Have I Changed My Mind About RFK Jr?

You will never agree with someone else on absolutely everything. So what do we do about this during a time of little trust and plenty of chaos?

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I have been emailed or directly messaged MANY times since RFK Jr. came out with his position on Israel.

“What do you think of him now?!” “Isn’t he just a distraction like everyone else?”

One observation in the second statement is the tantalizing draw of black and white thinking. “Someone is either good or bad, and we have to decide what that truth is now!”

This binary thinking is incredibly strong right now in some. We had someone withdraw their financial support for our publication last week simply because I suggested Snopes was not wrong 100% of the time.

“A platform has to be right 100% of the time or they are useless,” they said to me.

That is quite the position to have and an impossible result to achieve. Doesn’t that make every platform useless? Is every person not worth listening to as well?

I find it troubling when people cannot concede that others are right when they are indeed right. And you may or may not be surprised by how prevalent this type of thinking is at the moment.

This leads to the discussion I want to have today about RFK Jr and his stance on the Israel/Palestine conflict.

RFK Jr. stated the following weeks ago on Twitter,

“This ignominious, unprovoked, and barbaric attack on Israel must be met with world condemnation and unequivocal support for the Jewish state’s right to self-defense. We must provide Israel with whatever it needs to defend itself — now. As President, I’ll make sure that our policy is unambiguous so that the enemies of Israel will think long and hard before attempting aggression of any kind. I applaud the strong statements of support from the Biden White House for Israel in her hour of need.

However, the scale of these attacks means it is likely that Israel will need to wage a sustained military campaign to protect its citizens. Statements of support are fine, but we must follow through with unwavering, resolute, and practical action. America must stand by our ally throughout this operation and beyond as it exercises its sovereign right to self-defense.”

This rubbed many people the wrong way as this has always been a controversial topic, and many have felt there shouldn’t be such a strong lockstep allegiance with Israel.

For me, when it comes to this conflict I don’t think more war is going to be the answer - especially not in the form of collective punishment as we see now.

Eliminating Hamas entirely is impossible, just like it was with ISIS. All that will happen is what has always happened, a perpetuation of more violence that results in more trauma and terror attacks 5 or 10 years from now that will be labelled as “unprovoked.”

We must pull back to the type of sensemaking that allows us to see more deeply into the cause of our current events, and then respond with this in mind. See the image below, you may recognize it from last week’s piece.

It feels shortsighted to look at a single event on the surface and then find ways to justify how we will respond, all while taking no responsibility for the actions that will then occur later. The key point here is: this is moving from “Was this justified?” to “How can we observe the totality of why things happen?”

To make an observation is not to justify, it’s the understand. When we understand, we can provide more effective solutions. All of this is built on our ability to have empathy and truly hear the various perspectives at play.

Israelis are hurting, as are Palestinians, as are Hamas members. Why do so many, no matter which side, put so much effort into avoiding empathy and connection for the other’s experience and perspective? Why do we choose hate instead?

I wonder how RFK Jr. would respond to this type of discussion. Why does he hold the position he does on the Israel/Palestine conflict? I don’t know.

Perhaps he has publicly discussed but I have not heard it. If you happen to know where he has please drop a link in the comments.

What Could A Response Be?

Of course, we have to ask what other type of response is possible in this volatile situation. Violence is an aspect of our human experience to some extent, but how do we work to truly limit it, not just now, but in the future?

This reveals the messyness of the human experience - especially when we consider the reality of collective trauma and our overall collective conditioning.

My work has been built on the feeling that no system or societal situation can truly change without changing the consciousness and mindset of its people. It is this that drives what occurs. This is why the iceberg model I presented above is so important. By nature, looking at underlying system drivers forces us to have empathy and move to a different level of consciousness.

This is why our modern culture and narrative avoids depth like this in mainstream dialogue. The upholding of our narratives requires a lack of empathy. It requires that we dehumanize and disconnect from the true pain of war. This is why propaganda, narrative control, and selective media stories have always been the way they have been. They shape the way people see something based on the desires of those in positions of power.

Much of the time, it leaves us disconnected. It leaves them feeling like there are two completely different realities in something like the Israel/Palestine conflict, but one must be more to blame and more wrong. Those then become the ones who must suffer.

