He channels his soul as a coping mechanism for fear
Christian (Catholic)
Investment banker and philanthropist
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Second Thought podcast script
On 28 May 2025 a Christian called John Studzinski presented thought for the day.
He seems like a decent enough chap but this broadcast was not good. In essence, it’s barely coherent commercial for Christianity, advertising ‘access to the soul’ as the effective means for to humans to manage fear.
Yep. Not kidding. It’s that unhinged. Apparently, the only way to deal with being afraid of something is to channel your soul from some, unspecified, other plane. The word soul here is not being used as a metaphor. This is what he really claims.
And on the way to this ridiculous endnote, he reveals further how allergic he is to fact and to logic.
Here’s how he opened.
STUDZINSKI: Sometimes, you need to be brave just to listen to the headlines. But it’s a mistake to try and hide from what’s going on in the world. As JRR Tolkien wrote, “A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.” We all know that the world can be a wonderful place. But it has also always been a frightening place. Most frightening right now – after decades of relative, if uneasy stability – are the radical changes in the world order. They are happening so quickly and dramatically that even the experts can’t predict what will happen next. The world’s dominant fears today are radically different from the universal fear we experienced five years ago. Then, it was Covid. Surprisingly, the pandemic and its lasting consequences play little part in current narratives – it could be that we’d like to pretend that it never happened.
There was in that a lot of simplistic rubbish.
He cautions against avoidance as a strategy for dealing with fears. Fair enough, but he then immediately does something many would consider to be worse, he takes an alternate path to failure and begins to catastrophise. Catastrophising is toxic, self-destructive and frequently happens at huge costs to friends and family. It seems that he’s OK with his pathological coping strategy, perhaps, as it make it easier for him to sell what he believes are the benefits of religion. If so, he has all the integrity of a snake oil salesman.
Moreover, wallowing in bad news contributes to a distorted perception of the world as it really is. If we don’t know how the world really is, how do we know how we should act to make it better or save it from getting worse? I get the sense that John already ‘knows’ everything he wants to know. He doesn’t want to be troubled with inconvenient speculation that the world might not be the plaything of an all-powerful god that appears to treat humanity the way an abusive partner treats lovers.
He also claims the world has always been a frightening place. This is rhetorical bullshit. Frightening to whom? For what reason?
Let’s listen again:
STUDZINSKI: Sometimes, you need to be brave just to listen to the headlines. But it’s a mistake to try and hide from what’s going on in the world.
So far, so benign. Except, to note there are worse strategies than avoidance. That Studzinski appears later to endorse.
STUDZINSKI: As J double-R Tolkien wrote, “A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.”
I’ve no objections to an obscure Tolkien quote. His whole item, though, may have been balanced by some companions to Tolkien. Marcus Aurelius, perhaps, who wrote, “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it.” Or even, Mandela who said, “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” More on them later.
STUDZINSKI: We all know that the world can be a wonderful place.
Yees. But please tells us you’re not up for a platitudes battle with Ibrahim Mogra?
STUDZINSKI: But it has also always been a frightening place.
Oh dear. It seems that he is attempting to outperform Ibrahim on cliched trite. Yes, John, things can from time to time be wonderful and things can be frightening, worlds included. Thank you, John.
STUDZINSKI: Most frightening right now – after decades of relative, if uneasy stability – are the radical changes in the world order.
Now we have a small problem. Banality has given way to falsehood. Albeit mild. John might think that radical changes in world order are the most frightening things happening right now, but it’s a falsely applied generalisation to suggest this is true for everyone.
Mild, perhaps. But he’s far from done….
STUDZINSKI: They are happening so quickly and dramatically that even the experts can’t predict what will happen next.
Mr Studzinski, congratulations. In just 17 words you’ve broadcast a strawman argument, a non-sequitur and a false claim.
- The speed and drama of things happening cannot legitimately be used to quantify the accuracy of foretellers. Which gives us the non-sequitur.
- Experts are not, and never were able to predict the future. There’s the false claim.
- John, though, makes his implicit claim that experts were able to predict the future only so that he can dispute it. Classic strawman deception. He stands the strawman up that he then knocks it down to make a false point.
