Polarization pushes people apart. Writer Chloé Valdary says we can heal deepening divisions by treating each other like human beings, not political abstractions.

Guests

Chloé Valdary, founder of the organization Theory of Enchantment.

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Transcript

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: This is what polarization in the U.S. sounds like.

KAROLINE LEAVITT: The Democrat party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens and violent criminals.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: She’s a radical left lunatic.

STEPHEN MILLER: The Democrat party is terrorizing the American people.

HASAN PIKER: White supremacist, Nazi piece of [BLEEP].

DEAN OBEIDALLAH: The GOP stands for Guardians of Pedophiles because Donald Trump is the predator in chief. The GOP is the party protecting pedophiles and sexual predators.

STEVEN CROWDER: They’re violent. They want you dead.

YOUTUBER: Charlie Kirk just got shot. Woo!

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: They just do not love this country. We call it the Hate America rally because you’ll see the hate for America all over this thing when they show up.

CHAKRABARTI: Polarization pushes people apart. It leads to painful breaks in families and in friendships. Is it possible at all right now to heal these seemingly ever deepening divisions? Chloé Valdary joins us now. She’s a writer and founder of the organization Theory of Enchantment. Chloé, welcome back to On Point.

VALDARY: Thank you so much, Meghna.

CAKRABARTI: I want to know, first of all, as you heard those clips that we just played, kind of how did you feel? How did you respond to that?

VALDARY: One thing I noticed was that there’s a lot of fear in the room, so to speak. Seems to me that’s the main common denominator. That’s the main frequency.

It’s the sound of fear that is present in the physical bodies of these individuals who are saying dehumanizing things about each other and yeah, just there’s a lot of fear in the room.

CHAKRABARTI: And I wonder if, I don’t know if we can tell, maybe we can’t, because many of these people are actually quite prominent and powerful.

They included, obviously, President Trump. You heard from the White House press secretary there. You heard from high profile Democratic pundits like Hasan Piker. There was someone from MSNBC. I’m not, some of these people might actually not be feeling fear, but trying to foment it, right? In others. What do you think it is that makes us as individual humans vulnerable to when people are trying to foment fear in us.

VALDARY: I have to say, I do suspect that there’s fear present in those individuals, even though, let’s say, the facade they project on screen or wherever they show up may be one of belief or conviction or a real belief in their arguments.

I think that’s true at some point, but I think at another point or at another level, many of these individuals do genuinely believe that the quote-unquote other side is out to get them, out to destroy them. And I think that is certainly animating and motivating their tenor, the tone, the consistency with which they drone out this very fearful, hateful frequency.

And I think that fear is a very, or can be very easy to spread because it’s a felt sensation in the body. It’s a felt sensation in the nervous system. And when we are prone to be brought to fight or flight in the nervous system, we become really alert. We become, we have a feeling of aliveness, right?

Fear … can be very easy to spread because it’s a felt sensation in the body.

Fear is not the only source that gives us a feeling of aliveness, but it’s certainly one of the emotions that does. And so we get alert, our eyes start to dilate, and it actually gives us a kind of quality-of-life experience that can almost feel like ecstasy. And so as human beings, we are designed actually to go into ecstatic states. And anytime we pull up our cell phones, anytime we find ourselves scrolling on social media, whether it’s Instagram or TikTok or X, whether we know it or not, we’ve entered into a trance state.

We’ve moved from, whether it’s walking down the street or paying attention to something else, to moving in a state where we’re scrolling and we’re taking in content that is provoking us in an emotional way and using an emotional frequency.

So if we’re not aware of who and what we are as human beings, how we operate, how our nervous systems operate, how we can learn how to co-regulate our nervous systems, then we will be prone to enter into these frequencies, which are ultimately trance states.

But that unfortunately, when brought to a certain fever pitch, can lead to violence and can lead to destruction, but at the end of the day, it’s still the human being human, if you will. And so the task is for us to learn ourselves and really study ourselves and love ourselves. And that takes time.

That takes work.

CHAKRABARTI: No, you’re exactly right. As there’s endless studies that show that when people are deep in some kind of fear response. As you said, there’s a neurological change, right? There’s also even a hormonal one; cortisol levels shoot up. There’s an interruption in our nervous system in terms of our ability to access the parts of our brain that do critical thinking.

