We don’t often hear the word POLYMATH, probably because there aren’t very many. It’s the perfect way to describe Peter Rollins, though. He’s that rare person who can deftly weave a huge range of ideas to help us think through big, complex issues. Also… bonus! Peter Rollins is a hell of a hang. Integrating psychology, history, theology, philosophy, and the X factor of the Irish storyteller, Peter Rollins provides us with his singular view on human nature. We found many moments during post-production where we replayed sections over and over to savor what Peter shared - we think you will, too. Tell Me Something True is a 100% independent podcast. There are no corporations or advertisers backing this community. We are 100% funded by the TMST community. Peter’s site: https://peterrollins.com/ Support TMST and keep it ad-free: https://tmst.supercast.com/ Join our free on-line community (it’s NOT a Facebook group!): https://www.tmstpod.com/
Tell Me Something True
Peter Rollins and The Happiness Paradox
Laura McKowen: [00:00:00] Hey, Laura, here, there are some people we meet in life who have a true knack for shifting our perspective to help us make connections. We just would never make on our own, or they're just the very best Tang today. I'm going to introduce you to someone who has all three. I discovered Peter Rollins a few years ago.
[00:00:24] He's a polymath from Belfast. Think of Peter as your friend from Ireland who asks all the best questions about faith and psychology and belonging. A few years back, I attended a festival he produced called Spark. It's this unbelievable blend of radical theological exploration, plus arts and music and magic and comedy and hours of talks and lovely tours of Belfast.
[00:00:53] It's just you and a bunch of other misfits from all over the world for five incredible days. I actually wrote a couple of chapters of my first book while I was there. All right. So coming up, I want you to listen for Peter's encouragement to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. He swears we'll be fine if we stop believing we can eliminate doubt and anxiety. Embracing that liminal space of not knowing is one of our greatest freedoms. And Peter has a lot to offer anyone who's up for freedom.
[00:01:32] Enjoy.
[00:01:40] I listened to one of your talks from last year about, I don't know the official title, but it was basically an argument against happiness
Peter Rollins: [00:01:46] My typical cheery self.
Laura McKowen: [00:01:48] Your cheery Christmas talk. But I have similar inclinations on the topic of happiness and I often have written about it. I call it thin milk.
[00:01:58] It's not really what we want actually, but what I have been able to tell from my own experience is that in a very basic sense, what we really want is meaning and meaning comes, in my experience also from a little bit of struggle, maybe a lot of struggle struggling against something. I've heard you talk a lot about a lot of things, but not about this topic.
[00:02:18] And so when you started talking, it provided this whole other framework for thinking about this after more than a year of a pandemic with all this loss and grief and. Everything that's happened going against happiness or making an argument against happiness seems like kind of crappy thing to say in a way.
Peter Rollins: [00:02:39] Yes.
Laura McKowen: [00:02:40] You said in psycho analysis, there is a price to pay for happiness, the fundamental compromise, and that the more happiness pervades one's life, the more that individual becomes a stranger from their unspeakable passion. So can you talk about that?
]Peter Rollins: [00:02:56] You know, a lot of the fantasy we have as human beings is we want to struggle against struggle, we want to get to a point where we can be everything we want to be and have everything we want to have.
[00:03:07] And the difficulty is when we don't get what we want, we can be depressed. There's a certain on happiness with not getting what you want. But the other thing, which is a little bit less new, and as there's a strange type of unhappiness with getting what you want, if you, if all your dreams are fulfilled, you suddenly discover that your dreams do not fulfill you.
[00:03:29] So on one side you have depression. And on the other side, you have melancholy. Depression is kind of where you lose twice, but melancholy means even the winners lose. Even when you get it. Like if you, if you support a football team and your football team wins, everything, they just literally win everything.
[00:03:46] You're going to find a bit of sadness in that. That's going to actually be depressing and you're going to really only start to get happy again, once they lose once there's a little bit of struggle, kind of back in the game. The real enjoyment is in the struggle, the ups and the downs, the highs and the lows.
[00:04:04] It's almost like we're like a child who thinks that the pleasure of Christmas is in the gift. And we're excited about, you know, we're always jumping up and down and we can't sleep. And we're thinking about the gift that's under the Christmas tree. And we don't realize that actually there's all of this enjoyment in not having the gift.
[00:04:21] And if we're honest with ourselves, that's where the real enjoyment is. That's why, if you're going for a holiday, there's no point buying a holiday last minute, because you're partly paying for the excitement of the holiday. The same with the lottery tickets. You're not paying to win. I mean, my goodness, if you win that would be a nightmare, you're paying for the fantasy of winning.
[00:04:38] That's what the dollar is worth. You know, what you would do if you had the money. When I talk about in psychoanalysis, the insight. It's not there to help you be happy to get rid of the conflicts of your life and to kind of settle everything and some sort of peace, but rather it's about somehow enjoying the fact that we have contradictory desires that we struggle and that actually meaning and struggle and sacrifice and conflict is not something to run from.
[00:05:06] It's actually where the meat of life is.
Laura McKowen: [00:05:09] It's very counterintuitive to how we live in the west. Absolutely counterintuitive. Everything is about chasing the thing. I want to linger on the contradiction piece, because once you started to go into this in your talk and I will link this for everyone. So you don't feel like, like we're having a private conversation.
[00:05:29] But talk about that contradiction, what you mean by that? Just a little bit more, because I think that's something we could just fly right over and not really explain.
Peter Rollins: [00:05:37] There's an old parable and I'll just maybe briefly tell this parable and we can jump into it. It's a, it's a beautiful Jewish parable of two rabbis who are arguing over a passage in the Torah and they can't come to agreement about what it means.
[00:05:50] And they've been arguing for 20 years, right. In this park. They meet once a week, they argue and they fight. And finally God, who's got the patience of a Saint, but finally got so annoyed at listening to these two rabbis argue that God says to the angels, I'm going to go down and I'm going to tell these two rabbis the meaning of the verse.
[00:06:09] So God parts the clouds, comes down to the two rabbis and says, I've listened to you argue for 20 years, I'm going to tell you what it means. And then a rare moment of unity, the two rabbis turn to God and say, "what right have you to come down here and tell us what it means? You clear off back to heaven and let us argue about it .
[00:06:26] I love this powerful because in it, you could say God is the symbol of that which brings peace to the conflict. That which kind of gives the answer that kind of resolves the conflict. A lot of people think of religion as that, or there's lots of other secular forms of bringing peace through money, fear, whatever it is.
