Re-Souling the World

Solving this crisis of adolescent masculinity and rediscovering our shared morality.

Reminder: I’m hosting an office hours on Zoom this Saturday at 10amPT for paid Substack subscribers. You can find the link to register at the bottom of this newsletter. Come join us! We will spend some time chatting and re-calibrating our nervous systems and then if time allows, we might do some work around wanting. If it’s not the time for that, we will do that work together next time.

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Early Saturday morning, people began DM’ing me links to Peter Attia’s appearance in the Epstein Files. If you haven’t been following, from 2015-2019, Attia both feverishly pursued and maintained a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein—and some of the emails are vile. (Also prominently in the Epstein Files: Deepak Chopra.)

“The Garden of Earthly Delights,” Hieronymous Bosch, The Prado, prints from €8.00.

People are DM’ing me links because in February 2022, before the New York Magazine story called “Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control” came out, which discussed Huberman’s non-operational lab and his contemporaneous relationships with a whole bunch of women who all thought they were dating him exclusively, I wrote a Substack called “Ending the Manel.” My newsletter was about the preposterously low female guesting rates on many prominent podcasts. I chose shows where I knew this would be particularly shocking, so I didn’t audit Joe Rogan—I audited Huberman, Attia, Tim Ferriss, and Sam Harris, though there are many others with the same poor female-to-male guest ratios. At that point, Huberman had interviewed eight women total; Attia wasn’t doing much better, with a rate of about 10-11%. (Weirdly, I recently felt called to go back and look to see if anything has improved; it hasn’t.)

That post took off and I wrote some follow-ups, which are all relevant to this unfolding story as well. They are: “The Perception—and Reality—of Scarcity,” “Who Gets to Be an Expert?,” “The Achilles Heel of Women.” The second most relevant is the final piece of the series, which I published in the aftermath of the Huberman piece in New York Magazine. It’s called “One Thing We Need to Learn,” and it’s about the way we rush to defend these guys because of our own anxiety about admiring them. (In the case of Huberman, we saw attempted take downs of the women and the writer, who also happened to be a woman.)

So back to the Attia drama.

In response to his presence in the files, Attia sent an email to his team and patients/clients (which he posted on X on Monday), in which he expresses remorse and humiliation, though it gets about…5% there? The email is full of self-justifications: You can tell that he is lying to himself and that he is working really hard to restore internal consonance with who he professes to be. (For more on this, tune in to my episode with Carol Tavris on cognitive dissonance and self-justification: “The Self-Justification Trap.” It’s a great explainer on the rampant hypocrisy that we see throughout culture.)

Attia claims that he asked Epstein about the 2008 arrest for child prostitution and that Epstein minimized it (and Attia bought it); Attia describes himself as naive, wide-eyed, and new to the table—that Epstein’s wealth and proximity to other powerful people meant to him that Epstein must be a-ok. They were his rubber-stamp. As someone who prides himself on being driven by evidence…I’m sorry, but no. Self-justification, self-justification, self-justification.

Attia claims in his posted email: “In November 2018 I read the Miami Herald investigative article. I was repulsed by what I learned. Nauseated. It marked a clear and irreversible line between what I knew before and what I understood afterward. At that point, I told him directly he needed to accept responsibility for what he did.”

There is no evidence of this in the emails we’ve seen to date, only evidence of concern for Epstein’s legal woes. None for the victims. As Dr. Jennifer Gunter points out, The Miami Herald broke a story on Epstein on November 28, 2018; Attia emailed Epstein on December 4, 2018 to ask: “What is fallout from recent story?” and “Legally any change?” To which Epstein replied: “Zero.”

Internet sleuths have also linked together his emails with a confession he apparently made in his book Outlive, that when his one-month-old son stopped breathing and spent four days in the NICU, he didn’t fly home to be with his child and wife for 10 days, since he had “important meetings” in New York. As the internet sleuths sorted out based on the emails, those meetings were at Epstein’s. Attia does express contrition in his book: “Even today, just thinking about what happened, I feel nauseous about my behavior.” That said, I cannot imagine a female physician with his same platform making a similar confession in her mega bestselling book and not getting destroyed. (I haven’t read the book, though many have as it’s been on the New York Times bestseller list for 129 weeks.) This new context makes it even more monstrous, sure, but it’s wild to me that more people didn’t say: Wait, what? Something is really wrong here for someone who is supposed to be an agent of healing.

I guess what I’d offer is that Attia has been showing us who he is for a long time; that he’s a man who needs help, holds women in very low regard (both professionally and personally), and has no relationship with his own soul. In Jungian terms, he has no connection to his anima. Jung postulated that all men have an inner feminine soul (anima) and women have an inner masculine soul (animus)—we ignore, neglect, abuse, and repress these energies at our own peril. I feel very sad for him. He must feel incredibly alienated from himself. But I feel much sadder for the victims.