Within this conflict, there are those of us on the outside of it (in a way), who aren’t living in the countries involved and who don’t have the power of decision making. There are those within the countries, hurting, at risk, and need to consider what’s in their yard. They also don’t have the power of decision making. Then there are those involved who are in positions of power and who do have their hands on decision making.

So where do healing and a change in consciousness I mentioned above need to be applied? To me, in each layer. However, that is a tough ask for those directly involved in a time like this.

Those involved are operating from shock, pain, and trauma. This can produce a gap between those involved. It creates an othering effect that can lead to an inability to empathize with, connect with, and feel the other. This can also happen to those existing ‘outside’ the conflict from a distance. With this, we lose the ability to integrate another’s experience into the whole, making it easier to want to destroy them.

To make a deeper level of connection and listening available we have to move to the heart in order to feel the true experience of another. Within that, we sense a shared humanity and no longer find it as simple to go to war and cause limitless violence.

The risk of this choice for those involved in the conflict is of course, “If I do this deep act of seeking peace, and take associated action like releasing hostages, stop bombing etc, will the other?”

In real-time chaos, this is truly difficult, but this is the most potent time to act in this way because the stakes are so high and the potential ripple effect is so great. Billions are paying attention.

To me, true leadership would be having the ability to discuss this sort of solution versus responding from the same level of consciousness we have always come from. And it’s here where I don’t agree with RFK Jr’s view of this conflict.

Did My Mind Change?

All of this said, my position on RFK Jr in the beginning, which can be found in this essay I wrote, is that his role is not necessarily to become the next President of the US, but to change the global conversation and help people reflect on ideas in new ways. He’s a disruptor of the norm and a catalyst in shifting consciousness.

I think some people thought that I had chosen a side: RFK Jr.’s, which is why they wondered if I still supported him. I’m not even a US citizen.

For me, I go back to the iceberg model. His campaign is an opportunity to shift the greater social field that is the United States, bringing new words and ways of seeing things to a larger stage by the nature of his character and viewpoints.

Through the way mainstream media and elitists respond to him, people will see how much they fear different ideas and people who look to bring power back to the people.

These revelations serve as a catalyst for people to look more deeply into what’s beneath the surface of the iceberg, providing that level of inquiry is open to us (i.e. embodied sensemaking.)

Through this catalyst, people will likely remove or lessen the trust they give the existing political structure. Sure, it can be chaotic when the masses lose trust in their institutions, but it’s necessary when those institutions have proven themselves to be largely corrupt and not working in favor of the people who put them there and need them in a sense.

To me, this shift is going to occur regardless of his position on this one issue. Therefore my mind has not changed on the role he brings to the table. He is a disruptor of a stale consciousness and is somebody who will change the conversation meaningfully.

Further, if there is anyone who would change their mind about a big topic like this, I think it’s him. His willingness to examine and re-examine evidence seriously to go beyond widely held beliefs in society is evident. He carries a humble quality that is exceptionally rare in politicians at a federal level.

That said, I am deeply curious about why he holds the position he does on this conflict, and I’m not sure we’re going to get a clear idea of why through media interviews with him.

As a final thought, his disruptor status is actually increased for me given his stance on Israel/Palestine because it forces people to have to address nuance.

“What do I do when I agree with RFK about everything but not this? Do I bail? Do I call him bad names now? Do I lose all hope for someone to come and change the world?”

This is life. We’re never going to agree on everything, so what do we do about that? How do we operate as a society? How do we stay in the game and not bail out into our own corner? I can’t tell you how many times over the last 15 years readers have angrily unsubscribed and called us nasty names because after reading 100 articles of ours, we published one with a small detail they disagreed with. Why is our finger always on the trigger?

This might cause us to reflect on how we participate in creating our systems. Can we take responsibility for the state of our current society and what can we do to change it?

You may feel it’s naive to view the world and solutions in the ways I’ve suggested, and perhaps it is. But I truly don’t feel that in my heart, mind, and body.

Further, what is the other option? To do what we’ve always done? How is that working out for us collectively as we grapple with whole system crisis on every level? Do we sometimes disguise our cynicism as being “realistic?”

Let me know your comments, thoughts and feelings below, and thank you for reading.