I am truly honored to bring you the thinking of today’s guest, Arno Michaelis, a public speaker, author and activist for peace and justice. He was formerly a leader of the white power movement and a founding member of what became the largest racist skinhead organization in the world.

Arno and I will be discussing a range of topics, such as the basis of violence in the world, what forgiveness and reconciliation mean in the face of racial wounds, and what each of us can do to make this a more compassionate and just world.

We Find What We Look for in Life — So Be Mindful of What You Seek

You can listen to the full conversation by clicking ‘play’ above, or on the following podcast platforms:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Play
• Stitcher

 

 

The following is a taste of my conversation with Arno.

Q: Would you say that fear is the basis for much of the violence in the world today?

Arno: I would say it’s the basis for all the violence in the world, honestly. I think it’s very simple that if you have a sense of inner peace and you have a genuine love for yourself, then that very logically transfers to your relationship with the world.

Q: Based on your experience, how can we become more aware of ongoing racial injustice?

Arno: I think what’s essential to get to that point is that, and this goes for all human beings, it’s not just white people, is that we all need to see ourselves in others, and we need to see others in ourselves. And I think that the key is the process of listening and suspending judgment and our egos and the willingness to be uncomfortable in that process.

Q: How do you define forgiveness?

Arno: I have adopted the idea that forgiveness is vengeance. For me, my self-forgiveness is my vengeance against white nationalism. It’s my vengeance against the movement and the people who are still committing violence under the influence of that ideology. If I don’t forgive myself and I’m busy beating myself up–and for a time before I went public with my story, I hated myself worse than I ever hated anybody else for the harm that I had done and the people that I had hurt–it’s going to diminish my capacity to help others.

Q: What about reconciliation? What does that really mean in the context of healing the wounds of racism?

Arno: I think reconciliation, in any sense, first of all, all parties involved have to come to the table asking themselves if they want to be right or they want to be effective. And that’s a difficult question to answer in a way that’s going to lead to reconciliation. If you truly want reconciliation, you have to say, “Look, I’m willing to suspend my need to be right in this conversation.” And in going back to what we were talking about earlier, you need to listen and you need to do so without judgment. And yes, it’s not fair for the offended party to have to do that. But again, do you want things to be the way they should be or do you want to, like, accept things the way they are so that you can find a place to move forward from? It’s a very difficult process to reconcile any kind of wound.

When asked if there’s one last thing he’d like our listeners to hear, Arno says, “As human beings, we find what we look for in life so be very mindful of what you seek.”

About Arno Michaelis:
At a very young age, Arno Michaelis became deeply involved in the white power movement. He was a founding member of what became the largest racist skinhead organization in the world, a reverend of a self-declared Racial Holy War, and lead singer of the race-metal band Centurion, selling over 20,000 CDs to racists around the world.

Today Arno is a public speaker and author, working with Serve2Unite, an organization that engages young people of all backgrounds as peacemakers. 

Find Arno Michaelis on Social Media:
https://www.giftofourwounds.com/ (Website)
https://www.facebook.com/giftofourwounds/ (Facebook)
a href=”https://twitter.com/serve2unite?lang=en”>https://twitter.com/serve2unite?lang=en (Twitter)
https://www.instagram.com/_serve2unite_/ (Instagram)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPcYwCxX2Yo3sliFXiUxeXQ (YouTube)

Arno’s Books:
My Life After Hate
The Gift of Our Wounds: A Sikh and a Former White Supremacist Find Forgiveness After Hate, with Pardeep Singh Kaleka

Books Mentioned in the Interview:

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari
Nothing Bad Between Us: A Mennonite Missionary Finds Healing in Her Brokenness, by Marlena Fiol, which is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

About Marlena Fiol:
Marlena Fiol, PhD, is a globally recognized author, scholar and speaker. She is a spiritual seeker whose work explores the depths of who we are and what’s possible in our lives. Her significant body of publications on the topic, coupled with her own raw identity-changing experiences, makes her uniquely qualified to write about personal transformational change. She is also a certified tai chi instructor and freelance writer whose most recent work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and newsletters.

Find Marlena Fiol on Social Media:

Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
LinkedIn

Podcast Transcript:
Below is a complete transcript of the podcast. I used a transcription service to create this, please note that there may be errors. For a 100% accurate quote of what was said, please listen to the podcast itself via the links above.

