The New York Times ran a story last week that brought me back to the glorious days of my misspent youth.
It was a story about a 1936 film that was originally released as a pompous public service announcement and went on to enjoy a second life decades later as a midnight-movie classic: Reefer Madness.
I saw Reefer Madness with a group of friends at the Uniondale Mini Cinema on Long Island when I was a teenager.
And yes, we were all hippie freaks toking on clipped roaches right up to the moment we walked into the theater.
If you’ve seen it, you know. If you haven’t, trust me: there’s just no any other way to fully appreciate this movie.
It’s hysterical. As in literally hysterical; an unintentional self-parody in which two puffs off a joint instantly induce violent and uncontrollable laughter, dangerous hallucinations, and a complete breakdown of moral restraint. Addiction, criminality, and insanity soon follow.
Or so the film’s producers would have us believe.
The premise is so preposterous, the acting so over the top, and the attitude so laughably melodramatic that it’s impossible to take Reefer Madness seriously.
Until you realize that it’s purpose wasn’t just to rally support for a war on drugs; it was to justify a war on people.
Reefer Madness was co-opted by Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, for a disinformation campaign that used racist rhetoric to denigrate African American jazz musicians, whose music he characterized as “satanic” due to their regular use of the “weed with roots in hell,” and played on the fears of White Americans to convince them that cannabis—re-branded as “Marihuana” to linguistically associate it with Mexican immigrants—was inherently evil.
Anslinger had a problem, though: there was hardly any scientific data to support his claims.
So, he enlisted 30 scientists to develop proof that cannabis was a dangerous drug.
29 told him there wasn’t any.
But 1 said there was and that was all he needed. He knew it wasn’t true. He didn’t care. Anslinger took the lone theory that supported his preferred narrative, sensationalized it, and fed it to the press, which sold it to the public.
Sound familiar?
It should: J.D. Vance knew perfectly well that Haitian immigrants weren’t eating the pets of the people who live in Springfield, Ohio but, like Anslinger, he wanted the media’s attention and the story fit his agenda. Same circus, different clowns.
Tactics like these obviously violate the yogic principle of truthfulness, but they also speak to another principle: deference to expertise:
Nowadays, of course, everyone’s a “seer of the truth.” No matter what you believe—or want to believe—you can hop on the Internet and find the 1 study out of 30 that proves you’re right.
Such is the stuff of popular resistance to governance by educated “elites,” which is understandable when there’s real evidence of ulterior motives behind policy-making, such as monetary gain, self-promotion, or both.
And today’s resistance is no longer just a matter of distrust. As Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise puts it,
I personally don’t feel any hostility toward “established knowledge,” but I can testify to the fact that the Ayurvedic protocol I’m following is doing more for my skin, sleep apnea, and hearing loss than anything the dermatologists, sleep specialists, and audiologists my primary care physician referred me to have.
Now here’s the important point: the results I’m getting didn’t come about as a result of my having done my own research; they’re the result of my deference to an alternative authority. Ayurveda, in its own cultural realm, is a well-established science of well-being.
Similarly, yoga is also a science. And to teach it, one needs to be a scientist who has followed the established protocols under the direction of an expert and validated the results by direct perception. This goes for both the postural and spiritual aspects of yoga.
We are the world’s foremost experts on our own experience of practicing yoga according to a teacher’s instructions, but that doesn’t make us our own best teachers. There’s a big difference between being the authority on yoga and being the authority on our own experience.
If we lose sight of that difference, we can easily end up selling ourselves on the lone theory that supports our preferred narrative instead of deferring to authoritative sources of specialized knowledge who can help us see the truth.
That’s assuming, of course, that we want to see the truth. Truthfulness begins with being truthful to ourselves.
Truthfulness requires something that manipulators of popular fears don’t usually have: humility.
Humility is the mandatory pre-requisite for acquiring knowledge and the first symptom of acquired wisdom.
It’s only when we put knowledge and wisdom together that we take our first steps toward becoming seers of the truth.
Wishing you all good fortune,
– Hari-k