This man really knows how to weave deceptive rhetoric.
STUDZINSKI: The world’s dominant fears today are radically different from the universal fear we experienced five years ago. Then, it was Covid.
Ah, so we’re back to pointless platitudes. Yes, John, when we have different threats we have fears of different things. Amazing insight. Good work.
John then appears to lose the plot.
STUDZINSKI: Then, it was Covid. Surprisingly, the pandemic and its lasting consequences play little part in current narratives – it could be that we’d like to pretend that it never happened.
What kind of condescending arrogance proclaims we all like to pretend that Covid never happened? Speak for yourself Studzinski!
And he’s surprised that Covid isn’t in ‘current narratives’? Did he suffer a brain fart? Do you think he noticed that there has been no lockdown in the UK between 2021, and when he made his broadcast ? Did he notice that we now have a bewildering array of vaccines against corona viruses, when at the time of the outbreak we had none? Had he noticed that global deaths from Covid have fallen somewhat? At the peak of the pandemic in 2021 there were 3.5 million annual deaths. There are currently fewer than 300,000, making Covid today roughly comparable to a moderate-to-severe seasonal flu.
And he’s surprised that it’s not in current narratives? Is he also surprised that steam locomotives aren’t in the headlines? Or that the shooting of John Lennon isn’t greatly discussed? Or that the deadly 1918 outbreak of Spanish flu isn’t among current narratives?
But he was also at pains to point out a huge amount of change in the world. Making it obvious that he was aware of many good reasons for those narratives to have changed too. You know what journalists do, John? They write about what’s new. They also write sometimes about what’s important. They tend not to write about things that are not happening. I appreciate that I’ve conflated ‘current narratives’ with themes in news coverage but this imprecision is on John. If he wishes to claim he was making a different point I look forward to hearing it.
It may be that John Studzinski would prefer to pretend that Covid never happened but to suggest that of everyone else and to cite lack of Covid mentions in current narratives as a reason is both starkly arrogant and starkly stupid.
It seems that all this incoherent garbage was by way of precursor to a false equivalence John makes between how he claims that Covid changed society and how he was changed by recovery from a near-fatal road accident. He is apparently unaware of what a medicine ball is or that it was medical science and not prayer that saved his collapsed lung. Regardless, we can all share in his gratitude that he survived.
With alarming lack of reason, he then bridges from the aforementioned false equivalence to the exclusive role of his soul in mounting an effective response to fear.
It was at this point I began to wonder if John had been at the mushrooms.
STUDZINSKI: Fear can attack our body, our intellect and our emotions, but our soul exists on a different plane that only we can access. If we succeed in finding ways of tapping into our soul, we can put our fears into context and make ourselves at least a little braver, more able to formulate strategies for survival or even to learn to prevail. You will soon hear the news. The headlines might turn out to be daunting. But …This is as good a time as any to start putting your fears aside.
WTF?
Forget Marcus Aurelius. Forget Nelson Mandela. Forget Tolkien. All of whom had much that is valuable to contribute on the nature of fear and human adversary. Forget qualified practitioners in mental heath. John needs no insights from philosophy or leadership or psychology for the understanding of our fears. No, his fear can only be defeated by tapping into his soul. By tapping into an imaginary, eternal self that was a concoction of religion, co-opted from Greek philosophy.
This is no different from saying that only sky hooks and goblins enable us to put our fears into context. You can believe it all you want, John, but presenting unverifiable belief as fact is no different from deception. Without a caveat for belief, Is it in any way responsible to advise someone struggling with their fears should do anything but seek professional help?
It’s not just bullshit. It’s irresponsible bullshit.
Finally, a word on declinism. John is brushing here on a great fallacy, that the world is a dangerous and fearful place and that the danger and fear today are in some way unique. Perhaps that they are greater than ever before or that the consequences of them may be greater than ever before.
This is declinist horseshit. What follows is a timely extract from an episode of this podcast from the summer. It was in response to riotous rubbish broadcast on 18 April 2025 (which was Good Friday) by Lucy Winkett on the subject of Good Fridays…
Declinism is a fallacy. It’s the belief, contrary to objective evidence, that a society or institution is in decline, commonly resulting from cognitive biases, where the past is viewed more favourably than the future. Rose-tinted nostalgia, if you will, but for academics.
