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- Yascha
Shalom Auslander is an American novelist, memoirist, and essayist. He is the author of Foreskin's Lament and, most recently, FEH: A Memoir.
In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and Shalom Auslander discuss how religious narratives inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition affect our sense of self-worth; how to actually help oneself while steering clear of "self-help"; and how to begin the lifelong work of charting a path towards unconditional love and self-acceptance.
The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: This political moment is one that can easily push you to despair, to a little bit of self-loathing. Your new book is in many ways about the personal dimension of self-loathing.
Why do you think that this book is particularly timely in 2024?
Shalom Auslander: Well, I don't remember a time that I didn't have this hypercritical voice in my head about myself and then, eventually, about others. And as I reached my mid-40s, I found myself in a hospital having taken some dangerous weight loss drugs, and started to consider where this story came from—thought sitting in the ICU might be a good place to work on the new book.
I was raised in a very Orthodox community in New York and I've written about it before. That's kind of what I write about, identity and finding my place and leaving one place and trying to find another. It's an Exodus story that just keeps getting told over and over again—hopefully with a better ending than in the Bible, because that didn't work out so well when they got to the promised land. Still hasn't. And started to realize that as I was going through this and I'd lost some friends to overdoses and self-loathing, frankly, and was wondering where this was all coming from and began reading about the place of story in the human mind. We've always known story is important to us narrative community and all that. But it's starting to look very much like story is our OS; it's how we know ourselves. And I started to realize and look at the stories I've been told since I was a child and the story that I've been told, and that millions and billions of people have been told for hundreds and hundreds of years, is a pretty awful story.
In the story of the Old Testament, which is sort of our oldest story or one of them, we're the bad guys, we're the antagonists, we're the piece of shit. That's what was sort of interesting to me was trying to understand where all this came from. And I started to write it about two years before COVID. But then with the rise of Trump and COVID and everything else, and internet, social media, this hatred for ourselves and each other started to become so loud that I felt it was the time to write the book.
Mounk: What do you think sort of drove you towards that form of self-loathing? Do you think that has to do with the personal circumstances of your upbringing? Do you think it has to do with sort of broader problems in American culture?
Auslander: It'd be nice if it were just me. Obviously, the specifics of my childhood and what I was taught had a lot to do with that. And so that was the question for me: specifically, where is this coming from? And when I started to see this story called “feh,” which is a Yiddish word, it just denotes disgust. It's like you step in shit and you just say feh. And it's what I was told about myself and basically with the Old Testament and then every other holy book after that sort of tells us about ourselves as well: We’re created from dirt—first thing we do is steal then we lie about it, then we get thrown out of Eden, then our son tries to kill our other son, then God says, to hell with this, I'm killing everyone, I'm drowning everything except one family. The family survives and the father rapes the daughters—the end. And that sort of goes on for about 900 chapters and it's a really messed up story. What I realized as I got older was that this story is everywhere. This is a very strange thing that we do. The first strange thing we do is that we tell stories as humans. That's weird, we're the only animal that sort of seems to do that. And to add an even greater level of weirdness and fucked-upness to it, we tell stories where we're the antagonist, where we're the awful one. And when I started to see that and see it in my own life and see it in the culture, see it in books on science and books on philosophy and films and everything else—it was shocking. And it was shocking because it was so not surprising given that story we tell ourselves, the state of the world or who we are as a species.
It just feels like, of course you end up at this place. Why wouldn't you? We’re the wolf in “The Three Little Pigs,” we’re the bad guy. So we behave that way and we believe that about ourselves and we keep telling this story over and over again. In a lot of ways, this is the story of me trying to find a new story.
Mounk: Do you think that what you're picking up on is something peculiar to the Western tradition or the “Judeo-Christian” tradition? Or is this something universally human? Do you think it's something in our psyche that is drawn to these stories of self-flagellation?
Auslander: I think it is primarily Judeo-Christian, Islamic—I mean, unfortunately, that's the bulk of the world and the bulk of history (that we are aware of, anyway). I think there are obviously other mythologies that don't get into shame and guilt and finger pointing, but the majority seem to.
