Thomas Hübl: Welcome to the Point of Relation. My name is Thomas Hubl, and I am very excited to be sitting here with you, Abigail. Abigail Disney is joining us today, so very warm welcome here-
Abigail Disney: Thank you.
Thomas: … to Point of Relation.
Abigail: I’m excited to be here.
Thomas: Yes, me too. I’m excited to be here with you, and I’m curious to learn from you. The first thing I would love, maybe if you could share with us, is first of all, what are you most passionate about now? And then maybe you can speak a little bit to your journey that made you be passionate about what you’re passionate about now, and that we can see a little bit your life trajectory leading up to this moment in your life and all you’re doing now, so we can learn a bit.
Abigail: That’s a good question. That’s a big question. I think even as a little child, I was very concerned with what was fair and what wasn’t fair. That was just an upset… I think because I was a middle child. As a middle child, you pay a lot of attention to who’s getting what and whatever. But I was conscious very young that we were well-resourced as a family and that something different was happening with us than with my friends and so forth. So I’ve had my eye on that all my life. I left home. I went to college. I decided to go to graduate school at Columbia, and I found myself in the 1980s in New York City in a city where the homelessness crisis was really out of hand. I saw a person step over another person to get to work, and that was a moment for me. I had a sense that things weren’t right or fair, but where do you have to have fallen to be able to step over another human being? Something was very wrong.
So I started a long journey into things like giving money to charities, and then starting my own foundation, and then volunteering for things, that kind of thing. One thing led to another, and I have increasingly tried to figure out how to use the resources that I was given and the resources that I’ve developed over time to make the most difference, which is a very mushy way of saying it. But in essence, it’s about bringing as much peace into the world as I possibly can and as much fairness into the world as I can. So that led me to filmmaking, and I made a couple of films. And then a couple of years ago, some of the workers at Disneyland reached out to me and my great uncle was Walt. My grandfather was Roy Disney. We went there a lot as kids, and I have such affectionate memories of being there with my grandfather. He was a lovely man.
One of the things he always said to us was, “Don’t you dare disrespect those people who work at the park. They work so hard.” So that was really important to him. Everybody knew him by his first name, and he knew everybody else, and it was a really warm relationship. In 2018 when I got an email or a message on Facebook from some of the workers saying, they won’t even negotiate with us, we’re making $11 an hour, I can’t feed my family, those kinds of things, I knew enough about the world to know that was happening at almost every company. I had never wanted to go toward the family company as a way of this crusade of making things fair. It always felt too big and too scary for me to try to take on. But I had a long think about it.
My first reaction was to tell them, “Well, I can’t help you. There’s nothing I can do.” And I thought, “Well, that’s not the most honest answer.” I had to admit to myself there wasn’t nothing that I could do. And then aren’t we all challenged in life to figure out if it’s not nothing, then what is it? I started to talk about it more publicly, first of all in the context of the CEO’s salary, which his compensation for that year was… Now I’m forgetting the number, but it was $25 million or something crazy like that. It seemed like a good way to bring some focus on just how obviously viscerally wrong this was. When that started to get some traction, it felt like, well, okay, so let’s talk about this. What do I do? I make films.
So I started a film about it, and it came out in 2022 at the Sundance Film Festival. It was called The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales. It was an attempt to put together… Disney’s such an interesting company because basically everything about American business is right there in that company. Everything. Everything, every labor problem, every copyright problem, everything.
They do so many different businesses. And then everything about Americans and what they think about themselves is there in that company too. Every fantasy we have, every fear we have. It feels like if you’re going to talk about America and its it and its super ego, that Disney is a perfect place to go. So we tried to weave a story together of first of all, what happened at Disney, what I remember as opposed to what exists now, what is life like for workers there now. And then to weave it together with the story of American history and especially American corporate history in the way, in the last 50 years, it’s radically changed and has amount to a massive change in the personality of the country we live in. I can remember it being a different country.
