163: Kendrick, Drake, Christian Nationalism, and Accountability without Free Will

This week I tackle some of the questions and comments I've been getting over the last couple months. I talk about Trump's neoliberal agenda, his capture of the Evangelical Right, Consistency and Accountability in both criminal justice and religion, and I clean up some of what I may have missed during the last few episodes I've done on these issues.

This episode was mostly unscripted and it's all over the place, but hey, some people enjoy rants, so if that's you, have at it. 

Transcript

Welcome…
Today’s episode is a bit of housekeeping over the last half dozen or so podcasts wherein I’ve talked about religion, free will, and the historical link between the growth of neoliberal capitalism and the growth of the war on drugs, along with the increase in casualties from that war. And it’s been an interesting few weeks of replies from a lot of listeners—way more than normal, so I must be on to something—and all of these replies have been, for the most part, incredibly positive—thanks for that by the way. I see the numbers this podcast has, so I know lots of people listen, but when I can put a name and feedback to those numbers, it makes this work feel a little more, I dunno, worth it maybe? 
See, when I started this podcast five years ago—wow, that’s wild—there weren’t many people in this space. Drug Positive had a podcast at the time that was great, but that was just about it when it came to alternative narratives of addiction and drug use. Shortly after I started my podcast, Emanuel Sfarios stopped doing Drug Positive, and for awhile it felt like I was a dying breed. But in the last few years, lots of great podcasters have started to show up in this space, and many of them have angles and degrees far beyond what I can offer on some of these topics: Huberman Lab, the Peace on Drugs podcast—shout out to Aron—Crackdown, Say Why to Drugs, although I think Dr. Guage may have also pulled the plug on that for the time being, Drugs and stuff, and lots more. That’s great news, but it also left me feeling for a while like maybe it was time to end this project. The last year or so of content has been an attempt to step outside of my regular drug talk box and bring in some additional components of culture and human nature to talk about how the war on drugs and the addiction problem are far bigger than just drugs—they are woven into our culture at every level. And that’s when the emails got heavy—as I released what I felt might be the final episodes of this show covering Neitzsche, Adorno, Marx, Marcuse and lots of other scholars usually left out of discussions about drugs. But that’s also when the emails picked up, so thanks to all of you who have taken the time to reach out and offer follow up questions or comments. Today’s show is about y’all. 
Where to start: well, let’s revisit religion—I know, I know—I’ll keep it short. But it’s worth summarizing what I’ve been talking about for years now in regards to how religion almost always causes people to abandon moral positions and hold themselves to a much lower standard of accountability. 
We’ve got this book that man call holy—the Bible—and it’s packed full of the most evil shit you can imagine. Seriously. If you don’t think so, try this—think of something really bad. Something so awful it would turn your stomach to hear about it even if it happened before you were born. Go all in here—let your Freudian id offer you some evil shit. Got it? Now go to your magic google machine and type in your evil thing followed by the words “in the Bible.” Child sacrifice? It’s in there. In fact, the entire religious foundations of Judaism, Christianity and Islam all start with a story that is so disgusting to me as a father. See, God’s been kinda off the scene for awhile at this point in the Bible. He made Adam and Eve, put them in a garden and made sure they didn’t know the difference between good and evil, and then punished them and US when they did something he considered evil—ate a piece of fruit that made them immediately understand the difference between good and evil. And then God watched Cain Kill Able, and he steadily everyone gets more evil—odd that knowing the difference between right and wrong would somehow make people more evil, not less, but there it is. So by Genesis 6—just six chapters into the Bible—God is pissed off and disappointed in his creation—he thinks he really fucked up humans, so he decides to fix the problem by killing them all—the babied, the disabled, the elderly, the preachers—everyone except for one family. And then, just like back with Adam and Eve, apparently god watched this family inbreed for generations until they grew the entire Earth’s population back. 
