Speaker 1: A media.
Speaker 2: Humanity is not a parasite, but the systems we collectively
Speaker 2: uphold today are certainly parasitic. They maintain their hold on
Speaker 2: us due to our interdependence, as we rely on each
Speaker 2: other to survive. And these systems, as destructive as they are,
Speaker 2: are how we know how to cooperate. And they also
Speaker 2: maintain their whole of course, through ideology, the sets of
Speaker 2: ideas about the world carried through religion, philosophy, politics, education, culture, etc.
Speaker 2: And to some extent they maintain their hold through violence.
Speaker 2: And so we can, and I believe we must break
Speaker 2: free from this parasitism. I believe there are other ways
Speaker 2: of relating with each other with nature, and I'll talk
Speaker 2: about those ways at the end. By the way, hello
Speaker 2: and welcome. It could happen here. I'm andress Age Andrewism
Speaker 2: on YouTube, and I'm joined today by.
Speaker 3: Mia Wong also here. Yeah, we're doing great introt yepee.
Speaker 2: So I want to talk about paris Is the development
Speaker 2: of paristism over time, as discussed in Samuel Milla McDonald's
Speaker 2: book Progress, which I highly recommend quite an enjoyable read.
Speaker 2: So I actually really first heard about that book years
Speaker 2: ago before it was even out and I had reached
Speaker 2: out and I was like, oh, I would love to,
Speaker 2: you know, get a copy as soon as it's available
Speaker 2: and talk about it and stuff. And you know, I
Speaker 2: was at that point in my life, I was really
Speaker 2: voraciously consuming these kind of grand narratives of history. And
Speaker 2: of course we know the flaws with these grand narratives.
Speaker 2: They have limited explanatory power. But I still found use
Speaker 2: in these narratives and understanding aspects and angles of his history,
Speaker 2: at least when you take a critical approach to them.
Speaker 2: Because I mean history is, as the name implies, a story.
Speaker 2: You know, there are many interpretations and frameworks that can
Speaker 2: be used to explain or better understand different aspects of history,
Speaker 2: and so progress offers one framework through its three eras
Speaker 2: of focus. Of course, history isn't actually so linear. Different
Speaker 2: forms can coexist, forms can come and go. It is
Speaker 2: in this sequential development as is sometimes posed. But there
Speaker 2: are trends that we can observe, and so at these
Speaker 2: three phases that McDonald discusses identifies particular ideas of progress,
Speaker 2: forms of parasitism and egence of history. And I think
Speaker 2: it's a very compelling connection between the theology, politics, economics,
Speaker 2: and ecology that intertwine to make up history. Obviously not
Speaker 2: perfectly accurate, but I think it helps us to see
Speaker 2: certain tendencies more clearly. So we can look at a
Speaker 2: lot of the anarchist approaches or anarchist a jacent approaches
Speaker 2: to tracing the development of the state in history. You know, Pt.
Speaker 2: Gal Loose had worship and power. Jmec Scott has against
Speaker 2: the Green and in progress, although I don't think he
Speaker 2: is anarchist anarchista jacent in progress. McDonald's starts with the
Speaker 2: beginning of recorded civilization in three thousand BCE and looks
Speaker 2: at the way that many early states developed from a
Speaker 2: blend of religion, politics, and daily life. So I mean
Speaker 2: humans had lived for hundreds of thousands of years before
Speaker 2: recorded history, right, They spread across the globe. They experimented
Speaker 2: with all kinds of different social, political, and economic organizations
Speaker 2: that are now lost. Their time and the Dawn of
Speaker 2: Everything by David Grieber and David wen Grew kind of
Speaker 2: wrestles with some of this. In the early years of
Speaker 2: recorded history, there were many manners of approach to state
Speaker 2: development from roughly three thousand BCE to fourteen hundred CE.
Speaker 2: This is the first phase of McDonald's timeline, human societies
Speaker 2: such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesonarica, and medieval Europe saw
Speaker 2: a combination of hierarchy with cosmology. McDonald calls this phase
Speaker 2: Heaven in the book, not to co sign it as
Speaker 2: an ideal, but illustrate the prominence of religious power in
Speaker 2: this time period. And me I know, even hosting recently
Speaker 2: about the impact of religion and the seeming hesitance people
Speaker 2: have nowadays about actually engaging with what it means materially
Speaker 2: for the experience of domination in our day to day lives.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, and erstent thing you can you can look
Speaker 3: at sort of in that period is the emergence of
Speaker 3: states alongside sort of the emergence of temple complexes as
Speaker 3: the thing that creates a bunch of the administrative systems.