That has led me to where I am right now, which is to say, well, okay, you’ve looked at your family, and I’ve done as much as I could. I’m proud to say they got up to $18 an hour and then a 42% raise from there. So I’m proud of that. But I’ve always known in the back of my mind that there was a story about my mother’s side of the family that came from Louisiana, all the way back to the first white settlers there. I had never let myself look at it before. I feel like Americans, we give ourselves so much latitude not to look at things. We dedicate so much energy to not knowing things. So I decided to start to have a look at that story. Of course, it’s the story that I wish weren’t true, but of course there were people, humans that were owned, bought and sold by my ancestors back through the generations.
So the question that I’m now really circling around is like, what does that ask of me? What does that mean? Because a lot of people dismiss that question right away. Especially people in the south will say, “Well, that has nothing to do with me. I didn’t do any of these things. I didn’t buy and sell anybody. I haven’t benefited by it.” Those things are all true for me as well. But you know when your stomach grabs hold sometimes? You know that this isn’t nothing. I’ve spent my life benefiting in ways I never even tried to benefit by the relationship I have to this person that I barely knew. He died when I was six. It seems natural to people to offer me credit for things I haven’t done and think that I’m smarter than I am and laughed hard at my jokes.
I’ve benefited by that in a thousand different ways. It doesn’t stand a reason that I also need to take in the things that are negative and look at those as well. I can’t do one thing and not the other. So that’s what I’m preoccupied with right now. That’s led me to thinking about and studying this question of moral injury, which is, as you know, I’m sure about it because you study trauma. It came from the study of trauma. It’s not precisely trauma, but I was raised in a home where racist things were said and done, and my mother was repeating what she’d been taught and her mother was repeating what she had been taught. I never knew where quite to put that. I think there is obviously less intense version of moral injury that I think many of us carry.
The more we work to try to not see that, I think the more we take out of ourselves in terms of psychic, and moral, and intellectual, and spiritual energy. So that’s how I want to take it on. I want to take it on as this question of is moral injury like trauma collective, and is it transgenerational? If it is those things, then America has a lot to reckon with. All Americans have a lot to reckon with. We all live on stolen land. We all benefited by stolen labor. The more we deny it, I think the further we get from any peaceful society. I think a lot of our very toxic politics have to do with the fact that we actually reaching a point where we can’t swallow anymore of these sins, the sin-eaters weddings. We’ve been eating sins for centuries. I think you can only eat so many and then things start to go haywire. I think a little bit, that’s what’s happening to us in this moment.
Thomas: Wow.
Abigail: Sorry about the airplane.
Thomas: No, I don’t hear the airplane.
Abigail: Oh, you don’t? Good, good.
Thomas: No, I’m just saying, wow. You said so many important things right now in one go. I just want to highlight a few things. First of all, it touches me how much it touches you because I feel like the depth of your depth speaking also, and even if some of the things are things that you’re still finding out. But deeper inside, I feel a strong drive that this is very important and this reaches me like the depth of your essence speaking here and that these matters are important. I think also when you spoke about the privilege and that many of us have certain levels of privilege, we also have a responsibility. I think when you spoke about looking. Also, let’s stay now globally, but let’s say in the US society, how much is being invisible and not known as a defense to what you said.
I think is true that the moral injury in my understanding what I have seen in the intergenerational work, it’s definitely intergenerational, and it’s definitely, we have much more work to do and we need a different system in the society that we can process these things differently than we do it now. You said another thing that I want to highlight is, the less we look at it, the more chaos we will experience in this society. I think all of these things are very, very wise and I think should be heard by many, many people because I think we really have to go and look voluntarily before we look when there is a massive crisis. Anyway, the crisis is already here. I think we are living in the crisis. Yeah, I love everything you just said. It’s very powerful. Thank you.