Religious types, at least, if those among them presenting TfdT are representative, seem to be hard-wired for declinism.
In many ways, this seems understandable. One might suppose that if people were convinced that modern life were terrible, you would be better placed to offer your ancient religion, from a simpler time, to people as a means to find solace from the hardship and pain they experience. It’s not just those preying on your soul who are vulnerable, though, to declinism. We all are. Its appears to be quite a natural phenomenon, that has evolved in humans alongside the other cognitive biases. Hence the need to be wary of it, especially given the assistance it is provided by news media. Our news is more plentiful and more accessible than ever before, and news outlets have a significant preference for news that is bad. On declinism, though, everybody’s doing it, is not an excuse.
In 2017, Hans Rosling’s posthumously published book Factfulness provided a brilliant and entirely accessible guide to how the world is in much better shape than most of us, before reading it, thought. Much of his latter life’s work was based on the idea was that none of us can make or comment on policy choices unless we know the problems we face and those we don’t. His book was seemingly almost singularly responsible for initiating a U-turn in understanding among serious journalists in the UK who previously thought that our planet was danger of over population.
The world is not without its problems but those living in it today have things better than any time in our species’ history. It seems likely that claim will meet with one or two raised eyebrows. And so it should. The Royal Society has as its motto, ‘Nullius in verba’ which means, ‘take nobody’s word for it’. This is advice that I’d applaud a messiah of any sort for spreading. Hence, it’s entirely understandable if you feel scepticism about my claim that we have things better today. Please read Factfulness, and while you’re waiting for it to arrive, visit gapminder.com, which is the online project Hans Rosling established to help close the gap between what we believe to be true about the world and what is actually true about the world. Conveniently, it provides a selection of simple quizzes that swiftly reveal how what you think you know compares with what you actually know about the state of the world today.
While you’re at it, order Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature which carefully distils tracts of research into a description of how much less violent our world has become over human history.
Taking just one measure of violence, even accounting for wars that currently rage, the likelihood of someone alive today suffering a battle-related death is around 2 in 100,000 (a global average). This is astonishingly low. In 1960 that rate dropped below 5 per 100,000 for the first time since 1900. By 1971 it had dropped to below 2 per 100,000 where is stayed until 2021, since then it’s been hovering just above 2 in 100,000. If you graph these figures from 1900 to today on a sheet of A4, the line looks completely flat and almost at zero since the beginning of the 70s.
We’re living in one of the safest eras in history and we are most certainly living in the healthiest, wealthiest and most equitable and most educated time there has ever been. Not only is global over-population the opposite of the problem we face, consider these:
- The first/third world comparisons with which many of us grew up, has long been redundant – Only 10% of the world’s population lives in a low-income country (and falling)
- The average life expectancy on Earth is climbing. It was 29 in 1800. It was 32 in 1900. It was 46 by 1950. Today the average life expectancy at birth is 70
- We’re richer and we live longer. We’re also safer from disaster, disease and crime:
- In the last 100 years, death from natural disasters has decreased by more than 50%
- 80 percent of the world’s one-year-old children have been vaccinated against at least one disease
- Only 6% of 5-year-olds are underweight
- 60% of the world’s population feels safe walking alone at night where they live
- We’ve also done a tremendous amount to reduce the impact of discrimination
- Globally, there is only a difference of 10% in the number of years the average 30-year-old spent in school between men and women.
- Homosexuality is legal in 65% of countries.
Any reference to how terrible the world is today, needs to be understood in the context of these numbers. When anyone seeks to advance their own views by making a general contrast between how bad things are now compared to some earlier time, they are engaged in deceit. Perhaps they’re just lazy, and the convenience to them of the comparison outweighs the risk that might accompany researching the truth. Perhaps they know they are spouting horseshit and are misleading you deliberately.
Is john being lazy or deceitful? Given the guff he fed us on channelling the soul as a means to defeat our fears, and his carful construction of rhetoric to make plausible-sounding false claims, I struggle to imagine he’s being lazy. He set out to deceive. Unless, he really had been at those mushrooms.
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