“When Kath and her boyfriend arrive at a remote cabin, they find a mysterious young couple already there. But when her boyfriend disappears with the young woman, Kath becomes obsessed with finding an explanation with the help of an unlikely supporter.”
I checked this 2022 film out of the library so I’d have something to watch while knitting in the evening. I like Winona Ryder, although her character in this film is very different from the beloved Joyce of Stranger Things. As you can see from this cover, she doesn’t look at all like the same person.
This is a mystery/thriller. I won’t give away the plot, except to say that it is disturbing. Instead, I want to talk about the movie’s theme: aging and the way our culture fears it.
Gone does a fabulous job of working the theme into almost every scene. (And, now that I think about it, it’s even arguably present in the title … you wake up and your youth has “gone in the night.”) Some things are very subtle: for example, when the boyfriend (I think his name is Max) gets out of the car to retrieve his hat, the camera lingers on Kath, sitting in the driver’s seat. She opens the mirror on the sun visor and looks at her reflection, then wrinkles her forehead and touches the lines there.
Max is having a beer with a young couple. The woman is flirting with him. She asks how old he is, and he jokingly replies, “Fifty.”
“Fifty? You look good for fifty,” she responds. “You look like you work out.”
“Oh, God, no, I was kidding! I’m not fifty!”
In fact, Kath and Max are both probably closing on 40, or perhaps in their early 40s. They don’t have grey hair or use a walker. They are not old enough to be grandparents. They are middle-aged. Kath seems OK with this. She would be happy to live with “my books, my plants, and have it quiet … forever.” Max, on the other hand, seems to be trying to cling to lost youth. He wants to go to raves and concerts, hike up mountains, and do all the things done by adrenaline junkies in their 20s. He and Kath, since they are not married and don’t have children, are still sort of trying to live in youth culture, but they keep getting messages that they don’t belong.
“How long have you been married?” the twenty-something woman asks Kath.
“What makes you think Max and I are married?”
“Oh! It’s just that people like you are usually either married or alone.”
“What do you mean, ‘people like me’?”
Awkward silence.
In another scene, Kath is following someone. The person leads her to what appears to be a rave happening in an old warehouse. Kath says to bouncer, “I need to get in for a minute. I can pay whatever.”
The bouncer, who is eating a snack, eyes her up and down and then says through a mouthful of food, “Dyahavakidinere or somethin’?”
“What?”
With an eye roll, he clears his mouth, and then articulates very clearly, “Do – you – have – a – kid – in – there?”
Fear of aging – and ultimately, of death – ends up being highly relevant to the plot of Gone. And, really, unless you happen to be a Christian with the certain hope of the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, how could you not fear it? As Kath says, in a memorable line, “We are all scared.”
The second I sat down across from him, he said, “So, Poetry Boy, here you are. And you’ll be awestruck to learn that with a single glance through the glassy surface of your idiot gaze, I can see straight into the black heart of nothingness that is your godless and therefore soulless experience of this our only mortal life. And on that evidence of my own senses, I feel safe in saying you have now become morally dead in the service of your country and are therefore ready for your next government assignment.”
“Uh .. thank you?” I asked.
The House of Love and Death, by Andrew Klavan, pp. 4 -5
It’s an older Asian couple taking each other’s picture in front of a teepee, in Yellowstone.
I also saw a Pakistani family doing the same thing, which was also super cute.
I can’t remember who it was, but one commentator I listen to pointed out, in response to the move to take American Indians out of team names and products, that American Indians are famous all over the world.
Anyway, I’m here at Yellowstone with the fam and it’s very international here. Languages I heard in the space of a few hours:
Hindi (? – pretty sure)
German
Mandarin
Korean
Spanish
British English
They all came to see Old Faithful, the geyser. Even more faithful than old faithful were the people. We all came at the time it was predicted to blow. We all sat quietly, as if at church, except that occasionally someone would say, “It’s starting! It’s starting!” – and it would be a false alarm.
When Old Faithful did demonstrate its power once again, we all raised our phones in unison, and faithfully recorded it.
The human kindness continued the next day at this lookout point (veiwing Grand Teton peak), reachable by tram from Teton Village. 10,450 feet in the air, we faithfully offered to take each other’s family photos in front of the panorama, exchanging phones and then giving them back.
Human beings can be faithful, and kind, for a couple of days while on vacation.
The One who made the mountains is faithful forever.