Look, there's a need for shame, right? A societal need for guilt, for responsibility, for remorse, and for self-evaluation. Shame is something different. Shame is not, “you did something wrong, but you are wrong; in and of yourself, you are wrong, you are flawed.” And that does seem to be from some sort of Jude -Christian background. I don't see it in a lot of ancient cultures. Interestingly, with the Greeks, like the gods are the screw-ups. They're the fuck-ups. They're the ones having sex with their sisters and killing their mothers. And it's interesting because you could look at that and kind of go, well, I guess I'm not so bad. Or they're also, they're also bad.
From my background, you know, Moses was perfect. He sinned once. And because he sinned once, he wasn't allowed to go into the Promised Land. That's a pretty high bar for the rest of us because I sin about 12 times before I get out of bed—that's just in thought. So it's a very destructive story. And you see it being played out over and over again.
Mounk: One of the things you talk about is that your brand of shame is influenced by a Jewish upbringing and that might feel like a very specifically Jewish thing. I think often in popular culture we joke about Jewish mothers—there's also jokes about Catholic mothers doing that, being particularly good at instilling guilt and some form of shame, for example. But you had a meaningful friendship with Philip Seymour Hoffman, who comes from a very different kind of cultural background; and as I take it, you think that he actually felt quite a similar form of shame. Tell us what's universal about this.
Auslander: Yeah, that was a big moment for me. I knew him for a few years, right until the end. We met and started working over a project or two that we wanted to do and quickly just realized that we were kind of feh-brothers. We come from very different places, almost opposite places and yet we heard the same things from mothers, from siblings, from teachers, holy men, the world in general, that left us feeling shitty about ourselves as creatures, as souls, right? And I knew immediately that there's just something about him and feh people in general that you just know when you meet them what's going on with them. And most of our time together was spent just talking about this. And when I got the call that he’d been found it was shocking because he, of everybody I knew, was such a force of nature and such a particularly powerful human being; to have been brought down by a story that he was told by his loved ones, by his guardians, whoever it was, really hit me hard. It really made me think I could be on this road myself. If you don't have self-worth, then why not be self-destructive, right?
In one of his last emails to me—it may have been the last email, in fact—after a lot of other things he wrote at the very end, I just want to have self-worth. And that was staggering because he had these beautiful children, a great relationship, and didn't see anything in him that was worth anything. And so the effect of that was, wow, this is not a Jewish thing.
In fact, I think that it's one of the places tribalism comes from and tribalism is going to be the end of us. But it comes from this, “we're chosen, they're not chosen”; “we're sinners, but they're sinners even more”; “we go to hell, but they go to a worse hell.” Phil came from a family that was Irish Catholic. His mother was a judge. There was a lot of judging going on in his world that he could never escape from. And it's reached incredibly epidemic proportions today.
Mounk: It's interesting the thought that obviously normally tribalism is a competition over positive things, right? But it's also just competition, and if you're saying we are particularly screwed up, then fuck you, we are even more screwed up than you are.
Auslander: Yeah, I remember hearing being told that Moses was the “most humble man ever” and I thought that's pretty funny. The competition about who's more humble. Like how do you win that without losing?
Mounk: I have a dim memory of Donald Trump once saying something along those lines.
Auslander: Yeah, and you know, to me, he seems like a brand of feh. I don't think he got a whole lot of love or attention or whatever it was he needed. And so sometimes the result is internalized and sometimes it's externalized.
Mounk: What strikes me about Trump is that he seems like a very sad man, that despite all of these objective successes, all of these objective reasons to feel on top of the world, he feels aggrieved about the world and he feels that he doesn't have genuine friends.
Auslander: Right, I mean, it's Dante-esque. That's a particular sort of hell: “We're gonna give you all the delicious fruit but no sense of taste,” right? And he always reminded me of my father who was a very angry person. And I thought the same thing of one as I did of the other, which was that I wouldn't want to be that person for two minutes. I think I'd blow my fucking head off because he's so filled with rage and loathing all the time. And then what? And then someday you'll be dead and you've spent your life hating and loathing. And he would never admit it, of course, but the little bit that I've bothered to read about his childhood, about growing up, none of that is surprising, right? He was not told a very good story about himself.