And then in Genesis 12, God meets his new bestie—a man named Abraham—God forced him to change his name—and God promises Abraham all sorts of power, wealth, notoriety—he literally tells him that if he sticks with God, Abraham’s descendants will be as numerous as the stars—I guess God didn’t know how many stars were in the universe—if you count just the stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and if you put them into piles of, say, a million each just to keep the math simple, there would be a hundred thousand piles, and that’s just in our galaxy. So either humans are going to be around for another billion years or so, or this story is so fishy by chapter 12 you get tired of being lied to and chuck the story. But here’s where the real test comes in—both for Abraham and for the reader of the Bible who is, presumably, a perspective convert to one of the world’s 3 main religions. God has promised A all this stuff, and Abraham seems sincerely excited about this promise—who wouldn’t be, right? But first God has to make sure A is really his boy—like Trump, it’s all about mindless loyalty with God. So God comes down and says, “Hey A, ol chap. I need to sacrifice something to me. I need you to kill something and then burn it on a rock because I’m really into that sort of thing.” A says, “hell yeah, I’m into ritual killing of animals too. Which animal should I kill, dismember and burn?” And God, probably chuckling below his breath, says, “your son.” 
Follow me—God tells A that his test of faith is whether or not he is so loyal to God and to the dreams of wealth and power he’s now lusting after, which god has promised him, that he would kill his own kid and burn his body in a ritual sacrifice. Think about this—shouldn’t this be a test of whether you’d tell God to get bent? You’ve got 2 options here: either God will know you are the sort of person who will kill your own children for no good reason aside from your thirst for power, or that you are the sort of person who would never even consider such a thing regardless of how much god might punish you or take back his promises to make you rich. What would your answer be, deal listener? I can tell you what I’d say—I’d say fuck off. If you are going to kill him and I can’t stop you, then do you. But I’m not doing your murdering for you for wealth—I’m no hitman, especially of my own family.
A did agree to kill his own kid—that’s the moral—hilarious to call it that—the moral of the story--that if God tells you to do something confusing, immoral or even outright evil, you will be rewarded for doing it. Spoiler: at the last second, as Issac, A’s son is tied up—talk about trauma—a ram appears and God tells A, “just joking! Instead untie your kid and kill the ram for me.” One wonders what sort of trauma therapy Issac needed after that; I can’t imagine what it would be like to have your dad try to stab you to death and light you on fire as a kid, but I’m sure it fucked up their relationship. Anyway, I think this is also a test for the reader—a litmus test of “if you can run past this moral barrier and not notice breaking your own ethical values, then you might be ready to be a religious person.” Instead of god starting off his story by choosing A when he does the right thing and refuses to commit infanticide, he instead rewards him for being a willing participant. Jan 6 anyone? For those that don’t know, behind the people breaking into the capitol were rows of Christians blowing horns, singing praise and worship songs, and cheering on the insurrectionists. I wonder what would make someone so loyal to an authority figure that they would abandon their own morals….oooohhhh. 
And this is what I was trying to get at last week with Dr. Perez, and repeatedly in the past with lots of guests—how on earth they know which stories and verses are to be treated as holy, and which ought to be thrown away. The answer is always, "I just know, and anyone who doesn’t agree with me is clearly wrong.” But religious people don’t say that—they instead dance around it because I think, much like admitting you think A did the right thing, it’s such an awful thing to say out loud that they know better. There religion, from its very beginnings, gives them a good reason to give up their moral standard and accept that not only is killing one’s son sometimes okay, but it’s holy and pleasing to God—what the fuck? This is one of the reasons religion feels so good to people. Yes, it also comforts in times of pain, and it offers answers to confusing and hopeless questions, but it also allows you to ignore that itchy, annoying moral voice in your head that often says, “do better! You are violating your own principles.” You can get a religious person to endorse the most atrocious behaviors imaginable as long as you explain that it’s part of God’s plan.
