~ Waylon Lewis [intro to Self-Help is Bad for You]
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Why I hate Woo Woo and you should too, too.
Woo woo isn’t cute.
Astrology is fine if it’s a game, and fun, but the second you start viewing the world through bullshit, it’s a different world (and not in a good way).
I’ve lived in Boulder, and Vermont, and Boston, most of my life. And all these places are liberal. I’ve seen science-respecting community-caring liberals vote for Trump. Many of them, last round.
What was the stepping-stone in between? Woo woo.
Call it what you will: spiritual materialism, magical thinking, MAHA, woo woo, conspiracy, Q, anti-vaxx…it all sends good caring sane people into a place where they no longer care about community. Sure, they still care about many good things: poison on our grass or farms, say—but they’ll vote for someone who will push poison 1000x harder in a heartbeat. They care about genocide, of course—but with the help of nihilism and conspiracies and woo woo and spiritual materialism they’re happy to vote for someone who will make that genocide far, far worse. Both examples affect real people, real planet, real animals, real-ity.
Take the term Empath, for example.
No, really, please—take it. I don’t want it. It takes the most beautiful and powerful and vulnerable thing in the world, empathy—the emotion that has the power to transform suffering into love, confusion into joy, loneliness into community—and they make it about its opposite: leave me alone stay away from me I can’t afford to be around sick or weird or homeless people, etc…because I’m such an Empath. That’s the opposite of empathy, which is about being of benefit to all sentient beings through the power of being genuine with and open about our own experience of being human.
So this book is dedicated to Woo Woo.
…Dedicated to burying it, like any bullshit, in a heap of compost
(shit is not something to throw away, but to use, to learn from, to create new life and beauty and truth)
in a deep hole and planting a native tree in it, so that birds and insects might live long and prosper.
As Trungpa Rinpoche said, Dharma (“truth”) is often perceived as a Big Insult to our big little ego. In that way, any time we dare to criticize magical thinking, self-diagnosed Empathdom, anti-vaxx miasma…we risk pissing off a lot of people we mostly like.
So I approach this book in a few ways: with humor, which disarms. With plaintive genuine sweetness, which is personal and vulnerable. And, straightforwardly, because as Whitman reminded us, and Trungpa reminded us, the best approach is no strategy. Just straightforward candor. That’s love.
And what the world needs now is love, sweet love. And urgently, and lots of it.
~
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