Marlena: I am truly honored to introduce today’s guest, Arno Michaelis. At a very young age, Arno became deeply involved in the white power movement. He was a founding member of what became the largest racist skinhead organization in the world. He was a reverend of a self-declared racial holy war and lead singer of the race metal band Centurion, selling over 20,000 CDs to racists around the world. Wait, wait, wait, don’t click us off. Now, fast forward. Today, Arno is a public speaker, author of “My Life After Hate,” and works with Serve 2 Unite, an organization that engages young people of all backgrounds as peacemakers. His latest book with Pardeep Singh Kaleka is “The Gift of Our Wounds: A Sikh and a Former White Supremacist Find Forgiveness After Hate.”

So the title of this podcast is “Becoming Who You Truly Are.” And this season, we’re talking about forgiveness and reconciliation as paths to healing and finding our true selves. Over and over in different ways, my guests are addressing the question, “What does it really mean to forgive?” Arno’s journey makes him uniquely qualified to address this and other important questions related to forgiveness and reconciliation. Arno, welcome. It’s so good to have you on the show.

Arno: Oh, it’s my pleasure, Marlena, thank you.

Marlena: Arno, I’d like to begin our conversation by asking you to briefly describe your youth and your increasing involvement in the white power movement.

Arno: Yeah, I grew up in a kind of lower to mid-middle-class household in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My background is really an outlier for violent extremism in that I didn’t grow up in poverty. There wasn’t physical violence in my home, but my father’s alcoholism did put a lot of pressure on my mom and her suffering hurt me as a kid. So I started lashing out at other kids from a pretty early age. And I went from being a bully on the school bus to fights in the schoolyard, to breaking and entering and vandalism. When I was 14, I started drinking myself, and by the time I was 16, I was very accustomed to violence. I had been violent since I was a little kid and hate was just kind of another part of the thrill I was continually seeking.

And that’s what made white nationalism and the swastika attractive to me, really, because it just angered people and repulsed people. So I initially got into it for kicks and I was introduced to the ideology through white power skinhead music. And I had been screaming in punk bands for a couple of years at that point and it seemed a logical thing to start my own white power skinhead band with some friends of mine. And that band really helped our small skinhead gang grow quickly and pretty soon we got the attention of other skinhead gangs around the country and more established old school white nationalists. And that’s really what began my involvement in hate groups in 1987. And I spent seven years of my life doing that.

Marlena: So looking back, how do you now think of the links between childhood anger and adult violence?

Arno: Well, I think the link is pretty plain. In mental health lingo, they called it adverse childhood experience. And it really boils down to the simple truth that hurt people hurt people. Now, fortunately, not all hurt people hurt people because, I’m a Buddhist nowadays and Buddhism 101 is just that life is suffering and a lot of our suffering is caused by trying to avoid that fact. But, fortunately, most people who suffer have a healthy means of processing that trauma. When you don’t have a healthy way of processing trauma it can very easily get transferred to other people. And I will say that I was offered every single healthy way of processing trauma on a silver platter throughout my childhood.

And I just didn’t engage with any of them, and that’s what led me to start lashing out and hating people and hurting people. And I love the theme of your podcast, the finding the true self because I think my true self all along was there saying, like, “What are you doing? Why are you doing this? This isn’t right.” But I didn’t have the courage to acknowledge that voice, much less answer it. And I spent a lot of energy trying to suppress it. But to me, you don’t have to connect many dots to go from childhood adverse experiences to violence as an adult.

Marlena: Yeah. You say hurt people hurt people, and your father was a hurt person who hurt you. But you write that memories of all of that hurt, and I quote, “Must be met with compassion not just for me, but for my dad. As we’ve both grown older and wiser, my relationship with my dad has turned into one of the most rewarding of my life.” This is so similar to how I described my relationship with my father in my new book “Love is Complicated.” We also grew older and wiser, but I think probably most important, we became less defended and more vulnerable, which allowed us to heal our relationship. So, besides growing older, how do you explain the transition in your relationship with your dad to becoming one of the most rewarding in your life?

Arno: Well, I think you nailed it with vulnerability. That’s really important to move past that fear of showing your honest authentic self, especially when that honest authentic self is hurting. And on my dad’s side, too, I’m sure it’s been really difficult for him to have his life thrown under the microscope for a minute in the process of me doing that to my life. And he’s taken it very gracefully. And I make a point of, in all my writing and all my speaking and storytelling, and I’ll emphasize it now that all my bad decisions and all the harm that I’ve done is on me and me alone. It’s not my dad’s fault. It’s not society’s fault. It’s not anybody else’s fault.

But I really can’t tell the honest story if I don’t talk about where my suffering began. And it is important to emphasize as well that Arno II, my grandpa, really made my father’s life difficult as my dad was growing up and much more so than mine. So these are cyclical things and I’m sure if I delve deep enough in family history, we could go back to Arno I and beyond him to find out where, you know… It’d be very difficult to put a finger on where the trauma began, but it’s easy to see how the trauma cycles.

