Navalny, Tucker and Truth
When Courage Conquers Convenience
Given the overlap between Tucker Carlson’s Putin interview, the fracturing of U.S. support for Ukraine, and the “Sudden Death Syndrome” of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, it felt timely to share these thoughts again.
Gotta admit, the stats seem fairly bleak for living a life of courage and integrity these days!
And it makes total sense when you read the research on how Truth fares in the world.
But once in a blue moon, Truth can flip things on their head entirely.
(at a cost not less than everything).
Read on to find out the Whys and Hows of when Evolutionary Fitness beats Timeless Truth, and those rare moments when the tables can turn in our favor…
Evolution Didn't Optimize for Truth
A little while ago I rewatched cognitive neuroscientist Donald Hoffman's TED talk "Do We See Reality As It Is?” It spoke directly to the better and worse angels of our natures these days–from Instagram Hucksters all the way to political dissidents.
Hoffman’s lab has developed computer simulations of evolution to try and figure out what traits best select for evolutionary fitness (or extinction).
They ran hundreds of thousands of simulations comparing three different characters:
The All Truth / No Fitness guy
The Some Truth / Some Fitness guy
The No Truth / All Fitness guy
And they found that the 100% Fitness/0% Reality folks outcompeted the other two every single time.
So Hoffman coined a term for this surprising phenomenon:
Fitness Beats Truth (FBT).
Meaning, that if I am optimized for food, sex, and survival I will thrive and outcompete anyone who is indexing for the Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything.
So even if my NoTruth diet is riddled with magical thinking, self-dealing, or otherwise douchey behavior, if it increases money, fame, sex, power, attention (or more prosaically, food, clothing, shelter and offspring) then I will be rewarded handsomely for my delusions.
Truth be damned.
So that explains how a dude blown apart by the cosmos on ten hits of acid might end up broke and homeless. Sure, he glimpsed what Nikola Tesla had hinted at that "the universe can only be understood in terms of energy, frequency and vibration!" but he might have overclocked his processor in the expansion.
High on truth. Low on fitness.
Spirituality, Captured by the 'Gram
Or the converse: it also explains how wisdom and spirituality have been so thoroughly captured by lifestyle influencers, instagram shamans and seven-figure manifesters. They're not optimized for Truth, or even remotely interested in it.
They're optimized for fitness––likes, clicks and bucks. And that works way better.
After all, how many of us know of some wise old zen monk eclipsed by a hunky guy shooting #inspo posts for the 'gram?
(and if you don’t know the former, but follow the latter, that kinda proves the point)
Or how ‘bout an academic who just might hold the keys to solving energy, conflict, climate, finance, or farming, whose books (and tweets) disappear into a void compared to their smooth-talking colleague who landed a slot on Rogan?
Or a selfless statesperson trying to broker political solutions to a world in crisis, out fund-raised, and outvoted by someone with a knack for rhyming tweets?
If FBT, Fitness Beat Truth, all the time, every time, we might as well slit our wrists now.
Can We Flip the Script on Truth?
But sometimes, once in a blue moon, the opposite happens.
Truth beats Fitness.
Not often, definitely not always. But sometimes.
The saints of the Axial Age––from Buddha to Jesus to Zarathustra––lived lives no longer (and often a good deal shorter) than any of us. But their truthbombs still send shockwaves through the world. All because they prioritized the Truth that burned inside them over any instinct for self-preservation.
There are others today.
Take two figures from the current crisis in Eastern Europe––Russian dissident Navalny and Ukrainian president Zelensky. Both of them were solidly decent guys, doing their bit to subvert the dominant Putin paradigm, until they hit their #truthbomb moments.
For Navalny, who had survived a sinister poisoning attack, his moment came live streaming a YouTube call where he punked his attackers into thinking that he was their boss. He then tricked them into confessing their crimes, live. On video.
Navalny, top left, pretending to be one of the FSB assassin’s superiors
It was ballsy AF, ripped the mask off Putin's plausible deniability, and played like a digital age equivalent to "counting coup" (the traditional warrior practice of going into enemy territory and touching your enemy with a ritual staff, rather than with a weapon––considered the ultimate risk and honor).
Then, as further dedication to his Truth Beats Fitness philosophy, Navalny returned home to accept imprisonment rather than live in exile. Over the last few years, he continued to communicate, write letters to other dissidents and put on a brave and humorous face to his followers on the outside.
Until Putin isolated him in a remote gulag and had him killed last week.
Read here some of his testimony from his 2014 initial court case
How many times can a man who isn’t breaking the law give his last words? Zero. If he’s really unlucky, once. But over the last two years, I’ve been asked if I have any last words six, seven, maybe ten times.
I’ve heard this phrase many times now: “Mr. Navalny, do you have any last words?” I get the sense that my last words mark the last days for me, for someone, for everyone.
It’s important to me to address you, the people who will watch or read my last words. It’s more or less pointless, but the people who look the other way are also a battlefield. On one side of it are the crooks who have seized power in our country, and on the other are people who want to change this. We are fighting over the people who look the other way, the people who shrug their shoulders, the people who are in a situation where all they have to do is not do something cowardly, who do it anyway.
For Zelensky, a comic and performer before becoming Ukraine's president, but otherwise largely unknown and unremarkable, his moment came in the first week of Russia's invasion. When Western agencies offered to evacuate him to safer ground, he replied "I don't need a ride, I need ammunition!"