Here I am, using my color vision to spot the ripest raspberries in the thicket. Darker ones are ready. I can distinguish fine grades of color.
Then, I use my specially designed opposable thumbs to pick the ripest raspberries. My fingers have been given the ability to sense, and calibrate their grip for, the finest gradations of pressure. This allows me to pull each berry off its core without squishing it. Most of the time.
The raspberries, for their part, have been specially designed to be picked and eaten by me. Every year, they produce a ridiculous bumper crop. “Pick us!” they groan. They have been given thorns, of course, but these are at best a halfhearted attempt to fight back. All I need to do is put on a long-sleeved shirt, and the prospect of a nasty scratch is no match for the motivation furnished by the berries’ taste.
The raspberry bushes are very good at surplus. They produce far more berries than I can realistically pick, and they hide them where I will never find them all.
They taste sweet-tart. They provide fiber and Vitamin C and I don’t know what all. They look so pretty paired with yogurt and oatmeal on a summer morning.
This morning while I was deep in the raspberry patch, my son picked up one of our chickens and at that moment she laid, the egg dropping from his arms to the ground. It didn’t break. Food was literally falling from the sky.
When one is trying to get into a house, one seeks openness. One pushes to open its door. So when the gods were seeking to get into the American house and that of Western civilization, the focus was on openness and tolerance. It was never really about either.
The Return of the Gods, by Jonathan Cahn, p. 219
The above book qualifies as my most mind-blowing read of the year so far (as well as I can remember). I’ll work on a review to have up by Friday.
In the meantime, the primary domain of this here Out of Babel blog is now outofbabelbooks.com (note that I have also updated the name on the banner). If you are here, congratulations, you found it!
The old url, outofbabel.com, is still in the process of being transferred to another user. Apparently, this can take a while. When the transfer is complete (perhaps by next week?), the address outofbabel dot com will no longer be associated with me in any way. At that point, some of you may see your shortcuts to my blog stop working. I don’t know. If that happens, keep calm and create a shortcut to outofbabelbooks dot com. Thank you.
“You read people’s books, and you think you know them. They’re having a conversation with you for hundreds of pages, and there’s an intimacy there that you develop on your own. I really loved Henry McTavish. And then I got here, and the drinking, the excess, the look in his eyes as he handed me the key … Maybe now I think my picture of him was wrong.”
-Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone on this Train is a Suspect, p. 155
Sorry, folks. Life has continued to be busy. So this weekend, I’m re-posting another one of my most-often-viewed essays for your edification.
Discovering the Extent of the Problem
I learned the word Hermeticism recently.
Here’s an extended simile of what my experience was like in doing a deep dive on this word.
Imagine that your drain keeps backing up. You take a look, and discover a root. You have to find at what point the roots are coming into the pipe, so you do the roto-rooter thing. It turns out that the roots are running through the pipe all the way down to the street and across the street and into the vacant lot, where there is a huge tree.
And oh, look, it’s already pulled down the neighbor’s house!
That’s what it was like. (Oh, no! It’s in my George MacDonald pipe too!)
What Methought I Knew
I’ve listened to a number of James Lindsay podcasts, and he talks a lot about Hegel. In discussing what exactly went wrong with the train wreck that is modern education and politics, James has to dive deep into quite a few unpleasant philosophers, among them Herbert Marcuse, Jaques Derrida, Paolo Friere, and the postmodernists. And Hegel.
I had heard James describe before how Hegel saw the world. Hegel had this idea that progress is reached by opposite things colliding and out of them comes a new synthesis, and then that synthesis has to collide with its opposite and so on until perfection is reached. This process is called the dialectic. Marx took these ideas and applied them to society, where there has to be conflict and revolution, but then the new society that emerges isn’t perfect yet and so there has to be another revolution and so on until everything is perfect and/or everyone is dead.
Obviously I am simplifying a lot. James can talk about this stuff for an hour and he is simplifying too, not because these ideas are themselves complicated but because Hegel produced a huge dump of words, and he came up with terminology that tried to combine his ideas with Christian concepts so that they would be accepted in his era. Anyway, the word dialectic is still used by postmodern writers like Kimberle Crenshaw, and it is a clue that they think constant revolution is the way to bring about utopia.