There are a lot of men who are disconnected from their souls, which inversely causes them to lash out, minimize, and suppress the feminine elsewhere. Their feminine is in their shadow, or blind spot, and it terrorizes them from their unconscious. They then project this fear/hatred of their own disowned feminine on the feminine in the culture, typically represented by women, as well as LGBTQIA+ folks—they project this on anything or anyone who they perceive to be “weak,” “soft,” “powerless,” and so on. Their inner feelings are reflected by their external behavior. (It’s a whole ‘nother topic but it’s fascinating to me that Trump mostly uses plasticized women to be his guard dogs: Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Karoline Leavitt, Tulsi Gabbard, and so on.)

I had mythologist Michael Meade on Pulling the Thread a week or so ago, and I would strongly urge you to go and listen to what he has to say. It’s called “How to Grow Your Soul.” We spoke at length about the manosphere and the medicine that Meade, specifically, would tender. (For those of you who are unfamiliar, Meade was part of a cultural push with Robert Bly (author of Iron John) to raise the consciousness of men back in the day. As he quipped, people would call it a men’s movement and he would counter that, “there’s already a men’s movement: It’s called Congress. In other words: If you’re on top, you don’t need a movement, you need a breakdown.”)

Meade went on to offer that the manosphere would be better termed the “adolescense-ophere.” As he added, “it’s more like adolescent teenagers than it is men.” This is true: It all feels awfully juvenile. His larger point is that when men refuse to do the soul work—which is a journey in and down (not valiantly into the external world), “they are becoming more isolated, more inflated, more disjuncted, more dissociated, more anti-world, more anti-nature, and more anti-feminine.” It sounds about right. We desperately need men to grow up.

Traditionally, we offered these adolescent boys initiation: A transformational crossing of a threshold that moved them from childhood to adulthood, a rite of passage that felt like the death of the old world and the birth of the next. Traditionally, this was done in community (overseen by other men), in service to the collective. As Francis Weller points out (you can hear our podcast conversation here: “There Are Two Moves When Faced with Uncertainity”), initiation was never about the individual: It was always about the tribe.

In In the Absence of the Ordinary, Weller writes:

“Traditionally, initiation was never meant for the individual. It had nothing to do with personal growth or self-improvement. It was an act of sacrifice on behalf of the greater community into which the initiate was brought and to which they now hold allegiance. They were being made ready to step into their place of maintaining the vitality and well-being of the village, the clan, the watershed, the ancestors, and spirit. It was never about them, but about the continuum of generations to come.

“This thought is exceedingly difficult for us to digest in our highly personalized/psychologizing way of thinking and perceiving. It is always about us—our wounds, our growth—which keeps us at the center of the wheel.

“I called initiation ‘a contained encounter with death.’ Martin Prechtel said those “who didn’t fight death in adolescence were destined to live in a walking death.” This failure to confront death during initiation dooms many of us to become agents of death, eating life wherever we go. Any sideways glance at our culture reveals a massively consumptive, parasitic energy, feeding off the life force of the planet. This is the direct consequence of abandoning the essential practice of initiation. Restoring rituals of initiation is at the heart of any meaningful cultural change.”

We are missing all of this in our culture.

We are also missing a shared morality—or any sense of morality. Or, I should be more specific and say that those with the most power seem to be missing their morality. (As Lord Acton observed, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”)

I had mentioned above that Sam Harris is someone who hosts a disappointingly small number of women on his podcast—surprising, to me, in part because I’ve heard that his wife is brilliant and fantastic, which makes me think he has a healthy relationship with both his feminine soul and his ego. (Annaka Harris is the author of Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind.) That said, I had to chuckle when I searched for him in the Epstein Files. He’s in there, but mostly because Epstein really, really wants Harris to be in his orbit. He emailed Sam to ask him to dinner with Woody Allen and Noam Chomsky—reminding him that he had met him at TED—to which Sam replied with only one line: “Only if you film it. :)” He also appears with Annaka on an invite list for an unspecified event under the DECLINED column.

I’ve heard that Sam is extremely ethical—discussions of morality are a core tenet of what he’s about—but it’s still refreshing to know that there are people who act with integrity even when nobody is watching. It’s reassuring to know that some people are immune to being buffeted by cultural pressure from people like Epstein and can actually be trusted with power (and our faith). (To that end, snaps to all the prominent female physicians who actually have something to lose by openly criticizing Attia, particularly because they are some of the few women who these guys host: Here’s looking at you Dr. Sarah Szal (Gottfried) and Dr. Lucy McBride.)

I have a lot more to say about morality and what we need to reweave into the fabric of our society to keep this enterprise together, but for now, I wanted to leave you with a quote from Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. This is from Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, which was the last book he published before he died in 2020. (It’s beautiful and prophetic, I highly recommend.)

“Love your neighbor. Love the stranger. Hear the cry of the otherwise unheard. Liberate the poor from their poverty. Care for the dignity of all. Let those who have more than they need share their blessings with those who have less. Feed the hungry, house the homeless, and heal the sick in body and mind. Fight injustice, whoever it is done by and whoever it is done against. And do these things because, being human, we are bound by a covenant of human solidarity, whatever our color or culture, class or creed.

“These are moral principles, not economic or political ones. They have to do with conscience, not wealth or power. But without them, freedom will not survive. The free market and liberal democratic state together will not save liberty, because liberty can never be built by self-interest alone. … Morality is not an option. It’s an essential.”

Alright friends, I’ll see you next week. Take care of yourselves and each other.