RFK Jr. has apparently read a whole bunch of C.S. Lewis

Well that's encouraging

I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind with this post. Living in a swing state as I do, with therefore a slightly higher (though still rounding to zero) chance that my vote will matter, I will probably vote Donald Trump for president. But RFK Jr. has impressed me in a medley of ways.

For one, he’s a liberal from thirty years ago, which makes him sound positively libertarian/conservative at least some of the time (like, apparently being concerned about the military-industrial complex is now a conservative thing or something, as Democrats can’t dump enough money onto the new forever-war in Ukraine).

Two, he seems to be an honest and thoughtful guy, and that counts for a lot. Here in East Lansing, I supported one city council candidate (who won), a friend had pointed out that a lot of his campaign was about climate change. Sure, I can believe this candidate and I disagree about all kinds of stuff, but my history with him suggests he’s an honest and thoughtful guy, and in East Lansing government, that counts for a lot. Give me the honest and thoughtful progressive over a dishonest slogan-spouting progressive, any day.

And three, Kennedy is willing to talk to anybody. I’ll show you a clip below from a recent appearance on Robert Breedlove’s podcast. Breedlove is pretty well known within bitcoin circles, but that’s sort of niche, I’m guessing most of you have never heard of him. Reminds me of (another controversial figure, I know), Michael Heiser, in Christian circles. Here was a PhD-holding, serious intellectual, but he was willing to go onto the “Bob Loves Extraterrestials” podcast (yes I just made that up) that will get 1000 views total and talk about the Christian view of alien life, or whatever. I found that admirable, he wasn’t “above” talking to anybody.

RFK Jr. and C.S. Lewis

Onto the main attraction then - Kennedy recently appeared on Robert Breedlove’s podcast. I feel like I could have been Breedlove in another life, actually. He got started as sort of a bitcoin guy, and launched from that into a podcast called What is Money? about just that question, and then the podcast sort of became just whatever Breedlove, who has a very philosophical mind, wanted to talk about. So here he interviews Kennedy. If Kennedy goes on CNN he probably gets asked something like “what would you do about rising healthcare costs?”, if CNN is even that kind to him. He goes on Breedlove and instead gets asked, “what is truth?”, which is pretty awesome.

The section I want to talk about begins around 36:45.

Breedlove’s question to him is,

Can you tell me how you personally define truth, and how your relationship with truth has changed throughout your life?

And Kennedy uses that to launch into a discussion of C.S. Lewis. How encouraging is that from a US presidential candidate? He says:

C.S. Lewis was a famous... he would never describe himself as a theologian, but he was definitely a brilliant Christian thinker and philosopher. He wrote these great science fiction novels called Perelandra and Out of the Silent Planet, and then he wrote kids books, the Narnia books, and then he wrote a series of very, very brilliant and accessible religious... I guess you would call them monographs almost... Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain... and he has a very interesting mind…

...but probably his most influential books are The Screwtape Letters, which is a series of letters from a senior devil to a junior devil who is trying to tempt a human being who has just righted their life, somebody who has sort of just gotten sober...

I doubt either Trump or Biden could name-check such an impressive set of books, I’m afraid. And then he elaborates on one Lewis book, which obviously affected him quite a bit.

…and then he wrote another book that I love called The Great Divorce, and it's about a bus ride from Hell to Heaven. And the way that he portrays Hell in that book is a place where you can have anything that you want. So you arrive in Hell and say 'I want a nice house'. But to you a nice house is like this house you got here [Breedlove's nice house in Miami], it's really great, really has everything that you need, but it's kind of simple. It's not extravagant. It doesn't have an Olympic-size pool, it has a modest pool, right? But you get that when you go to Hell, you say 'I want a house like that'. But then you see your neighbor has one that's twice as big with the Olympic-size pool so you say, I want now one bigger than my neighbor. Well you get it immediately, but your old house doesn't disappear, it's still there. And the new house is then on the outskirts of the town, and the town keeps getting bigger and bigger because people keep demanding new houses, and they get farther and farther apart. Humanity gets farther and farther apart as they get bigger and bigger stuff and there's no real companionship.