[00:06:45] The two rabbis, I think are a symbol of our own subjectivity that we love and we hate. We want to go out, we want to stay. And we think one thing and we think another, that we have a conflictual nature. It's not just that I have a conflict with you. More fundamentally. I have conflicts with myself and the Torah is a symbol for language.
[00:07:06] So language generates these conflicts. But basically what's interesting to me is that we want, a god of some kind, you know, whether it's, as I say, a partner or an experience or money or fame to bring this peace and this calmness and get rid of the conflicts that, that are within our lives. But actually it's the conflict that's enjoyable.
[00:07:31] The two rabbis are going, this conflict that we have as generative is generative of our friendship. It generates knowledge because we learn from each other and makes us better rabbis. And the last thing we'd want to get rid of is that right conflict. So a lot of my work is about helping people realize that you do love and hate.
[00:07:51] You do love your children and want to get rid of them. Right? You do want to go out and be sociable and stay in it. You are this set of conflictual emotions. And instead of trying to get rid of that, which we all want to do, we think the answer is to get rid of that struggle. Actually it's about finding a place within it, finding a way to enjoy this ambiguous dimension of our lives, because that's what it is to be human.
[00:08:19] By the way, that's called anxiety for Soren Kierkegaard the philosopher, he said, anxiety is the feeling of not knowing what you need to do, of not being determined. Basically you could go in, you could go out, what should I do? How should I act? What job should I have? This is anxiety. And in our society, we try to get rid of anxiety.
[00:08:38] Soren Kierkegaard had this completely counter-intuitive notion that actually anxiety is the sign of your humanity and your freedom, even calls it spirit. And he says that we have to find a way to embrace our anxiety. And weirdly as we embrace it, we rob it of its sting. As we somehow say yes to it and allow it to be part of us, it actually becomes not an enemy, but a friend.
Laura McKowen: [00:09:03] It seems to me that the suffering that maybe we don't have to go through is the resistance against this conflict within us. That the anxiety that is maybe not useful is that suffering the anxiety is painful. It can seem painful, right? But in that context, it's a natural outgrowth of just some friction within us.
[00:09:26] And the resistance of that is the suffering.
Peter Rollins: [00:09:29] Yes exactly. In philosophy, this is called dialectics and dialectics is fascinating. It's a fascinating area, but in a nutshell, if I apply it to our everyday lives, dialectics is this really weird position where it says, when you're confronted with two options, we want to choose the best or maybe a middle route, but dialectics kind of says, you got to choose the worst.
[00:09:52] And when you choose the worst, you actually get the best. So for example, if you're suffering. And yougo to a a psychoanalyst and you sit down, you don't want to go into your darkness. You're saying to the analysts, keep me away from that black hole. That's the whole reason you're there, probably because you've been trying to keep that away.
[00:10:10] There's all these tentacles coming out of that place. And I just let's, let's shut that side, but the, the analyst helps you actually go in to that black hole and go into the darkness. And in the darkness, you find life whenever you're confronted with life and death, where you want to live for yourself or die to a cause or to another, weirdly in dying, you find life or go in into the darkness, you find the light, go in and sit the narrow road.
[00:10:37] You find that the width, it's this weird notion of we have to go fully into the anxiety, but in doing so, we actually rob it of it's sting, but as you said, it's when we resist this journey that all the suffering happens. The more certain we want to be, the more uncertain we are, the more happy we want to be, the more unhappy we are. This is one of the issues with self-help, to be honest. Some self-help is good, but, you know, a lot of self-help is, in the words of Adam Phillips, as human beings, we live between who we are and who we would like to be. And we live between what we have and what we would like to have.
[00:11:16] And a lot of self-help is designed to help you get to where you want to be and to get so you can have what you want to have, right. And for someone like Adam Phillips and psychoanalysis, the idea actually is grace. Grace is the opposite of self-help. Grace says you don't have to do anything. Actually what you need to get rid of is the. very desire to move. It's a weird kind of acceptance.
Laura McKowen: [00:11:41] So, to get rid of the desire to have what you think you want. Like what does that even mean? Because were we not supposed to desire things?
Peter Rollins: [00:11:51] Yeah, well see, this for me, I don't know too much about AA or anything, but I, one of the things I love about AA and I like to call it step zero, because I'm from Europe and our lifts start at zero.
[00:12:01] Your lifts in America start at one, we start with zero. Cause zero's a number, right? So zero is the first number one. So step zero for me and something like AA, is that before you try to do anything, you're just in a room of people who say, we don't need to do anything you're accepted for who you are. We're all rubbish together. You're broken, I'm broken, we're all broken and you don't have to do anything.
Laura McKowen: [00:12:24] You don't have to fight that anymore. That is the relief of being in a room like that.
Peter Rollins: [00:12:29] Eventually when you're in that place of grace, you're able to put into words the truth and you say your name and you say you're an alcoholic, which is because the whole idea of repression is we never speak the truth.
[00:12:41] You push the truth down and you deny it. I'm not an alcoholic I could give up any time I want, et cetera, et cetera.
Laura McKowen: [00:12:46] The alcoholic means being this, this, this, and that. I'm not that there's no way, if I'm that, I can't live with it.
Peter Rollins: [00:12:54] All of these excuses, right? Because the last thing we want to confront us ourselves, right.
[00:12:58] That's why, by the way, I've always find it weird when people ask you what you believe. Cause we're like your consciousness is designed to protect you from seeing what you believe. I'll never tell you what I believe, we don't know ourselves. So in, in this space of grace, where you're able to be honest with yourself and you're able to, in the religious terms, you shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.
[00:13:19] So you're able to know the truth, bring it up to language in that space of grace, step zero. I think that's what sets in motion all the other steps, because the weird paradox is this is only when you are in a space of acceptance where you don't have to change. Ironically dialectically that's when you can't change it.
[00:13:40] So that's the weird paradox is, the, oh, the moment that I, that I go, I'm accepted and I don't have to do anything. I can just be who I am. That is actually the, the motor of real transformation. And that's that technology is called grace, because grace is kind of the, that you don't have to go from a, to B.
[00:13:58] You don't have to get anywhere. You're rubbish. I'm rubbish. We're all a bit rubbish and that's okay.
Laura McKowen: [00:14:05] My mind’s sort of exploding right now because I'm writing another book right now about sobriety. And one of the first points I'm trying to make is that it's not your fault. When I boil this down, when I boil down the what's underneath, it's not your fault.
[00:14:22] It is shame. It is this self-blaming self-hating part of us that cannot accept the shadow. I'm more familiar with Jungian psychology. So the shadow, the darker parts of ourselves, and there are many other layers in the, it's not your fault blame, the whole thing, but a big piece of it is people thinking they are totally responsible.