So, I was familiar with Hegel through the podcasts of Lindsay, and I was also familiar enough with Gnostic thought to at least recognize it when it goes by, as it so often does. For one thing, you kind of have to learn a little bit about Gnosticism if you are a serious Christian, because gnostic (or at least pre-gnostic: Platonic, mystery religion) ideas were very much in the air in New Testament times, and many of the letters of the New Testament were written to refute these ideas. Also, Gnosticism, particularly the mind/body duality, has had such an influence on our culture that it’s hard to miss. It’s present in New Age and neopagan thought, and it’s called out in Nancy Pearcey’s book Love Thy Bodyfor the bad effects it has had on the way we conceive of personhood.
So that’s the background.
Several months ago, I was listening to Lindsay give a talk summarizing his recent research to a church group. He was talking about theologies: systems of thought that make metaphysical and cosmological claims, and come with moral imperatives. And he dashed off this summary, something like the following:
“You could have a theology where at first all that exists is God, but He doesn’t know Himself as God, so in order to know Himself he creates all these other beings, and they are all like pieces of God but they don’t know it, and their task is to become enlightened and realize that they, too, are God, and when they realize this, eventually they will all come back together, but now God is self-conscious because of the process of breaking He’s been through.”
And I’m thinking, Sounds like Pantheism, or maybe Gnosticism.
And James says, “That’s the Hermetic theology.”
And I’ve got a new word to research.
Kind of a Weird Name
So, why is it called Hermeticism? Does it have to do with hermits?
My first foray into Internet Hermeticism immediately showed that the school of thought was named for a guy named Hermes, as in this paragraph from wiki:
Hermeticism, or Hermetism, is a label used to designate a philosophical system that is primarily based on the purported teachings of Hermes Trismegistus (a legendary Hellenistic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth).[1] These teachings are contained in the various writings attributed to Hermes (the Hermetica), which were produced over a period spanning many centuries (c. 300 BCE – 1200 CE), and may be very different in content and scope.[2]
One of my search hits, I can’t remember which one, said that Hermeticism is “often confused with Gnosticism.” O.K., so if it’s not Gnosticism, that means I know less than I thought and it’s all the more reason to research.
I also found avowedly Hermetic web sites like Hermetic World, whose “summary” is actually more of an attempt to draw you into their movement:
Hermeticism – The secret knowledge
Hermeticism is an ancient secret doctrine that dates back to early Egypt and its innermost knowledge has always been passed on only orally. In each generation there have been some faithful souls in different countries of the world who received the light, carefully cultivated it and did not allow it to be extinguished. Thanks to these strong hearts, these fearless spirits, truth has not been lost. It was always passed on from master to disciple, from adept to neophyte from mouth to ear. The terms “hermetically sealed”, “hermetically locked”, and so on, derive from this tradition and indicate that the general public does not have access to these teachings.
Hermeticism is a key that gives people the possibility to achieve everything they desire deep in their hearts, to develop a profound understanding of life, to become capable of decision making and responsibility; and to answer the question of meaning. Hermeticism offers a hidden key to unfolding.
Nobody can teach this knowledge to himself. Even in competent books like Kybalion, the teaching is only passed on in a veiled way. It always requires a master to pass on the wisdom to the able student. Today, as in the past, authentic mystery schools are a way to acquire this knowledge. The Hermetic Academy is one of these authentic schools.
This is certainly the genuine article, but it is perhaps not the first place to go. I wanted to learn about the basic doctrines from a neutral source, simply and clearly described. I didn’t want to have to wade through a bunch of hand-waving to get there, at least not at first. Still, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that Hermetic World tries to cast a mysterious, esoteric, yet somewhat self-help-y atmosphere on their first page. After all, it is a mystery religion.
Well, at least now I know why it’s called Hermeticism. It’s basically an accident of history, due to the name of the guy to whom the founding writings were attributed.
Time to move on to a book.
Moving On to a Book
I am fortunate to be descended from a scholar who has a large personal library, heavy on the theology.
I asked my dad.
Serendipitiously, he had just finished reading Michael J. McClymond’s two-volume history of Christian universalism (the doctrine that everyone is going to heaven), and he remembered that Hermeticism entered into the discussion. He was happy to lend it to me. You can see all the places I’ve marked with tabs. Those are just the ones where Hermeticism is directly mentioned. I hope you now understand my dilemma.