Marlena: Yeah, good on you that you’re breaking that cycle. Let’s take a little bit further the notion of fear and vulnerability. You write about your years in the white power movement, and I quote, “My hard shell covered up the insecurity and fear I felt inside.” Would you say that this is the basis for much of the violence in the world today, the hard shell behind which we hide the fear that’s inside?

Arno: I would say it’s the basis for all the violence world, honestly. I think it’s very simple that if you have a sense of inner peace and you have a genuine love for yourself, then that very logically and just elementary transfers to your relationship with the world. But if you don’t have a sense of inner peace and you don’t have a genuine love for yourself, that’s when that fear and insecurity is something that you feel you can’t reveal and you end up expending all sorts of energy to hide those fears and insecurities and the… I use an analogy of a card house. So have you ever seen somebody take playing cards and build the, you know, stack them edge to edge standing up? And you build this very delicate…and people who are good can build you big giant ones, who got a real steady hand.

But as big as you could build a card house, if somebody walks by and stomps on the floor too hard, the entire thing can come tumbling down. It’s very fragile, it’s very delicate. And when you adopt a extremist ideology as your identity, everything you are is essentially that card house. It cannot face any scrutiny and cannot be questioned and cannot be seen by the world and so you are constantly trying to shield your house of cards identity from being threatened by the outside. And it literally can, in the case of Wade Michael Page, the man who murdered Pardeep’s father and five other people, it can literally drive someone to the point where nothing but homicide followed by suicide seem to make sense.

Marlena: Yeah. And just for our listeners, he was referring to Page who was the racist who was responsible for killing the father of Arno’s co-author, the Sikh that wrote the book with him. So, Arno, you talk about alcoholism and extremism as having sort of similar roots. Can you say more about that?

Arno: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been very grateful to have celebrated my 9th anniversary of this phase of my life, excuse me, 10th anniversary on the MLK holiday of 2020. I went public with my story in 2010. And so since then, I’ve been traveling around the world and working with former violent extremists of every possible stripe you can imagine, as well as working with survivors of violent extremism, and doing so with government agencies, military law enforcement, NGOs, interfaith agencies, everything you could think of. And there’s been a number of very plain trends that I’ve observed over this decade. And one is that the similarity between violent extremist ideologies and addiction in the sense of substance abuse to the point where an org I’m working with now, Parents For Peace, is actually actively creating a 12-step program to help people get over hate ideologies.

And going back to the idea that hurt people hurt people, if you can’t process the suffering you’re going through, addiction is just one of many bad ways you can try to answer that pain. So if you don’t want to face your fears and vulnerabilities, you can numb it with alcohol or drugs or any whatever kind of substance you’re abusing, and/or numb it with violent extremist ideologies. Far more often than not, those two elements of addiction and violent extremist ideologies will co-present, especially in white nationalism. I’d be hard-pressed, I could probably count on one hand the number of white nationalists I’ve encountered who weren’t raging alcoholics or even methamphetamine addicts or had some sort of very serious substance abuse issue co-presenting with their violent extremist ideology. And so the reasons why substance addiction develops is the exact same reason that a addiction to violent extremist ideology develops and the path is also dead-on the same.

In 12-step programs, you talk about rock bottom. It’s that moment where you, you know, wake up with, finally, that worst hangover and you’re in jail or you’ve done something horrible and you’re like, “I can’t do this anymore. I gotta stop and I need help to do it.” Every single former violent extremist I’ve ever met, whether it’s a former white nationalist, a former jihadi, a former anti for, you name it, every single one of them has had a rock bottom moment where they had said, “I can’t do this anymore.” And so these parallels are so striking that in Parents For Peace now, we are actually meeting with government organizations as well as like big tech in pitching violent extremist ideology as a public health issue, rather than a political one. And one we need to approach with the same sort of care.

Marlena: So 10 years ago, you turned your life around in quite an incredible way. Can you briefly describe for our listeners the motivations that had you do this? This dramatic shift?

Arno: Well, yeah, actually, I got out of hate groups in 1994. I went public with my story in 2010. So there was a good chunk of time between when I left hate groups and when I really reached a point where I felt I needed to share the story publicly. But the simple answer is still how I left the main group was exhaustion. It was exhausting on so many levels to live that way and…

Marlena: To keep that house of cards up.

