The End of Faith...in Sam Harris
requiem for a former hero
Why Write This Now?
Sam Harris deleted his Twitter account on Thanksgiving Day, 2022.
He will probably come back. Twitter accounts can be re-activated within a 30-day window, and if he doesn’t reactivate, on Christmas Day his handle will be available for anyone to grab. He could avoid that by logging in for a bit, then deleting again, but to do this every thirty days, forever, without ever tweeting, will get tiresome. He has the opportunity to direct public conversation anytime he chooses, and Trump is running again. Something, probably Trump-related, will occur that will strike him as too important to not tweet about, and he’ll be back.
This is entirely predictable, so why write a requiem now?
Deleting his Twitter account is signing his name, too large and with an attention-grabbing flourish, in the corner of a painting he’s spent the last six years toiling over.
It is a moment for reflection.
So let’s reflect.
What Sam Harris Did For Me
For a long time, I loved Sam Harris.
My therapist and I had to agree on a definition for “love” to use in his office, because it was never clear—not to him, and usually not to me—what I meant when I talked about my fears around love.
We settled on: “Love is a commitment to another’s well-being; further, a commitment so strong that it includes a willingness to sacrifice.”
There was a long period of my life when I absolutely loved Sam Harris by this definition.
There was a long time, when, if Sam Harris needed a kidney, I would have donated mine without hesitating. It is hard to imagine what else I could have sacrificed to help someone who has been wealthy and privileged since childhood, but if any opportunity had been presented to me, I would have taken it.
Where did this come from? How did Sam Harris earn my loyalty?
I grew up in a Christian church and school that was far outside the Christian mainstream in some respects—far enough that the word “cult” isn’t unreasonable—though it was fairly typical in others. If you’ve seen the documentary “Jesus Camp,” you know a great deal about what my childhood influences believed and the way they taught me to think and react to the world.
Sam Harris’s book, Letter to A Christian Nation, set me free. He took every doubt, question, and logical inconsistency that I had ever been paddled, reprimanded, or shamed for voicing, laid them all out clearly, and explained why they were legitimate things to notice. He gave me permission to recognize and live in reality. In a very literal sense, he set me free.
Then he wrote Lying, a book that was a game-changer for me. Growing up in an abusive home, children learn to keep secrets and tell lies to survive. He flipped my perspective on its head and made me re-think almost everything.
Once again, he took part of my dark and tragic backstory that had me in chains, and set me free.
I felt as much love and loyalty as almost everyone would feel for someone who entered a prison, wherein they were suffering terribly, and set them free.
Twice.
When A New York Bullshitter Broke A Human Soul
Sam Harris has been diagnosed with Trump Derangement Syndrome many times and in many ways, and I think it’s warranted.
Trump was a monstrously unfit choice for the Presidency, and I still think that he is characterologically unfit despite his having done a significantly better job than I thought he would. At the beginning, I absolutely had TDS myself. I cried when Trump won, and it took me most of a year to fully accept that it had happened. I remember taking final exams in May of 2017, calculating that he would still be President when I graduated, and being gobsmacked.
This couldn’t be possible…could it? Could Donald Trump really be President of the United States?
Over time, I learned to accept reality, and then to stop reacting to everything he said as if it were part of a psychological experiment to raise my blood pressure.
When I learned about narcissistic hyperbole, much of Trump’s rhetoric made much more sense to me, and I slowly developed a model for how to understand him.
Sam never seemed to adjust to reality. He simply kept existing in a universe where this thing had happened that was just so wrong, so intolerably wrong, so beyond the pale, that it vexed every moment, tainted every pleasure, was nearly the only thing worth being angry about—and it was always worth being angry about.
I got really good hearing technology not long before I started college in 2016, and the new joy of listening to podcasts meant that I listened to many of them dozens of times, including most of Sam’s.
I thought many times, listening to his podcasts in 2017-2018, about his wife and children, and hoped he wasn’t as hard to live with as those podcasts made it seem like he might be.
Even though I agreed with him about Trump, it grew very tiresome. It seemed there was no topic he couldn’t turn back to Trump, and how manifestly awful it was that this orange liar was in the White House, and how unfair and wrong and just plain awful!
Sam gained a lot of attention on Twitter and elsewhere for some of his more hyperbolic statements, among them that Hitler was more virtuous than Trump, but eventually it settled into a case of “my hero isn’t perfect; he has this one big blind spot,” and it became easier for those of us who still appreciated him to enjoy the rest of what he had to say.