Things like that. Point well taken here, but just quickly as an aside, you said people are entering a trance state. What do you mean by that?

VALDARY: That’s a good question. Let me see if I can try to tease it out a little bit. Whenever we, let’s say, find ourselves at a dancing, I’m a dancer. I love to dance, right?

So I love to go out in New York City and dance. When we enter into these states where we can be with other people and dance and drop the mind, bypass the sort of like prefrontal cortex part of our mind, where that stops the mind chatter. And we’re in a state where we feel a oneness in the room with other people, when we’re dancing.

That’s an example of a trance state. And human beings have been doing this. Entering into trance states since the beginning of time. The word trance is related to the word train and travel, and it has these very interesting Sanskrit etymological origins. So anytime we’re moving, essentially, from a state where the mind chatter is strategizing and trying to figure out how to do things.

To a state where that drops and we feel a sense of flow, a sense of connectivity, that can be described as a trance state. And —

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, go ahead. No. I was just going to say now, it makes sense now because, so it’s like you are actually entranced, right?

VALDARY: Yes. Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. No, and I completely understood now.

Thank you for that clarification. Now I understand what’s so interesting about this is that that state of being entranced can have a very positive impact. But then you were also saying that when the fear response is triggered, it’s also a kind of trance state, but one that has a negative impact.

VALDARY: Yes, because fear is a kind of connector, right? If I am deeply afraid of something or someone, and you’re also deeply afraid of someone, of that same person, or that same ideology, or that same other thing, then you and I can connect over that. We can feel deeply bonded over that. We can even connect on a, let’s say, tribalistic way or through a tribalistic way.

And that fear is what would connect us in that context. And if we’re not in relationship with our fears, right? If we’re not, and this is where things like internal family systems and other psychotherapeutic wisdom traditions can come into being, to help us manage or really, again, enter into a healthy relationship with these emotions.

If we’re not aware of when our body feels fear as just a basic first step, then we can get carried away, right? The fear can actually start to control us instead of us controlling the fear. Because it feels, it can feel, if I’m angry, if I’m deeply angry and I have righteous anger. That can easily tip over into self-righteousness. And I really think it’s important to stress this on an embodied level, on a somatic level and not necessarily, or exclusively on an intellectual level. It feels good in my body to feel righteous indignation.

It feels incredible. It feels like I’m alive. And so I’m just one person. You put me in a room full of other people who are feeling righteous indignation at the same source or towards the same source. That’s an incredible feeling, and it’s a powerful feeling.

And if I’m walking around in the world where I’m other otherwise disassociating, where I’m otherwise not in touch with my feelings. And this one moment, or several moments throughout the day, the only time I feel something is when I’m in a state of fear. When I’m in a state of anger against someone else, then that’s actually going to be very addictive.

And I’m going to look for that and search for that totally unconsciously, because I’m not aware of how my nervous system works. I’m not in conversation with my emotions and this is why it’s really important, Meghna, to stress the embodied peace.

Because so much I’ve seen in academic intellectual spaces, and I come from this world. So I say this with all love and compassion, but I’ve seen in academic and intellectual spaces, this sort of bypassing the conversation about the body. About emotions. I’ve seen this sort of try to get control of your emotions or deny your emotions or suppress your emotions.

One of the famous taglines that the political commentator Ben Shapiro has said in the past is facts don’t care about your feelings. He’s a very prominent person in the political world. And he said this time and time again, and neurobiologically speaking, that’s simply not true.

There’s a really beautiful book that was written by I want to say his name was Antonio Damasio who wrote about, it’s a book titled Descartes’ Error, and it’s about the neuroscience of the brain and the way the brain works. And he discovered that in order to actually discern how to respond properly to something, to your environment, to a context, to discern what we call facts, right?

In English, it’s not that you need emotion, it’s that emotion is right there in the brain and throughout the body, right? Helping you, motivating you to discern. So we really have to start having a conversation about the embodied peace, because I think that’s what’s missing.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Chloé, I completely agree with you. As you were saying earlier, that anger or righteous indignation produces a kind of high, actually, in the body. And the brain. And to do that in a group, it’s strongly bonding, right? Between people, and I think that’s why throughout human history, we have seen charismatic leaders, in fact, deliberately try to invoke that sense of righteous indignation in order to bond people.