Speaker 3: Graver talks about this. I think that actually where a
Speaker 3: bunch of sort of the administrative systems that would become
Speaker 3: like credit, are these things that are developed in order
Speaker 3: to sort of track resources moving into these giant temple complexes.
Speaker 3: And so you have the situation where you know, the
Speaker 3: things that are going to become the building blocks of
Speaker 3: economics and exploitation for every single subsequent period in history
Speaker 3: are developed in order to in order to fuel these
Speaker 3: sort of hierarchical massive complexes, where like just staggering amounts
Speaker 3: of resources are like fueled into into these sort of
Speaker 3: temple complexes. And that's a you know, that's a thing
Speaker 3: that continues to current present day.
Speaker 2: Indeed, you know, indeed we have we have temple complex
Speaker 2: like what is temple complexes and this of megachurches nowadys, yeah, it's.
Speaker 3: Like what is the megachurch? But like the temple complex
Speaker 3: is force?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. That's the thing, right, like we
Speaker 2: are seeing an echo of this historical time period even
Speaker 2: in the present, because the idea of progress in this
Speaker 2: time and in these places was about progressing toward a
Speaker 2: higher alignment with the divine order, the will of the gods,
Speaker 2: you know, ensuring that different groups of people were in
Speaker 2: their proper place in that order. And so you had
Speaker 2: the development of religious laws and theologies and monumental architecture
Speaker 2: which established this particular kind of order. And when disasters struck,
Speaker 2: whether it be floods or drought, cer invasions, this was
Speaker 2: a sign, a sign of the times perhaps that the
Speaker 2: order was breaking down, and so it's really funny to
Speaker 2: me that, you know, in this progressive account of the
Speaker 2: idea of progress that McDonald's talking about, you know, even
Speaker 2: the earlier ideas of progress have not entirely gone to
Speaker 2: be you know, they haven't been replaced by the next era.
Speaker 2: They have just taken on subtler forms, and sometimes not
Speaker 2: as subtler forms.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's there's a concept that the journal Chwong uses
Speaker 3: where I mean they're specifically talking about like the ways
Speaker 3: that elements of like the Chinese I guess you call
Speaker 3: it the socialist regime are sort of taken and then
Speaker 3: used in the capitalist regime. They go to this thing
Speaker 3: from biology called exceptation, where something like evolutionarily that was
Speaker 3: used for a different purpose is like repurposed for a
Speaker 3: new thing. So it's like, you know, you've like finn
Speaker 3: becomes hand like that. I'm a lot of great biologists,
Speaker 3: but this is this kind of thing where like you
Speaker 3: have this situation where like, yeah, elements of like the
Speaker 3: old notion of what progress was, of like the sort
Speaker 3: of centralized hierarchical complexes of religion are like excapation by
Speaker 3: the next thing that's going to happen, and that's taken
Speaker 3: by the next thing, which is taken by the next thing,
Speaker 3: and we still have our sort of like versions of
Speaker 3: it that have been taken through like countless numbers of
Speaker 3: world systems.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I definitely see that. Of course, there were
Speaker 2: differences and how they would have i think, approached religion
Speaker 2: and thoughts of religion compared to how we doe psychologically.
Speaker 2: In a time like that, they didn't really have this
Speaker 2: more prominent and culturally accepted secular line set that we
Speaker 2: have today where religion could even be seen as something
Speaker 2: separate from everything else, you know. For them, religion was
Speaker 2: whole reality, worked the seasons, the hardest illness, victory, and war.