So what’s this got to do with free will? Well, if you listened to the episode a few weeks back, you know that I was really trying to focus in on the miniscule decisions we all make all day every day, where free will is alleged to exist. And despite how hard I looked, I kept realizing the reason someone does what they just did is ALWAYS the same—they did what they did because of what happened before—a day ago, a second ago, a year ago, a century ago. Our minds are the product of the life we’ve lived, from our DNA, which we don’t freely choose, to our early upbringing, which we don’t choose, to which morals and ethics stick with us and which we discard, which we also don’t choose. My values are different than yours, and everyone else’s for that matter, because none of us have the same life experiences. I’d never dream of killing my kid for a bunch of inheritance, but maybe you would. If we looked closely at why we both made our very different choices, we will find that somewhere in the past we had different experiences that shaped our views of the world differently. Maybe you had Baptist parents who raised you to believe the Bible as written whereas I grew up in the church of satan. Or may we both grew up Baptist, but I had an experience a few years ago where my date said something about Abraham being evil, and for some reason—the sermon I’d heard the week before? The conversation I had with my mom last night? The verse I read this morning? The extra donut I had with breakfast—for some reason their words resonated with me and changed my mind. Did I choose to have those words resonate? Of course not. How could I? I could choose to not listen to those words—I could choose to plug my ears or run away from the table and put on headphones blasting metalica, but then we just arrived at a different decision that, if we zoomed in, we’d see also just popped up in my consciousness based on my past experiences. And when I thought about whether or not to do it—to run or stay, to listen or plug my ears—I had a process of decision making start to happen, and in that process I weighed my values—I like being viewed as open and friendly, and I hate it when people shut me down, so I’ll listen with an open mind—and I decided to stay. Could I have chose to not value my reputation in that moment? Of course not! Did I choose to value my reputation in the first place? Also of course not—it just happened, and it happened because of the past—who raised me? How? What schooling did I have? What relationships have I experienced in the past? All of it becomes the decision I will make next. 
All this to say 2 things that should bring these strands together. 1. Religious people don’t have any more free will than I do. I can’t choose what I believe anymore than they can. So I don’t hold it against religious people, but 2. They also can’t help when their minds change or when they hear a piece of information on the right day, from the right person, in the right tone of voice, using the right words, and it resonates with them! That’s why I  talk about this so much. It’s not that I hate religious people or think they are evil. I don’t think anyone is evil. I think we are all products of our past, and tomorrow you will view this podcast as something you listened to in the past—something that might change your mind and cause you to make a different choice tomorrow than you otherwise would of. There’s no space for free will in our experience of experience. 
And since I spend a lot of time talking to Christians of all stripes, including Christian Nationalists, lemme just take you to the well on this one, because as exhausting and infuriating as it often is to listen to some people explain their views and defend hate filled positions, I’m a sucker for it—I really want to know what makes these people tick because I really don’t think they have free will. And that means the only way anyone will ever convince them to change their minds is to offer them something that causes them to realize they have been wrong—to give them something that changes their minds—and we can’t do that if we don’t understand why they believe, or at least why they think they believe.
I’ve got this family member—one of many Evangelicals in my circle, this one is a preacher—let’s call him, I dunno, Lanister. Of course he’s not representative of what every Christian or every conservative or every dude thinks, but as you hear how he’s viewing the world right now, and how he’s avoiding accountability at every step, you might see some eerie parallels between him and many an American lately. Two words to remember as I wrap this episode up: accountability and consistency. These are two things large parts of our country seem to have given up on lately, and they are really important. Without them you wind up having two billionaire playboys who have fathered 12 kids with five wives shaping the concept of Christain family values. You’ll wind up with entitled assholes who have received more than 18 billion from the government since 2008 working to cut spending anywhere they can…except for their own handouts. You’d wind up with a name-caller and chief who is far more concerned with his own golden image than in helping struggling citizens get ahead of things. Without consistency and accountability, just about any system of belief or government or business falls apart—it’s eats itself. While the democratic party has abandoned it’s fight for the working class by taking huge donations from mega-doner corporations in exchange for favors, the right has taken unaccountability and inconsistency to a whole new level. 