Arno: Exactly. Yeah, running around trying to shield the house of cards. From the get-go, as I mentioned earlier, I knew what I was doing was wrong. And so I’m constantly suppressing this knowledge of my inner wrongness with alcohol, with violence, with white power skinhead music, surrounded myself by other angry white kids, and just like cordoning myself off in every aspect from the rest of society so that I could maintain this very fragile, violent extremist ideology. That was exhausting. It was exhausting to deny myself elements of arts and culture that I have taken for granted my whole life. I grew up a film, sports, movie, TV, music geek and I still am to this day. And the thing about violent extremist ideology is that none of those things are allowed.

And, again, this is common to all violent extremist ideologies. In Islamist, violent extremism like the so-called Islamic State or Al Shabaab, what have you, they take the idea of haram which is sin in Islam to this extreme where everything is haram. The newspaper is haram, any content that doesn’t agree with your violent extreme ideology is haram, movies are haram, music is haram. And that is exactly how I existed as a white nationalist. For the exact same reasons. We didn’t call it haram, but it was the exact same process, the exact same concept. If I’d shared my love for a Hollywood movie with my fellow skinheads, it would make me a race traitor. It would make me complicit in the genocide against white people for liking the movie Blade Runner, or God forbid, watching the sitcom Seinfeld, which I did anyway.

I snuck away to enjoy Seinfeld because I loved it as much as anybody else, and it actually became a big part of me leaving in that here is the show that is quintessential Jewish humor, and it brings joy to my life literally, like, every day, not just when I’m watching the show, but because it’s an observational kind of humor when you’re having a bowl of soup. Or you’re doing anything that’s mentioned in Seinfeld you’d get a chuckle. But for me after that chuckle, I would be like, “Oh, does Jerry Seinfeld get to live in your whiter and brighter world? And if he does, do you think it’d be very funny if you’re exterminating all the other Jews?”

And there’s no answer to that other than everything I believed was nonsense. And so it was a reminder of how wrong I was when I would have to sneak around and enjoy…sneak around to watch a packer game. So that was exhausting. But what was most exhausting was when people I claimed to hate treated me with kindness. And I was very fortunate that that happened many times during the seven-year period I was in hate groups and it eventually brought me to the point where I was looking for an excuse to leave.

Marlena: And then there was your daughter.

Arno: Exactly. My daughter was basically the excuse I was looking for.

Marlena: Yeah.

Arno: In early ’94, her mother and I broke up, go figure, but hate and violence and alcohol is not a recipe for a healthy relationship between a man and a woman. And I found myself a single parent of my 18-month-old daughter. And a couple of months after that, a second friend of mine was murdered in a street fight after a concert my band had played at and by that point, I had lost count of how many friends had been incarcerated. So it finally hit me that if I didn’t change my ways, death or prison was going to take me from my daughter. My daughter was a catalyst and very, you know, an essential piece of that process, but I do believe if it wasn’t for that huge sense of exhaustion, that second murder could have driven me further into the movement. So, again, when I say I’m lucky, like, every single day, I am just in awe of how lucky I am that all these planets aligned to weed me out of that nightmare into a life of where I’m grateful and joyous.

Marlena: And the world is grateful for you. So for the sake of our listeners, Pardeep is the Sikh who’s the co-author of Arno’s book “The Gift of Our Wounds.” Arno, can you tell us briefly about how you met Pardeep and what he means to you?

Arno: Yeah. Pardeep’s father Satwant was the founder of the Sikh temple in Wisconsin. His father came here with nothing and he went from having $35 to his name to owning a very successful small business and he put up his gas stations and his rental properties as collateral to build the Sikh temple in Wisconsin. And he died defending it and his community to his last breath. And Pardeep sought me out a couple of months after the shooting really looking for an answer as to how somebody could do this, but also looking for accountability in that I was in the media. I was involved with after the shooting. I made a point of saying, “I feel responsible for this. I helped to create the guy who committed this atrocity.” And as Pardeep and I sat down for dinner, we talked for four hours and we found that we had way more in common than difference. And from that day forward, a friendship and brotherhood began that has really spanned across the earth now and we’re so grateful to be able to share our stories through the “The Gift of Our Wounds,” and we’re going to continue doing that going forward.

Marlena: It is such a powerful book and there will be information on the show notes for people to get the book. I want to talk more about accountability in a moment. But at some point in the book, you say, “See something, say something.” That’s your motto when it comes to prejudice. I want to ask you, though, it seems to me that one of the problems with those of us who’ve grown up as privileged whites is that we often don’t even see the injustices that are right in front of us. Based on your experience, how can we become more aware of ongoing racial injustice so that we actually do see something and then say something?