Speaker 2: All of this was interpreted through a secret lens. People
Speaker 2: knew what place they had in the cosmos, or at
Speaker 2: least thought about it in that lens, and they understood
Speaker 2: what role they had in the divine hierarchy on a
Speaker 2: material because I mean, we do have to think materially
Speaker 2: and not solely ideologically. These societies engage in what McDonald
Speaker 2: called continuous and regional parasitism to extract resources like food, labor,
Speaker 2: and land, and the agents of this parasitism are city states, kingdoms,
Speaker 2: and empires. On the city state level, you had them
Speaker 2: dominating their immediate hinterlunds, and on an empire level, their
Speaker 2: conquering neighbors done for either integration and taxation or tribute
Speaker 2: or slavery. But due to the limits of the technology
Speaker 2: of the time, you know, they didn't have the instant
Speaker 2: communication and fast transportation that we do today, there were
Speaker 2: limits to how far an empire could spread. Even the
Speaker 2: largest empires had their limits and would often devolve power
Speaker 2: or fracture. Tensions would begin to build as growing empires
Speaker 2: struggled to uphold central authority. Belief systems came into conflict,
Speaker 2: and contact and intellectual traditions developed. Over time, governance would
Speaker 2: get more bureaucratic, religions would face reform due to challenges
Speaker 2: from within, and by the time that we approach the
Speaker 2: late medieval period around the thirteen hundreds and fourteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: at least from a europe focused account or Old World
Speaker 2: focused account, the world is indeed change it transition has
Speaker 2: begun from this Heaven phase to the next phase in
Speaker 2: McDonald's framework, as in the nation phase from fourteen hundred
Speaker 2: to nineteen hundred, where we move away from a world
Speaker 2: of cosmic order to a world more distinctly human, a
Speaker 2: world of human order. Religion phasis, of course, but authority
Speaker 2: has begun to move from the heavens down to earth,
Speaker 2: an earth that could be observed, could be measured, navigated,
Speaker 2: controlled by human beings. And so we see this in
Speaker 2: this time with the emergence of the sciences and the
Speaker 2: emergence of newly minted political theories, and the idea of
Speaker 2: progress in this time was redefined as expanding knowledge, increase
Speaker 2: in efficiency, mastering the environment. Hence the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment,
Speaker 2: advances in avigation, and so on, and consequently parasitism as
Speaker 2: a process becomes more disposed. Extraction would stretch across continents
Speaker 2: and would be carried by maritime tree routes, taking resources
Speaker 2: from different parts of the world, including sugar, cotton, spices, metals,
Speaker 2: and labor, all flowing through increasingly complex global systems and
Speaker 2: increasingly industrial supply chains. As wealth starts accumulating in certain
Speaker 2: regions thanks the extraction of others, you know, the rich
Speaker 2: is being built up at one place because of the
Speaker 2: poverty being developed in another place. As the agents of
Speaker 2: this time of the kingdoms and empires but also newly
Speaker 2: minted corporate charters and nation states. To be clear, I'm
Speaker 2: not trying to say that these are these sole agents
Speaker 2: history in any of these particular periods, which is that
Speaker 2: they were significant. I don't want to deny the role
Speaker 2: of you know, the politics from below the rabble as
Speaker 2: Graba sometimes refers to them, would have also shaped the
Speaker 2: development of history.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's also worth noting too, and it's
Speaker 3: something you were talking about from the top. But as
Speaker 3: with all of these sort of like really really broad
Speaker 3: sweet books at history, this is capturing trends in a
Speaker 3: few places in the worlds as they moved. There are
Speaker 3: obviously many, many, many other things that are also coexisting
Speaker 3: with all of these systems. At the same time, the
Speaker 3: entire world world in like two thousand BC is not
Speaker 3: just like mirror images of like the Shang dynasty everywhere, right, Like,
Speaker 3: there's yeah, a whole plethora of different systems that are
Speaker 3: interacting with each other from I mean, I can't even
Speaker 3: there's there's just an unbelievable sort of diversity of like
Speaker 3: cultural forms, some of which are states, some of which
Speaker 3: are not. But yeah, when you're doing a macrohistory like this,
Speaker 3: you were looking at certain sets of thems and matching
Speaker 3: patterns with them. But that also is not We're also
Speaker 3: not saying here but that's literally everything that is happening
Speaker 3: on earth, because it's not. But yeah, just just want
Speaker 3: to get that in for the people who are gonna
Speaker 3: get very mad about this. We're are aware of the
Speaker 3: presence of other narratives. We have. We have we have
Speaker 3: done our postmodernism training, we have done our historical archaeological stuff.
Speaker 3: I just what did this noted?