In McClymond’s Appendix A: Gnosis and Western Esotericism: Definitions and Lineages, I found at last the succinct, neutral summary I was looking for:
[“Hermetism”] as used by academics refers to persons, texts, ideas, and practices that are directly linked to the Corpus Hermeticum, a relatively small body of texts that appeared most likely in Egypt during the second or third centuries CE. … “Hermeticism” is often used in a wider way to refer to the general style of thinking that one finds in the Corpus Hermeticum and other works of ancient gnosis, alchemy, Kabbalah, and so forth. “Hermeticism” sometimes functions as a synonym for “esotericism.” The adjective “Hermetic” is ambiguous, since it can refer either to “Hermetism” or “Hermeticism.”
McClymond, p. 1072
O.K.
So it isn’t that different from Gnosticism after all.
“Esoteric,” by the way, means an emphasis on hidden or mystical knowledge that is not available to everyone and/or cannot be reduced to words and propositions. “Exoteric” refers to the style of theology that puts emphasis on knowledge that is public in the sense that it is written down somewhere, asserts something concrete, can be debated, etc.
Even though I have literally just found an actual definition of the word that is clear enough to put into a blog post, in the time it took me to find this definition I feel that I have already gotten a pretty good sense of what this philosophy is like. Perhaps it helps that it has pervaded many, many aspects of our culture, so I have encountered it many times before, as no doubt have you.
I began to peruse the tabs in the volumes above and read the sections there, in all their awful glory.
Yep, James Lindsay in fact did a pretty good job of explaining the core metaphysic of Hermeticism. Of course, this philosophy brings a lot of things with it that he didn’t get into. If we and all beings in the universe are all made of the same spiritual stuff as God Himself, it follows that alchemy should work (getting spiritual results with physical processes and the other way round). It follows that astrology should work (everything is connected, and the stars and men and the gods not only all influence each other, but when you get down to it are actually the same thing). It follows that reincarnation should be a thing (the body is just a shell or an illusion that is occupied by the spirit, the spark of God). It follows that there are many paths to God, since we are all manifestations of God and will all eventually return to Him/It. It follows that the body is not that important (in some versions of this philosophy, matter is actually evil). Therefore we should be able to physically heal ourselves with our minds. Our personhood should be unconnected to (some might say unfettered by) our body, such that we can be born in the wrong body, or we can change our sex or our species if we want to. There might also be bodies that don’t have souls yet (such as unborn babies), and so it would be no wrong to destroy them. Also, since matter is not really a real thing, it follows that Jesus was not really incarnated in a real human body and that He only appeared to do things like sleep, eat, suffer, and die. Also, since we are all parts of God like He is, He is not really one with God in any sense that is unique, but just more of an example of a really enlightened person who realized just how one with God He was.
I imagine that about twenty pop culture bells have gone off in your mind as you read that preceding paragraph. You might also have been reminded of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, which teaches that we were all pre-existent souls literally fathered by God out of some sort of spiritual matter before we came to earth to be born.
So, What the Heck Is It?
Hermeticism is not just one thing. It’s a whole human tradition of thought. It had a lot of streams flowing into it, like Plato, first-century mystery religions, Gnosticism, and early attempts to reconcile Christianity with these things. It has a lot of streams flowing out of it, like many Christian mystics of varying degrees of Christian-ness; Origen; Bohme; Hegel; medieval and Renaissance alchemy; the Romantic literary movement; Mormonism; New Age thinking; identity politics; transhumanism; Shirley McLaine; The Secret, and the movie Phenomenon.
Not all of these thinkers hold to the exact same set of doctrines. In a big philosophical movement like this, almost every serious thinker is going to have his or her own specific formulation that differs from everyone else’s in ways that seem really important to people on the inside of the system. So anyone who is an insider or who has made it their life’s work to research any of the things I mention above (and many others besides) could come along and point out errors or overgeneralizations in this article and make me look like I don’t know anything. That’s partly because it’s a huge historical phenomenon and I actually don’t know much of all there is to know. It’s also partly because these mystery religions delight in making things complicated. They love to add rituals and symbols and secret names and to discover new additional deities that are personifications of abstract ideas like Wisdom. It’s supposed to be esoteric. That’s part of the fun.
Another reason it’s difficult to describe Hermeticism accurately is that when all is one, it is really difficult to talk about anything. In this view of the world, when you get right down to it there is no distinction between spirit and matter, creator and creature, man and woman, conscious and inanimate, and the list goes on. I called it Hermeticism at the beginning of this paragraph, but I was tempted to write Hermeticism/Gnosticism, or perhaps Hermeticism/Gnosticism/alchemy/mystery religions/the New Age/Pantheism/postmodernism. If you’ve ever read any New Age writers, you’ll notice that they tend to write important terms with slashes like that (“Sophia/the divine feminine”). That’s because it’s all one. They don’t want you to forget that. They don’t want to forget it. Even if these ideas do not go very well with the human mind, and they tend to break it if you keep trying to think them.
