CONTINUED FROM Part II—Making America Great Again

“I am about to suggest that you give up trust in experts and begin to trust yourself. . .”
—Stephen Harrod Buhner

In Part I of this review, we saw how Buhner offers exercises to lower our sensory gateways and open the doors of perception.

In Part II, we commented on his unexpected diatribe on the evils of institutional regulation, and the inherent superiority of independent, unregulated, “unschooled” individuals who epitomize the American ideal. This part of the book culminates in a call to trust yourself over the so-called experts, a suggestion not only gratuitous but dangerous, as we have come to appreciate with the developments surrounding the 2020 U.S. election. As of this writing, Donald Trump continues to incite belief in massive election fraud, and his outraged followers hope for legal loopholes, armed uprisings, or the imposition of martial law to overturn the results.

In Part III of this review, I want to ask whether trusting your feelings is always a good idea. You might feel, for example, that a certain person is friendly, only to find out on the presentation of new evidence that you imagined it. He still feels friendly, but he’s actually a corrupt bastard bent on manipulating you for his own selfish purposes.

That’s just a random example, of course.

Feeling vibes is a lot easier than Buhner makes it out to be. The problem is that the message of the vibe may be distorted by internal factors, and contradicted by external indications. Ignoring those indications and trusting your feelings is certainly an option, but I’d stop short of making it the recommended option at all times. Sometimes it’s better not to trust yourself. The possibility that you could do something stupid is always a real one.

Buhner comes close to recognizing this in Appendix 1, “Sensory Overload and Self-Caretaking,” and to a lesser extent in Appendix 2, “On the Healing of Schizophrenia.” Mostly, these are about techniques for preserving your sense of well-being in the imaginal realm, by managing sensory gating and heeding the voices of your “inner council,” the different modules of your consciousness. There are a few passages applicable to the problem of trusting yourself over experts, as it might manifest in embracing theories about U.S. elections stolen by secret cabals of child-molesting Satanists in collusion with Hugo Chavez and the CIA. In a section called “Paranoid Events,” Buhner advises guarding against excessive personal fear or panic; in such cases, “The worst thing you can do. . . is to act on what you are perceiving.” Later, in a section on “The ‘Ego,'” he notes the dangers of megalomania and related states of mind. And finally, talking about schizophrenics, he acknowledges that they need to “trust their perceptions but be suspicious of their interpretation.” But the perceptions themselves are still presumed to be accurate—in fact, more so than with non-schizophrenics.

At this late stage of the book, the idea of misinterpreting the feeling sense is newly introduced, and only briefly. The problems it can cause are represented as purely personal ones, with no social consequences—an assumption consistent with Buhner’s faith in the virtue of rugged American individualism. I wish he’d spent more time on these issues, and less on his libertarian, MAGA-like political digressions.

After all, as he frequently reminds us, vaguely citing Einstein:

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
—attributed to Albert Einstein by non-experts

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