[00:14:47] Like if we could accept that we're all rubbish and there's beautiful things in us. There's everything in this. But if we could accept that, those things, aren't a commentary on our worth as a human or our okayness or our morality that it's just how humans are made. It seems like the major key to unlocking almost everything that we suffer with.
Peter Rollins: [00:15:12] I could outline very briefly three types of enjoyment that are key because to be human is to not just experience desire for a cup of coffee or to see friends. We are also infused with what is called the tactical term jouissance and jouissance means a painful pleasure. It's anything you do.
[00:15:30] That's non utilitarian, like a type of pleasure that might damage your health, damage your relationships, damage your work life. I mean, to be honest, alcoholism is a perfect expression of a type of jouissance, because
[00:15:43] it's a painful pleasure. It's a self-destructive thing that also gives a person joy. And two forms of jouissance that are very common.
[00:15:53] And I think our whole economy runs on them is one, the jouissance of wholeness, which is the pleasure we get from a mirror image of ourselves, of some perfection that we want to feel some wholeness and completeness that we desire. It's called a mirror phase with children, it's the point when a child looks in a mirror and they're fascinated by their mirror image and say, their mother is saying to them, look how cope beautiful and strong you are. Inside they don't feel beautiful and strong, but they look at the mirror image and they see their parents are saying, that's you, and you're beautiful, and you're strong. And they're fascinated in this with narcissism, the, not the image. The ideal image of the self.
Laura McKowen: [00:16:32] So it creates this chasing.
Peter Rollins: [00:16:34] And then of course, it bites us in the ass because the return of the repressed, it comes back and then we get judged by that perfection.
[00:16:40] So sometimes we feel great about it and we feel fantastic and yes, and then we feel condemned. We feel like the answer. You'll see this a lot on Instagram with people who often, oh yeah. You know, people here are giving you this, this sense of like of achievement and how you can have everything you want.
[00:16:56] Those people are often driven by a very punitive superego that is actually telling them at times in their life, how terrible they are, how awful they are, how much harder they have to work. And it's actually, in the Oedipus complex and Freud really obviously built a lot on this guy, Oedipus wants to sleep with his mother.
[00:17:15] He doesn't know it's his mother, but he wants to sleep with his mother. His father is in the way. So he kills the father and he sleeps with his mother. He thinks it's going to be wonderful, but it's a curse. It's a disaster. Now Oedipus is a symbol of us. And the mother is a symbol of oceanic oneness going back to something that is perfect and going back to the womb and the father is what gets in the way, right?
[00:17:38] So this is actually a story of, uh, you know, fulfill your dreams and then realize how horrific your dreams are. You get what you want and yeah, but there's a voice called a superego. That's the voice that keeps saying you should get this. You should have more friends. You should be having more sex. You just lose the weight, exactly.And today, superego isn't very punitive in a sense of saying you should be nicer to your mum is saying you should be having more fun. You should be more fulfilled. You know, the demand Nike's demand just to it. What a horrible demand, right? Just how fun just Huff, just do it. Just be everything.
[00:18:14] You can be the tyranny of happiness, the tyranny of being everything you can be. So we live under this tyranny, but what we're talking about here is the freedom from the pursuit of health. We also need a freedom from that very pursuit itself. And that's a kind of Salvatore move that story of Adam and Eve as an edible story, Adam and Eve, walking around the garden, a piece of fruit that will offer them wholeness to be like God, to lock the lock.
[00:18:41] The superego is called the serpent, which is the voice that saying you should get that piece of fruit, right? Break the prohibition, get the fruit. And it's a disaster. And we think that the purpose of life is to be the serpent or to obey the superego. No, it's to exorcise the superego with a serpent, not to obey the voice. That's the more radical move.
Laura McKowen: [00:19:03] My invitation to this was through getting sober among other things. But that was sort of my super event. I can see that the thing you just touched on about social media and sort of the super ego, because it has, there's two effects that, that has, it has the effect of the person who
[00:19:19] is transmitting those messages and what is going on within them. But the receiver of those messages, what we see just feeds our own desire. It confirms what we maybe subconsciously or unconsciously think, which is our superego thinks, which is right. That's if only that, if only that, one of the reasons I ended up leaving social media is because nothing was ever enough.
[00:19:48] My life was no longer enough. Nothing. I was experiencing felt like enough anymore. And to me, that was the biggest tragedy because I have an amazing life. So I keep writing down this question. What is enough? What is enough? Cause I think maybe that's what we. That's the satisfaction that we want or the, what we're chasing and happiness is what we think we're chasing is enough.
Peter Rollins: [00:20:19] Yes. A hundred percent, by the way, I love what you're saying, because the way I've described the superego, the serpent social media for us today is the serpent right? So for many of us today, the serpentine voice is precisely Instagram. If only you look like this, if only you had a family like this.
Laura McKowen: [00:20:36] And it is that enticing, it is that, it's as addictive to me. I started to just draw parallels with drinking. It's like, I make excuses for it. I rationalize it. All the same behavior. I mean, is it going to kill me? Maybe not, but if it makes it seem as though my life is not enough, that's sort of a death to me. So I guess I'd want to linger on this question. You know, what is enough?
Peter Rollins: [00:20:59] Yes. I think that's the key. That's the key question. So actually, so I, I mentioned three types of jouissance, so the first one was, you know, wholeness, completeness, and the serpentine's social media voice. It's always giving you an ideal to live up to and giving you ways to purchase things in order to get that lifestyle.
[00:21:18] Um, the second is a transgressive jouissance and this is the jouissance, the pleasure we get, not from wholeness and satisfaction, but from transgressing, like telling lies to people. Secretly having affairs, taking drugs and no one knowing, or having a religious past and trying to find ways to attack it to take up positions that are fighting some, some imagined religious conservative or whatever it is.
[00:21:48] So there, there is this profound enjoyment to transgression and people get caught up in that. And I think addiction and you'll know this better than I, but there's can be a lot of transgressive jouissance in addictions, all the secret stuff that goes on, transgressive ways of living.
Laura McKowen: [00:22:05] Totally. And you as much shame as you can have about those things, you, part of you is fighting it part of you really likes your secrets and believes you can't survive without them.
[00:22:14] I mean, that was something that had to like wean off of far after when I quit drinking was my secrets, the little 10% that I kept to myself.
Peter Rollins: [00:22:23] Well, yes, it's very enjoyable in a way there's a deep truth to all of these types of jouissance because there is something so exciting about transgressive living.