Mounk: What do you think is the difference between feh people and non-feh people?
Now, obviously everybody has some form of internalized shame and so on, but you used this expression “feh people,” and I think it's true. There's some people to whom their experience of feh is fundamental to their personality and to their experience of life and the great struggle of their life is to grapple with feh. And to others, it's a momentary transitory experience that comes in in certain contexts, but that isn't characteristic in the literal sense of who they are in the same way.
Auslander: Right, like who can walk past a store window, see a reflection of themselves and not have it ruin the rest of their day. My idea of hell is just an enormous mirrored room that I can never escape the view of myself. That's why I hate getting haircuts, because you just have to sit there and stare at yourself for an hour and a half.
Mounk: How do you think religion plays into that? So in the way you were just putting it, you were sort of assuming a religious context and were saying that part of at least one route by which you may develop feh is that you're told a set of religious concepts about what makes you worthwhile and what makes you a sinner and therefore leads to that form of self-loathing.
But there are some people who grew up in deeply religious communities who, like Nat Flanders in The Simpsons, seem to come out pretty well. And of course, I grew up in a very non-religious environment, and I certainly know plenty of feh people. But it seems to have come to them at least by a less direct religious route and perhaps not by a religious route at all—you know, is this just sort of about you need somebody, ideally both of your parents, but at least one parent who just gives you a sense of unconditional love and a sense that there's something worthy about you, no matter what you do, no matter what mistakes you may do as a kid or no matter what your shortcomings may be?
Auslander: Well, I think Ned is suppressing a lot of rage so I'm not sure you want to end up like Ned Flanders. I think that worked out so well for Ned. I feel like Ned is probably not living the life he wants to deep down inside. It's hard to psychoanalyze an animated character, but I do feel like there's stuff going on in the bathroom when he's alone that I don't think any of us want to know about. But I think that there is, look, there's something basic to this story, and it's ancient. What's amazing to me about it is that it doesn't require religion necessarily. A big teller of the story is Arthur Schopenhauer, who didn't have that, but was convinced that people were horrendous because of the story he saw in his life and the way he grew up. So I think there's something about religion that has crept out of the realm of religion, right? It's a Chernobyl event; it's not just the reactor, it's everything around it. And it feels like it's infected the world to some degree. To your point, yeah, I think if you just have someone in your life who says something that is valuable or worthy of you, it can upend that story. It's a fragile story, right? So all it needs is somebody to say the good thing, but there's very few of those people willing to do it. It's not like every religious person is going to feel this way. I heard a story about a therapist treating a young ultra-Orthodox boy who had tried to kill himself and it turned out it was because he was closeted, a homosexual. He didn't want to tell his family (this is like very ultra-Orthodox, shaved head, the whole thing). The therapist's point of view was you need to tell your father this. You need to be honest about this. But he was terrified. His father was like the big rabbi in town, severe guy and he said, “Well, if you want to bring him to the next session you can tell him in front of me.” Because he was generally fearful for his life, like he thought this guy was gonna kill him. And they sit down and the father sits next to him on the couch and the kid says, I have to tell you something. And he's shaking and sweating. And he says, what is it? And he says, I'm gay. And the father, a big black hat, long black coat, looks at him and just starts to cry and just says, “That's it? That's the reason you tried to kill yourself? But I love you. You're my son. I want you alive. I want you here.”
And it was this really moving story that made me realize, wow, it can be counteracted by decency, by the slightest amount of decency. But that seems to be disappearing. I can't spend more than a minute online on social media or news media without wanting to kill myself. I don't know how guys like you who sort of do this for a living and have to keep up on things aren't running down the street naked tearing your hair out because that's what three seconds of it makes me want to do. I mean, if I ever ran into like Wolf Blitzer or something I'd push him in front of a bus. Like stop, just stop shitting on me. Stop telling me everything is awful. Stop telling me the world's dying. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
Mounk: You've written really movingly and with great voice about politics for us a couple of times at Persuasion, including a great send-up of the media as the sort of stirrers of shit and doom, and that what they have to do to make sure that people don't wind up being too optimistic about the world. But you seem to also be having this struggle with yourself. I know that you've on your Substack (which is excellent) mused about whether you should accept commissions to write about more cultural and political issues.
