Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s priorities may seem like a random grab bag of contrarianism, conspiracies, and earnest environmental activism: vaccine skepticism, Bitcoin enthusiasm, government-run organic farming communes to wean people off pharmaceuticals, opposition to corporate polluters, embrace of climate change skeptics.
But there is nothing random about these positions. RFK Jr. represents a simple and compelling worldview about the problems facing humanity: Naturalness is good, and unnaturalness leads to evil. Now a part of Trump’s transition team, his worldview may end up influencing American political policy, specifically on pet issues involving public health, ranging from the allocation of medical research funding (GMOs, CRISPR) to the government’s position on vaccines. For scientists, medical professionals, and journalists who want to understand why so many people embrace that worldview, what its influence will look like, and how to push back effectively, it is crucial to understand Kennedy’s unique interpretation of “natural.”
One place to start is with the near-religious significance of “natural” for the Natural Law Party, the obscure political party that nominated RFK Jr. as its candidate in Michigan. According to their platform, “when people live in harmony with natural law, they don’t make mistakes — they spontaneously uphold higher values, and they enjoy naturally good health and a life free from problems.”
Scholars who defend natural law insist that “natural” really means something like “rational,” but for everyone else, including RFK Jr. and the Natural Law Party, the meaning of “natural” is straightforward: that which humans have not engineered or interfered with. The more something depends on human artifice, the less natural it is, and, by extension, the more we should fear it.
Especially revealing in the Natural Law Party’s platform is the choice of the word “spontaneously.” Naturalness in this broader sense is associated with being organic, spontaneous, bottom-up rather than top-down, individual instead of institutional, grassroots instead of astroturfed.
This understanding of natural goodness as ideological lodestone has immense explanatory power. Consider Bitcoin, a high-tech, energy-gobbling innovation that has many environmentalists worried. Why would RFK Jr., who made his name as an environmental crusader, be so enthusiastic about it?
The answer is that Bitcoin is natural in this sense: spontaneous, bottom-up, and largely free from institutional oversight. “In the same way that the U.S. government and most governments in the world have been telling people what to eat … in economics there is a very similar problem,” explains economist Saifedean Ammous, a carnivore and vocal supporter of Bitcoin. “Instead of money being a free-market institution, which is what we had under the gold standard, [now we have a] twentieth-century model of government telling you no, you have to use this piece of paper.” As Nassim Taleb, the contrarian investor, mathematician, and Paleo dieter puts it in the introduction to Ammous’ book: “Bitcoin is the first organic currency.”
A narrower conception of “natural” may seem like it explains opposition to GMOs and pesticides, along with vaccine skepticism and a predilection for raw milk. Of course the Natural Law Party supports “natural herbal preparations, natural dietary supplements, and alternative medical treatment modalities.” But reading on, their explanation shifts to the broader version of natural: “[T]he prevention programs endorsed by the Natural Law Party significantly reduce the need for conventional medical treatment by empowering individuals to take better care of their own health.”
The real virtue of natural supplements and alternative medicine isn’t that they actually come from nature. After all, supplements are clearly manufactured, and stainless steel filoform needles don’t grow on trees! Opponents of the “natural goodness” position enjoy pointing out such obvious contradictions. But they miss the point. Naturalness, in large part, is about resistance to control. Natural supplements empower individuals to take care of themselves as they see fit, instead of submitting to the unnatural top-down edicts of government, depending for their health on pills and procedures that must be approved by institutionally sanctioned elites.
For this reason, RFK Jr.’s brand of environmentalism is entirely about opposing large institutions — anything with an acronym or a Big in front of it. He is happy to sue Big Agriculture and Big Pharma, but he also opposes the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration (Big Government). He respects the environment, but he doesn’t respect top-down laws that prohibit cutting the head off a whale. If an individual is moved to spontaneous cetacean decapitation, that’s just natural.