Arno: I think what’s essential to get to that point is that, and this goes for all human beings, it’s not just white people, is that we all need to see ourselves in others, and we need to see others in ourselves. So that needs to be the foundational practice of all human beings, to work towards a society where all people are valued and included. Pardeep makes the point very often that it’s easy to see yourself in somebody who looks like you, who worships like you, smells like you, dresses like you, has the same background that you do. And when you’re an immigrant community from Punjab in the United States, like you’re literally surrounded by those people. But it’s more difficult to look outside of your insular community and really make it an intentional practice of seeing yourself in the people who don’t look like you and don’t worship like you.

And I try to follow that example and I think that’s what has to happen first. And, unfortunately, what’s happening a lot in our society nowadays is that people are approaching these issues like politics forward rather than humanity first. So they’re presenting a subjective political opinion, and they’re going to pieces when people don’t agree with it. And there’s nothing else that can happen when you don’t create that sense of common humanity first of all. So I think what’s important is to listen and to listen without judgment. And as you’re doing that, be ready for discomfort. Be ready to hear things that might hurt or might challenge you and remind yourself that the more often we get outside of our comfort zones, the larger our comfort zones ultimately become, and it helps us individually but it also helps the people that we listen to. And I think that’s the key is that process of listening and suspending judgment and our egos and the willingness to be uncomfortable in that process.

Marlena: I’m so glad you went on to talk about how we can become more aware because it’s, I mean, it’s such an ancient…you quote in, I believe, a 13th century Sufi, in your book that’s saying, “God exists in all beings.” And so it’s an ancient, ancient idea, but it seems like we really often don’t live as if it were so. And so the listening without judgment and being ready for discomfort, those are great possibilities to move toward more of a focus on oneness. Pardeep writes that for him, forgiveness is vengeance. I love that. “It’s the most devastating weapon against the suffering from which all violence stems.” Arno, how do you define forgiveness?

Arno: Well, the way I see the world and the way I think and operate has been forever shaped by my relationship with Pardeep. And I have adopted that idea that forgiveness is vengeance and for me, my self-forgiveness is my vengeance against white nationalism. It’s my vengeance against the movement and the people who are still committing violence under the influence of that ideology in the sense that if I don’t forgive myself and I’m busy beating myself up…and for a time before I went public with my story, I hated myself worse than I ever hated anybody else for the harm that I had done and the people that I had hurt. And it was Pardeep who showed me that if I’m spending all this energy hating myself, it’s gonna diminish my capacity to help people like him.

It’s gonna diminish my capacity to help others begin a healing process and also to reach kids who are making the same mistakes I was doing. It’s going to diminish my ability to do anything good, basically. And so rather than allow that to happen, I’m going to forgive myself with vengeance against hate, and against fear and ignorance. And I need to have that kind of drastic motivator because there will always be a part of myself that wants to just haul off on me, and then say, “You’re not worthy of love. You’re not worthy of success. You don’t deserve to be happy. You don’t deserve to thrive.” And if I believe those things, I’m not going to be able to help anybody. So in a sense of vengeance, even a sense a spite against the fear and the hate, I’m like, “I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna forgive myself.”

Marlena: Yeah. So our listeners may be thinking, “Well, how can we really forgive heinous acts of racial wounding, let go of our desire for revenge, and at the same time hold perpetrators accountable for what they’ve done?” How do you put this together?

Arno: Well, a huge mistake people make about forgiveness far too often is this idea where it means everything is fine. Like it means like, “Oh, it’s okay. It doesn’t matter that this guy murdered my dad and five other people. That’s no big deal.” That’s not what it means at all. What it means is that you are no longer letting that murderer control your life and control how you act and how you think. When Pardeep says forgiveness is vengeance for him, I can corroborate that because I can tell you, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the shooter wanted to destroy not just the people he physically killed, but he wanted to destroy everyone connected to them. He wanted to drive them out of the United States of America and drive them eventually off the face of the earth.

And Pardeep says, “Hey, I got a wife. I have four amazing kids. I have a widowed mother. I have a community that needs me. I’m not going to take one bit of time and energy that they could have and spend it hating or being bitter about what happened, about this atrocity that was committed.” And I can say from a white nationalist standpoint, that’s the most devastating blow you can deal. They want you to…when I was a skinhead, I wanted people to not just hate me, I want them to swing at me. Like, I wanted people to fight me. And when they did, they were literally putty in my hands. But when very brave people, like a Jewish boss, a lesbian supervisor, a black and Latino co-worker said, “No, I’m not gonna let you make the rules of our engagement. I’m gonna make the rules and the rules are, this is how human beings should treat another human being.” That was not weakness, it was not capitulation. That was power. And that’s what people need to understand is that forgiveness, kindness, compassion is living and operating from a place of power. It is not capitulation.