Not only together, but to the idea that those charismatic leaders are selling. So breaking through that though, is where your Theory of Enchantment comes in. Now we’ll talk about the principles within the theory in just a few minutes, but this word enchantment is so evocative to me. Can you just tell us generally, how would you describe what the Theory of Enchantment is?

VALDARY: It’s basically, the Theory of Enchantment says that the world is fundamentally good. And that the way that we can, we as human beings can tap into this truth, can become aware of this truth, is by learning how to fall in love with the world through a series of practices and principles that we’ll talk about.

And ultimately, that means learning to fall in love with ourselves. And this is a really important, I would say, it’s the number one important practice that we as a species in this late hour must learn. Because so much of our conflicts, our bitter conflicts come from when we feel insecurity, insecure about aspects of ourselves that we don’t like or that we haven’t taken full responsibility for.

And in feeling insecure and not knowing how to deal with that insecurity, we often project it onto others in order to cope with the pain of insecurity. And so there are practices we can do, there are principles we can start to embody in order to reverse that. But ultimately, our inability to love and accept ourselves, and this is something that James Baldwin spoke about and wrote about a lot, and he’s someone that has deeply inspired me and motivated me in creating the Theory of Enchantment.

In feeling insecure and not knowing how to deal with that insecurity, we often project it onto others in order to cope with the pain.

But if we don’t learn how to love ourselves compassionately, then we will take the things we don’t like about ourselves and project them out onto others, and only see the monstrous part of ourselves exclusively in others. And wage crusades against the other without reflecting back on ourselves and within ourselves.

CHAKRABARTI: Let’s take a detour for a second before we get to the principles.

VALDARY: Sure.

CHAKRABARTI: Because you talked about James Baldwin. Tell me more. He’s obviously one of America’s great writers, civil rights activists. What particularly, are there particular books or passages or how did he influence your thinking about this, the Theory of Enchantment?

VALDARY: James Baldwin wrote a really beautiful essay, I believe it was his first essay, called Everybody’s Protest Novel. And we studied this essay in the Theory of Enchantment online course. And in this essay, James Baldwin criticizes the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And Richard Wright, who wrote Native Son.

And Richard Wright was a Black man. Harriet Beecher Stowe was a white woman. Both of these individuals were writing novels whose purpose was to criticize racism. However, Baldwin critiqued both of these pieces. And he argued that both of these pieces reduced the human being, stereotyped the human being, both Black and white, and failed to take into account the all-pervading complexity of the human being, which could never be reduced to categorization.

And he said that these novelists failed to really grasp and behold the mystery of what it means to be a human being. And that was, I guess, the driving force of his critique. And it’s a really powerful critique. Because it essentially invites us to basically loosen the rigidity with which we hold our identities, which is a very difficult thing to do.

It’s very difficult to walk in the world with an understanding that we are so much more than the personas we carry. I am a woman. I am Black. I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. I was raised in a Christian family. I graduated from university. All of these things are true about me.

It’s very difficult to walk in the world with an understanding that we are so much more than the personas we carry.

All of these things are aspects of who I am, but I’m also so much more than this. And always will be. And every human being on Earth is so much more than all of the answers they could possibly give to the question, who am I, or who are you? And so Baldwin was trying to point to this deeper, what he called disquieting feature of the human being.

This is also something I think that Kendrick Lamar has spoken to in his poetry. When he says, for example, in the song DNA, I got power, poison, pain and joy inside my DNA, right? He’s as an artist, and this is the artist’s task. And I think we really need the artist now more than ever. In these days. But he is showing us, he is modeling what it means to fully hold your complexity with compassion and say, this is who I am.

It’s very hard for us in a society where we’re told we must fit into a box, or we must almost not be too much. It’s very difficult for us to recognize how big and powerful and beautiful, and it’s really important to stress that part. How beautiful our species is, and I think that’s one of the really important antidotes that we need to be speaking about and proclaiming.

As we’re trying to combat the fear that pervades our culture, we need to be reminded of how beautiful we are as a species and what we’re capable of, how big our love can be for both ourselves and each other.

CHAKRABARTI: I’m noting here, I was just looking this up as you were reminding us about Baldwin’s really profound thinking. So much of his writing is full of these thoughts. There’s one of his very famous quotes of love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without. And know we cannot live within.

