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Kitchen Table Kibitzing Friday - 'Decoding the Gurus' [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-09-08
Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.
I would guess that the below activity is not satire and that you can actually rank a list of the “world's greatest self-declared Gurus.” Maybe ‘Guru’ is too ethnic, or 1970s-sounding, perhaps better referred to as masterminds and egomaniacs. Or even ‘stable geniuses’.
A Gurometer does seem like a new app that could help you determine whether you’re also a nutter. Otherwise, it’s qualitative analysis in social science meets Coffee Talk, by two academics doing field work, armed with Lykert scales, and categorizing narcissists. The podcasted conversation between Chris Kavanaugh and Matt Browne below does verge into discussions about meta-theorizing. But they do generate some kind of scale to assess ‘Guru-ness’ and we do know now that selling nutritional supplements helps makes you guru-tastic and a monetizing grifter.
A psychologist and an anthropologist try to make sense of the world's greatest self-declared Gurus.
An exiled Northern Irish anthropologist and a hitchhiking Australian psychologist take a close look at the contemporary crop of 'secular gurus', iconoclasts, and other exiles from the mainstream, offering their own brands of unique takes and special insights.
Leveraging two of the most diverse accents in modern podcasting, Chris and Matt dig deep into the claims, peek behind the psychological curtains, and try to figure out once and for all... What's it all About?
Join us, as we try to puzzle our way through and talk some smart-sounding smack about the intellectual giants of our age, from Jordan Peterson to Robin DiAngelo. Are they revolutionary thinkers or just grifters with delusions of grandeur?
(2021)
While Chris and Matt have discussed factors that would cause a particular person to rate highly on a “gurometer,” they haven’t (to my knowledge) given a clear and concise definition of what it means to be a guru, and they might never do so– which, frankly, would be fine by me.
But generally speaking, the people they’re “decoding” are cultural commentators with large followings on the internet, who engage with those followers primarily via the internet (especially Twitter), and create content in podcast or Youtube video format.
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