[00:22:33] Like it makes you feel alive, right? When you're dying. I mean, at a very superficial level cigarettes are that. You feel alive smoking a cigarette cause you know you're dying, right. Cause what's called a death drive. So, but then like, this is terrible. These are two types of enjoyment that are going to damage me profoundly, right. Really, really hurt me, really through me, by the way, the difference. This is a very important difference in philosophy between instinct and drive. Animals have instincts and instinct is as powerful as drive. So an instinct for meeting an instinct for food and instinct for shelter, right? So animals have instincts, but instincts have three parts and instinct is discreet.
[00:23:11] So it's like very basic things, food shelter meeting. So very discreet things. Secondly, once they're satisfied the animal rests, right, the animal gets shelter, the animal rests, and then thirdly, they're in the service of life. So instincts serve to help the animal die of natural causes basically, not die of external causes.
[00:23:33] A drive is different in three ways. One a drive can be for anything. It can be for stamp collecting. It can be for drinking. It can be for trainspotting, a drive can connect to anything, to fetishes, to all sorts of things. Secondly, drives don't get satisfied. So even if your drive is for shelter, if you've got a drive, then you want a bigger house, a better house, two houses you know, it's, it's never satisfied.
[00:23:59] It's like the gambler who they actually are not addicted to winning they're addicted to losing because it's the losing that creates the fantasy of winning. And then thirdly, it's in the service of death. These, these are destructive. So the question is what type of enjoyment or jouissance in life is life-giving, is not going to destroy us.
[00:24:20] There is what's called the jouissance of impossibility of enjoying your struggle. One of the things I like about AA as well, I knew a lot of people who have gone through it and they talk about it being an eternal struggle. It's not like something you overcome right. As it gets there. It's like, it's this eternal struggle and that's a jouissance of, I'm enjoying the fact that I'll never get there. That's the kind of enjoyment.
Laura McKowen: [00:24:43] That's the two rabbis.
Peter Rollins: [00:24:45] Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yes. So my work, I do a thing called power of theology. It's a, what is it? Well, it's nothing. It's just, I it's just a name I've given to my work, but every time he tried to explain it, I'm like I could do that better.
[00:24:58] I could write a better book on it. So it's, um, it's constant failure, but that failure generates more knowledge and also it's where the enjoyment is. I enjoy the failure. I enjoy getting up and going, I'm going to explain it better today, but knowing that I never will. That's a type of jouissance of struggle.
[00:25:15] So in our contemporary society, we struggle against struggle. We fantasize, if only I work hard enough, I'll be able to live by the beach, I'll be able to get rid of sacrifice. I'll be able to get rid of struggle.
Laura McKowen: [00:25:27] I just want to slow that up. We struggle against struggle, meaning we try not to, we want to do everything we can to not, instead of everything we're talking about, which is accepting that this friction that we have is I think where the enough comes from, you know, but there, like you're saying, there are positive and negative types of struggle. There are struggles that are generative and struggles that are destructive. And so on a hundred percent, actually the reason why our contemporary systems work is precisely because they don't work.
Peter Rollins: [00:25:57] So if, for example, if someone says, you know, like if you go to a prosperity church and you go, why do people go to prosperity churches? When it's obvious they don't work. Right? It's obvious that the people inside the church are no richer than the people in the community and all of that. But then you go, well, that's exactly it is that you go to the community and they dangle something in front of you say, which is wealth.
[00:26:19] If you have everything you want. Right. So that's desirable, but it's precisely desirable because you don't have it, because you feel to get it, if ever you got it, you'd realize it's not that good. So there's the traumas that happen to us. And there's the trauma that is us, the trauma that is being human. It doesn't fix that.
[00:26:34] And actually, ironically, here's the terrifying thing is when struggle disappears from your life, you don't suddenly feel amazing. You feel like the living dead, you know, you feel like a kind of like, just like a lot of people are feeling in COVID like, there's a lot of people who are stressed because they having to pay the bills.
[00:26:50] They don't. So there's that, that's the losing doubly, right? You're really struggling, but the ones who have the money and, and can survive, but whose life is just every day is Groundhog Day. It's just one day is the same as the next, it starts to feel a little bit like you're not living at all.
Laura McKowen: [00:27:06] There's nothing to contend with.
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Laura McKowen: [00:29:00] One of the things you also talk about is sacrifice, and this is all related. Right. So maybe talk about it. What is the purpose of it? How do we do it wrong? Yeah. You know, what do we get confused about when it comes to sacrifice?
Peter Rollins: [00:29:15] Yeah. So funnily enough, in the past and certain religious traditions sacrifices, an integral part of religion, but we know we live in a time where we want to sacrifice, sacrifice.
[00:29:26] We, we kind of want to get beyond it. But when you think about sacrificing for, you know, someone you love or for a job or something like that, it's actually, you realize it in losing your life again, dialectically you find it, it related to this notion of sacrifice. Of course, scapegoating. So scapegoating is the idea that you put all of your own luck, all of your darkness, your shadow onto something else or somebody else. And then you externalize it from you and then you, you throw it into the desert. So the idea was the scapegoat went into the desert. So today you'll see this happen. It's called projective identification. Where say, I say to you, you're angry with me.
[00:30:08] You're like, no, you're no, I'm not. I go, no, you are angry with me. You're angry with me. You're really angry. You're an angry intolerant person. And eventually you lose your ride and you say, I'm not angry and intolerant. And then I'm like, there you go there, I told you you were angry and intolerant so, often what a person, we all do this is I project a part of myself. This may be angry and intolerant, and I find it in the external world and I put it onto you. And if I'm lucky I can so rile you up that you actually identify with that, it's called protective, counter- identification. So you take on the projection. And then I can identify with that, but externally.
[00:30:44] So actually what we're all seeing is the unknown face of ourselves in the world when you're fighting something, it is, it is your own face nine times out of 10. So the reason why I'm connecting this to sacrifice is, we're always trying to get rid of the darkness, the repressed parts of ourselves.
[00:31:00] We want to put it out into the world. We want someone to take that on, and then we want to throw them into the desert. We want to get rid of it.
Laura McKowen: [00:31:07] I mean, that's, that can explain our, so much of the culture war that's happened.
Peter Rollins: [00:31:11] So yeah, purity culture and all that. So, so we do that and then we want to get rid it. And briefly. It's wonderful. Briefly. We all celebrate together. It unifies the group, however only temporarily because here's the trick of scapegoating is the lack and the shadow that you're putting onto the other is actually inside yourself. So basically from fascist ideology, the point of the Jewish community, is it.