Abigail: Thank you. It’s really going against the American grain right now because if you look at the loudest forces in public life in this moment, they’re the voices of pushing forward at all costs in an aggressive view of how interactions should occur. So apologies are really not respected. They’re not respected for the courage that real apologies take, and guilt is not thought of as an actual real visceral thing that this is not a stupid thing to feel. It’s a little stupid not to feel it for some things. So the outer world in our society, in this country right now is so coarse, so hard, so unbending. I really feel the need to at least make some space for the credibility that comes with bending that the incredible gift it is to choose to bend.
Thomas: Yes, I agree. I very much agree. I think collectively, we don’t understand that if we slow down for a moment, if we create spaces to digest, if we reckon our past, if we allow the changes in society that need to happen as a consequence, we cannot just reconcile the past and stay the same today. Reconciling the past means we become somebody new that we all don’t know. It’s like, not we are restoring backwards. We are restoring into a future that we don’t know, and we don’t, I think if… And then we see wow, actually what we were afraid of, that we will lose something, the opposite’s going to happen. We will actually all win when we restore our past. But if we don’t do it, we will actually more and more go into a downward spiral.
Abigail: Beyonce, being a very wise woman, has a line at the beginning of American Requiem which is, for everything to stay the same, it needs to change again. I think that’s a really beautiful place to start a song with a name like American Requiem because there’s so much about mourning in American life right in this moment, and especially African-American people know this better than anyone. The idea that we are grasping so tightly to what is currently true and even squeezing with all our might to hold it where it is, and the harder you squeeze history that oozes between your fingers. So you’re watching it happen in places like Florida where they’ve made it illegal to talk about race history in the classrooms when there’s enormous history to be studied and benefited by. It’s amazing that guilt is dismissed as a weak emotion when they’re fighting so hard so that nobody ever feels it. That feels to me like a little bit of a confession of how powerful and how much it asks of you. The fear is of guilt and the recognition.
Thomas: Absolutely. Yeah, I agree. Again, I agree completely, and I have taken thousands of people into reconciliation processes with their past in different cultural fields. Every time we did it, even if it’s not easy, even if it’s… We go through difficult emotions and difficult processes, but at the end of the day, it feels like you’re closer to yourself, you’re more intimate with yourself in life, and you have better relationships, and you feel that you reconciled something and you grew, you matured. I think that’s exactly what we need now. We need more mature societies to strengthen our democracies, and I don’t think there’s any way without reconciling the past because that fragmentation… Look, when you look at social media at the moment, how much fragmentation, how much war, war, war, war is going on-
Abigail: Yeah, the more we fragment, the more war and violence in general feels like the only answer to every question. If we could actually look at the Middle East and see, oh, my gosh, we’re basically the same people with a shared history, it’s… That’s very simplistic. I understand. But even at the same time, we are solving every problem with a hammer, and we have so many more tools if we would stop to take stock.
Thomas: In your own experience, when you started to look at your own family history, do you want to speak a little bit about how you experienced it and what’s the learning maybe that came out of them?
Abigail: I was in Selma, Alabama on a trip with a group of church people, and we were just experimenting with the idea that we could do reconciliation trips across the south with conservatives and liberals and so forth. I had never been to Selma before. It’s a really extraordinary place of pain. It’s not a place where that redemptive story dominates at all. That was one afternoon, and the rest of history in Selma has been just damaging and ugly. As one example, it was 1965, the march in Selma, but the mayor in 1965 was still the mayor in 2000. That is how long that same guy and that same sheriff were in charge in this place where when you speak to Americans about Selma, they get a little misty-eyed and think of it as this great victory, but it’s this forgotten place. Anyway, so I was going through this experience that this woman had set up because it was a big slave training outpost as well as a lot of other things before the civil War.