Should people run away from politics? And perhaps it goes against my instincts to say that civic education is important, that an engaged citizenry is important. All of this is sort of true in general, but like if it's getting you down, perhaps you should just tune out. How should we think about how to deal with this charged and ugly political and cultural moment?
Auslander: Right, well, there's a few answers to that. I mean, broadly speaking, I think one of the tricks that the media has done is it has conflated the way we interact with our screens with being politically active and wise. So when I talk about having to get away from all of that, I'm not talking about—if you are genuinely curious about the history of Ukraine and Russia or the Middle East or Africa (whatever it is), go research it. Go read a book. Go read ten books. Go take a course. There are plenty of things you can do. But clicking on a clickbait headline and writing the comment, “No, fuck you,” I'm not sure is a political life.
Social media, Truth Social, Twitter, all that shit—look, I think our instinct and the way we were raised was you don't kill the messenger, right? But if you think about that expression, that was when one messenger came to the king and he couldn't stand even one piece of truth so he killed him. Today, by 9am I've got 10,000 messengers in my living room. And they're shouting at me and they're trying to get in the front door and I try and close it but they're getting in the living room window and they're coming down the fucking chimney. And you know what? I might want to kill a messenger or two because they're not helping.
They're not giving me any credible information. I'd rather they just leave and let me sit with my book that I can read about the history of 1948, whatever it is. So I do think that there's this sort of aspect of ourselves where we’re like, well, I should be involved. I should know what I'm doing. But the way they've defined it is a lie. The way they've defined “involved” is a way to make them money. You're not really involved. You don't really know.
I have this issue with people that—to get tribal about my tribe—who didn't really know anything about Israel or care until October 7th. And then once they heard about what happened, they knew everything. They've made an opinion about it. “I'm going hard right on this, I'm going hard left.” And they don't really know anything. So it's not being anything other than emotional about shit. The other thing you get accused of when you say, I'm just gonna take a break from the news, is you can't live with your head in the sand. So, two points about that: Number one the ostrich is the most successful land mammal in history, there is nothing older, so the thing knows what it's doing, whatever it's doing. We should be copying ostriches. The second thing about ostriches, about living with your head in the sand, is that the alternative—living with your head in a sewer—isn't right either. I'm just going to stick my head in a sewer full of shit and pat myself on the back for being politically aware. It's bullshit and it serves nothing other than the money people, frankly, who are encouraging this, who know what they're doing. They're very good at it. And it's destructive.
I write in the book that there were times like in COVID or Trump era where I'd go to the bookstore, which was always my salvation—was always the place I could go to just hear honesty—or you know what, even more than that, that rare commodity today, wisdom, some sort of wisdom. And then I started to go and notice that all the books were just not only not wise, but they were moronic. Every book could have been titled FEH. You're feh because you're this, you're feh because you're that, you’re feh because you didn't do that. And it was just like, to hell with this. I'm just gonna go home. I'll write my own book about this.
Mounk: So how do you try and overcome that? Perhaps all you need is one parent that is deeply accepting, right? That may have all the religious reasons or the ideological reasons to reject you, but who says, love of my child is much more important than any of that. But if you grow up and unfortunately you have a father who doesn't react with that acceptance, if you don't have somebody who's giving you that kind of unconditional love, what do you do?
I'm particularly intrigued to hear your answer because I feel like so much reflection in this kind of space is frankly bullshit. So much of it is self-help books that take up two-thirds of the shelf space in Barnes and Nobles. And you have such a deep and instinctive aversion to that form of bullshit that I'm intrigued as to how you can work on your feh without becoming a patron of a self-help industry.
Auslander: I sort of rolled lemons for the first 20 years in the slot machine of life. It was just all lemons. And then after that, I started to roll just gold bars. And one of those gold bars was my wife. We just had our 32nd anniversary. I think we're the last people on earth to be married that high. I also met a shrink who was enormously wise and sort of a father figure to me. I was able to spend a lot of time trying to get to the root of this. I think if I picked up a book and it said, here's the way to get happy, I would have just thrown it in the trash. Like it doesn't speak to anything. The changes take time. The changes take work. It's not going to be, I don't think, a life coach or an Instagram meme about “you'll know you're happy when you want to be happy” or some bullshit. I think it's really hard. I think wisdom is really hard to find and love is hard to find.