[00:31:35] We want to get rid of them because they're the problem. But actually they cover up for the problem that the lack is within us. So when I say by integrating sacrifice, this is what I mean is if you have a community and a community of rubbish, as I mentioned, that's, by the way, one of the earliest definitions of the Christian, was it a collective of trash?
[00:31:53] We are the trash of the world. So yeah, the apostle Paul said, Christians are the trash of the world. So the rubbish of the world, the refuge of existence,
Laura McKowen: [00:32:02] I love that so much. That's a good, that's a good tagline for a community.
Peter Rollins: [00:32:06] Beautiful. Isn't it? I mean, it's a, it's the ultimate critique of purity culture because purity culture, which is always connected with religion is, how do I get rid of the dirt within myself and within the world, how both literally and metaphorically. So literally purity culture was what do you do with urination and excretion, but then also what do you do with the people who you see as dirty or the part of yourself that you see as dirty.
Laura McKowen: [00:32:29] Without even knowing it, right? This is mostly subconscious or unconscious.
Peter Rollins: [00:32:32] Uh, yeah, absolutely. So we don't even know we're doing it. In fact that's necessarily unconscious in a way, because if you, yeah, if you realized it you wouldn't do it. Apostle Paul's one of the first critiques of purity culture, actually in religious discourse, when he says we are the trash of the world, you know, we, in other words, you have to embrace your own lack right?
[00:32:52] But the irony here is if you're able to embrace your own lack and your own shadow, your own darkness, and you have a community that circled around and that lack that actually makes the community a lot more gracious, a lot more beautiful, a lot stronger. And my examples of this falling also, obviously Eucharist is a meal around a shared loss.
[00:33:14] The death of God, right? And AA is a circle around a lack because there's basically two ways to have community. We all unify over what we share and over our shared scapegoat. This shared enemy that we hit. Right. That's a great way of unifying, right? Yeah. There's then the other, which is, cause that just is so destructive, the other is we're unified around our shared lack
Laura McKowen: [00:33:35] Okay. I want to press pause on that cause that's really something. Okay. We either unite or draw community around our scapegoat or an enemy we hate. Or, our being trash.
Peter Rollins: [00:33:49] Yes. A kind of lack. In AA, that's why I see AA as a real innovation and community in the 20th century is because you're not unified by education or money or sex or race or class. You're unified precisely in a shared lack, a shared brokenness. My name is Pete and I'm an alcoholic, right? But that there's, it's a share type of lack so it's particularly over, say, alcohol, but it's like that community unifies not by saying, oh, the problem is outside there in the scapegoat. But the problem is in this room in a community of grace where everyone is accepted in their brokenness, that for me is a beautiful analogy for the types of communities we need today, more than ever.
Laura McKowen: [00:34:36] It's so it's so fascinating. It seems so obvious when we say it like this, but what occurs to me. The communities that are formed around that were more resistant to joining or creating because of what they are because of everything we've been talking about this, not wanting to look at our, our darkness, not wanting to acknowledge the contradictions in us.
[00:35:02] And I don't want to talk about cancel culture per se, but I think purity culture is a way to study it because I do think it's really important and interesting. It's easy to form communities, just like it's easy to gossip. And I think the reason it's easy to gossip is because in a way it works to create an immediate connection.
[00:35:22] It's a very fast, easy form of currency, but it has a price. It ultimately does some destruction in us.
Peter Rollins: [00:35:32] It ultimately creates war, not conflict. So there's comedian, Dylan Moran who said, you know, war is not conflict, war is the inability to have conflict. And then you get a little skit on it. But I love that line where he just said, yeah, war is whenever I say to you, I can't tolerate your difference.
[00:35:47] I can't tolerate what you have to say. I need to kill you. I need to get rid of you. I need to silence you, whether that's personally or in your work, or literally physically silence you in some way. But whereas conflict is precisely the point where I go I don't like you I don't like what you have to say.
[00:36:04] I think you're an idiot and I'll sit down and I'll argue with you. Like, this is what I love about again in Ireland. You know, you come by, you hang out with people and you have a big fight and you'd say, I never want to see you again. You argue, you fight, and then at the end of the night you go, I'll see you again next week.
[00:36:18] Seamus I'll see you again next week. And that's what, that's what psychoanalysis is, is you can argue with your analyst, you can shut out them and say, you don't care. You're just doing this for money. I'm never coming back. And at the end, it's like, see you next week at two o'clock next week at two.
Laura McKowen: [00:36:32] The entire point was to say those things because they are there.
[00:36:37] Now, it seems what you're saying is there's a big scapegoat or there's many scapegoats. And all these people can very quickly come around and agree and say, yes, yes, yes. You deserve this. You deserve this, you deserve this. I mean, is this observations you've had about purity culture?
Peter Rollins: [00:36:55] Oh, a hundred percent. So I like, I couldn't tell you how many times this happens. It almost feels like a caricature, like a movie, you wouldn't believe it. But what I often find is when I work with people or chat with people who are very angry at somebody else and for what they think. Honestly nine times out of 10, very quickly, I can find that that's actually a disavowed part of themselves, that it's a part of their own past, their own history, their own something. And you find that what they're arguing with this other person who may or may not have that belief, right. That doesn't matter to them. They may or may not fit. You're like, it's almost like a bully needs someone to bully.
[00:37:32] And if you find someone who you think deserves it all the better, right? Lecan once said that he used an example of a man who was jealous because he thought his wife was having an affair. Right. And then, so we can say, so he, this guy's pathologically jealous, but then he finds out that his wife is having an affair.
[00:37:49] Right. Lacan says, he's still pathologically jealous. He just happens to be right. Right. Just like if you're paranoid, delusional, and you think the FBI have surveillance in your house. Yeah. And it turns out, they do, you're still pathologically delusional. Right. So on that. So if you find an enemy who actually enables you to project very easily onto them, a political leader, for example, then that hides your own projections even better.
Laura McKowen: [00:38:20] Yeah, because it is a, it's a great, I mean, what you're saying is I want to make that connection. The pathologically jealous man is something in himself, the insecurity or, uh, something that he's projecting and it's going to be there, whether or not he's right.
Peter Rollins: [00:38:34] A hundred percent. So for example, a lot of people say, oh, I'm jealous because I love. But if someone is, uh, suffers from neurosis, no, it's generally not that they're jealous because they love it's, they're jealous because they'll see you any way to maintain their love, their desire. So the jealousy is actually the thing that's required in order for them to experience passion. Some people today are libidinally invested in their political enemy.