Speaker 2: Of course, of course, and like I was saying, they
Speaker 2: had these other egenes, but for the particular narrative of
Speaker 2: focusing on the kingdoms, the empires, the corporate charters, and
Speaker 2: the nation states. And you know, nation states. We take
Speaker 2: them for granted now, but they really were not always
Speaker 2: a thing. You know, the idea of a group of
Speaker 2: people with a shared identity, language, culture, and history being
Speaker 2: artificially i would say, unified under a state. It has
Speaker 2: to be constructed and enforced through violence and assimilation. You know,
Speaker 2: you didn't have this concept of France until France was
Speaker 2: built and the whole world is suffered as a result.
Speaker 2: You know, yeah, you didn't have this concept of Italy.
Speaker 2: You didn't have this concept of Nigeria. You didn't have
Speaker 2: this concept. These nation states had to be constructed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, even China, which is seen as like the sort
Speaker 3: of archetypical example of this, Like we have a bunch
Speaker 3: of records of people in the fifteen hundreds, and I
Speaker 3: think even through the sixteen hundreds, like going and talking
Speaker 3: to people in China and being like, yeah, You'reine, and
Speaker 3: the people are talking to are like, what the fuck
Speaker 3: is China? What are you talking about? Like we're like
Speaker 3: under this ruler, who's under this ruler, who's under this ruler?
Speaker 2: Who's like yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: You know. So yeah, these things have to be constructed,
Speaker 3: and they were constructed a lot more recently than people think.
Speaker 2: And then to actually get people to identify with them
Speaker 2: also has to be constructed over generations in some cases.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and usually by you know, a process in which
Speaker 3: I mean the only way to cause people to have
Speaker 3: a positive identification with like a specific new bounded national
Speaker 3: territorial identity is to have it be posed against an other.
Speaker 3: So yeah, what of these? What are these? Also like
Speaker 3: the question of the national, like the twentieth century national
Speaker 3: liberation movements is when you get like, for example, like
Speaker 3: pan Arabism, It's like, okay, like whose national liberation is this,
Speaker 3: because sure as fuck is not like the Kurds or
Speaker 3: Yazidi's it's you know. Yeah. This is all of which
Speaker 3: is to say what you were saying, which is this
Speaker 3: is a violent and bloody process that is a lot
Speaker 3: more recent that people understand.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. This time also saw a lot of revolutions, bloody indeed,
Speaker 2: you know, the rise and fall of old powers and
Speaker 2: new powers. And this is also a phase I think
Speaker 2: that could be marked by its contradictions. You know, you
Speaker 2: had this rise and tide of ideas like liberty and rights,
Speaker 2: and you know, liberalism was developed in this period, as
Speaker 2: was socialism. But you also had obviously this vast industrial
Speaker 2: exploitation of peoples and ecologies. We saw the development of
Speaker 2: the sciences and scientific classifications, but you also saw how
Speaker 2: that gave way to pseudo scientific justifications, inequality, you know,
Speaker 2: the create chain of being, the idea of the white
Speaker 2: being on top of everyone else. Yeah, we saw self
Speaker 2: determination for some and self determination not so much for others.
Speaker 2: As by the time we reach the eighteen hundreds, the
Speaker 2: piece of change was exceedingly traumatic. And volatile industrialization, urbanization,
Speaker 2: communication and transportation converged to compress time and space. We
Speaker 2: see the booth of new ideas and reformed relations, and
Speaker 2: by the time we reach the early twentieth century, a
Speaker 2: new phase is taken shape. We are now in what
Speaker 2: McDonald's calls the system phase, spanning from nineteen hundred to
Speaker 2: the present day. The system, the machine, whatever you want
Speaker 2: to call it, is this fast, interconnected set of systems
Speaker 2: that organize how we live, produce, consume, and even think.
Speaker 2: The system does not have, you know, a single king
Speaker 2: or figurehead that you can point to as the big bad,
Speaker 2: despite I think people's efforts to try and find a
Speaker 2: big bad. It's really a web of processes and incentives
Speaker 2: and networks, complex bureaucracy and global markets and industrial and
Speaker 2: post industrial economies and mass communication and the underground economy
Speaker 2: and all these different things chugging along almost like it's
Speaker 2: beastly bloodthirst is something benign. Forgive the alliteration and like
Speaker 2: to thrown out of poetry every once to know. So
Speaker 2: the idea of progress becomes very economistic in this period.