She created this experience of what it would’ve been like to be on a slave ship. So it’s in this extremely dark room, and you’re in there with strangers and getting pushed together and so forth. It was hard. I came out of there, and my phone rang as soon as I came out of there. I had sent a question to my cousin who does a lot of the research about the family about, what was the name of the town and how many people were owned? That was when she called me when I came out of there. She said, “This is De Lisle, Mississippi, and in the last census there were about 24 people.” They weren’t people with names. They were people with genders and ages, and that’s all. The 1850 census had about 12 people, so more people had been added. To say that I experienced it in my body is to say it very lightly, and it just came with me and I carry it with me still. I don’t know. I keep running up against this space of no language.
When I try to describe why it feels so important to look at it squarely, it just feels like I’m not living my purpose in life unless I really tell myself and the people around me truth about what was happening there.
Thomas: Yeah, I think that’s very true. You said it because many people might think, “Oh, it’s my body. It’s like a separate entity,” but actually, our body is a whole context of ancestors. When there’s something, when there is some ethical transgressions, we feel we cannot be embodied and live our full purpose without restoring what lives deeply in the soil of our bodies. Our bodies know, and that’s what you said. I felt it very strongly in my body. I have heard this thousands of times, the same sentence.
Abigail: Yeah, I’ve always-
Thomas: So that’s very powerful.
Abigail: I’ve always carried everything in my stomach. I don’t know why, just always in my stomach. When I’m not feeling well, when I’m happy, it’s in my stomach, either one. My cousin who’s done a lot of this research had started just inspecting who had skin cancer in the family because she had skin cancer that she was fighting. She went all the way back to however many greats-grandfather in Alabama whose daughter married the guy who was living in Mississippi. He was the most notorious slave owner in Alabama. He was just awful and famously evil, and he had skin cancer so badly that his entire cheek had been cut off, so that he had this face. If William Faulkner had written it, you would say, “Oh, come on, Abigail, you’re taking it a little too far there.” Because the vividness and the reality of the way the body is reflecting the damage, the horror or the evil, the toxicity of what was going on, which is not to say that people was going to cancer deter what they get.
But the visual image of him had to have been horrifying to the people he was buying and selling. He must have been terrifying, and it felt like a scene from a Faulkner novel.
Thomas: Yeah, it’s important what you just said also that not everybody who has some health issues, that’s the reason. Obviously, our bodies are very sensitive bio computers, and we carry a lot of our history. History has not gone. This unintegrated history is the past that travels with us, and you described it beautifully. How does this inform you today? First of all, I think it’s very courageous that you do this at all because many people don’t have the courage to look. You started, okay, even if it’s uncomfortable, even if I don’t know what I’m going to find, I will look. So how does this inform you today?
Abigail: I feel like we must all look at our lives and ask ourselves, are we uniquely placed? Is there some way in which I’m uniquely placed? I feel very uniquely placed because I’ve been so advantaged and so forth, but not just in that sense. I feel like I had an inside view of the way people in certain ways of life think as an example. I can remember my mother standing over me at nine years old when I was reading my history textbook and objecting to the way that the slave owners were being described in my history book. She said, well, as Yankees, they always lie to you, that most of the slave owners were very nice to their slaves. At the end of the war they wanted to stay with their owners because this is classic lost cause ideology, but she was passing it along to me as truth and a bigger truth and better truth than what was being told to me by my history textbook. That as I think part of the mechanism by which moral injury gets passed, it gets passed through lore and belief and so forth.
I lost my thread. What’s the second half of that sentence? What was the second half of that question?
Thomas: What you learned in your own inner research, how does this inform you today?
Abigail: Right. What I’m understanding is I’m reading Isabelle Wilkerson’s book about caste right now, which is a beautiful book. The way she speaks from the inside of the experience of being of this reviled cast, it came to me that, well, I know the inside of the experience of the other cast. I know what it sounds like inside of one of these families. I know what it looks like in terms of the way people treat each other and behave. I’m not interested in telling a horrible expose story. Actually, the story I want to arrive at is I love my mother. I loved her. She was a really wonderful, funny, fabulous person who also did these things. It wasn’t her essence. Maybe there are people for whom that’s their essence, but I think the large majority of even people doing the worst things, that’s not who they are.