It’s not letting anybody get away with anything. And in saying all this, I’ll emphasize also, I’m not a pacifist. If somebody comes and puts their hands on me, like, I will physically neutralize them. If somebody goes to hurt some other person in my presence, I will physically neutralize them out. I’ll do whatever I have to do to stop that violence, but I will do it from a place of compassion, understanding that the person committing the violence is hurting. And that is, again, is defiance. If I let their aggression make me aggressive then I’m playing by their rules, and I’m capitulating to what they’re trying to accomplish. Whereas even if I have to physically neutralize somebody, and once they are, I’m like, “Hey, I want to help you. How can I help you live a better life?” Like, that’s defiance and then that’s what’s going to lead to a better place for individuals and for society, not a punitive approach of trying to punish the suffering of somebody.

Marlena: Yeah. So we’ve talked about forgiveness. What about reconciliation? What does that really mean in the context of healing the wounds of racism?

Arno: I think reconciliation, in any sense, first of all, all parties involved have to come to the table asking themselves if they want to be right or they want to be effective. And that’s a difficult question to answer in a way that’s going to lead to reconciliation. If you truly want reconciliation, you have to say, “Look, I’m willing to suspend my need to be right in this conversation.” And in going back to what we were talking about earlier, you need to listen and you need to do so without judgment. And yes, it’s not fair for the offended party to have to do that. But again, do you want things to be the way they should be or do you want to, like, accept things the way they are so that you can find a place to move forward from? It’s a very difficult process to reconcile any kind of wound. But it’s, again, it’s all up to how we define power, and how we define our relationships.

And I think we need to ask ourselves, “Do we want to continue a domination-based society, and just switch places of who’s dominating who? Or do we want to have a society where everybody is valued and included?” Because there’s no way to do both of them. If somebody is dominating someone else, then obviously somebody’s not valued and included. So to move away from this domination-based model that, unfortunately, has been the way human beings have lived for 200,000 years. This isn’t just something cooked up by white supremacy 500 years ago, this is the human condition and it’s not particular to any one group or another.

Which leads me to my next point that I think is essential for reconciliation. And it’s the understanding that all human beings share an equal capacity to harm or to heal. And if we convince ourselves otherwise, there’s no way to reconcile from that. If we convince ourselves like, “Well, this group of people are just inherently more violent than my group or whatever, or my group of people is inherently less violent than…” you’re saying the same thing either way. When we can convince ourselves that everyone doesn’t share an equal capacity to harm or heal, then there’s nowhere to go from there but violence.

Marlena: Every one of us is capable of anything. Yeah.

Arno: Yeah, exactly. I have a friend in Pakistan, Tahir Malik, whose wife was killed in a suicide bombing and he started a group called Pakistan Survivors Network and later Global Survivors Network for people who have survived terrorism. And he shared wisdom from the Quran with me, which is essentially all these people are spending so much time talking about what’s heaven and what’s hell and where’s one and where’s the other, and it’s a foolish pursuit because both of them are within us at any given moment. So rather than trying to define heaven and hell, like, let’s look inward and ask ourselves if we’re being the best person we can be at every moment. And that’s essentially the real definition of jihad. To me, it’s hard to even say former jihadi because it kind of slurs the notion of what jihad really is. But you’re right, we all have that capacity for good or evil and we need to remain mindful of that.

Marlena: Yeah. Tom DeWolf, he’s the executive director of Coming To The Table, which is a nonprofit that is seeking to heal racial wounds, he was a guest on this podcast and he says that sharing our stories with each other is one of the most effective ways to bridge the gulf and develop meaningful relationships with people that we consider the other. Have you found storytelling to be important in your work?

Arno: Yeah, absolutely. I’m really glad you brought that up. Honestly, storytelling is the only thing that’s important. What it boils down to is that the stories we believe in our lives are what define our relationships with the world around us. And that’s very exciting news because the stories we believe are entirely malleable. They’re not set in stone, no matter how much we may convince ourselves that they are. And so if we allow some flexibility for the stories that define our relationship with ourselves and with the world around us, then now we have the capacity for reconciliation. And I believe there’s a great book called “Sapiens” by Yosef Noah Harare and he talks about before the Industrial Revolution and before the agricultural revolution, about 70,000 years ago there was a cognitive revolution when Homo Sapiens, for whatever reason, you know, cue ancient aliens guy right here, which I love that stuff, but the reason not being important, the fact is is that 70,000 years ago, we human beings started telling each other stories and believing these stories.

And what that does is it allows us to organize ourselves in an unlimited number of people, whereas our fellow primates really have never organized in groups of larger than 50 or so. So because 1.8 billion Muslims in the world all believe, and within that 1.8 billion, there’s a spectrum from like radical queer activist leftist Muslims to hyper-conservative Muslims and everything in between, but they all agree that the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, has brought the word of Allah to [inaudible 00:38:05].