In a sense, Hermeticism and all these other related movements are very diverse and not the same at all. In another sense, it’s all … the same … crap.
It is not demonstrably unchristian to kill the rich as violators of definable justice. It is not demonstrably unchristian to crown the rich as convenient rulers of society. It is not certainly unchristian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite certainly unchristian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, chapter 7: The Eternal Revolution
Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honorable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears.
Sadly, sadly, the sun rose.
A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Ch. V, “The Jackal”
I picked this up in the new-to-us section of the public library. This is a really well-chosen title, really lets you know what you are getting.
From the back:
If you’re struggling to stay on top of your to-do list, you probably have a good reason: anxiety, fatigue, depression, ADHD, or lack of support. For therapist KC Davis, the birth of her second child triggered a stress-mess cycle: the more behind she felt, the less motivated she was to start. …
Inside, you’ll learn to: See chores as a kindness to your future self, not a as rejection of your self-worth; Start by setting priorities; Stagger tasks so you won’t procrastinate; Clean in quick bursts within your existing daily routines; Use creative shortcuts to transform a room from messy to functional.
With KC’s help, your home will feel like a sanctuary again. It will become a place to rest, even when things aren’t finished.
I really wish that I had written this book, or that it had been written by Allie Beth Stuckey. This book, or a version of it, needs to be written by someone who understands human sin nature, grace, and the freedom that is found in Christ Jesus. It’s so, so close, but because of the author’s wokeness, there are jarring notes.
The Practical
To some, this book might sound as if it was written by a sloppy, disorganized person, to sloppy, disorganized people, to help them justify their sloppiness. On the contrary, it was written by a naturally distractible person, to distractible people, to help them achieve the level of organization that they actually want to, without letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.
KC went through rehab as a teenager. She has ADHD, is married with two small children, and is a therapist, which means that people talk to her about their frustrations with themselves and their inability to get their houses in order.
Consequently, the intended audience for this book is people who are responsible for keeping house, but have some major obstacle such as chronic pain, being in the midst of grieving, ADHD, depression, or having “issues” around cleaning due to the way they were raised … or all of the above. The goal is to help these people develop strategies to get over the mental (and sometimes physical) blocks so they can maintain their houses in basic livability. And I am there for it!
People in these situations might not have the time, energy, or attention span for a long book, so this little gem is written in short chapters, each of which gets right to the point. To accommodate people who might be very literal-minded (such as those on the autism spectrum), KC re-states all figurative language very literally. For example: “We are going to flex our motivation muscle” becomes “We are going to practice this skill until we get good at it.”
While I don’t believe that ADHD is a literal, physical brain disease, nor that it should be treated with drugs, I do believe that what we call ADHD is a good description of how some people’s minds, bodies, and sensory-processing work. And while I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD (and have no desire to), their descriptions of how their minds work, and the strategies they use to get things done, usually sound so familiar and relatable that I find myself asking, “Doesn’t everyone experience that?” So, I could probably get a diagnosis if I wanted to. I just don’t think it would help me. I’m an older person and I’ve learned how to set up systems that work for me.
With that in mind, many of the aphorisms and strategies that KC presents here, are ones that I’ve come to myself, over years of keeping house, in season and out of season, through small children, international moves, unemployment, depression, the lot. Things like this:
“I have a responsibility to make sure my family always have clean clothes. I don’t have a responsibility to make sure that they never have dirty clothes.”
Any cleaning is better than no cleaning.
Better a less efficient method or system that you can actually do, than a perfect system that never gets done.
Doing “closing chores” the night before is a favor to your future self.
Most people don’t have a motivation problem (since they do actually want to be able to do the task and enjoy the clean result). Instead, they have a task-initiation problem.
And the like.
The Spiritual
Of course, there is not a firm frontier between the practical and the spiritual in our everyday lives. As Solzhenitsyn has said, the line between good and evil runs “through every human heart.” Which means that, even as we face mundane choices like do I do the dishes, the laundry, or take a nap, we are interacting with issues of bondage to sin versus freedom, and grace versus shame. So it’s not really possible to talk about practical things like task initiation without also addressing the spiritual.