I was raised on a lot of those kinds of moments where as a child, I remember looking at my mother that day and saying, “But Mom, they were slaves.” So I got it, which I’m proud of, at nine. I was able to have the wherewithal to push back and to say that and to see that because not everybody can. So I’m proud of that, but I’ve heard so much worse. What I feel like is I don’t know where to store that. My grandmother especially said just some horrible, horrible things as I was growing up. Even as a child, I would feel myself go… like that. It was like, whoa, that was so hateful. She was wonderful. Also, she took such good care of my grandfather when he had a stroke. She took care of him until the day he died. She was loyal, and she was kind, and she was funny.
So I’m trying to figure out how do I arrange myself around? I need to hold these truths. I need to hold them. I will not let them go because they are true. But I also need to hold that I loved my grandmother and I loved my mother, and these things can exist both at the same time. I have a unique view of it because a couple of times, I’ve been public criticizing my uncle, Walt. It’s a well-documented history of racism and antisemitism. It’s like I can’t even believe I have to explain to people that it exists, but just go see Song of the South. That’s all you need to know. Anyway, I won’t make that argument, but in the times that I have criticized him publicly, the blowback I’ve gotten from complete strangers, people who never met him, didn’t know anything about him, just fans, has been shocking.
It’s really people calling me names, horrible names, and just telling me I should burn in hell, really the worst internet trolling in defense of this guy. So why? The question is why? I think it’s because most people feel that what I’m actually saying is you should hate yourself because I’m telling you to hate Walt. If you loved Walt, then you loved what he did and you enjoyed all the things that he made, then you should hate yourself. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is look at it. Look at it for what it really is. Nobody’s telling you you can’t enjoy the Jungle Book. But at the same time, Blue is funny, and they’re all funny. But it was from some of the most racist source material he ever used from Rudyard Kipling. There is a deep message in there that people wish they should stay with their own kind.
He made it in the middle of the sixties during the height of the civil rights movement. It’s really hard for me to pretend that all of that is contained in Jungle Book, even if it’s a very enjoyable film. I’ve had African-American people say to me, “Don’t dis Walt. We love Walt. You can’t criticize him for this.” Because they don’t know what to do with that either. So I feel like I’ve been wrestling with this for so long, this question of what do we do with the hateful things that are inside of each of every one of our histories? How do we own them? How do we tell ourselves the truth about them and still contain love and acceptance of the people who bring it into our lives?
Thomas: Yeah, that’s very interesting. First of all, it’s very fascinating to listen to you and to also the complexity of your life story. I think it’s very, very interesting. Again, what touches me is your willingness to keep going and to keep going deeper. This feels very resonant in me. I can feel very much in… I want to go to the root of this. Of course, it’s step by step, but I feel you. You’re very committed to that movement. You said something very interesting because light and dark or good and evil are… When we polarize into a shadow, it’s like it needs to be either one or the other. But that’s very dangerous because that’s where we exactly create these posters of life. These two deep posters that we try to feel safe in.
It’s much more challenging to say, “Wow, I feel love, and there was a lot of hatred.” It’s like that’s much more challenging and it needs much more maturity to host this in oneself and not try to polarize the tension.
Abigail: Right. Right, right.
Thomas: Because if you cannot be with the tension, you need to identify yourself with a pole. Either I’m on this side or on this side, but if you have enough consciousness to host the tension and you don’t need to reject it, you say, “Yes, this feels like a tension in me, and all of this is part of life. And it doesn’t mean that when I say there is love, I agree to the hatred.” That immature perspective can host contradiction and work with it. I think that’s so important. That’s what you also described about your fans because then it sounds like, oh, in the less mature perspective, it sounds like you’re telling them to hate themselves for all this stuff, but that’s not what you’re saying. But that’s also what immature perspective wouldn’t hear.