This is the party of constitutionalists—but Trump has already signed executive orders to cancel portions of the Constitution—the 14th Amendment—he’s repeatedly said he is staying after his term ends, and he tried to overthrow the government on Jan 6. It’s the law and order party, but they have sanctioned the release of everyone who was incarcerated for the Jan 6 attempted coup.  It’s the party of conservative Christian values—but Trump lies like he breathes and insults people like its second nature, plus, you know, the rape and the porn star and the grab em by the pussy and sneaking into the dressing room for Ms. Teen USA, none of it with apologies or accountability…you know, Christian values. And if you’re thinking, “he’s not like that anymore,” how do you know? If someone has made a life change that big—from being a misogynist prick to recognizing their mistakes and wanting to be accountable for them, then you would know because they’d say so—they’d live it out—they’d humbly ask for forgiveness, from you, from their God, from the women they victimized, and Trump has been clear he doesn’t ask for forgiveness, not even from God. 
Consistency just means that your answer to “what should happen to someone who tries to gouge a cops eyes out?” is the same regardless of who that someone is: what faith, what race, what political party, what gender does not matter. And accountability just means building in mechanisms whereby you can’t let yourself get away with violating your own principles, because let’s be honest, in the 2020s, it’s super easy to violate your own principles. And again, it’s not just Trump—he’s just a pimple that’s popping to the surface as a sign of what’s going on underneath. It’s our entire culture.
I mean, back to the lefties here, the Super Bowl halftime show this year featured a 5 grammy winning song that is packed with about every ism you can image—every ism you’d vocally condemn if I asked you directly: Do you support tribalism—looking at your in group as superior to others? the name of the song is “Aint Like Us,” do you celebrate colorism and racism: Kendrick says that Drake isn’t black enough to be black, do you enjoy sexism and misogyny: Christ, not just all the bitches and hoes used to insult men by suggesting they are bad women—reminder that those are misogynistic terms, men—but one of his biggest disses of Drake is where he gets the crowd to chant along with him that Drake is 69 God, because I guess men are less manly if they perform oral sex on women, right?  How about violence—do you endorse that? Fake news? Do you support and spread unverified claims made my sketchy media outlets, like music videos? 
I’m rambling, and probably pissing a lot of Kendrick fans off, but real talk—as you celebrate, laugh at, cheer and chant these words in front of your kids and friends, what sort of world are you trying to build? My point is that you would never admit the sort of world you are building by celebrating and rewarding those messages of violence, misogyny and insulting lies, yet most of us do it at various points in our lives anyway because humans kinda enjoy being super immoral—we violate our own principles all the time if we aren’t careful. We literally build belief systems to make it easier. So if you get pissed off at the hard core Trumpsters when they say something that sounds transphobic or anti-constitution—or a Lanaster in a minute, remember they are just humans too.
Ahhhh, what was I talking about before the Kendrick slip? Oh! Trump! BTW, when I was young, it was Hit Em UP by Tupac, so I get it—beef rap feeds something deep inside humans—the same thing football or UFC feeds in some people. Anyway, when Trump pardoned everyone who committed crimes on Jan 6—everyone, from the guy who beat a cop with a flagpole and then tried to gouge his eyes out to the guy who helped that woman break through the final barricade where she was shot to death to the guys beating up cops and smashing in the Capitol windows screaming “hang mike pence”—when he did that, he did something that, in the minds of people like Lanny, would have been unthinkable if the story had been switched and Antifa had raided the capital trying to Hang JD Vance. Same with the recent mass firings—Trump recently ordered the justice department to fire every US attorney appointed Biden. Imagine if Biden had shown up and immediately fired everyone in a department hired by Trump. I’d have been against it, just like I’m against this move by Trump. That’s consistency
So Lanny says these people shouldn’t be in prison—let em go—and my immediate thought is “bro, you’re a white dude who has lived in a country where, for your entire life—60 years plus—poor people and black people have been railroaded by the justice system, given overworked, shitty attorneys and oversentenced, then abandoned to prison.” As a preacher, I’ve actually been trying to talk to him about this for years, but he hasn’t been interested—sometimes he has even actually acted as if this disparity isn’t a thing, or at least not a very common thing despite the statistics. And that’s pretty common in white churches, at least when it’s those folks over there—the poor or black or muslim people across town. But now that it’s 1500 violent assholes who are the church’s friends, he’s interested. And of course, these 1500 Confederates had donations pouring in that hired some of them the best attorneys in the world. Poor people get shit when they are arrested. To look at the criminal justice system and see a problem is great. But to only want it fixed when it comes to your friends is shitty—it’s the sort of immorality inconsistent morality encourages. 