But once a week there's a bus that leaves from the downtown and it goes to Heaven. And when they get to Heaven the... what you do when you get to Heaven... I'm telling you this because it's a really interesting insight into C.S. Lewis, the way that he imagined, but it was very helpful to me at one point... there's a place where when you land there, you land at a kind of the shore of a great sea, and then you start hiking inland, and you're hiking toward this distant mountain range and that's where God is. But it's lightyears away, but every step you take closer to that mountain range the more love you feel, the more peace that you feel, the more serenity that you feel. And you walk through fields and forests and all different kinds of terrains, and you will meet other people, and then you'll walk with them maybe for a few hours, maybe for months, maybe for years, and ultimately you meet everybody who's ever lived and you hear their story and you interact with them.

And you know, sometimes you go in large groups, sometimes small, but you're always going toward that distant mountain range. Occasionally you get called back because you know one of the people or you have a special ability to coax one of the people who is coming up from Hell to stay in Heaven. Now when they get to Heaven on the bus, they're allowed to stay there forever, but they have to give up the character defect with the resentment or the anger or the addiction that was keeping them in Hell. So you have these people come back who are trying to talk them into it and it's just this, it's a very very beautiful story and, and in the end the bus goes back. Half the people on the bus stay, and half of them go back. But when the bus leaves they have the sensation that they're leaving on a journey to a distant planet, which is Hell, but actually the way that the people in Heaven perceive it is the bus just shrinks and shrinks until it becomes tiny, tiny, and it disappears into the interstitial grains on the beach. And you know people have this perception that they live in these houses in this great place, but everything in reality is infinitesimally tiny.

I don’t want to quote the whole thing, give it a watch yourself, but he also talks about how an obituary C.S. Lewis wrote for a friend, in which he referred to his friend as “honest as the daylight”, inspired Kennedy to clean up his own life. (He was, as he says, at one point both a drug addict and a DA. Drug addicts can’t be honest.)

I had a moment in court where I was in a federal district court, in front of the senior judge in White Plains, and I was in the middle of an argument, and I... during that argument the judge asked me a question and I said something that was not true. But it was something that was inconsequential... there was no way that I could ever get found out, you know, it just happened to be not true, and it wasn't that big a deal. But I sat down and it just started eating me. And so the next time I stood up I said your honor, I wanted to say that, um, what I said in my last statement was not true. And there was just a moment, like a microsecond in the court, with the bailiff, and the stenographer, and everybody just sort of looked up for a second, like I have never seen that before from a lawyer. And then everybody went back to business as usual....

But for me it was a critical moment. I'm sure everybody else forgot it within seconds, but for me it was a critical moment. Because it was part of me making a commitment to myself that no matter what the cause was, that this was the most important thing to me, to be honest with other people. And around that time I read the obituary by C.S. Lewis and I was like, wow, you know, I wish that one day somebody would say that about me.

You might enjoy watching the whole.

Kennedy on chronic diseases

Let me say one more unrelated thing. Kennedy is sometimes attacked for his views on vaccination. I know also there is this “vaccines cause autism” sort of social media meme. Kennedy assuredly does NOT make any such claim in this interview. What he DOES say in this interview is that, since the 90s, chronic disease has exploded, especially among children, and in the United States in particular, and something is going on, and we’d do well to figure out what that something is.

He throws out some numbers which I cannot personally confirm, but here you go. He says that the autism rate among people age 69+ is, depending on the study, 1 in 2000 to 1 in 10000. Among children today it is 1 in 34. As a kid, he had 11 siblings, 70 first cousins, none had food allergies. Now five of his seven kids have food allergies. When he was a kid, typical pediatrician would go his whole career and see maybe one case of juvenile diabetes. Now one in every three kids is pre-diabetic or diabetic. He talks about the surge in auto-immune diseases, neurological ticks, something is happening.

Of course you can wonder about survey methodology in stuff like that, wonder about “we’re just better at detecting this stuff now, is all”, but just looking around, you do feel like something is up. He suggests, could be pesticides and a thousand different additives in processed foods. Could be, yes, additives to vaccines (he got three shots as a kid, he says, and that was typical then, but his own kids got 72). Could be flame retardants on furniture and pajamas, could be aspartame, could be fluorides, could be some mix of all of the above. He seemed non-dogmatic on exactly what the cause was, but seemed quite certain that something was going on, and I find that position quite respectable.