Abigail: Yeah, for sure. There’s this visceral response, and I think what Walt offered in the things that he made was an image of America back to itself. It was a very benign, benevolent image of America, and people loved that story. What he offered people also were these polar choices. The bad guys are always very clearly bad guys, and there’s no complexity to them. How many bad guys are really like that? That’s a standard Hollywood thing. They give us the Nazi, and the boer, and the southern white supremacist, and they’re always the same. In the movie, The Help, the woman who’s a white supremacist, you know she’s bad because she also treats her children badly, and she also does all these other things so that the idea is that she just carries evil with her in every single way. That’s just not the way it works.
But you use this language 2D, which is interesting to me because that’s how I’m thinking of it. I think that when… because I’m very interested in these stories of people who turn out to have been much more complicated than we thought. George Washington turns out to be a terrible, terrible slave owner who did a lot of cool things. I think it’s interesting that Florence Nightingale, we think of as this benign nurse who was nice and everything. What she went through to go to crime and to deal with the soldiers was… Basically, the nurses at that time were thought of… They were called camp followers, and they were basically prostitutes. She risked her status. Say what you want about wanting that status, but as a lady in society to do the benign thing. So she’s thought of as this obvious person. So when Henry Dunant who was a very good friend proposed the formation of the International Red Cross, she opposed him because she wanted the soldiers to be treated and she wanted the hungry to be fed.
But she said, “If you form an agency that feeds and takes care of people, then there’s going to be no reason for any government to ever stop doing this, and it’s just going to get worse.” I think of that as such a morally sophisticated, complex thinking piece of decision-making that she had. We think of her as this nice lady, and I call it the IKEA effect because you go to IKEA, you buy a bookshelf. A bookshelf is shaped like this in the real world, but you get this flat box. That’s what we do when people die, is we just unfold them and put them back in that flat box so that they fit on the shelf just right. They don’t stick out in any inconvenient ways. They don’t ask you any questions.
We’ve done it like Helen Keller, who was a fierce anti-war activist and a very feisty left wing socialist. Everybody thinks of her as this kind, nice old lady who was blind and deaf. The minute she started speaking up, people said, “Oh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She’s just being led astray by her nurse.” I think it’s a big problem that we have in America of a particular form of emotional immaturity that is not exclusive to Americans, but it does characterize our public life.
Thomas: Yeah, I’m very happy we are speaking about this or what it takes to host this complexity, to let these contradictions or let these tensions within people within communities coexist. Because that’s much more challenging also to our ethical maturity than if we can say, okay, this is good and this is bad. It’s much easier because it doesn’t require relationship. But what we are talking about requires much more relationship. You need to be much more related and grounded in yourself because relationship doesn’t mean that you agree to these things. The opposite. You can be very clearly opposing certain values or certain actions or certain whatever aspects, but you are not this related. And then I think we are also much more effective in changing our society versus creating these boxes and then we cannot talk to each other. That’s why we cannot transform together.
Abigail: Right, right.
Thomas: And again-
Abigail: Well, if you look-
Thomas: You go ahead.
Abigail: Sorry, go ahead.
Thomas: No, go ahead.
Abigail: If you look at the primary political and social polarizations in this country, it really is between people who really are in flight from complexity and on both sides. They’re really looking for the world to be divided up into two types of people, which we know there are two types of people. People who think there are two types of people, and then people who know it’s complicated. Increasingly, for instance, when Florida says, you can’t teach this kind of history, what they’re looking to do is to close off all the escape [inaudible 00:35:37] and the escape hatches so that then we’re all walking the same straight line together, and it feels very clear. It’s a flight from reality. Yes. But it’s also this terrible narrowing, and it’s an atrophy of this muscle we all need, which is the muscle that holds complexity. The more you use it, the better it becomes and the stronger it becomes. I don’t know how to live in that narrow binary world. It’s a very inhospitable place.
Thomas: Exactly.
