe antivaxxers for their apparent irrationality. Often ignoring legitimate distrust of institutions many groups including disabled and Black Americans feel. See Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid if you want to hear the full story of that.

And their frustration also isn’t wrong: These fucks do get people killed. Wholly unnecessarily. And often baselessly. Andrew Wakefield made up the initial study linking vaccines and autism for a lawsuit and is still out there grifting parents whose only crime is wanting to help their children and being misled about how.

It makes me so fucking mad.

See, every perverse incentive that applies to commercial medicine applies to alternative medicine only there’s almost never anyone looking over their shoulder so abuse is even more rampant there.

But all of this is part of a process I hope society continues long enough to get somewhere with where we stop just accepting authority.

Most Alt-Whatever salesmen are just telling people to swap which authority they care about. Reject academic, accept Joe Rogan.

Well, what the fuck does he know?

And that brings us back to Whitman. This time from a song of myself:

Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams,

Now I wash the gum from your eyes,

You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.

Trusting unconditionally in authority isn’t a great recipe.

Yet, genuine authority is worth respect.

It’s a tricky balance you need to strike moment-by-moment.

This headline is so good I’ve assumed it was The Onion for years. Wrongly. Forgive me for my sins, ClickHole.

I think where we’re going with all this is a considerably more emotionally mature and healthy society, believe it or not.

We just have to avoid killing ourselves or eachother for another couple decades. Which… well, you never know I guess.

Stranger things have happened!

Conspiracies and Walt Whitman

The root of the appeal of conspiracy theories is the recognition Whitman told people to approach: Reexamine what you’ve been told and dismiss what insults your soul.

It’s been obvious basically the whole time we’ve had society that living in one involves some bullshit. Maybe some bullshit is inescapable. We don’t really know for sure.

Many Christians feel that materialist science insults their soul.

Most things in modern society insult mine.

What exactly are we to make of it? I don’t know for sure.

What I do know is we make choices constrained by structures and in doing so create this world together and it seems more likely than not that we could create a different one.

The point of all this is that aside from actual grifters like Wakefield most people involved in alt-movements are acting with good intentions. And that’s why a lot of attempts at checking misinformation spread often escalate the social pressures that creates them in the first place.

People don’t like being told what to do by people they don’t respect who they believe don’t respect them.

This is where debunking activities often miss the mark.

When debunkers rush to dispute an argument, creators rarely consider either 1. Why the ideas are appealing in the first place or 2. What valid things there are to learn about them.

The social aspect of paranoia is hard to understate. Conspiracy theories, as academics have observed for years, often reflect very real tensions between groups.

If I was an academic, I'd push to be able to teach a class on rhetoric using only Ancient Aliens as a source.

I think it's an absolute treasure of dishonest arguments.

Some of my favorite ticks include: Many ancient astronaut Theorists Believe, Is it possible that ___?, and The mainstream story says....

While I think lots of pseudoarcheology ends up being explicitly racist (Ancient aliens and just about anything that uses Chariots of the Gods as a primary source being great examples), I don't think that's why most people get into it.

It's fun, sexy, and accessible.

It's a kind of history YOU can be a part of right now.

And it's SO happy to talk up how smart and freethinking you are. You wouldn't be fooled by the mainstream, would you?

Of course not!

As if being mainstream was the core problem with "the mainstream".

I've been reading Ignatius Donnelly's immensely influential and popular book Atlantis the Antediluvian World and I get what's cool about it.

It shows a huge amount of information pointing in this one direction And as long as you don't question it too much you get to enjoy this cohesive worldview about ancient history and our lost legacy.

The only problem is as best I can tell with the claims I have any kind of knowledge about (which is only like 5-10% of the book so far, lol) that's just not true. He doesn't prove anything at all.

He doesn't even really try to. He just piles up cherry picked information and calls it a book.

And that's just less interesting to me than, well, the real world.

And I know some people are going to roll their eyes at this but this book is, despite going into it with a lot of sympathy for Donnelly as a guy, just super racist. It reifies savages vs civilization as a core distinction, it calls on mountains of then-current race science as contributing evidence, and puts forth some unique ideas.

It's not racist in the same way Ancient Aliens is where brown people aren't allowed to do anything cool without aliens. It just rebuilds all the worst colonial ideas of the 19th century.

And unfortunately, because 19th century European hyper-diffusionism can't go anywhere without Aryans, it played into nazi propaganda.

A thing Ignatius Donnelly would have been horrified by. The man was a radical republican when that was cool and good. In congress, he fought to expand reconstruction after the civil war. He wouldn't have been excited about his legacy.

But he still promoted the racial ideas of his time with terrible collective consequences. And we see a lot of the descendants of his ideas today.

We’re not so far away from Donnelly that we can assume we’re in a different position fundamentally. We’ve just got 2025’s racist baggage instead of 1882’s.

We’re also bound by an ecosystem of bullshit weighted towards ideas that serve the wealthy and powerful because they own the media and have since Donnelly’s day.

It’s not really surprising that people don’t cope with that well.

Something to consider.

Wrapping Up

We’re going to explore this more in the future ‘cause I’ve been chewing on this subject for the last few years and collaborating with other people doing the same.

Anyway, lots of thorny things to unpack and lots of work to do.

Up on deck is still:

1. Atlantica, the Atlantis documentary they won’t let us watch yet.

2. Dawn of Everything’s Indigenous Sources

3. Christopher Columbus’ Prophecies

And just to make a point about Atlantis just being tangled up in every goddamn thing:

The Atlantica documentary’s creator Michael Donnellan claims that Columbus knew about underwater currents from ancient knowledge surviving in secret maps and charts.

It’s all wrapped together and the work is breaking down the connections and making them more accessible and clear.

Alright, see you soon.

From a different email provider because we’re getting the fuck away from Substack!

-SF