Then came COVID.
A Spiritual Guru, Terrified to Die?
In Making Sense episode #256, with Eric Topol, Sam made a confession that is jaw-dropping, though it seemingly escaped most people’s notice, focused as they all were on the drama of his savaging someone about whom he says “I consider him a friend,” Bret Weinstein.
He says: “So this is a bit of a stretch psychologically to build a bridge between where we are and where the unvaccinated, the resolutely unvaccinated are. Right. So, I mean, you know, I'm living in a world where I and all of my friends were…early, impatient to get vaccinated. And many of us were going to vaccine centers early on and lining up for hours, you know, even whole days, hoping to get some overflow of vaccine.”
My best efforts to determine what “overflow” means in this context turned up that if vaccination centers had doses that were set to expire, they would vaccinate anyone present, eligible or not. (At the beginning of the rollout, vaccinations were based on age, health, or race related eligibility metrics.) I assume that is what he meant—that he went to vaccination centers before he was eligible, hoping for an end-of-day, otherwise-would-get-tossed-out dose, though it’s conceivable he meant something else. In the context of “lining up for hours, you know, even whole days,” I think my guess is reasonable.
Unless he has some health problem that he’s never disclosed, this behavior indicates an absolutely life-consuming terror of death.
COVID is not the bubonic plague, and we have known this from the very beginning. Sam Harris was 52, not 82, when COVID began spreading.
While some fear of death is certainly a core part of the human condition, it’s quite startling to find terror of death in someone who has made spiritual awakening a primary focus and who is behind a popular meditation and mindfulness app.
We are mortal beings, and learning to live in peace—without terror, and without becoming deranged in light of the inescapable fact that each and every one of us is going to die—is a primary objective of any spiritual path.
Luke 4:23 (“Physician, heal thyself”) comes to mind.
When “Weasel” Became the Only Word That Fit
It was July 2021, seven months after vaccines starting rolling out, when he released Making Sense episode #256, with Eric Topol. It was devoted to going after people he deemed purveyors of vaccine “misinformation,” primarily Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. He starts this off with a lie in the introduction, asserting that people have been misinformed, by his friends and fellow podcasters, into being “really worried about the COVID vaccines and not all that worried about COVID.”
Anyone who paid even minimal attention to the DarkHorse podcast would know that Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying were not COVID minimizers. They advocated masks well before the CDC did, sanitized their doorknobs, left packages outside, and otherwise took much more extreme precautions than most people did during the beginning of the pandemic. When we knew very little, they started off far more cautious than most people. (As we learned more, particularly about how ineffective masks are, they changed their stances publicly, but they started off applying a precautionary principle much more intensely than most people.)
I have the privilege of counting both Bret and Heather among my personal friends, but nobody needs to know them personally to know that this was a flat-out lie. Even a cursory perusal of their podcast during 2020 would show how hardcore they were on COVID precautions.
But since I do have the “actually I know these people” privilege, I will tell you that when I got COVID the first time, they were very concerned for me. Neither of them even once said “Oh, it’s no big deal, you’ll be fine.” They checked in with me regularly about how I was doing—and in my case, as my first round of COVID caused a re-activation of my high school mononucleosis and left me bedridden for months, this was not a quick and easy thing. Their concern was consistent and total, and it was based on their scientific thinking: they knew that nobody knew what the long-term ramifications of COVID might be, and they took that very seriously.
When I got it the second time—I fell on ice and broke my wrist on Christmas Day of 2021, and spent six hours in urgent care waiting to get x-rayed, during which at least a hundred people came in and out, coughing—it was thirty hours of a mild runny nose and that was all, but they were still concerned. A full week after I recovered, Bret was asking me how I was doing, if I had any symptoms, if I was sure I was fully over it.
If they are COVID minimizers who need to take it more seriously, then Jordan Peterson is disassociated from his emotions and needs to learn to let himself cry.
When Sam Harris answered questions about this episode later, he compared Bret to Alex Jones in answer to why he wouldn’t have Bret on his show to debate.
Comparing Alex Jones to Bret Weinstein is like comparing the Joan Rivers QVC Collection to the Hope Diamond.
This episode, starting as it did with a laughably false dichotomy, showed that Sam Harris was so devoted to his perspective that he fully lost, well, if not his mind, his theory of mind. He simply could not imagine anyone disagreeing with him whose position held nuance of any sort.