VALDARY: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: So we’ll get back to this in a second, but I appreciate that background. Because for a lot of folks hearing a concept of coming together around being able to be enchanted by ourselves, by each other, might seem like a stretch. So knowing the background of that, it helps a lot. And I will give voice to some of, let’s say, the more dubious or let’s say, the less agreeing questions about the Theory of Enchantment in a few minutes, but now to the principles of them.

Let’s go. The first one, as far as I understand is, you actually already mentioned this, is treat people like human beings. Not political abstractions. Now that one, as articulated, actually seems obvious, but how would you put that in practice then?

VALDARY: Yes. I like to say that the first principle, it’s actually the most important principle. Because it contains the other two principles, and it’s also the most challenging principle in the best way possible to practice. It requires a lifetime of practice. The art of becoming human is really I think the privilege of a lifetime. And so what does that mean practically? It really means, again, pointing to some of the things we spoke about earlier, is like really getting intimate with what it means to be in this body.

And to have this nervous system, this mammalian nervous system, which has this capacity to go into fight or flight, or freeze, fawn, rest, digest, like really learning what it means.

To be a part of this million year old evolutionary lineage on this earth. It means what one of my really beautiful teachers and sisters Maryn Azoff has taught me, which is this idea that like the earth herself brought you into being. And so regardless of who your parents are, regardless of your circumstances, regardless of some of the things, challenging things that you may have encountered in your childhood, regardless of the challenging, the things you may encounter today in your life, really knowing and walking with the knowledge that the earth herself brought you into being.

There’s a really beautiful teaching I’ve heard in like Zen practices. That human beings, we are the earth’s longing for itself. And when I hear that, I hear deep poetic resonance in that. And I think that if we learned how to see ourselves in that way and see each other in this way, we would begin to be able to treat each other like human beings, not political abstractions. What we do instead, is because we’re carrying around these personas, right?

Because we walk with these masks that Baldwin spoke about, we see each other as symbols, right? We see each other as abstraction. So you are this straight, white male, and so you represent this in my mind. You are this Black queer woman, so you represent this in my mind, and we’re not actually encountering the suchness of the human being.

Standing in front of us, we’re not even encountering the suchness of the human being that we are. And so it’s just symbol. And so the first principle is really an invitation to drop all of that.

CHAKRABARTI: Can I just jump in here?

VALDARY: Yes, please.

CHAKRABARTI: How do we do that?

Because just, you said this before, and I think it’s exactly right. That especially in this day and age, by virtue of culture and politics and media, people walk around, not just they walk around projecting those symbols first, by choice. Like how many times has someone said, I’ll just use myself, example.

Speaking as a middle aged Indian American woman, I have this opinion, which you have to honor. Frankly what you’re saying is that kind of statement is utterly meaningless because the label, middle aged Indian American woman. It’s not who I actually fundamentally am as a human being, but my counterargument to that, Chloé, is that everybody says that their identity is what matters first.

VALDARY: Sure. I love this question. Okay, so number one, I wouldn’t say it’s completely meaningless. It’s, let’s call it layer one. But there’s many layers, right? And number two, I think that when we enter into that sort of state of speaking. The way we speak to each other when we speak in that way is we’re actually not present.

We’re not being present with each other. Like we’re strategizing for an outcome that we want the conversation to have. If I say, if I enter into a conversation and I say as a queer Black woman, I blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s a strategy for me to try and get you to either see what I’m seeing or agree with what I’m saying, or feel like, quite frankly, you can’t like challenge what I’m saying.

But there’s a way in which I’m not actually being present with you. I’m speaking from the sort of like mind chatter, that’s again, trying to predict the outcome or strategize in order to bring about a particular outcome.

But I’m not actually present with you and I’m not actually listening to you or to what’s going on internally. Because if I’m strategizing. Then at some level, I’m afraid.

CHAKRABARTI: I think you’re exactly right. Because fear comes into this again, right? Yes. Like people oftentimes project the identity first because they’re afraid that they won’t be taken seriously.

VALDARY: Yes. And I get that. Like I have, that resonates with me deeply. I know what it’s like to be rejected and feel small and have parts of myself not be accepted by the outside world. And when I feel that way, of course, there’s a tendency in myself to contract, right?

But then, if I’m in tune with and learning about my nervous system. I understand, that’s a nervous system response. There’s nothing wrong. I can enter into conversation with it. I was like, oh, I’m feeling a contraction. And I could actually presence that with the other person that I’m speaking about.

