The content of CushVlogs often veers into religious commentary (the most recent one especially). Why do you think Matt is so invested in it? I'm wondering if it's due to one or more of the following reasons: Americans are uniquely religious, so trying to divine anything about their politics requires interpreting their faith. Or: Part of being a revolutionary is believing in a prophecy that an ultimate goal will be achieved one day--a goal there's not much concrete evidence for--and in this way the revolution is faith based. Or: Studying religion comes with the territory of being a history buff (things like Luther and the Hundred Years War midwifing capitalism onto the world stage, etc). Or: Matt is obsessed with his mortality and is more and more curious about the big "Why are we here" questions. The reason I ask is because I don't hear much analysis of religion in left spaces now, and I think there's somewhat of a vacuum left by the Bush-era /stem cell-era libs who would call out jesus camps, televangelists, and mega-churches. (Like, that part of the culture war was deemed over by 2008-09)
The religious trip he's been on started after the Podcast took off, maybe around 2018 or so.
He's spoken about how he was completely materialist, not being able to comprehend the proposition that he could be spiritual or religious until recently. Most of the religious stuff is vaguely christian, but also has that weird pastiche a lot of 90's and 80's kids got from Eastern concepts conveyed through media.
So, you've got a lot of "love", but all in service of the broader goal of self extinguishment, an ego death in order to understand oneself as a constituent part of a greater whole.
Also the faith, which isn't placed in salvation by the grace of God or resurrection, but faith in the world eventually being upended and capitalism destroyed. The faith isn't so much the conviction that you get with evangelicals, where you must believe it, it's more circuitous. revolution can only be embarked on if you believe that you can succeed, and therefore faith is a prerequisite. Alternatively, he has said that if humanity fails, then you can put faith in successive sapient species attempts at building civilization; while we might fuck up and cook the Earth, we can put hope in "the Squids," as he calls them. In this framing, you can attempt to make a change in the world (realistically on a small scale), and should you fail to do something grand, understand yourself as a component of a broader dynamic.
Ultimately, I see it as a concession that people can't be Vulcans, and in order to live, either more fully generally or in defiance of capitalist realism specifically, one can benefit from adopting spiritual paradigms.
In the light of morning, I felt I should add something. You're right that mortality is often a driving force in the adoption of spiritual and religious thinking, but our big wet boy had a mortality crisis earlier in life, around 18 or so. This is when his "spine exploded". If I remember correctly, he not only has limited mobility in one leg, but a kind of phantom leg pain he has compared with a mild burning. He has said that this is when he acquired an over developed hypochondria, and fixation on his own death.
If anything I'd say that this reified his materialist stances on life and death, and that his spiritual turn is more due to podcasting success. New wife, living in Cali, earning more money than he likely anticipated for the work(?) of essentially being a niche media personality recognizable mostly to online weirdos. That kind of life development can screw with a fella who's geared towards introspection and nebbish-ness.
It's a long play he's going to start a leftist church someday for the tax writeoff
I think Alienation under capitalism leaves a spiritual void in many, but not all people. Many faith communities in the U.S. had embraced the prosperity gospel mythology, which left a lot of good-faith seekers deeply cynical about religion. You mentioned above the Bush-Era backlash of the New Atheists who mostly ended up just being contrarians showing their Islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, etc. once the dominant culture took a turn towards liberalism. Matt entered the religious landscape under these conditions, and saw a need for communal support on “the left” that throughout most of American history came from religious or ethnic solidarity.
matt visited me in a dream and told me to kill everyone around me
They've always kinda been like that. I think the man is just thinking about this stuff a lot. To be real, I think of the vlogs as sort of sermons and appreciate them as that.
thanks for sharing this. I'm starting to understand how religion, love, capitalism etc. exist in uneasy and contradictory ways, as you describe
I think it's mostly because of his obsession over his mortality. He starts most of his religious commentary talking about the trauma of his disability, how that exacerbated his hypochondria and how it negatively affected how he behaved to others. It seems like his religious commentary is him figuring out how to be content living in his body and facing his mortality. Although he does also use this type of commentary to try and understand why we collectively feel stuck politically in the current moment.
That explains a lot. Catholicism has a very intricate web of answers to questions and criticisms built up over a very long time, so while there are ex-Catholics who don't never really engaged with it very deeply (fair and reasonable), there are also those who understand and navigate through it. If you take the second path, you end up knowing all this pretty much useless theory regarding a religion you don't believe in, so it's always tempting to find somewhere to put it to use, to look for places where it ties into things that actually matter, and sometimes the connections are there to be found.
Religion is a big part of (probably) most people's lives. It is a type of cohesive community that doesn't exist much anywhere else in this country so if you want to predict what a large group of people will do (as opposed to individuals who have near zero power on their own) then examining religion makes sense. Religion is also the only shared "philosophy" that any group seems to hold.
For men of a specific age we grew up with deep felt religious beliefs. When we enviably grew up and see that the fantastic battles of angels and demons didn't materialize. We fall into depression and ennui. We were promised meaning and beauty and found none. So we attach ourselves so different ideas to try to reclaim that.
You ever see the old Caral Sagan writings about universal love and respect of the numenous universe and how that can drive us forward to our best selves? He was a leftist that did a bunch of acid.
So it is a combination of those two forces I think. Also most people have religious feelings so it is occasionally useful to include those in analysis of societal forces and trends. I would say that in America we are almost uniquely unreligous. We have church, but for most people we see no evidence of religious faith or emotions. Just church tribalism.
I think you're right re: religious beliefs.
From William Empson's Milton's God
How a child is brought up to be a good character is hard to say, but the thing is often done, and fear of Hell is far from being an essential ingredient. But if the child is brought up to believe that without the Christian God there is no difference between good and evil, and later ceases to believe in that God (through having an intelligent conscience perhaps), he is liable to become like a dog with its back broken on the road by a motor-car, which one feels ought to be put out of its misery. This happens most often in Ireland, where religious education is particularly fierce; it is the whole theme of Waiting for Godot which English audiences found somehow familiar and yet excitingly mysterious. I know a little about what the audience thought, because I was kindly invited to speak on the stage, as one of the two Devil's Advocates in the initial debate, when a packed house of enthusiasts for Waiting for Godot discussed in the theater what they thought the play meant. No two of them agreed, and I came away strengthened in my own belief that this kind of religious education is a very unfair trick to play on a child.