It isn't just that you find someone in your life who loves you, right? Because it was interesting—I remember having this conversation 30 years ago with my mother and we haven't spoken since, but where, after arguing about something she said, “But I love you.” And I remember thinking, and I actually said this, “Yeah, but you don't like me.” And love is kind of an easy thing, right? In some ways liking is harder and certainly unconditional love is almost impossible to find, but that's what that ultra-Orthodox father was demonstrating. When I got caught eating cheeseburgers, I was told that I was finishing what Hitler started. And I was like, Hitler had a happy meal?
There were 613 conditions, all the laws in the Old Testament. So it's not easy, but the way that for me, I found it was just, like I said, writing and art and being around people who understood that there's something messed up with this. If I had stayed in the town that I grew up in, it’s not just that I wouldn't be on this podcast. I wouldn't be alive. I definitely would have done myself in, because all the messages in that world, right, in that community, were “They were right and you're wrong.” So if you're feeling bisexual, if you're hungry for a Big Mac, you slip and turn on the TV on Saturday, you're essentially bad and they're right for being angry at you. And you have to leave that community. These are bad communities. And nowadays the communities are larger than the community you grew up in.
And so we recreate these sort of suffocating communities wherever we go. And I think it's really hard and really critical that when you find yourself in them, you get out. I remember a long time ago, Jonathan Safran Foer contacted me because he was doing a Haggadah, the Passover book, and wanted to do a new one and he said, “Do you want to contribute?” And I said, “Well, sure, but it's going to be a very short contribution.” It's just going to be one word: “Run.”
“Hey kid, if you're reading this, get the fuck out.” But that's true. And it's funny because religion does have good stories of people leaving. Like if you look at the story of Abraham, right? The story I was told was—this was a little kid who saw his father praying to an idol and realized it was wrong and saw the truth and the one true God, etc. and left home to go do it. Great. So if you see something and you believe it, go follow it. But that's not what we say. We say, “because Abraham saw the truth, you can't have a cheeseburger.” Right? It becomes insane. If we're gonna admire him for being free thinking and bold, then we should be encouraging being free thinking and bold. But we don't, it's the opposite. So he gets to run away and I have to stay here? That's bullshit. That's complete bullshit.
Mounk: Random question: is your wife a feh person or is she not a feh person?
Auslander: She is, but not to the same degree. I don't think I could be with someone who had no concept of what this meant. She's British and from a very different kind of sect of Jews. But yeah, she heard some of the stories and there were elements of her life that also. If you don't hear the story and you don't read the story, you're still going to know the story, right? You're going to hear about it one way the other because that story, it centrally doesn't have to have Adam and Eve and Noah and Moses and all that other shit. It doesn't have to be Jesus. It doesn't have to have Mohammed. The story is just, “you're a bad person.”
Here's yet another instance where your badness shows itself. So I was seven years old and didn't want to ask my parents for money because they were always complaining about not having any. So I went to the local store and I was in love with Natalie Wood from West Side Story and I shoplifted the soundtrack, the cassette, and I got caught. And I learned a very important lesson, and that was if you're going to shoplift, keep your yarmulke on, because they never suspect little Jewish kids of shoplifting. I had taken mine off and they nabbed me in two seconds. Newbie mistake. But I went and stole the soundtrack to West Side Story and I was told it was a horrible person for stealing. And the reality is like, well, but I didn't want to hurt you and ask you for money. Like there's always this aspect of what's our point of view on this thing? And it seems like, inevitably, the point of view we come back to is: “You suck.” One way the other, “you suck”—Tonight on “You Suck!” And that could be any news channel, that could be anything online; Next Door is just a whole thing of “everybody but us sucks.” It's crazy.