Which brings me to the more practical piece of the first principle. Like how do we do this? How do we start to do this in this inundated world as it is? It’s very simple. Six month protocol. To really start to prime yourself for embodying the first principle. You have to sing every day and you have to dance every week, for six months.

CHAKRABARTI: You may have lost a lot of people right then and there.

VALDARY: (LAUGHS) That’s it. That’s it. Very simple, actually very easy. There’s no like set of definitions or propositions you need to memorize, right? There’s no like intellectual books. You can do all of that, right? I’m not saying don’t do that, but like we’re talking about the body.

We’re talking about learning how this mammalian animal body, Homo sapien, actually works. And in order to learn this, you have to enter into an embodied practice. So that you can start to see how your emotions come online and you can start to notice your triggers. Notice the way you, again, go into fight, flight, freeze.

Fawn, rest, digest. And the beautiful thing about music and dance is it’s a very safe container for you to explore these elements of yourself. Now, I know that if you’re listening you might be thinking to yourself, Oh, but I don’t have a nice voice. Or when I sing, people don’t like it when I sing.

I don’t like it when I sing, first of all again, as my beautiful teacher has taught me, shout out to Maryn and vocal transformation. Everyone can sing. If you have a voice, you can sing.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) My family may disagree with you on that.

VALDARY: I promise you; everyone can sing. And there are many wisdom traditions that I have such reverence for that, and this is, I’ll explain the connection to enchantment, the word, in a few seconds. Many wisdom traditions do not, as we, let’s say, in the west, approach music as a kind of performative thing. It’s oh, I should only sing if I’m going to be a professional singer or entering into competitions to sing.

These evolutionary biologists, including folks like Charles Darwin, believed that as a species, before we developed structured speech, we were singing to each other. Song is the way we used to communicate to each other. And I’ll make a very reductive, totally unprovable statement right now, about the Civil Rights Movement.

I believe that the Civil Rights Movement worked because African American culture is deeply musical. And if you listen to Dr. King speaking, you will notice he wasn’t speaking, he was singing. And at the protests that were set up to protest segregation, there were singers, right? There were people who intentionally brought the spirit of song to help move energy into those spaces.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Because you had mentioned Dr. King earlier. Let’s listen to a little bit of him because you’ve said that the Theory Of Enchantment is influenced in part by what Martin Luther King, Jr. called the beloved community. So here he is in his Loving Your Enemies sermon, 1957, Montgomery, Alabama.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: Agape is something of the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it’s what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them.

CHAKRABARTI: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. there in 1957 talking about agape love or unconditional love. Now, Chloé, let me ask you something. I know right now, we’re already getting some listener comment on this from folks who say, look, on paper, I understand the importance of becoming reenchanted with the world. But what they want is not necessarily to individually fall in love with the world again and fall in love with their fellow human being and have that love, that enchantment, be the vehicle for depolarization. What they want is systemic change.

And so the idea that small scale sustained energy is the way to depolarize a nation just falls flat for them. I think a lot of folks instead are yearning for a Dr. King type or a Gandhian type or even Jesus, some kind of charismatic leader who can inspire on a large scale the kind of re-enchantment you’re talking about.

VALDARY: Powerful question, and I want to answer this really, I want to take time to be very, to hold this question really carefully. And what I’m about to say next, I don’t want it to come across as belittling. But I do get this sense in this question that there’s a sort of desire motivating us sometimes to look for a kind of savior who will come save us.

We’re looking for like the one individual who will swoop in and just make it all go, make the bad all go away. And I get that. Like I have that, I feel that sometimes as well. But the fact of the matter is that the Civil Rights Movement worked because thousands of people, actually, day in and day out, not only did they go out to protest injustice, but when they weren’t protesting injustice, they were working on themselves.

They were committed to a kind of spiritual hygiene. They were training themselves before they entered into spaces to protest. And they were training themselves to see the person whose actions they were protesting as their brother, as their sister. As their kinfolk.

CHAKRABARTI: That was controversial within the movement itself though, right?

VALDARY: It was for sure, and it still is. But I don’t think we can deny the kind of systemic change that brought about, that helped to bring about. And there is going to be, and there always should be, a robust dialogue between those who see this as the way forward and others who don’t, or who have challenges to that.