Now here’s the thing, if your what the fuck radar is going off. I don’t think they should be in prison either. I don’t think anyone should be in prison—at least not as prisons are currently designed. But I do think people who are an active threat to a community’s safety should be prevented from hurting other people, and while they are being prevented—detained—restrained—the efforts of the restrainers—us, the State, whatever—should be focused on making sure that person is no longer a threat to society if at all possible. I mean, it costs upwards of 50-100k to incarcerate some people in the US, and it would be nice if more of them were out here instead, helping the rest of us pay that bill, right? So if we are going to pay big bucks to lock them up, it should reasonably only be to protect society and do whatever we can to reintegrate the rule-breaker back into society. 
If you’re thinking—What about punishment?!? What about retribution? Revenge? This person hurt my daughter!!” I’ll get to that, I promise—but since free will is not a coherent concept, the idea of punishing someone because of what happened to them in the past is as silly as punishing a tornado after it blows grannie’s house away. It only blew through grannie’s house because of what happened to it before, from 1 second before to 1 hour before, to days before, when it was just a little baby low pressure system hanging out over Denver. Letting go of the bizarre notion of free will causes an immediate reframing of justice. As soon as we see badly programmed people the same as badly programmed computers, you strategize for how to fix the problem in a completely different way. No one wants to punish their refrigerator when it breaks; but we do want to fix it. 
So to wrap up the convo with Lann-Dog, here’s the basics on how his political and moral decision making process works—basics that sound a lot like the US right now, and particularly like a lot of churches across the country—I’ve had this or similar conversations with dozens of Christians during the last year. 
First, he prides himself on not listening to any organization or reporter who holds different religious views than him, period. Yes, that’s right, he deliberately locks himself in what most of us would call an echo chamber. He also doesn’t listen to anyone who doesn’t report what he already believes to be true, so that means that when MSNBC or the Associated Press say something he doesn’t like—something that might trigger that little moral itch that tells him, “Lanny, my guy, we might want to change our mind about this. I think we weren’t entirely correct” he can reply, “nah, fake news.” And maybe the biggest whopper of all, he only believes what he decides to believe, not what he’s been convinced of, so don’t bother trying to share facts or new studies—that’s not how he goes about navigating the world. He just decides what suits him—what is most beneficial to believe for him—and then pretends to believe it until it really sticks, although he didn’t admit that—he actually insisted he can literally choose what to believe and then believe it. Not pretend to believe it; believe it. 
No surprise, he wound up a hard core citizen of Trumpistan who is full heartedly buying into the Christian angle—that Trump was appointed by God to reshape this country into a Christian fascist state—in the past he’s actually also said to me that fascism wouldn’t be bad as long as it was fascism for Christ—yuck.  If you’ve been struggling with people in your life who seem to have drunk the koolaid so to speak, this might all sound familiar. It’s more than just the church, but the taproots are clearly drawing from the reservoir of religious double standarism. 
Now, what the fuck does any of this have to do with how we punish people who commit crimes? Well, I think this pastor friend of mine—and a lot of other people who seem to be blaming their nasty behavior on God or politics or capitalism or their neighbor—that they have some bad programming that they would do better to notice, acknowledge and update. But they also can’t do that if they don’t ever have that thing—whatever it is—that comes along and gets through to them, touches them, makes them reconsider, sparks their spirit to say, “oooohhhh, maybe I’ve been being a real dick!.” And that’s what prison should be. 