[00:38:58] In other words, they need that enemy in order to help them feel like a cohesive unit to give themselves the jouissanse of transgression. If they lose that enemy, they lose something profound of themselves. So that's projective identification.
Laura McKowen: [00:39:14] What is the way through that? Because obviously when we're talking about the culture right now, when there are real problems and there are, and there will always be real problems in a very, very basic way.
[00:39:29] It doesn't seem as though this process of having a scapegoat, rallying around an enemy is ultimately going to lead to what we say we want. Yes. What is the way through for say the individually?
Peter Rollins: [00:39:47] Yes. Yeah, this is great. This gets to the core things, right? I'll give a few examples and how this works. So let's take an example of a couple, for instance, say this couple are together, but there's no desire really between the couple anymore.
[00:40:02] And maybe one of them is having an affair. The other one's always at work, but nothing's talked about, nothing's talked about it's all under the surface and it's under the surface because if it was brought to the surface, it would be a crisis. But of course the truth is the crisis is already there.
[00:40:17] It's just not being verbalized. So it's repressed. However, what you cannot speak, always finds a way to speak. So in your children, they're, they're having trouble at school. One of your kids suffering from eating disorder, whatever it is like the repressed always returns, right? So in this example, there's all of this bad stuff in the relationship.
[00:40:37] The key for me is, say that couple then go to somebody, an analyst, and start to talk about the situation, everything comes to the surface and they start to talk about their resentments and their angers and their frustrations. And it all starts to be seen and come to the surface. When that happens, one of two things will occur.
[00:40:57] You know, they'll either break up or they'll find a new way to have a relationship. They'll break up, not with each other, but with the type of relationship they have. Right. In fact, there's always those two options. You can break up with the person or break up with the relationship you have with the person.
[00:41:11] And the irony is we often break up with a person, but we don't break up with the type of relationship we have.
Laura McKowen: [00:41:17] Oh my God, I've never heard it said that way.
Peter Rollins: [00:41:20] We end up having the same type of relationship with the next person, because we were not able to break up with the form of enjoyment that we get out of the chaos.
[00:41:28] Yeah. Anyway, so, um, so you have that experience and the thing is, it's almost like, having the two people in the room able to tolerate the conflict, you're able to kind of tolerate the intensity of the conflict. You don't know where it's going to go. All you know is it's not going to stay the same. And that's very key to two things I'd love to define very quickly as one is what a symptom is.
[00:41:54] So in this couple, right symptom would be the kid wetting the bed, for example, right? The kid's not wetting the bed cause necessarily because they have problem with it. That could be because of the conflict in the parents. So it's, it's telling the truth that has not been said.
Laura McKowen: [00:42:09] A symptom is what tells you the truth about what's not being said.
Peter Rollins: [00:42:14] Exactly. It's like, and it speaks in a kind of really weird way. A symptom is a coagulation of a contradiction. So for example, if you, if you're got a really sore jaw, and maybe you realize that you want to shout at somebody, but you also do want to shout out them because you might lose them, right.
[00:42:31] It might be your partner. And you could like, if I shout at my partner they're going to break up with me, so you're clenching your jaw to stay quiet, but you're also clenching it because you want to shout and scream at them. So that's a symptom, cause it coagulates a conflictual desire.
Laura McKowen: [00:42:44] Coagulate, such an effective word there.
Peter Rollins: [00:42:47] A lot of what analysis does is it tries to allow the symptom to speak, what is the contradiction? This is key for me because I come from Northern Ireland where we had a thing called the peace process, the good Friday agreement where after a 30 year war of like a all fighting, uh, amongst everyone, governments and paramilitary or groups.
Laura McKowen: [00:43:08] You glossed over it that like it's no big thing. Like, yes, like 30 years of civil unrest.
Peter Rollins: [00:43:15] I love the fact it's called the troubles. I think that's a very Irish way to call it a year war, the troubles, just the troubles we have, but it, this 30 year war that finished in 1998, but what's beautiful about it.
[00:43:28] And this is why I call myself an apocalypticist. So I'm not a progressive of apocalypses because a progressive is often a person who knows where the future's going and they're on the right side of history. And then if, if you disagree with them, they can love you in a patronizing way. But you know, ultimately you know where it's all going.
[00:43:44] Yeah. Whereas on an apocalypticist means that an apocalypse is, is a kind of an end of a world, right? So an apocalypse is a world comes to an end. You don't know what the next world's going to be. You just knew that this world is coming to an end.
Laura McKowen: [00:43:57] Like the relationship.
Peter Rollins: [00:43:59] Yes, exactly. That's it. They don't know what the new configuration is going to be.
[00:44:02] They just knew that that old world has to die. That's it, and if you keep the conflict up it will die and it will take a new shape, a new form. So in Northern Ireland, these political parties all got together. Nobody knew what cause up until then everybody knew what the future was. Everybody knew what the right answer was until the conflict was so bad that it was going to destroy everybody.
[00:44:26] And then they sat in a room three days and on good Friday, and by the way, there's a real significance to good Friday where God experiences the loss of God, the inner conflict of the divine. But yeah, on good Friday, it was like, they argued and argued, not knowing what it would look like, but saying, I have to be in the room with this conflict.
[00:44:46] We have to all be in this room together, bring it to the surface because it's unacceptable. And out of that came the good Friday agreement, which is probably the most successful peace process in the history of the modern world. It's an incredible peace process that grew out of an apocalypse in which every party had to give up their sense of believing they knew the future and going, we don't know the future. We're going to sit in the room together and we're not going to scapegoat. We're going to look at this together, the apocalypse happened. So that's part of what this work is for me is it's like it's actually avoiding fantasizing what the utopia is because when you have utopia, it's always connected to scapegoating right?
[00:45:26] It's always, oh, if only we got rid of X, Y, and Z, everything would be wonderful, right? It's getting rid of that entire way of thinking and going, life is struggle, but some struggles get so bad that they're going to destroy everything. And once we face the central conflict then that could fall into something better, but you'll never get away of struggle, you'll just get deeper and deeper and more, let's call it more productive struggles, more enjoyable struggles.
Laura McKowen: [00:45:54] Generative struggles maybe is a good word. And I got to want to pause to just let that soak in. So I kept thinking, as you're giving this example, there's a therapist in the room and that therapist could symbolically be so many things. Even something like Christ or something divine. We put our trust in this facilitator, this person, this being, we put all the energy into this room because a therapist is there. I mean, that's, I have been in that room and you can't have those conversations without that third party there. It does end in something mostly it just ends horribly.