And I welcome that. I think it’s really important. I think it’s vital, but in this media ecosystem where we are so inundated with so much content that is algorithmically programmed to keep us in a state of fight or flight all the time, because that is what sales advertising, it is, even more, I would dare say, even more important for us to be engaging in the kind of spiritual hygiene and discipline, et cetera.

To be able to move about in the world and confront what we need to confront in a way that is loving, compassionate, and present. And by present, so often when we enter into spaces that are crunchy, we’re not here, we’re thinking about the past, we’re thinking about what’s going to happen in the future, but we’re not actually present with each other.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Chloé, can I just jump in here. Because … you actually anticipated my next question and I’m rethinking it in the context of the Civil Rights Movement. Because what I was going to say is that, yes.

Now in this day and age, partially because of media, but partially just because of the sort of conflict-ridden world we’re living in, people can very rightfully say, no matter where I look, anywhere in this world, whether it’s even in my own neighborhood or definitely internationally, all I see is violence, degradation, injustice of whatever stripe the person feels. Injustice is happening and so therefore it is next to impossible to believe that the people who are executing those injustices are worthy of humanization or my love.

But since you mentioned the Civil Rights Movement, it reminded me of another thing that James Baldwin said and I’m paraphrasing here, so correct me if I’m wrong.

VALDARY: Sure.

CHAKRABARTI: But didn’t he talk about that to just be Black in America? At the time of the Civil Rights movement and to be, I think he uses phrase relatively conscious —

VALDARY: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: Was to actually feel enraged all the time because of the, like, living, just being Black and alive was living in a system of injustice. And even in the face of that, he called for love.

VALDARY: Yes. And this, I think, is the difference between conscious rage and unconscious rage.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah, okay.

Yeah. Talk about that. Talk about that.

VALDARY: Which goes back to this entire conversation we’ve been having about actually entering into conversation with your emotions. The film Inside Out was a revolution in my mind when it came out, when Pixar produced this film years ago.

About a young girl named Riley and her emotions and the ways anger and fear and joy and sadness have this beautiful interplay, intricate dance within a human being, right? So this dialogue has begun, I think, in the culture to a certain extent. But it needs to go wide and far. It needs to spread far and wide.

Yes, Baldwin was talking about conscious rage. I was very negatively impacted by the DOGE cuts that the president passed. They negatively affected my business because a lot of nonprofits that I was doing workshops for got federal funding. That federal funding was cut, and I was enraged. And I was in conversation with the rage. The rage did not take me over. I wrote about this in my Substack, literally an article called Anger and Rage. And it’s this really delicate dance where you feel, I feel rage bubble up in me. It’s not really a bubbling up, it’s like a all-consuming fire, right?

The trick, the task to being conscious is to learn how to watch as the emotions like rise and fall in you. Because emotions are always rising and falling. You’ll notice if you start to feel, let’s say sadness, grief, there’s like a beginning point and an end point. It’s like a cycle.

The trick, the task to being conscious is to learn how to watch as the emotions … rise and fall in you.

It’s like a wave, right? And so if we could actually start to pay attention instead of paying attention exclusively to the news content that we’re scrolling. Just turn a little bit of that attentiveness inward and notice what’s going on in your body when you see a headline. ‘Oh, fascinating. I felt this wave of emotion moving around my diaphragm. How can I get curious about that? How can I start to commune with the incredible complexity of what it means to be human?’

CHAKRABARTI: There’s a couple of more aspects of the Theory of Enchantment and the principles that I want to get to in a second. But let me just follow up on this.  Where people are doubting. Because I think they might, while folks are appreciative of the idealism in the Theory of Enchantment, there may be this rejection of what folks are seeing as idealistic simplicity.

Okay, so for example, we got a comment from a listener named John in Portland, Maine who says, quote: Chloé with her Theory of Enchantment is going to reach no one in MAGA world. There’s only a few leftists that will buy into the notion that this is how we’re going to stop the polarization in American politics.

How would you respond to that?

VALDARY: Hi John. I hope you’re well.

CHAKRABARTI: By first humanizing John, I appreciate that.

VALDARY: (LAUGHS) Thank you for listening and thank you for being a part of this conversation.

