When I discovered Harris in mid-2019, I admired Harris for a few months until I got convinced that he is one of the biggest narcissists and frauds you will ever meet. It’s all words and no substance. So you know where I stand with him. I made up my mind about him some five years ago.
However, this guy has the gift of the gab—he is extremely smooth and good with words - paired with a seemingly calm and rational mind. The man can talk like no other.
He knows a lot more than me about almost all topics, but I don’t think that’s the case regarding spirituality. Therefore, after I read his spiritual book “Waking Up,” I realized how full of salmon this guy is. He is basically a failed meditator on top of being a failed psychonaut. At least, that was my assessment at the end of 2019, so I let him go.
Fast-forward to yesterday, when I encountered him again while researching Kristoffer Kisin. His famous podcast with Sam, “that apparently broke the Internet,” came up. This was mainly about his comments about Trump.
I vastly agree with Sam Harris on Donald Trump. Still, I totally disagree with sacrificing democracy and justifying illegal, biased, undemocratic behaviour to keep one man out of office. If you start to justify that kind of shit, you truly open Pandora's box. A similar thing is happening right now in Germany with the AfD party.
More concerning is his stand on Covid and some of his comments that openly support force-vaccination people “when a more dangerous virus comes around.”
Sam does that a lot. Inventing scenarios that aren’t real to justify what has been done.
Sam also doesn’t apologize or admit where he was so obviously wrong with his Covid predictions since day one. Instead, he doubles down, triples down, quadruples down, and gets increasingly “creative” in adjusting reality to his wrong views.
This is to be expected by a full-blown narcissist, so there are no surprises here.
His narcissism also explains his obsessions with Trump and, in this case, should be taken seriously. It takes a narcissist to recognize one and understand what they are capable of.
And like any good narcissist, he has no limits in lashing out and insulting people that don’t align with his worldview (like narcissist Trump) but turns into a whingeing victim when the fire is returned (like narcissist Trump), blaming deranged people and Twitter for his rising unpopularity, not his own doing.
Therefore, it is no surprise that Sam Harris is under fire from his enemies and the growing number of waking-up former podcast buddies.
This must approach the self-destruction of his podcast business despite having cult-like followers.
All this irrational, increasingly fantastic reasoning must hurt his reputation as a serious social commenter and will certainly hurt his numbers and income. But he doesn’t seem to care - digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole.
This financial and intellectual suicide can’t be explained by narcissism alone. And I am not the only person wondering what else is going on.
In this “I Am Coach Colin” Video Clip, Coach Colin makes a good case for the possibility that Sam Harris is a victim of Mass Formation Hypnosis.
MFH indeed infects even the most brilliant minds. After all, knowing stuff and making complex cause-and-effect calculations is handled by a different part of our brain than “self-reflection” and common sense.
You would think that a man who sells himself as a meditation expert is really good at self-reflection. But that’s exactly what led me to abandon Sam Harris back in 2019—his total lack of self-reflection. While I intellectually agree with many of his arguments—especially on free will—I can’t see the man walking his talk at all.
It is ironic. In my eyes, he is a failed meditator and now makes money with a meditation app. How do I know that he is a failed meditator?
Not even an average everyday meditator would fret and panic about everything Sam panics about. His mind is totally out of control. He is riddled with fears—the opposite state of an experienced meditator. He is a total alarmist. Yes, fear sells subscriptions to podcasts, but his alarmist fears appear genuine and not calculated to me.
So why is his meditation app successful?
Short answer: It is mostly his voice that does the trick.
He is gifted with an emotionless voice that works very well for guided meditations. The marketing is good too. It attracts people who are too lazy to find and do their own meditations, which are widely available for free everywhere.
Add the star factor, and you will have a great little “meditation product” that sells well and gives intellectuals the ego boost of calling themselves meditators when, in fact, they are talked into a pleasant trance by a great voice they believe in.
Granted, it really helps some people and is good for them to try it out. I liked it when I tried it. But not enough to pay for it, to be honest. But each to their own.
What irks me is that other podcasters elevate him to this “spirituality and meditation expert” and admiringly listen to his long-winded, average-at-best intellectual regurgitations of basic meditation theory like it is the latest gospel and he is the reincarnated Buddha. (Not that this is possible).
That stuff has been around for thousands of years and can be found everywhere. Many others explain it much better. But when it comes to meditation and explaining spirituality, words are cheap anyway.
And that’s where Sam’s spiritual bandwagon becomes totally unhinged from the train of reality.
Every spiritually advanced teacher you will ever meet will have an aura of love and gratitude around him. Sam is the opposite. He is an arrogant, cold fish. He is a narcissist, in love with himself and extremely deluded about spirituality. Narcissists are extremely charismatic, and people mistake that for “spiritually advanced.” Combine that with his great talking skills and total self-belief and you have the typical “false guru” syndrome people fall for.
So, is narcissism and Mass Formation Psychosis sufficient to explain his increasingly unhinged bending of reality to fit his opinion?
Maybe, possibly.
It can get the smartest people, and especially the lonely atomized people. And no one is lonelier in their hearts than narcissists.
But his unbelievable persistence—against all facts and reason—that looks more and more like commercial and reputational suicide hints towards something additional.
I didn’t research this, have zero proof of this and haven't heard anyone casting that suspicion over him before, which doesn’t mean much, as I haven’t followed the Harris mania closely for the last five years. Maybe this has already been discussed. Then please forgive me. But I have this hunch, and I have to say it:
What if Sam Harris is a secret Globalist with a specific mission?
Some years ago, in one of his podcasts, he disclosed that one of his subscribers is a billionaire. Who could that be? What if it is Bill Gates?
Sam Harris and his followers - tech-loving, atheistic science adorers fit right into the WEF world order.
Further, ideologically speaking, Sam Harris is not far from Yuval Harari.
Harris is also totally comfortable with extreme totalitarian measures.
He has a very loose relationship with the Constitution and democratic principles (Trump).
He appears frustrated and impatient with the slow-moving democratic processes (e.g., gun laws) and impatient to apply his “obvious” measures for the greater good. He supports the idea that police hold people down and force vaccinate them when the circumstances request it.
Doesn’t that tick all the Globalist’s boxes?
The total disregard for the financial and reputational hits he must take for his unwavering 2020 Covid stance would also be explained.
Maybe he is secretly funded by the WEF and doesn’t really have to care about his financial success anymore.
But maybe I am totally off the mark here. I am sure you let me know.
Last year Russell Brand had him on his podcast & our entire live group on Locals had all turned into Sam Harris NON-fans well before the end! His arrogant hypocrisy was all over the place. Then he led a live meditation that had a good number of us moving out of meditation mode & back into live comments about how awful it was. I’ve never heard such a poor & also fast paced ridiculous meditation. We were laughing at the notion of paying for an app to hear more of them. I’d have paid for him to stop doing it.
Yes, he seems more concerned with his celebrity than would a legitimate spiritual guru. The latter, in my experience, tries to behave in accordance with higher principles. Traditionally, as you pointed out, love and compassion.