Abigail: I think that’s part of the reason why trans issues, for instance, are so important right now in the public life because feminists have always been pushing in the direction of, can we please take off the strictures on gender roles? Even if they weren’t necessarily talking about trans issues, they were attacking the gender binary. So it could only have taken us to this place logically. Yeah, what would happen if there were no gender binary? Would we all fall apart and die, or would we just take each person at what they present themselves to us to be? Why do we need to know more than that in the short term? I think one of the reasons that’s really getting under the skin of the right wing in this country is because it goes against everything that they really need to believe, which is that the world is easily divided into two categories in 100 different ways.
Thomas: Yeah, it also confronts, of course, on the one hand, some spiritual concepts. It also confront us with our own inability to be related to us. All the parts where I’m not at home in myself, I need to make more strict or rigid in the world, or they are more chaotic. But when we know from trauma, either it becomes very rigid or it becomes chaotic and disorganized. I think what we see is… Also, what you said about restricting history, these kind of things never last. We cannot suppress. Yeah, it’ll last for some time, but it’ll have to break open. And then the only choice is a crisis, a major disruption, more pain because we can’t clean the past. That is very painful. That doesn’t work. I think we throw enough painkillers on discomfort and try to keep our cities clean and all the rest is somewhere where we don’t see it.
This doesn’t work. We know this. I think what you’re talking about is so important. How can we motivate our culture? I think very strongly that we need to create an architecture in the country or in countries around the world where we have a mainstream architecture. There are hospitals, we call it the medical system, and that’s where you get medical care. But we need another architecture that is the collective integration process of the legacy of every nation. And then US has its own, Germany has its own, Latin America has its own legacy, but we need a system where we can process that as a citizen’s responsibility. Without that, I think we keep repeating all this fragmentation, as you said.
Abigail: Well, that’s why the economic damage over the last 50 years of everything that started in the seventies and then with the Reagan administration, it feels like I’m just talking about mundane politics. But actually, what happened over that time was the takeover, the absolute capture of the imagination of this country by the idea that we’re all individuals. That’s what’s underneath every single piece of damaging legislation and corporate ideology that we’re now reading… the whirlwind from now. The idea that you pull yourself up by your bootstraps is comedy. Actually, you know, try it. You can’t do it. It can’t be done. In the 19th century, it was an expression that was used to define something that was impossible to do. So it is frightening to me how much we’ve managed to sell people this notion that they’re alone. It’s why one of the reasons moral injury is such an important thing to study because the only thing that seems to help… Because no medicine, there’s no specific therapy, the only things that help are working in groups and talking spiritually.
For the Pentagon of all places to acknowledge there’s such a thing as moral injury, and to hand it to the Chaplain Corps… This is the Pentagon we’re talking about. This is the most left brains rational thinking thing in the world. For them to say, chaplains were out of ideas and the suicide rate is so bad, we really need to talk about this. That is like the Pentagon saying that war is a spiritual problem.
Thomas: Which it is, exactly.
Abigail: That should have been a seismic moment when they decided to do this, because that really is the least spiritual entity acknowledging that there’s such a thing in spirituality that it exists. What’s really interesting these days about moral injury is they’re doing fMRI studies now that show it showing up in a totally different part of the brain. Have you read about this? It’s very interesting. So it shows up in the precuneus, which is the part of your brain that’s in charge of remembering the things that have happened, recalling episodic memories, putting together for you the story of your life, your identity, who you are.
I can’t think of a better word than conscious. We lost in the last 20 years a little over 8,000 people to combat, but we lost over 30,000 people to suicide.
Thomas: Absolutely.
Abigail: That’s an astonishing number, and that should scare the life out of all of us in terms of what it is we think we’re doing as a country.