That single, pithy statement (along with a series of selfie videos and gutsy decisions) galvanized Ukrainian resistance, pulled NATO together in a way that it hadn't been in years, prompted Germany to open its checkbooks and double down on war spending in ways that neither Obama or Trump had achieved, and, wait-for-it, did the most unthinkable of miracles...
Created a moment of bipartisan consensus in Washington DC that approved stiffer Russian sanctions than Biden even asked for! Republicans (minus the unimpeachable Tucker Carlson) even broke with Trump's boot-licking of Putin, and took a clear stand against.
Since then, we’ve seen the impact of their truth bomb moments shift.
Zelensky’s been worn down by prolonged war and his stance has become more politicized in the Western world. Democrats and Republicans have splintered into very different interpretations of what that war means to Europe and the United States.
(see last week’s post on our Hamilton v. Jefferson cage match on U.S. intervention for more perspective on this)
Carlson’s Putin recent interview and the media response to it was just a highly visible example of that tension.
But Navalny’s recent death has triggered a brief halo of martyrdom. It’s too soon to tell, but it might be enough to galvanize Congress to send more aid to Ukraine.
Since the West has already sanctioned Putin as strictly as it can, it’s unclear what might happen in response to Navalny’s death, despite chuffing and chiding from Biden, Sunak and others.
His wife who has stayed out of the political spotlight until now, has vowed to take up the cause. How courageously she fills his shoes and keeps his memory alive will matter.
This Truth Beats Fitness moment, can only come when a person has set aside their own personal agenda (i.e. seeking pleasure and avoiding pain). Once they commit to Truth though, anything becomes possible. Their power expands exponentially.
It's paradoxically why martyred saints are so inspiring and why suicide bombers are so terrifying.
We yearn to conquer death, and when people model that in their lives, it’s a powerful tool for change.
What it Means to Take a Stand
Gandhi knew this and even coined a term for it. Satyagraha. "Truth Force." The power that is unlocked when a person stands deeply in integrity, in humanity. It was enough to topple the British Empire, it was enough to desegregate the American and African South.
It could be enough to save us now.
Because as long as we're playing it safe, and playing it selfish, we will continue to get #Fitspo Fitness over #Truthbomb Truth.
But if we can flip the script, so that Truth Beats Fitness, we have a chance.
It's the old Kubrick film Spartacus, where the slave rebels all choose to be crucified on the Appian Way rather than betray their leader.
"I'd rather be a free man in my grave," sang Jimmy Cliff, "than living as a puppet or a slave!"
That Spartacus moment still resonates. Even for youngsters who've never seen the original film, they've seen it riffed and referenced a dozen times, from South Park to the Simpsons.
Shakespeare's Caesar said it best, “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once."
That turns the Fitness Beats Truth theorem on its head.
It could even give us an updated version of our own––something like:
"Fit cowards die fearfully a thousand times, but Truthful heroes die courageously, and but once."
No one gets out of here alive. Navalny knew it. So does his wife. Zelensky does too. We're in the middle of their passion plays right now, but we all know the inevitable ending.
It's not about getting a reprieve or an airlift out, it's about dying well, once.
The only question then is how to take their example and find Satyagraha for all of us.
So that Truth doesn't just beat fitness once in a blue moon. So that Truth can transform Fitness––from selfish self-preservation, into selfless transformation.
That would be a #bestlife worth posting about.
Best article yet. This. Is. Everything. Immaculate synthesis. Thank you and more please!!
The secrets of our evolutionary potential are encoded in our genetic patterning which is programmed/designed for the body to consciously incarnate the Radiant Light of which it is a manifestation and in which it is appearing.
That ancient understanding was/is signalled via the words:
Sat-Chit-Ananda Being-Consciousness-Bliss.
The template for that intrinsic potential is in the subtle anatomy of the human body-mind-complex. The seven primary chakras which are potentially enlivened by Kundalini Shakti Energy which (itself) circulates up and down (and thus energizes) the spinal column which is quite literally the Tree of Life.
A good but limited place to begin this understanding would be via the writings of Gopi Krishna beginning with his first book Kundalini The Evolutionary Energy In Man.
And the book by Arthur Avalon titled Serpent Power Secrets of Tantric & Shakti Yoga. There are of course many such references too.
It is of course somewhat fanciful to claim that we are still being affected by the Saints of the Axial Age. In fact it just aint so!
Never mind that since then countless thousands of such Radiantly Alive Saints, Yogis, Mystics and Sages have appeared all over the world, primarily in the East but even to a much limited extent in the West too. Some of the most powerful of such Yogis, Mystics and Sages appeared in the 20th Century.
As far as I know no Radiantly Alive Saints of the stature of St Theresa of Avila and St John of the Cross have appeared in the Western world for the past 500 years.
Why is this? It could be said that beginning with the European Renaissance the consciousness and mind of Westerners has been increasingly trapped in and controlled by the spirit-killing left brained paradigm pointed to and described with much detail by Iain McGilchrist in his book The Master & His Emissary.
The entire thrust/zeitgeist of the much hyped Western mind is to shut down this intrinsic (latent) possibility/potential. There are many taboos against anyone from becoming "too mystical".