Speaker 2: It's focused on growth, output, productivity, effisiency. Our entire economy
Speaker 2: is basically organized around these metrics. That's the thing that
Speaker 2: people are worrying about. When they're on Fox Business or whatever,
Speaker 2: the Financial Times, whatever spaces of dialogue about the economy.
Speaker 2: The focus is not on actually all a people's needs
Speaker 2: being met. It's what's what's growth looking like this quarter?
Speaker 2: How efficient, how we exploit in the planet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm still going to be haunted forever by that
Speaker 3: the clip on CNBC that we played in the EDA
Speaker 3: a few weeks go, whenever this is coming out, where
Speaker 3: the CNBC anchor goes, Trump has threatened to wipe out
Speaker 3: a civilization. What does this mean for investors?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I saw that. I saw that.
Speaker 3: That's horrifying, haunting, haunting. Shit.
Speaker 2: The way that our economy has been built around these
Speaker 2: metrics is truly horrifying. And you also see the idea
Speaker 2: of progress in this time tends towards the economistic, you know,
Speaker 2: the inevitability of globalization, the ideological victory of capitalism, and
Speaker 2: so on. And parstism in this system phase is as
Speaker 2: the name implies, systemic. To quote directly from the book,
Speaker 2: contiguous parstism had captured energy from additional societies and native,
Speaker 2: wild and domestic species. This is the parstism of the
Speaker 2: first feeds. Disparate parisism, meanwhile, had captured energy from additionous societies,
Speaker 2: imperial so and both exotic, wild and intensively domesticated species abroad.
Speaker 2: And that's the second phase. And so the new form
Speaker 2: networked parstism captured energy from all of these as well,
Speaker 2: but with the addition of ancient species of plant to
Speaker 2: animal in the form of fossils. This enabled concrete energy
Speaker 2: capture through increase in electrification, and then the digitization and
Speaker 2: extraction and production and abstract energy capture from extremely large,
Speaker 2: dense populations of urban subjects. Though the foundations of this
Speaker 2: system were built in the nineteenth century, it was only
Speaker 2: the twentieth century that it came to dominate endcode. So
Speaker 2: this parstism is networked on another level. You know, it
Speaker 2: flows through global supply chains. It extracts fossil fuels, you know, coal, oil,
Speaker 2: gas power, maintains the entire con it maintains transportation, industry, agriculture,
Speaker 2: digital infrastructure, all of it world, as we've seen, has
Speaker 2: been built around these fossil fuels. And something as simple
Speaker 2: as blocking a helly Spawns street can have a diret
Speaker 2: impact on the entire world, much of which is yet
Speaker 2: to be felt. Even as the strait has now been reopened, well,
Speaker 2: it has not been reopened about to be seemingly, I mean,
Speaker 2: Israel did viod this. He's fire though, right, so it
Speaker 2: probably will not be opened again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean even before that it hadn't been reopened.
Speaker 3: I I don't know. I have no idea when this
Speaker 3: episode is going to come out, So I I am
Speaker 3: standing for the record here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very hard to comc It's impossible.
Speaker 3: It's like not impossible. It's extremely difficult to figure out
Speaker 3: whether the strait is open on an hour two hour basis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like fair, I don't know what the.
Speaker 3: Fuck it's gonna be, Like, I don't know, Like maybe
Speaker 3: so maybe someone will have like filled the straight in
Speaker 3: by the time this episode comes out, like who knows,
Speaker 3: who knows? Yeah, yeah, sorry, I just I've been so
Speaker 3: straight pilled.
Speaker 2: That's a fair point. That's fair point. I guess. The
Speaker 2: point I'm trying to make is even in the hypothetical
Speaker 2: scenario where this strait is fully opened, we're still going
Speaker 2: to feel the impact of that brief period of closure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is dunphased by the way. It's not just
Speaker 2: on the whole extraction of resources, of land of labor.
Speaker 2: You also notice that it extracts our attention as well,
Speaker 2: through the collection of data, through the increasingly efficient ways
Speaker 2: that it seeks to draw out eyeballs for the sake
Speaker 2: of advertising, for the sake of profit. And this unprecedented
Speaker 2: scale of extraction obviously cannot last. It's merely borrowing from
Speaker 2: the future and from million year old ecosystems. Eventually, that
Speaker 2: debt is going to catch up on us. In fact
Speaker 2: that it already has begun to catch up on us.