Belief that living naturally provides a simple solution to the world’s problems is what I have called an empowering epistemology. Empowering epistemology is an approach to knowledge that emphasizes agency creating beliefs. If you need a vaccine to stay safe, you do not control your health — doctors and pharmaceutical companies are in control. The very idea of being a patient is passive. The ability to prevent disease by eating natural food and taking supplements that you’ve chosen creates agency. The mantra of “do your own research” taps into the same empowering epistemology: You can figure things out on your own, in your free time, instead of depending on knowledge produced by institutions.
Simplicity is essential to an empowering epistemology. Blaming “chemicals” for every ailment from nut allergies to depression means that suddenly we understand what are otherwise immensely complicated problems, and, even more remarkably, we have the power to solve them, all by ourselves, without any expert or elite guidance.
Seen from this perspective, the alliance between Trump and RFK Jr. makes perfect sense. Trump represents the same empowering epistemology, the same sense that institutional outsiders following their natural instincts can solve the problems created by faceless corporations and government behemoths. Among those institutional outsiders are those voters who, in the very act of supporting Trump and RFK Jr., feel like they are taking matters into their own hands.
People do not adopt empowering epistemologies because they are ignorant or misinformed. They adopt them when institutions betray their trust, when experts are patronizing and dismissive, or when traumatic events leave them so fearful that identifying a simple villain is the only way to cope.
In a discussion of RFK Jr.’s shifting position on climate change, the journalist Evan George cites a formative childhood moment detailed in the recent book “Silent Spring Revolution.” Just 9 years old, RFK Jr. had the privilege of attending an intimate ecology seminar in his own home with Rachel Carson. Afterward, the young nature lover was incensed about destruction of the environment. He wrote to “Uncle Jack” secured a private Oval Office meeting, and, as a gift, brought a seven-inch spotted salamander.
But the gift went horribly wrong. The tap water RFK Jr. used to transport the salamander was chlorinated. By the time he arrived at the Oval Office, the poor creature lay dead at the bottom of its fishbowl.
“We see young Bobby’s rescued salamander poisoned by an invisible, seemingly unexplained force,” George writes about the incident. “Who knows what kind of impression it left, but it sounds like a distressing experience for a nature-loving kid who never meant to poison an animal. It’s hard not to see parallels between the often-invisible threat of toxic pollution that would become a great focus of his environmental work and the imagined threat of vaccines that have more recently become his obsession.”
Faced with a host of invisible threats, it is impossible for laypeople to evaluate each one on its merits. Just understanding the history and nuance of the debate over fluoridated water, for example, could take months of full-time research, and a very reasonable outcome of that research is uncertainty. And faced with endless examples of institutional and government malfeasance, outsourcing one’s understanding to the experts is not a viable alternative.
Enter RFK Jr., Trump, and their empowering epistemology. Trust your gut, go with what’s natural, reject the elites artificially engineering your world, and you’ll “enjoy naturally good health and a life free from problems.”
Once we understand what drives the appeal of this ideology, addressing its problems — conspiracism, outlandish health theories, rejection of basic scientific consensus — looks very different. Instead of informing people, we should focus on empowerment and trust. At every level of institutional power, effort should be directed at empowering laypeople by soliciting community input and erring more on the side of ceding control to community leaders.
Without trust, however, empowerment efforts will be useless. This means we must also focus on holding experts, institutions, and corporations publicly accountable for wrongdoing. Research fraud, for example, should be punished much more harshly and publicly, given the damage it does to institutional trust. The same applies to corporations and government officials who deceive or defraud the public.
By focusing on disempowerment instead of disinformation, we will address the real reasons people are driven away from expert knowledge and toward RFK Jr. If his worldview continues to exert widespread appeal, institutions should blame themselves. Otherwise they will only reinforce the elitist, patronizing, top-down mindset that drives people to embrace natural goodness.
Alan Levinovitz is professor of philosophy and religious studies at James Madison University, where he specializes in the intersection of philosophy, religion, science, and medicine, as well as classical Chinese thought. His most recent book is “Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science.”