Indeed, in that podcast, his reasoning for why well-qualified doctors disagreed with him and agreed with Bret and Heather was that “we have a background level of schizophrenia in any human population of 1%.”
A theory-of-mind failure so total is usually only found in the deeply religious, and even then, usually just in how someone could possibly deserve the eternal torment of hell—they really knew the truth.
He also made a peanut butter analogy, on which he doubled down repeatedly, that’s chilling.
In that episode, he and Topol also laugh at the possibility of vaccine passports and how all that will be necessary is making life “unpalatable” for the unvaccinated for a couple of weeks and they’ll capitulate.
The Doubling Down, with Christakis
In Sam’s December 2021 podcast, #270, with Dr. Nicholas Christakis:
He once again lied about Bret and Heather, mischaracterizing them as crazy: “Many, several friends and colleagues who have prominent podcasts…Have fallen into this paranoid picture of what's going on. And, you know, there’re extreme end points of this paranoia. There's the idea that Bill Gates is putting tracking devices into us with the vaccines. Right. I mean, so there's the crazy end of crazy. But it seems to me that this basic picture, even without the craziest flourishes on it, is more or less insane.”
Both Sam Harris and Nicholas Christakis are smarter than I am, which is how I know that they knew they were lying when they asserted that healthy young people should get the vaccine, even if it carries risk, because the vaccine reduces their risk of death.
They knew that when a probability is infinitesimally small, changing it—even by a lot, which I will concede for the sake of this comparison, though I don’t believe it to be true—isn’t worth taking on more risk.
Think of it this way: would you risk something important to you, like taking on an unknown health risk—in order to get your hands on a lottery ticket that is twice as likely, or even 10 times more likely, to win the jackpot than any other ticket?
Of course not. Because odds of 2 or even 10 in 258,900,000 (today’s Mega Millions jackpot odds) are still not going to result in you winning.
In that episode, they also went so far as to pretend that vaccine immunity is superior to natural immunity.
The Grace I Tried to Give Sam
Sam Harris’s mother, Susan, created the hugely popular TV series, “The Golden Girls.” He grew up as part of one of the most highly privileged classes of people imaginable—the children of Hollywood big-shots.
He spent his twenties traveling the world in a way that only the wealthy ever get to do before returning, and then wasn’t even finished with school when the “Four Horsemen of New Atheists” stuff started. If there’s any evidence that he’s ever had even one moment of economic insecurity in his life, I haven’t been able to locate it. That is a kind of distortion lens around real life that very few people could surmount.
Since becoming a best-selling author and podcaster, he’s even more wealthy and privileged. Further, his fans (including me, back in the day, yes) are of a sycophantic variety that is more than a little startling. (Check out the Sam Harris subreddit if you doubt me on this.)
When a person becomes famous for reasons of their intellect and perceived character traits, they are in a far more precarious position than someone who gets famous for their looks, their ability to play sports or music, or to act. The distortion lens that happens around anyone in that position is massive, and it is nearly total.
As surely as starry-eyed fans who will rarely if ever critique are bound to rise up, so bad-faith critics will make a habit of jerking off hate boners and others will pile on just for the fun of it. The lure of using the latter to insulate oneself against any criticism at all is powerful.
To retain one’s epistemic humility requires the wisdom of self-awareness. Sam boasted of this in the Triggernometry interview that went viral over the summer—that the primary difference between him and others is that he runs an algorithm of “intellectual honesty” that others don’t. I no longer believe his operating system runs this algorithm at all.
You have to know that reasonable people with well-thought-out criticism are in fact going to hesitate to disagree with you. Either because they appreciate the intellect and character that you brought you to their attention in the first place, or because they don’t want to somehow be lumped in with all the bad-faith criticism that such figures inevitably receive. You have to know that you’re going to mess up, and you have to be willing to hear about it when you do. This means you need smart people around you who will love you enough to tell you the truth, even if the truth is sometimes not so fun to hear.
The primary subject of Sam’s attack, Bret Weinstein, is actually really good at this. When I’ve told Bret I disagree with him, which can happen, he asks questions, as many as it takes to be sure he is fully seeing the world through my eyes, and then he genuinely, sincerely, and honestly thinks about it. When warranted, he changes his mind.