Speaker 2: We're not in the when climate change happens in the future.
Speaker 2: It is happening right now, and the Nation States are
Speaker 2: carrying on business as usual and business is booming. They
Speaker 2: are the agents of this processing phase. Do not care.
Speaker 2: This period saw the rise of corporations, you know, these
Speaker 2: massive transnational entities. I want you to notice about this
Speaker 2: period is that they are the agents of this time,
Speaker 2: even sometimes more than countries. Some of them, some of
Speaker 2: these corporations have more power than entire countries. And with
Speaker 2: the advent of mass communication and comblization, we also saw
Speaker 2: ideological coalitions which could be seen as another agent in
Speaker 2: this phase. You know that the government's institutions, media, tech
Speaker 2: giants and movements that share a particular worldview and shape
Speaker 2: the narratives that determine what people be it workers, consumers, users,
Speaker 2: or citizens believe it's normal, necessary, and didn't never tell
Speaker 2: As a person living in this time, it is very
Speaker 2: difficult to see it. You know, you get used to
Speaker 2: a certain system. It's you know, it's like water to
Speaker 2: fish if you abstract and tangible, like, what are you
Speaker 2: talking about this? There's nothing besides This can be the
Speaker 2: reaction you get sometimes and it is not on any
Speaker 2: one individual to understand the detailed machinations of the entire system,
Speaker 2: the biggest picture. Nobody I think sees all the machinations
Speaker 2: of the entire system. But nevertheless, the system sees you.
Speaker 2: You know, it sees you as part of its functioning.
Speaker 2: And to kind of bring it to close, what I
Speaker 2: want people to take away from this is that you
Speaker 2: know you can be and you are an agent in history. Now,
Speaker 2: whether you are an agent of history that serves as
Speaker 2: a cog in the machine, or you are an agent
Speaker 2: of history that serves as a wedge in the machine.
Speaker 2: That's really up to you. We're obviously facing down enormous wealth,
Speaker 2: deep inequality, technological advancement, military might, environmental stray, and atomization.
Speaker 2: The twenty twenties have been a world bind of a
Speaker 2: decade already and it's not even over yet.
Speaker 3: Oh God, still fore worry. Yeah, this decade sucks.
Speaker 2: It really does. But the system is not unassailable. Yes
Speaker 2: it can and it does adapt to our ruptures, but
Speaker 2: it is a lot more fragile than it puts forward,
Speaker 2: you know, to borrow from. I can't remember who said it,
Speaker 2: the concept of paper tiger. It comes from Chinese mythology.
Speaker 2: You're Chinese military philosophy.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, like I know, oh Mao talks about it
Speaker 3: a lot. I don't actually know where it's from, but.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but I say that to say that it's
Speaker 2: a paper tiger, you know, a particularly study paper tiger,
Speaker 2: but a paper tiger nonetheless.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And never have the people who are attempting to
Speaker 3: write the paper tiger have like, never in the entire
Speaker 3: like history of modern capitalism has it been written by
Speaker 3: people who have less idea what the fuck they're doing. Nick,
Speaker 3: Never have people who understand the system so poorly been
Speaker 3: in charge of it, and they are, you know, they
Speaker 3: are already kind of cheering it apart because they don't
Speaker 3: understand it at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think one of the one of these signs
Speaker 2: of that was just the idea that you can kneecap
Speaker 2: your country is soft power mechanisms entirely and believe every
Speaker 2: other country in the world and expect nothing bad to happen.