Take a second right now to think about the worst punishment possible—the most awful way to punish someone for a long time—maybe the rest of their life. This has been a weird episode where I’ve asked y’all to do evil thought experiments a lot more often than normal—but you might think of daily whippings, burnings, dismemberment, starvation, or some other physical torture. But imagine if instead of all that, the person who commits a crime actually has the severity of their actions—the ones that landed them in prison—fully weighing them down and pressing their spirit into the dirt. What if every day, the person who stole your stereo or killed your friend woke up—if they slept at all—overcome by grief and guilt, and compelled to do anything they can for the rest of their life to try to make up for some of the damage they have done? Imagine they are inconsolable—that even after you tell them that you forgive them they feel compelled to keep giving back anyway, and they still wake up feeling guilty about it every day. Imagine that. Talk about punishment—it would be inescapable, permanent, and it would come to bear on every single element of one’s life from then on out. 
That’s what I envision the justice system of the future doing—although I’m being hyperbolic in the amount of guilt most people will probably struggle with. When someone has committed a crime and hurt someone else, don’t we really want them to feel bad about it? To want to make it right? To do whatever they can to prevent others from making the same mistake in the future? And let’s be honest, when we see someone bloodlusting after revenge against the person who hurt their loved ones, even though we completely understand, don’t we feel somewhat disgusted by that unavoidable piece of human nature—our desire to feed of the pain and suffering of certain others? A society built on the principles of redemption and reintegration sounds so much better than the one we currently live in, built on the promise of “if you hurt someone else, we will all get together and hurt you longer and worse than you hurt them.” 
That’s what prison could be. It could be designed to create real accountability, not just “we will torture you for X years if you do this crime.” And this is what I hope to see happen someday in this family member—not prison or anything, but the same result—redemption, although honestly I don’t actually think it will happen in this case. It’s weird, you know—I know a lot of adamantly racist people, transphobic assholes who have literally told me in the last couple weeks that trans people are trying to destroy our kids and that there are places in the US where they are teaching children that quote anything goes sexually—super hateful jerks, mean people who will tell me that I deserve to burn in hell for all eternity and not bat an eye—and they are all religious people who don’t seem to notice they are being so awful, even when someone tells them. They say incredibly awful things about their god without noticing, and when I point it out they don’t care: they lie about him, or they tell stories that paint him as an immoral jerk who gives them an extra mile of gasoline to make it to the gas station where they pray for the homeless guy panhandling outside—the guy who god was too busy to miracle because he was sliding you a few ounces of gasoline. They use their religion to prevent the moral itch from being felt, and even though I think there is still hope for most of them, at least a little bit of it, eventually that switch gets scarred over, corroded shut, rusted solid—eventually the change becomes permanent. That’s the feeling I get with this family member lately, yet I still keep engaging because who knows, maybe I’m wrong. And boy would it feel fulfilling to hear them admit it one day while fully confronting the damage they’ve done in the world and the guilt they have to work through. I mean, I used to be a bigot who blamed it on Jesus, and I slowly realized I was doing major damage to human lives, and I made a sincere, ongoing effort to change that, so I know it’s possible. Same as with the prison redesign, I think the way we treat offenders—murderers, rapists, transphobic assholes, religious fascists—that it can either push them farther away or bring them back into the fold. I prefer we get everyone into the fold.
Thanks for listening to this ramble-fest. It was underscripted and over annoyed, but hopefully something in there resonated with you. If you or someone you know is or has been a Kratom user, reach out and share your story. I’m planning an episode soon about the Kratom Wars, and as someone who has used it a lot and found a successful tool for my recovery, I’m worried that some states, and maybe even the federal government, will do what they’ve always done and pass laws that make the addiction issues in our country worse. Keep an eye out for that episode soon. In the meantime…