Thomas: Yeah. I said this often in my talks also, I think the way we deal with war is actually… First of all, is part of the hypnosis of the individual that you spoke about. Because there’s such an overemphasis on individual, which I think if there are many people in our society that live in pain because of the system that we created, then being open to that and feeling interdependence is almost not possible because we need to protect ourselves to not feel what we are actually creating every day. So that’s I think one element of this hyper individualism. The other one is when you look at armies, I often say I think our societies do not understand that the weight of war doesn’t rest just with the soldiers. It rests with every single citizen of the country. So if the army goes to war, the residue needs to be carried by everybody.
But we don’t have those. We don’t have any rituals. We don’t have any awareness process like how war affects the entire society of a country. Because we don’t have that, it gets compressed into the people that were actually in combat or that actually suffered a moral injury. That is completely out of balance. I think that the wars are collective events that affect collectives, and we need a much deeper understanding of that, and that will relieve some of the suicidality because it’s actually becomes a shared responsibility. But the other side of it would be, we would all stand up much more and say, “No, that war is not going to happen because we know what’s the impact.” So I think peace is an outcome of a collective understanding of war.
Abigail: Yes. Yeah. A lot of the people I talk to who deal a lot in moral injury describe veteran moral injury as a terrible and unjust allocation of the appropriate level of guilt-
Thomas: Exactly.
Abigail: … for what’s happening.
Thomas: Exactly, yeah.
Abigail: This is true for people who work in slaughterhouses and people who do all kinds of other morally injurious jobs. We just look the other way and say, “Take care of that for me.” But we are asking them to carry so much. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is such a fascinating character for me because when he was arrested, it was because he had willingly decided to become part of a plot to assassinate Hitler. For me, knowing what a Christian he was and how committed to non-violence he was and what a pacifist he was, I feel like there’s no greater sacrifice I can imagine, than stepping into what would sincerely feel to him like throwing his eternal soul away because that’s what would’ve been for him to kill even Hitler. What an extraordinary act of love it would be to offer up your eternal soul for everyone else. That is an appropriate way of understanding the moral injury of one act. That is him understanding the gravity of it.
I was in North Korea a few years ago on a peace mission with a bunch of women activists. It was fascinating. We had a meeting in North Korea with a bunch of women who were still alive and have survived the Korean conflict, and of course, the Americans were in the north doing what all soldiers do in all conflicts. Not Americans are particularly bad, but they’re no better than the other army attempting to occupy a space. I’ve been in a million these circles because I’ve traveled to conflict zones and spoke with women.
So these women set up a circle and they told us about this horrible thing that happened and that horrible thing happened and so forth. I couldn’t shake the feelings something was really interesting about this, and then it came to me that, “Oh, my gosh, this war was in the late forties, early fifties, and it’s alive for them. It’s still alive.” Try coming to this country and asking American, what happened to the Korean War? We’ve been at war almost nonstop since that day. It’s not alive for us in any of these conflicts. We are not holding the reality of these conflicts, and it is so much to our peril that we pretend that nothing is happening.
Thomas: I love this. I see our time, so we’ll slowly come to an end, but I would love maybe to have a second part to this edition.
Abigail: I would love that. The time has just flown by.
Thomas: Yeah, right. It’s like boom and almost an hour past. Because I think there are so many sub-aspects of what you spoke about, and especially to dive deeper into the moral injury, I would love that. Also seeing the other restoration or repair processes and what’s the spiritual dimension, maybe to talk more about what you just said, the unconscious denial of the war memories in our societies. I think there’s so much more to talk about, but it needs a little bit more space. So I would love that. If there’s anything that you want to leave us with, please, and then-
Abigail: I think we should always leave room for the possibility that we might be wrong in whatever it is, and certainty is the enemy here. We really need to be suspicious of certainty, whatever shape it takes. If we can learn to be more pliant and to learn from each other more, I think we would build a far more peaceful society.
Thomas: That is beautiful.
Abigail: Yeah, thank you.
Thomas: Thank you so much. It was a real joy, and I feel there’s so much more coming through both of us in the conversation, so we should definitely continue. So thank you very much.
Abigail: Thank you very much.