These are people on the other side of the planet from each other, speak in different languages, different ethnicities, different genetic makeups within, you know, Homo Sapiens. But they all agree on that story, and that’s an incredibly powerful thing. So when we understand how powerful stories are, and we really develop an interest in hearing them, and kind of making our own stories dynamic, living, evolving things, that’s the approach that can lead to our own personal happiness and success and lead to societal happiness and success as well.

Marlena: Arno, it just gets back again to what you said earlier about listening without judgment and being willing to live in discomfort. It seems to me that our stories are so tightly wound up and perfect in our minds that listening to something that might have that story break down a bit is very, very difficult. So it still comes back to what you said earlier.

Arno: Yeah, absolutely. And again, I think a lot of my work is just to try to…I don’t want to try to get people to think one way or another. I’m not trying to adjust their political opinions directly. I just want them to become fascinated by a story as I am, and have a curiosity to hear stories that might challenge them a little bit. And finally, to reach a point where they’re like, “Hey, I’m the author of my story. I don’t have to have my story dictated to me by a YouTube video from the backwaters of the Internet or from a classroom at some, you know, academic college.” You’re the author of your story one way or another, and when you realize that power, it’s a really transformational thing.

Marlena: I love that you brought curiosity into the conversation. I was speaking with the authors of “The Beauty of Conflict for Couples” recently and their premise is that with curiosity, you can really get through almost any conflict. And it is all about, isn’t it, taking your story but allowing it to be a bit more malleable and changed by someone else’s story and being curious about what is really going on. Yeah.

Arno: Yeah. Curiosity is so underrated and again, it’s underrated when it’s really a prerequisite for all sorts of other things that maybe don’t understand they need that prerequisite so they kind of start from a point beyond there and that’s why they fail. If you could set that foundation of curiosity and wonder and just establish that, “Hey, it’s an amazing thing to be a human being and it’s this existence we all co-create every moment is something that’s primally basically good,” curiosity helps you understand that truth and practice it, cultivate it. And so I think there’s a lot of time and energy being spent nowadays in a political realm and it’s a lot of wheel spinning if you don’t have curiosity as a foundation.

Marlena: You work with a lot of youth. How do you instill a sense of curiosity in a young person?

Arno: Well, it begins by storytelling. My story is sensational and it’s entertaining. As shocking and challenging as it is, part of my job is to entertain and to captivate people and even maybe get them to trouble here and there. And when I am successful in doing that, I think that seeds curiosity because you’re basically challenging someone’s preconceived notions. I have a, and this has happened for the past 10 years, I’ll have a gig at a college and the people organizing the gig will make a poster where across the giant top of the poster it says “former” in like 72-point font and then below that, it will say “white supremacist” in a 12-point font. And all people see is the “white supremacist.” They don’t see the former part.

And to the point where I’ve had talks protested and kids are like, “I don’t want the Nazis speaking at our school.” Like, they’re not letting themselves even hear the former part. But at almost every single talk as well, I’ve had someone from the audience come up to me, very often students of color, will say, “Look, I wasn’t even gonna come to this. I was going to protest it, but I did and I just listened to you and I’m so glad that I did because you’ve proven to me that people really can redeem themselves.” There’s a lot of people who come into that equation just saying, “There’s no way a neo-Nazi’s ever gonna change. That’s impossible.” And if I do my job well, they’re gonna walk out of there going, “Oh, no, it actually is possible.” And when that happens, that sparks curiosity. That’s like, “Well, if that’s possible, what else could be possible?”

Marlena: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So with your life, you are in fact instilling curiosity. That’s great. Let’s talk about where extremism might take us in the future. We may soon be able to make genetic choices to create ever more perfect humans. And so rather than killing off those who are “imperfect,” the idea might be to leave them behind by developing the perfect. What’s your reaction to these possibilities?

Arno: Yeah, I forget, I read “Wired Magazine” so I’m up on all the, you know, the latest AI and nanotechnology and biotechnology things. I forget the name of the…it’s a gene editor is what you’re talking about and CRISPR, maybe? I’m not sure. But yeah, it’s scary and I think, plainly, it could go horribly, horribly wrong. But at the same time, it’s the type of thing where I really believe that if people who are applying these ridiculously powerful technologies and people who are using these ridiculously powerful technologies, whatever you do, if you’re doing that from a place of inner peace, it can lead to somewhere good. If you’re doing it from a place where you’re hurting and you have this unprocessed trauma, it can lead to somewhere really, really bad. So I think that’s the difference. And the technology itself, I think, is kind of arbitrary.