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Mounk: I'm gonna, as a final question, make you engage in a self-help exercise: What is a piece of advice that you would give for people who do feel deeply shaped by feh to start overcoming it? And what is a piece of advice you would give for people who perhaps are partners to somebody who's a feh person, who have people in their life who are deep feh people (and perhaps those who are less so) for how they can be helpful to that person the way that you say your wife has been helpful to you for 32 years?
Auslander: Well, I think everyone involved has to first of all sort of understand babies aren't born hating themselves. Right? The baby doesn't come out and go, “holy shit, look at this belly, I have to get to the gym. These diapers make my ass look big.” We're not born that way. So it's worth asking then if it's not endemic to us, if it's not part of who we are, then where did it come from? Because that's very freeing. That makes you go, okay, so it's not a fact, right? It's something I was told. So then you can start asking yourself, well, who told me this story? Why did they tell me this story? Where did I get this story? And you can start to see it as just that, as just a story.
Because it's just a story. That's what's so staggering about all this, is that when you look at the destruction it's caused and the type of society we've built out of it, it's just a story. It's just, once upon a time you were born and you're bad. And so we have to watch you and we can't trust you and, I'm disappointed in you; or, you're the worst thing in this country and you're the enemy of the people. And you're just like, holy shit, this comes from a story. This is just bananas. And so much pain and suffering has come out from it, both, you know, globally, but mostly just personally. Like, I just know so many people whose marriages have broken up because they couldn't face that there's something going on, right? Because it's easier to believe that your parents told you the truth or your teachers were right than it is to say, they were all wrong. But you have to have that courage to just say, what if? What if I wasn't born bad? What if somebody told me I was bad? What if this whole collection of myths and fairy tales and everything I was told and taught in life right up till today, right up to today on my Insta feed, what if that's all just been convincing me of something that isn't even remotely true? And how does that make me feel about myself, about others, about the world?
You just have to be brave enough to question it and cut off the parts that are telling you that. I spend a lot of my time cutting off; in my younger years it was the family members who made me feel that way. Nowadays it's just every time I turn on my laptop I've got to make sure my web blocker is on, my ad blocker is on, my news blocker is on, to keep those voices out because they're not helpful. They don't have my best interests at heart and yeah, you know what, sometimes it'd be nice to sit down and watch the news. But I know it's gonna make me hate myself or hate somebody else, so I don't.
I try to just get people to talk about where the story came from. I think it's really hard. Here's the thing, I think Freud's been discredited and I'm sure Jung's on his way, too, and all this stuff about therapists and where it all came from. But I actually think the most brilliant part of the therapeutic process is that you have to go to them.
Everything comes from that, that decision. You can't force someone to go. I know because after I was caught shoplifting they forced me to go to a shrink and it just doesn't work. I just thought he was an asshole. And that place I think is where you start to grow—is when you yourself are brave enough to go sit down and look in the mirror because no one else can do it for you.
My wife couldn't make me see. One of the through lines in FEH is this sort of blindness that I've had that makes everything and everyone, myself and the world included, look hideous. But she couldn't change that for me. I have to sit there and say, “I need this help.” There's something wrong with my eyes. I mentioned in the book there's this fascinating condition, a brain condition that's incredibly rare, but it's basically people who are blind, but they're convinced they can see. It's called Anton syndrome, and they're not lying, they're not in denial, they will sit there and they will tell you there's a credenza over there, the bed's on the left, the dog's sitting in the corner and then you say, “okay, great, thanks, have a good day,” and they get up and walk into the wall. Because they're blind and their mind tells them something else. What's interesting about that is there's number one, there's no cure, and number two, the most important thing is it comes from trauma: You weren't born with Anton syndrome, you got hit in the head.
So I think it's worthwhile for people to go, “Maybe I got hit in the head. Maybe I'm not like this because I'm like this. Maybe I got hit. Maybe there's some trauma somewhere.” And then you can start to go, OK, am I gonna fix it or am I gonna let it drag me down? Am I gonna go to the grave feeling this way because people told me I was shit. I get one life, one shot at this, and I'm going to spend it hating everyone and myself because somebody told me something because I didn't get what I needed from the people who should have given it to me? If that's the way you want to go down, if you want to lay down that way and die, great, but I don't. I'll fight it until the last breath.
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