[00:46:36] We can't manage that as, as humans or as people. If we're talking about a larger cultural crisis, or even what happened in, you know, after the troubles, who was the therapist in the room?
Peter Rollins: [00:46:49] This is key, by the way, it's great that you say that because we mentioned earlier about projective identification. Like it is not for everybody for erotic structures,
[00:46:59] we do this inherently. Like we don't come to know ourselves directly. We come to know ourselves in directly through another. So I project myself onto another and then gradually through some help, I can start to see myself in the other. So there's always this external. In a way we need art. We need music, we need therapy.
[00:47:20] We need, we need these external structures to help us in this journey. For me, there's two types. The liturgical structure, there's the liturgical structure that would kind of like help you escape the lack right here. Kind of like live music, going out and dancing all night or whatever. You get rid of the lack, you have a blast, but the next day it comes back. Or there are liturgical rituals, where you go for coffee on a Tuesday with your friends.
[00:47:47] Uh, you have poker on a Friday night where you talk about your week and all that, but these liturgical structures that don't help you avoid the suffering . So pop music, you listen to pop music. You forget about your sadness, but if you go to a sad singer song writer, you know, Irish singer songwriter, And they're talking about, how their one true beloved died of consumption.
[00:48:06] They'll never love again, right? That music helps you connect with a part of yourself that you don't want to connect with.
Laura McKowen: [00:48:13] It helps integrate you. I mean, that's a good literature does too, to me.
Peter Rollins: [00:48:17] A hundred percent. So Soren Kierkegaard says, what is a poet? A poet is someone who screams and cries in agony, but whose lips are so formed that when they cry out, beautiful music is formed. And so we say to the poet sing to us again. So the poet beautifully confronts us with our own repressed truth, but in a way that's beautiful. That's exquisite. That kind of like that helps me work through it. And then I come out feeling all the better for it. So there's a certain sense of which we need external rituals.
[00:48:47] And then of course the big thing you said. The rule of a third person in Lacanian psychoanalysis, they call it the subject supposed to know, where we think someone has the answer. And that's actually important. Now, the problem is this. We kind of need it because that allows us to put everything onto that person.
[00:49:05] Right. So you say to an analyst, I had this with my friend recently where I had a dream. I explained the dream to him. And then he, he went to the bathroom and he came out of the bathroom and with a smile on his face. And I said, oh, I know what you think. And then I gave an, the interpretation of the dream that I thought he had.
[00:49:20] Right. And then I realized, cause I knew the structure. I was like, laughing to myself. I was going like, you weren't thinking anything, were you? And he says, no. I was thinking about what I was going to do later on. But I, I couldn't interpret the dream myself. I had to imagine there was another who had the interpretation of the dream.
Laura McKowen: [00:49:36] In order to allow yourself to say it or think it even. Wow. That's fascinating.
Peter Rollins: [00:49:42] It's so funny. Cause I like, I, I thought about the dream and I couldn't figure it out. And then immediately I said, oh, I know what you're thinking. I said, you think this, this, this and this. And it's like, oh my goodness, that's a brilliant interpretation, but I couldn't do it myself. I had to have a subject supposed to know.
Laura McKowen: [00:49:55] Tell you what you actually think. Yes, exactly.
Peter Rollins: [00:49:57] But my, my worry is a lot of spiritual gurus for me, the best guru is a guru who reveals that they're not guru. The last guru is the guru who reveals that they were just someone there helping you come to this, understanding yourself. I always worry, when you meet someone who, who does the opposite, who actually pretends, they are the subject supposed to know, the subject who has all of the answers and all of that, that's the problem. But what you do need is if you can find someone who's qualified, who plays that rule. And then the last act of that game is where they go, and by the way, I didn't do any of this. You did it.
Laura McKowen: [00:50:34] That's right. Well, that's the entire premise of psychoanalysis, right? So circling back to the sort of metaphor of the therapist and the couple, and, and then the larger cultural crisis that, that we're in, in the states, who, or what would the therapist be?
[00:50:52] It feels like that's a critical piece of this that we believe that there's this sort of meta therapist. It seems my experience is that the individual work is the most promising place, the individual and small community and inter-relational, you know, in your own home, in your community type of work is what allows it to spread outward.
[00:51:17] Yes, but if not that I don't know.
Peter Rollins: [00:51:19] Here's an answer for you, I mean, this podcast, not with not wanting to give you publicity or anything, but, but what you're doing with this podcast, I think from talking to you and knowing you a little bit is, is that you're trying at a large scale actually, in terms of, you know, this can reach anyone in the world, you're trying to help people, maybe confronts their repressed face. And so it's like, where are these spaces? And I think some, sometimes podcasts can do it. Good singer, song writers, good comedians, art. Yeah. So there's these there's these places, but I have the same question as you, and this is my life's work as well as I am trying to set up communities that live these principles.
[00:52:00] But it's like at the moment, I feel like we're, uh, the underdogs a little bit, we're living at a place where, you know, it's, it's harder to do this. It's hard work to do because you want to avoid being seen as the enemy. You want to avoid becoming a scapegoat. There, there, there has to be a way in which you, you don't fall into the divides, the current divides.
Laura McKowen: [00:52:24] But I don't even know that that's possible. Right. To what degree is that possible? I mean, Jesus, his story of Jesus is he was the ultimate scapegoat.
Peter Rollins: [00:52:32] I'm in the process of trying to produce a documentary about Tammy Faye Bakker. It'scalled an American Contradiction, the working title, and the reason for picking her is because Tammy Faye Bakker is beloved by people who would be self identify as say, religious fundamentalists, conservatives, and is beloved by people who, um, are obviously she was a big gay icon, also in the trans community.
[00:52:58] And actually today people think that those communities there's no unity. There's no unification, it's conflict, but Tammy Faye Bakker, you will get a RuPaul sitting beside some, a Baptist pastor from little rock, Arkansas crying together, singing Tammy Faye things. So my thing is we need a new Tammy Faye for today who are the people and they won't necessarily come out of philosophy right. That they might be an artist. They might be a comedian, but someone like Tammy Faye Bakker who just embodied contradictions, she was small town girl, but so kind of like larger than life, she was so authentic and yet hid behind so much makeup and falsity. She seemed so committed to small time values, but was so consumerous, right?
[00:53:47] All of these contradictions were in, she incarnated these contradictions in such a beautiful and tragic way that she brought together, seemingly people who are impossibly divided. So who is a Tammy Faye for today and we need the Tammy Faye for today. She was the apostle Paul of her moment, you know, bringing together.