I can remember, I can recall back when I was on X, I’m no longer on X, but I can recall, like when I was saying, when I was preaching this message of love and compassion, I can recall people on the right saying the same thing about the left. Saying oh, this message of love and compassion will never reach the leftist, it’s only the right-wing people who will respond and attune. Or it’s only the Christians or it’s only this particular group of people who will respond. And so I think it’s fascinating how we imitate each other as human beings, unconsciously. We mimic each other. This is a part of what it means to be human.

This goes back to that first principle. I’m really learning. Like again, how we operate. Learning as much as possible without judgment to see like the exquisite patterns and the way we patterning pattern ourselves. But I would say, I cannot predict the future. Can’t guarantee any outcomes in life.

Never could, you can’t either, John. None of us can do that. The only thing we can do is be present to the moment and be alive to the moment-by-moment by moment. Yeah. And so in my limited ability to be present to the moment by moment. I can say what I feel Earth, creator, whatever you want to call it, motivates me to feel.

And I can only say to you what I have seen to be true in my 32 years on Earth and in my years of being in spaces of conflict. In my years of navigating conflict internally, within my own being, I grew up in a politically conservative family. I knew Charlie Kirk. And I no longer identify as politically conservative, but I have a lot of family in those spaces. I have a lot of family in MAGA territory, and I have a lot of love and compassion for those people. They’re my family, right?

Whether they’re my literal family or they’re not my blood family, I consider them my family. And so whether they are able to hear me or not. My role, insofar as I am aware, and as walking the earth with the utmost integrity that I can muster, is I will approach my family as family no matter what.

No matter how they show up, no matter who they are, no matter what frequency of fear, rage, et cetera, that they’re bringing into their space. My role and my task and the invitation that I am suggesting to all of us to choose if you want to, if you feel it somewhere stirring in your soul, is to dare. Because it is a dare. Because John’s right, there’s no guarantee right to walk in this way.

And the last thing I’ll say is that this deeply affects me. Like I told my parents that I was bisexual in April, and my father stopped speaking to me. And so I am personally deeply impacted by the grief, by the sorrow, by the rage, by the fear, by the feeling of rejection, by the feeling of smallness.

Like I felt it, and I still feel it from time to time. And so I’m not coming to you with this sort of like heady, hyper idealistic, not on the ground, not rooted practice. I’m saying that this is what has been really meaningful for me. And you can take it or leave it. And if you leave it, I wish you all the best and I wish you well in your journey.

CHAKRABARTI: There’s another one of the principles. We only have two minutes left, Chloé, unfortunately. But there’s actually the second principle, so the third one is root everything you do in love and compassion. I think you’ve talked about that within the context of this whole entire conversation, but the second one, criticize to uplift and empower.

Not to tear down or destroy. How does that work?

VALDARY: So Maya Angelou, just quickly, again, another one of my favorite people. Great poet, woman, writer, et cetera, said that if you tell someone over and over again that they are nothing, that they are less than nothing. That they act like nothing.

If you tell them this over and over again, eventually, they will show up in that way. And I have to just say, over the past six years, and this isn’t to take any responsibility away from the right in how they’re showing up and people in conservative family and how they’re showing up.

But for the past six years, certainly on, on X, I saw the left saying explicitly to white men, that you are nothing, that you are evil, that you are monsters and you must pay for what you have done. So on and so forth. And I’m not surprised. Because again, this is about sound, frequency and the way sound moves.

I’m not surprised that we have this sort of mimetic response on the part of conservative white men showing up in a very monstrous way. Again, this isn’t to take responsibility from the way from them for showing up in the way that some of them are showing up, but it’s to say that there’s a dynamic.

There’s no such thing as the individual, isolated, atomized human being. We are all interconnected. And what we do, what one person does affects what another person does, so on and so forth. It is ultimately —

CHAKRABARTI: But can any criticism, uplift, that’s the part I’m not understanding. Criticize to uplift. How do you do that?

VALDARY: Yeah. By criticize to uplift what I mean is, there was this, and I hear the music coming. There is … a person who used to be a white supremacist. He’s no longer a white supremacist. And the way he came out of that ideology is, like, people were criticizing him, but they were simultaneously telling him that you’re a beautiful human being.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah. Okay.

VALDARY: You’re a beautiful human being and helping him to see his true essence beyond the noise and the hatred. And the vitriol. Again, going back to that thing that Baldwin taught us in Everybody’s Protest Novel, to really encounter the grandness of what it means to be human.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.