Fake, Phony & Soulless - A Palatable Felt Sense

A reflection on the state of politicians and our cultural acceptance of insanity as normal.

Before You Begin: Take a breath. Turn your attention to your body and release any tension. Breathe slowly into the area of your heart for 60 seconds, focusing on feeling a sense of ease. Stay connected to your body as you read. Click here to learn why I suggest this.

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Note: For the context of this piece, I am using soulless not as a word to dehumanize but as a way of suggesting a deep disconnection from self. A felt sense of an ‘emptiness’ in the way someone comes across.

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Outside of my belief that our societal system is badly designed, I have not voted in nearly 20 years because the general quality of high-level politicians doesn’t inspire me to vote.

They seem fake, phony, and soulless. I don’t know if they act this way because that’s how they think they are supposed to act, but it seems wildly ‘off’ to me.

As I’ve honed my skills as a somatic practitioner, I understand more deeply that human beings have a relational capacity via our ventral vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is a large wandering nerve that’s part of our parasympathetic nervous system. One of its main functions is to provide us with the ability to socially engage.

This nerve connects to our facial muscles, ears, gut, heart, vocal cords and more. It helps us regulate homeostasis and sense tiny minute details about how someone speaks or expresses themselves with their face. With this, we can automatically sense what someone is saying beyond the words they use.

Further to that, we have a heart that picks up on the magnetic field of other people. It has long been studied that we have the ability to sense and feel a lot about another person via an exchange of electromagnetic fields within our hearts that is processed and decoded in the brain. Things like people’s emotional state can be felt without even opening our eyes or saying a word to one another.

In concert, these two relational capacities, especially when we are attuned to them, give us the incredible opportunity to connect deeply with one another, empathize with one another, and sense what is beyond words.

Simply, within our biology, through our ventral vagus nerve and heart, the capacity to deeply relate, sense and connect is evident.

To be clear, these capacities don't suddenly provide a completely relevetory intuition of every single detail about what someone feels, is thinking, or what their intentions are - that would be kind of boring - but they do provide a lot of information we use, and can use, every day.

I have said can multiple times with italics because although we have these capacities, they work much less efficiently the more dysregulated our nervous system becomes. Something I feel is all too common in our modern society. Further, to bring what we sense with these capacities to our conscious mind can take a bit of practice because we have often become too stuck in our heads.

The State of “Leaders”

With all that said, when I listen to people like Justin Trudeau, Joe Biden, Jagmeet Singh, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton and many other politicians, every part of my being tells me that these people are fake, phony, and soulless. (Note I don’t think Trump is perfect by any means, but I found it fascinating that he seemed to hide his true self less than other leaders.)

I'm not saying that these people don't have a personality or don't have the ability or capacity to be loving, but it feels as though something is off. That an aspect of their heart has become absent from their consciousness.

Perhaps it’s the chronic stress that they've been through to get to the position they've arrived at, or maybe it’s prior trauma, or growing up in a disconnected home, either way, listening to and sensing these people makes me feel they are operating solely as a cognitive robot.

The emotion of these people often seems fake and scripted, their eyes don’t feel warm, and they rarely or never seem to offer any authenticity. You could say that for the most part, they carry with them many of the characteristics of a sociopath.

Our leaders break laws, showing little empathy or authenticity, manipule and deceive people with charm, humor, and charisma, show little or no authentic guilt, or remorse for the harm they cause others, and justify actions that negatively affect others. All of these traits resemble a sociopath, but truly they come from trauma, life experience, childhood and chronic stress. These show up when we don’t resolve trauma, become deeply disconnected from ourselves, and thus others.

Again, my intention is not to defend, dehumanize or demean, but to express a felt sense I have in words that can be understood by other humans.

‘Sociopath’ is only a label. In my view stopping at labels doesn’t help us much in many cases. Asking: how did this person develop sociopathic traits? Leads us to pathology which can also help us solve the problem at it’s core. If we label and stop, we usually don’t solve much of anything.

I believe we gain a lot by having empathy for people arrived at the person theyare today. It also gives us the chance to show up with the ability to provide a solution. But this is a discussion for another day.

Participation Feels Off

Even though so many of the above characteristics seem obvious in high-level politicians, I am being told that I need to vote for one of these people or I'm not doing my duty as a citizen.

I'm being told to vote for people that appear to have little to no authenticity, little to no heart, little to no care, and exhibit little to no love.

Why would I do such a thing? Why would I expect our world would get any better if I kept participating in the re-election of people like this over and over and over again?

What’s bizarre is it feels like we have become so desensitized to how insane this is that we don’t even notice it anymore. It’s just normal, and we’ll fight to defend this normalcy.

“Politicians lie, that’s just how it is.” And yet I’m the crazy one for thinking we can do better?

The Response To RFK Jr.

To further the fact that our society has essentially become ill on a deep level, notice the mass cultural response to somebody like Robert F Kennedy Jr.

I'm not suggesting that RFK Jr. is perfect, and that he doesn’t make mistakes or that you should vote for him, I’m simply asking you to reflect on something here.

When I listen to Robert F Kennedy Jr. I see and feel somebody who still has a connection to his heart and the wellness of other people. He clearly has a healthy relationship with nature that feels authentic and sacred, and isn’t expressed through a simple statement “I love trees. Stop C02 emissions!”

He has admitted when he’s wrong on some occasions, agrees to look into things deeper, and genuinely expresses himself.

Plainly, there is something that my internal capacities sense about RFK Jr. that is different from other politicians.

Again, it does not matter whether you agree with him or not. I’m simply asking if you sense something different from him.

When I look on YouTube videos, blogs or podcasts where RFK Jr appears, I’ve seen comments like this many, many times:

“I’m not too sure about RFK Jr. and his policies but he seems like an honest, real, and humble guy. It’s rfreshing. There’s something about him that is intriguing, so I’m going to listen to him more.”

Or

“I saw so many people talking about RFK Jr. and saying harsh things. So I listened to the guy for 3 hours. He’s honest, humble, and tasks the time ti genuinely explain how he feels about things. His ideas arent even that out there and he seems to have a lot of evidence behind what he’s saying. Either way, it’s nice to see someone honest.”

People sense something different, and that’s great, but the fact that the mainstream has gone all out trying to attack this guy suggests that they’d rather defend the fake, phony, and soulless, and it makes me wonder if they have even stopped to sense if RFK Jr. is different.

Those who have sensed something is different have become curious. That curiosity led to deeper listening. Deeper listening that was brought on by following a subtle felt sense or intuition that something is different. That something is inspiring. And with all that, these people found out that the mainstream characterization of RFK Jr. was not even accurate.

I’ve seen millions of purely logical and cognitive critiques on RFK Jr. since he began. To me, this purely logical approach is part of the illness within our society. We have become almost solely cognitive in our way of being, and as a result, we don’t even sense the rot within people holding high positions in our society, because the words they use logically match what we want to hear, even though we know it’s a lie.

We’re lost. Although many are starting to see this.

Is our mass culture so caught up in the normalcy of sociopaths running our society that we cant even recognize an honest and humble person? have we decided those qualities don’t even matter?

Why and how have we become so desensitized to this? Why do we fight to protect this behavior?

On all aspects of the political spectrum people are asking for a better world. But I feel before we can get to a point we must bring back to our awareness the felt sense of attuning to the state of our leaders and reflecting on what qualities are being projected to the masses.

I don’t mean to sound hyperbolic but, when the masses begin sensing that the behaviour of the majority of our politicians resembles an illness, we will know we are coming back to ourselves.