The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized, Part 2 (Interview w/ Báyò Akómoláfé)

04/07/23 • 76 min

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Báyò Akómoláfé is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual whose vocation goes beyond justice and speaking truth to power to opening up other spaces of power-with. In this episode of The Emerald, Báyò joins Josh for a deep-dive discussion into how the Western psychological vision shapes modernity, and the need to expand into alternative stories of what 'being' means. Says Báyò: "Psychology is complicit in the creation of Western modernity. It is not a thing apart. Its disciplinarity, its history, and its legacies are tied up with the industrialization, commodification, the manufacturing, the replication and the reproduction of the human subject. How we think about what it means to be human, what it means to have agency, what it means to think, who has cognition, who doesn't have cognition — all of this is tied in with the historicity of psychology." Using animate tradition as a foundation, Josh and Báyò explore Norse and Polynesian trickster myths, trauma discourse and Puritanism, and pay homage to the gods of in between spaces as they explode open a vision of being, bodies, and sentience that is vast, wild, and porous.

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The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized

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Once upon a time, psychologist James Hillman spoke of anima, the breath of life, the soul of the world, as something that had to be rescued by psychologists from theologians. Now, with pop-psychology vernacular inundating all aspects of life, it may be time for the breath of life to be rescued all over again. The New York Times recently released an article entitled 'The Problem with Letting Therapy Speak Invade Everything.' Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe writes of the need to 'decenter Western psychology.' It seems that psychology discourse has grown from a simple means of understanding and evaluating the forces at play in the psyche to be the medium through which much of modern discourse takes place, through which nearly everything is evaluated. If there is a value to ritual, it is increasingly articulated as a psychological value. The traditional yogic process has become deeply conflated with the psychological process. Traditional plant medicines are on the verge of a global psychologization. Psychology vernacular has been adopted en masse — and also weaponized en masse — so that simple disagreements in viewpoint or worldview are now called out as psychological pathologies. Activist movements have abandoned the spiritual vocabulary of Martin Luther King and Gandhi and the Dalai Lama in favor of outing narcissists and addressing collective traumas. Part spoken-word rant à la Gil Scott-Heron, part devotional ode to the breath of life, this episode is not an indictment of psychology or of therapeutic systems that benefit many people, but rather a glimpse into what goes missing as we increasingly evaluate everything through the psychological lens. As always in the modern west, what gets sidelined first is... the animate itself. There are textures and depths to the way that traditional systems understand relationality with the larger animate world that get lost when seen through the modalities that have arisen out of individualism. And in traditional animate systems, we find visions of consciousness, animacy, and relationality that make us deeply rethink psychological visions of trauma, safety, agency, and alterity. Listen on a good sound system, at a time when you can devote your full attention.

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Animism is Normative Consciousness (Re-mixed, Re-musicked, and Re-released)

For 98% of human history — over 10,000 generations — our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted with a world that they saw and felt to be animate — imbued with life force, inhabited by and permeated with beings with which we exist in ongoing relation. This animate vision was the water in which we swam, it was consciousness in its natural dwelling place, the normative way of seeing the world and our place in it. It wasn’t a theory, a philosophy, or an idea. It wasn’t, actually, an "-ism." It was direct, felt experience. It was, simply, how things were. Which is why it has been commonly understood across the entire world for all of time. In this musically reimagined reissue of a classic episode of The Emerald, we explore how foundational the animate worldview is to the human experience and to human consciousness, and what we lose when it starts to fade. Listen on a good sound system when you have time to devote your full attention.

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