KC does a pretty good job of this in her book. She starts out by saying (page 11), and this is in bold, “Care tasks are morally neutral. Being good or bad at them has nothing to do with being a good person, parent, man, woman, spouse, friend. Literally nothing. You are not a failure because you can’t keep up with laundry. Laundry is morally neutral.”
Now, since I can hear howls of objection, let me address this. What she is trying to express here, is that shame does not energize people. It paralyzes them.
Yes, moms do have a duty to keep on top of the laundry cycle and yes, (contra KC Davis), there IS such a thing as laziness, and laziness IS sinful.
But when it comes to “care tasks,” many people (most people?) grew up being shamed not for character flaws such as laziness, but for lack of technical skills in the tasks, for not doing them up to an adult’s standard, for not doing them perfectly, or for not knowing where to start. Consequently, many (most?) people have a huge burden of shame and failure around household tasks. And this burden of shame, and this perfectionism, makes it much, much more difficult to get these tasks accomplished (or in some cases even started). See? KC is not saying, “Let’s get rid of the shame because it is 100% OK to never clean your kitchen.” She is saying, “Let’s get rid of the shame associated with these tasks because only then will you be able to do them.”
In other words, KC in her self-examination and her work as a therapist has stumbled upon that biblical truth: “the law kills, but the Spirit gives life.” The only people who are free to act and move in this world are those who are not paralyzed by shame.
It’s at this point that I wish this book had been written by a Christian, because this point really deserves to be developed further. How does one set others free from shame? Certainly, if people have indeed been shamed over things that are morally neutral (such as being slow at doing chores, or doing the dishes a different way than your parent), then this needs to be clarified. But this is not enough, because not all our shame is spurious. We actually are sinners, and we actually do know it. It is not enough to say, as KC says, “I don’t think there is any such thing as laziness.” Even when we have gotten rid of the spurious shame over morally neutral things like being naturally untidy, even if your particular client is not actually lazy … what about the other shame? What are we going to do about that?
In other words, the only way that people can truly be set free from shame is when they turn to Jesus, the living Christ, who alone has the power to free us from shame, so that we can “do the good works that He prepared in advance for us to do.” I think Allie Beth Stuckey could do a lot with this. In fact, I’d love it if she were to have KC Davis on her podcast.
But then, she proceeds to shoot herself in the foot
The other problem I have with this book is as follows. For the most part, KC does a great job of being gentle with her readers and treating them like responsible human beings. But every so often, she turns around and sucker-punches them with identity politics.
Many self-help gurus overattribute their success to their own hard work without any regard to the physical, mental, or economic privileges they hold. You can see this when a thin, white, rich self-help influencer posts “Choose Joy” on her Instagram with a caption that tells us all joy is a choice. Her belief that the decision to be a positive person was the key to her joyful life reveals she really does not grasp just how much of her success is due to privileges beyond her control.
pp. 14 – 16
It’s hard to know where to start with this paragraph. Does KC really think that a “thin, rich, white influencer” posts “Choose Joy” because she is already joyful? That such people have no insecurities or struggles? That all that is necessary for joy is having circumstances line up in your life such that you avoid three major conditions which the Identity Crowd considers to be disadvantages? This is so dehumanizing as to beggar belief.
I’m not saying “Choose Joy” is advice that would be helpful to anyone, really, but I at least recognize that most people who say things like “Choose Joy” obviously mean “Choose joy in spite of all the awful things that are happening in your life.” If people are happy, at peace, and free from shame or struggle, they don’t go around saying stuff like “choose joy.” And based on the practical wisdom in the rest of her book, I think KC actually knows this. But, blinded by identity politics, she considers it OK to lay aside what she knows and take a swipe at some of her readers in a misguided attempt to build up others of her readers. Unfortunately, this undercuts her message that she doesn’t want to shame anyone. You see, this book is not for you if you are rich, thin, or especially, white. And as we know, those always go together.
In the very next paragraph, KC says what she was actually trying to say, but in a much more sane and humane way, namely that different things work for different people:
Different people struggle differently — and privilege isn’t the only difference. Someone might find a way to meal plan, or exercise, or organize their pantry that revolutionizes their life. But the solutions that work for them are highly dependent on only their unique barriers but also their strengths, personality, and interests.
p. 16
Really, that paragraph would have been sufficient, excepting the word privilege. I do wish people would stop using the word privilege — which is a legal term — when what they actually mean is “advantage.” But that’s a rant for another day.