If you had to guess, how many friends of Sam Harris—particularly friends who are his intellectual and social inferiors—do you think have a story about “the time I thought Sam really screwed up when he said X, so I took a deep breath, called him, talked to him about it, and it went so well that I loved him more, and our relationship was actually stronger, when we hung up?”
The only way a person could have led Sam’s life without falling prey to these dangers is if they deliberately and consciously tried to guard against their own hubris, fairly early on in their trajectory as a celebrity. It’s a trap that would ensnare almost anyone.
But if you are powerful and influential, there comes a time when you have to be willing to look in the mirror.
The End of Faith…in Sam Harris
The time for looking in the mirror comes for all of us. Particularly if you have the profound responsibility of real influence, that time should come well before you end up where Sam ended up in the Triggernometry interview. In that interview, the author of a book about how lying is almost never morally acceptable asserts that the moral line for when honest journalism is required, regardless of whether or not it helps Trump, lies beyond the corpses of children. This video clip is courtesy of Alexandros Marinos, who has several threads on Sam Harris that I recommend to you.
In August 2022, Sam gave the aforementioned interview to Triggernometry that went viral and, as far as I can tell, marked the end for those of us who held onto our faith in him despite the TDS.
He applauded the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story because it hurt Trump’s chances in re-election. “That’s a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump. Absolutely it was. Absolutely, but I think it was warranted.”
His Triggernometry episode, about which I wrote at the time, and again in response to his Twitter thread defending what he said, was the end of anyone except his most ardent sycophants being able to respect him.
As my friend, Dr. Roller Gator, pointed out, Sam took on an astonishingly Trump-like persona in that interview.
He then doubled down, tripled down, and has never apologized for anything he got wrong during COVID, even after conceding that the CDC has been politicized in a recent interview with Bill Maher.
In Which I Give Thanks
Sam deleted his Twitter account on Thanksgiving Day, 2022.
Elon Musk is working to provide something much closer to a level playing field than has ever happened before, and this is utterly intolerable to the cultural elites.
The Parler play, to get Twitter banned from the app stores, is being pursued by those who cannot tolerate a genuine free speech platform, and it might work. Gator explains this strategy here. (He was referring to pre-Musk Twitter, but they are trying it now with Twitter under Musk, for the same reason: they no longer have control.)
Sam Harris is, and perhaps has always been, a crypto-Woke, one who can see and decry the excesses of Wokism while simultaneously using his considerable platform and every scrap of his influence to beg, persuade, and implore people to vote for the politicians guaranteed to bring us more of it.
Whether he comes back or not, in doing so, he has aligned with the celebrities, academics, and journalists moving to Mastodon, or simply leaving Twitter, in declaring Twitter an unfit place, tainted by the hoi polloi.
Sam Harris’s transformation from the man who said this:
"All we have between us and the total breakdown of civilization is a series of successful conversations. If we can't reason with one other, there is no path forward other than violence. Conversation or violence."
and this (emphasis added):
“The intent to communicate honestly is the measure of truthfulness. And most of us do not require a degree in philosophy to distinguish this attitude from its counterfeits…..Whatever our purpose in telling them, lies can be gross or subtle. Some entail elaborate ruses or forged documents. Others consist merely of euphemisms or tactical silences….The moment we consider our dishonesty from the perspective of those we lie to, we recognize that we would feel betrayed if the roles were reversed….”
to the man who said this:
“That doesn’t answer the people who say that it’s still completely unfair to not have looked at [Hunter Biden’s] laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the New York Post’s twitter account. That’s just a left-wing conspiracy to deny the Presidency to Donald Trump. Absolutely it was. Absolutely. But I think it was warranted.”
is fully complete.
I am, and will always be, grateful to the person who wrote Letter to a Christian Nation and Lying. But that person is dead.
Trump broke his brain.
Some combination of his own ego and fear of his own mortality broke his soul.
If I believed in any gods, I would pray for his resurrection.
But there are no gods, and nobody with access to him loves Sam Harris enough to help him see what he’s become.
All that remains, for the rest of us, is to try not to follow in his footsteps.
Housekeeping: comments are open for paid subscribers. If you can’t afford a paid subscription, email hollymathnerd at gmail dot com for a freebie. Links are automatically tweeted when I publish, and I’ve scheduled some tweets to re-up old posts, but I’m still not actively reading or responding on Twitter. Thank you!
Very good. All of this needed to be said, and you said it well.
A perfect eulogy for the man you admired. I honestly believe even Hitchens would have approved...