Speaker 2: I mean to say, the US doesn't face the consequences
Speaker 2: that it should for the things that it has done
Speaker 2: in this year alone, that's alone, in a decades of history.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But I mean when you saw the deconstruction of us AID, right,
Speaker 2: which was one of the US's primary mechanisms of having
Speaker 2: swaying other countries, building up goodwill in other countries, not
Speaker 2: also you know, intervening in the into the domestic politics
Speaker 2: of other countries, to break that down like a bull
Speaker 2: in a China shop, when that was really like one
Speaker 2: of the main pillars that was keeping your whole liberal
Speaker 2: world order float. It really, I think as an indication
Speaker 2: of the incompetence with even mes Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then even on top of that, I think even
Speaker 3: on an even larger scale, right, the entire premise for
Speaker 3: I mean, like the entire premise of the Pax Americana, right,
Speaker 3: The entire premise of the post World War two American
Speaker 3: order was that the US Navy would keep the world's
Speaker 3: oceans open for supply chains. Yeah, that was the whole thing,
Speaker 3: and it worked exactly as long as the US never
Speaker 3: actually had to fight a war over like the sea
Speaker 3: lanes that it couldn't militarily control. And then we fought
Speaker 3: the one war which would prove that we cannot in
Speaker 3: fact secure the sea lanes. Global capital ipakel transformations are
Speaker 3: happening in like the very structure of global capital because
Speaker 3: these people think that like the idea of not using
Speaker 3: your military power and then reaping the reaping the world
Speaker 3: spanning like trillion trillion dollar rewards of this, like they
Speaker 3: thought that shit was like girl, shit, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean the whole the whole point of what I've
Speaker 2: been thinking. Part of the point of investing in all
Speaker 2: of this military might is so that you don't have
Speaker 2: to use it. Yeah, it's just just try and scale
Speaker 2: people into just bowing down the station your troops outside
Speaker 2: the territory and like, yeah, are you gonna really try
Speaker 2: and challenge us? Yeah? And then you went and stomp
Speaker 2: told them with somebody and obvious they had to stand
Speaker 2: up and defend themselves. And now everybody is seeing what
Speaker 2: it is, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's a situation too where like yeah, like
Speaker 3: Iran has always technically had the military power to like
Speaker 3: control the stradeer of Moos, but they never did because
Speaker 3: the consequence of that would be the US bombing their cities.
Speaker 3: So the only way you could possibly lose control of
Speaker 3: the strad of from Moose is if you bombed the
Speaker 3: cities first. So all you had to do was not
Speaker 3: do that and it would be fine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I mean the little girls in the school
Speaker 2: were hamasna, so.
Speaker 3: Oh god, yeah, it's just just a tragedy. God, it's
Speaker 3: really hideous. They've decided to repeatedly shoot themselves in the
Speaker 3: balls because they just like wanted to go kill a
Speaker 3: bunch of brown kids. You know, this is an unfathomable horror.
Speaker 3: And also they so clearly have no idea what the
Speaker 3: fuck they're doing that it makes a lot of things possible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep. So the question is you
Speaker 2: know what comes next. We're seeing, like, as you said,
Speaker 2: epochal transformations just in this year alone. This phase will
Speaker 2: be incurrently as defined by McDonald. It's not going to
Speaker 2: last forever, you know. Unlike previous phases. However, this phase
Speaker 2: has been imposed truly globally. There's no longer a hint
Speaker 2: to land that one can escape too. Yeah, and so
Speaker 2: what comes next can be fragmentation, It can be some
Speaker 2: kind of evolution or calcification, or it can be a
Speaker 2: social revolution, and the moms and the cogs and wedges
Speaker 2: in this moment to actively decide in that. But I
Speaker 2: think we can do without this parasitism. As MacDonald knowes,
Speaker 2: there are other ways of relating with each other and
Speaker 2: with nature. He borrows from the ecological language of commensalistic
Speaker 2: and mutualistic relationships. In mutualistic relationships, organisms benefit each other.
Speaker 2: For example, we provide hives and protection, or bees pollt
Speaker 2: crops and produce honey. And commensalistic relationships, one organism captures
Speaker 2: energy from another while doing neither harm nor good to
Speaker 2: the other. There's lots of animals and plants who make
Speaker 2: their home among trees while neither harmin nor help in
Speaker 2: the tree itself, although some of them do end up
Speaker 2: helping the tree in more indirect ways, but finally in
Speaker 2: parasitic relationships, which is the kind that has proved disastrous
Speaker 2: for our world. One organism that be in us has
Speaker 2: captured the energy of another, or of multiple others to
Speaker 2: those others detriment our system has put us in the
Speaker 2: position of essentially being mosquitoes. One planet is and not
Speaker 2: in the role that mosquitoes play in the overall health
Speaker 2: of the ecosystem, but literally suck in more blood than
Speaker 2: the system can sustain. And so we have to shake
Speaker 2: things up. We have to emboldern ie and new forms
Speaker 2: of relations and what those relations look like after you
Speaker 2: as usual, All power to all the people. Peace.
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