Laura McKowen: [00:54:09] I would have never thought of that, but it's absolutely true. So we need a new Tammy Faye.
Peter Rollins: [00:54:14] You need a new Tammy Faye you know, so, um, that's for me that the whole point of the documentary actually is very subtly to show that, that there are ways in which, uh, seemingly impossible opposites can come together, not just in toleration, but since some sort of like this love.
Laura McKowen: [00:54:34] Maybe we can end with you, you touched on ritual, but not, didn't really say why you were talking about ritual. So maybe we can close with talking about, cause I think that's a good, tangible, a lot of what we've been talking about, maybe seems ethereal or hard to say, okay, what does this mean to me today? What can I do about this today? And it seems to me ritual has a place in there.
Peter Rollins: [00:54:57] Yes. A hundred percent. You know what? It's rituals in our lives that help us confront the conflictual and repressed parts of ourselves. And so that ritual might be as a, say, coffee on Tuesday morning with your friends. It might be that poker night with your mates. It might be going to confessional wherever it is that can help you lower your defense mechanisms and realize whenever I give advice, I'm not giving other people advice.
[00:55:24] I'm often giving myself advice that I can't give, so if I say to you, you should give up your job. You shouldn't be working there. You could get paid more somewhere else and you might go, are you not happy in your relationship? Right? Cause sometimes it's like, it's like, you're so passionate that I should leave my job.
[00:55:39] And I'm wondering whether you want to leave something yourself and it got, you know, actually I do. Yeah.
Laura McKowen: [00:55:44] I always get very curious when I'm emphatically giving advice to someone, right. What is going on? Why do it, why am I so invested in this?
Peter Rollins: [00:55:51] It's always after the fact, but that's great. It's almost like keeping an eye on yourself and going like, oh, why is it that I can't find the keys every time I'm going to my mums? Yeah. Is that because I don't want to go, I do want to go cause I'm looking for the keys, and I don't want to go cause she annoys the head off me. And then work through all of this. And because the core of everything we've talked about, again comes down to this idea that we are the wonderful contradiction of the universe.
[00:56:16] We are in the words of Alenka Zupancic, a philosopher: we are the tics and grimaces of the universe. We are the symptom of the universe. And as we're able to embrace that, we will find that we are in flow with the chaos of the universe. James Joyce had the word chaosmos, which is the chaos of the cosmos it's like, yes, chaosmos.
[00:56:36] So when, once we realized that we are a chaosmos, we will find that we were able to tolerate our own darkness and the darkness of others much better.
Laura McKowen: [00:56:44] I just want to clarify ritual for people because this is really, there's so much here, but I want to be specific about what that means. So something that you do regularly that allows you to relax your defenses, which means that you trust the people that you're with.
[00:57:03] I think this is almost always done in people, but I think it can be done also in nature or in observation of art music and things like that, where you are able to sort of bring the unconscious into consciousness and in discussion or some experience that allows you to interact. These contradictions within you.
[00:57:24] So would you say that's a good summary of what a ritual is? Because I want people to go, okay, do I have this in my life? And where can I find it?
Peter Rollins: [00:57:31] I would say, yeah, that's a great example of a good ritual. Like I think there's, there's rituals that help us avoid our suffering. And sometimes we need that. My goodness, like what would life be like if we couldn't go to the movies, watch a comedy and forget about the struggle.
Laura McKowen: [00:57:46] Right? And we don't have to have an existential examined experience.
Peter Rollins: [00:57:50] Exactly. So there's those rituals and those rituals, but they can become very destructive when we start to pursue that at the expense of everything else. And then the rituals that we've been talking about are exactly what you said, which are, what are the liturgical events in our lives?
[00:58:06] What are the things that help us like talk about those parts of ourselves? Confront those dimensions of ourselves. And, uh, that can be psychoanalysis. That could be AA. That can be coffee with friends. There's a whole pile of ways it can be, but it's going, do you have those deserts in the oasis of life? Right? Because the life is a big oasis and craziness and noisy.
[00:58:27] Where are those places in our lives where we can have that space to breathe and to be unhappy. As I mentioned earlier, I said, it's great to be free to pursue your happiness but where are those spaces where you're freed from the pursuit of happiness, where you're free to not have to be anything, not have to be happy.
[00:58:45] I mean, often whenever you have a parent who can't stand their child to be upset, it's because they can't stand to be upset themselves. So they'll always have to bounce the child until they're laughing. We can never be unhappy, you know, the unhappiness of never been unhappy, which Kierkegaard called the despair of not knowing you're in despair. So that, that kind of space is so vital for us.
Laura McKowen: [00:59:07] Even playing a sport. I started playing volleyball, beach volleyball because I met my boyfriend, plays it and I used to play and I started playing it again during COVID and I can't, I've been trying to figure out why this, the time I spent doing this is so helpful to me.
[00:59:22] And some of it is just being in flow of something and allowing, you know, to drop the rest of the world. But it also, I do confront parts of myself that I find really painful when I'm doing it, this self beating, like I have to make everything about winning and I have to compete. I don't want people to think they have to go sit in a room and talk about their hard things.
[00:59:42] It's just, you just said it, you can drop the pursuit of being happy, really striving at all.
Peter Rollins: [00:59:48] As you said, like these are really fun experiences. It's like, it's not that you go into this darkness and it's very sad. It can be listening to that exquisitely painful album, that album, that's just, you sit in the dark and you listen to it and it actually makes you feel alive in the death..
[01:00:18] *music*
Peter Rollins: Yeah. Those spaces are vital.
Laura McKowen: [01:00:39] Well, that seems like a perfect place to stop.
Peter Rollins: [01:00:41] Well, thank you. Thank you for inviting me on, I had a blast.
Laura McKowen: [01:00:48] Thank you for being with us today. In a way that he does, Peter laid out a lot to digest. We'll link you to all of this stuff when you head over to T M S T pod.com. While you're there, make sure to say hi and spend some time in the TMS T online community. It's not a Facebook group and it's ad free. And now I want to share something that is extremely important and relevant to you.
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[01:02:37] Coming up next time, a woman who drafts an essay on the internet that was read by over 3 million people from Zimbabwe via London, Africa, Brook is a mindset. With a profound vision for ending self-censorship.
[01:03:02] Tell me something true is engineered and mixed by Paul Shufu. Jeff Whittington was a producer for this episode. Mikel Ellcessor and I dreamed up the show and we're looking forward to joining you online and next time on tell me something true..