Whether we’re talking about gene editing or AI or nanotechnology or whatever, the difference between going horribly wrong and horribly right, and, honestly, we’re in a jam now as a human species to the point where we’re going to need to hit a home run one way or another with these technological spheres in order to address the challenges we’ve created ourselves by messing up this spaceship we all inhabit and depend on to live. So to me, that’s why it’s so important to look at the foundational things and that’s basically inner peace. The Dalai Lama said something to the effect of, “If we taught every eight-year-old to meditate on the planet Earth, we would have world peace in a generation.” And I wholeheartedly believe that, not just as a Buddhist and as a meditator myself, but as a student of life. And I think that’s the answer to these questions about these really imposing technologies. And it’s not an easy answer. It’s probably the most difficult one that a lot of people don’t want to hear, but I think that’s the only answer.

Marlena: So as a student of life, what have you observed in the last decades? Are we improving in allowing peace to be what motivates us as a society or even as a world? Where do you think we’re going? Where are we headed?

Arno: Well, I should mention, I have multiple PhDs from Google and YouTube and Discovery Channel in things like anthropology and neuroscience and whatnot. They’re not real PhD, but I’m very interested in…

Marlena: You have some credibility to answer this question.

Arno: I do. Yeah, I do have a little bit of credibility. And I am an optimist. In Sikhi, there’s something called Chardi Kala, which means eternal optimism. And it stems from the belief that everything that’s happening in the universe at any given moment is a divine creation and therefore is something be grateful for, not just when it’s great, but especially when it sucks because that’s when the most opportunity to learn is there. And as an eternal optimist, I believe that the human condition has been steadily improving for the past 200,000 years and that we currently live in a time where the lot of the average person is better than it’s ever been in human history. We have more people living on this planet than ever before, but fewer people living in poverty than ever before as a ratio of how many people are here.

There’s all sorts of really great indicators of, like, how we are continually progressing but human history has also demonstrated the progresses has almost always been a two-step forward, one step back kind of thing. And I think right now we are clearly in a step backwards. But regardless of that step backwards, humanity will continue to progress. And an example of this is how diversity is such an inevitable thing that even groups that claim to despise diversity are becoming more diverse going forward because they just don’t have a choice. It’s just the only way things will progress. An example of this is that in the alt-right sphere of extremism, the fastest-growing demographic of the alt-right is Latino men.

Marlena: Hmm. That’s interesting.

Arno: Right, you have Latino men who are saying how horrible multiculturalism is and how great nationalism is it and it’s just, to me, it’s just dying gas of those ways of thinking. And it’s not funny. You know, people get hurt. It’s a challenging time for so many people on this planet right now and the problems of racism and sexism and religious intolerance, homophobia, they’re all very acute. So when you have an acute painful issue and being told like, “Well, it’s gonna get better eventually,” like, that’s not a great answer to hear. But it is something I wholeheartedly believe and that you need to believe that while you’re taking every measure you can to address the acute nature of the pain.

Marlena: Yes. Arno, if there were one last thing you’d like our listeners to hear, what would it be?

Arno: Well, when people ask me to say smart things, my go-to line is that as human beings, we find what we look for in life so be very mindful of what you seek. And I entirely believe that wholeheartedly because my life has demonstrated the truth of it to me. There was a time when I believed that the color of my skin made me superior than everyone else and threatened by everyone else and at war with everyone else. And during those seven years, I tried to kill myself twice. I had two friends who were murdered, all sorts of really, really bad things happened because of what I made the decision to look for in my life. Today, I make a decision to seek reasons to have faith in humanity and to be grateful for my existence and the existence of everyone around me. And I find that everywhere I look. The world changes constantly, obviously, but the big change between Arno of 1990 and Arno of 2020 is what I decide to look for. And every single human being on the planet has the power to do that. Don’t leave it on the table.

Marlena: This has been such a meaningful conversation, Arno. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.

Arno: My pleasure, Marlena. I really appreciated the conversation and your thoughtful questions.

Marlena: I’ve been speaking with Arno Michaelis, whose latest book with Pardeep Singh Kaleka is “The Gift of Our Wounds: A Sikh and a Former White Supremacist Find Forgiveness After Hate.” You’ll find details on the show notes about how to purchase their book as well as my new book “Nothing Bad Between Us.” And I’ll also post a link to my website. And thank you, our listeners, for joining us today. If you know anyone who’d be interested in this podcast, please do share it with them. And if you liked it, take a moment to rate and review us on iTunes or your favorite podcasting network. Instructions on the show notes make rating and reviewing easy.

And remember, we are together on this journey.